Respond

May 1999 - Volume 31 Issue 5

Oops. We were dead wrong when we reported last month that Juanita Broderick had written Bill Clinton "I admire you very much." It was he who had written those words to her, a fact that alters the significance more than a little bit.

Thomas Ewing, a congressman from Illinois, may turn out to be new Speaker Dennis Hastert's closest confidant. Certainly he's the closest in physical location, having been assigned an office within the Speaker's own suite. John Feehery, a Hastert spokesman, says that he does not know of another case where a speaker has shared quarters with another member.

Michael Isikoff is said to have been unhappy with the way he was treated when he worked at The Washington Post. If so, his new book Uncovering Clinton certainly settles some scores. He describes Robert Kaiser, the Post colleague who expressed the greatest disdain for his Paula Jones scoop, as "a pompous snob." And he carefully points out that the Post's Susan Schmidt and Peter Baker got it wrong when they reported that "Lewinsky described Clinton and [Vernon] Jordan directing her to testify falsely in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case."

Federico J. Pena did not appreciate the White House's attempt to blame him in the Energy Department's slow response to Chinese espionage. His friends are asking "Didn't Bill Clinton appoint him?"

Paula Jones got just $200,000 from the $850,000 settlement of her suit against Bill Clinton. You will not be surprised to learn that the rest went to lawyers. But you may not know that she would have received $440,000 if she had accepted the 1997 settlement offer made by Clinton's lawyers.

Advancing White House trips is a job often left to junior staff, especially when the destination is a Buffalo or an Indianapolis. But when the destination is glamorous, the assignment becomes a much-prized perk. Thus the advance team for Hillary Clinton's recent jaunt to Marrakech included Deputy White House counsel Cheryl Mills.

California Congressman James Rogan was supposed to be in trouble with liberal Hollywood Democrats because of his ardent advocacy of impeachment. But it seems his equally ardent advocacy on behalf of the financial interests of the film industry counts for more with at least some movie moguls. According to The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin, the Motion Picture Association of America's President Jack Valenti sponsored a fundraising dinner in late March at the Hay-Adams Hotel attended by biggies from Disney, Universal, Paramount, Fox, and Warner Brothers.

When the editors of the National Review asked Dick Morris to review George Stephanopoulos' new book, they probably didn't intend to do George a favor. If so, they were not disappointed. Morris calls the book, "the most gripping tale of a man's successful battle against his conscience since Albert Speer's cliffhanger Inside the Third Reich."

As for Stephanopoulos's standing in the Clinton administration, Morris says "by the time I came to the White House in late 1994, George had already fallen. He was out of power, out of the loop, out of the president's good gracesŠI spent hour after hour plotting against Harold Ickes. But of George I thought little. He was a spent force. Our titanic tug-of-war existed only in his fevered, 30-something imagination."

Bill Clinton, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Jodi Enda reports, is working on a book on race and racism. The principle ghostwriter for the first draft, she says, is Harvard law professor Christopher Edley.

John G. Rowland, the republican governor of Connecticut, recently told a group of GOP moderates: "I will report to you that the good news is that the rich people and the business people still like us. But that's about it. Unless they can vote four or five times each, we've got some problems in the next couple of campaigns."

George Tenet, the CIA's director, immersed himself in hot water with the White House when he leaked word to The Washington Post that he had opposed Bill Clinton's strategy in Yugoslavia. The leak came just at that most embarrassing moment when the policy first appeared to be not working.

Matthew Miller, a columnist who works out of Los Angeles and knows something about the customs of movieland, says the stars have a solution to the kiss-and-tell memoirs that make Washington so nervous about what departing subordinates might say. He calls it a "political prenuptial." When an employee is hired, he or she would sign a contract of confidentiality pledging not to disclose anything until five years after their boss leaves office. "Hollywood celebrities have required such contracts forever from every cook, nanny and 'personal assistant' they hire."

That "bad back" that kept Hillary Clinton from accompanying her husband to Central America had, we are told, recovered enough for her to bounce around on a camel ride in Egypt.

~Susan Threadgill