I've just finished reading the 600 pages of material released last Friday by Paula Jones's lawyers, and I've just finished watching Kathleen Willey on "60 Minutes," and I've just finished reading Bill Clinton's statement that he didn't bother to watch Ms. Willey on TV but that he knows what she says isn't true anyway. And I still believe the president. Truly, madly, deeply, I believe. Also verily.
I believe that the president is "mystified" by Ms. Willey's claim that he sexually assaulted her when she visited him in the Oval Office on Nov. 29, 1993, to ask him for a desperately needed job. I believe the president did not grab Ms. Willey, kiss her, touch her breasts and place her hand on his genitals, against her will. I believe that Ms. Willey is perjuring herself to hurt the president, even though the record shows that she supported and liked Clinton very much, and continued to support and like him even after the alleged assault, and that she only talked in the end because she was compelled to by Jones's lawyers.
I believe Ms. Willey is, like Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers and Dolly Kyle Browning and Sally Purdue before her, and like the women who will come after her, a baldfaced liar. If Monica Lewinsky sticks to her affidavit that she never had sex with the president, I believe her. If she instead confirms the long hours of recorded conversation in which she detailed a sexual affair with the president and affirmed her intention to lie in the affidavit -- well, then, I don't believe.
I believe all this because I am assured of it by Robert Bennett, the president's sexual misconduct mouthpiece, which is a distinguished position. It is distinguished from David Kendall, his personal-finance corruption mouthpiece; from Lanny Davis, his campaign-finance corruption mouthpiece; from James Kennedy, his White House general scandal mouthpiece; from James Carville, his "independent" general scandal mouthpiece; and from Michael McCurry, his don't ask, don't tell mouthpiece. I believe that all presidents require, for the handling of daily press inquiries, enough mouthpieces to outfit the wind section of the National Symphony Orchestra.
I believe, as the White House whispering campaign already has it, that Ms. Willey is a bit nutty, and a bit slutty. I believe that, the way things are going, David Brock will write an article to this effect for Esquire.
I believe White House communications director Ann Lewis is right to suggest that Ms. Willey's desire to work in Clinton's 1996 campaign casts doubt on her claim that Clinton abused her in 1993. I also believed Ann Lewis in 1991, when she explained why Anita Hill continued to work for Clarence Thomas after he allegedly harassed her: "You don't know what it's like to be a young working woman, to have this really prestigious and powerful boss and think you have to stay on the right side of him, or for the rest of your working life he could nix another job." I believe Ann Lewis is not a rank hypocrite. I believe that it is not despicable for the president's henchmen and henchwomen to smear the reputations of others in order to protect their boss from allegations of misconduct.
I believe that Clinton-Gore fund-raiser Nathan Landow did not try to pressure Ms. Willey to lie in her deposition in the Jones case, and that there must be some perfectly innocent reason why, after Ms. Willey was subpoenaed in the Jones case, Landow's real estate company chartered a plane to fly Ms. Willey to Landow's Eastern Shore estate.
I believe Ms. Willey is lying even though her account of Clinton's amatory approach is remarkably similar to the account Ms. Jones offers of the Clinton modus operandi on May 8, 1991, in a room in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, Ark. I believe Ms. Jones is lying even though her sworn account of what happened to her that day is supported, in graphic, pathetic detail, by sworn contemporaneous accounts from her sister, Lydia Cathey, and by her friends Pamela Blackard and Debra Lynn Ballentine. I believe Ms. Willey and Ms. Jones are lying even though their stories are buttressed by the sworn deposition of Judy Stokes, alleging a similarly sudden and unwanted sexual approach by Clinton against a former Miss Arkansas, Elizabeth Ward.
I believe that L. D. Brown, Larry Patterson and Roger Perry, three former Clinton bodyguards, were all lying in their sworn depositions in which they described, to varying but conforming degrees, Clinton as a sexual adventurer of great recklessness and a man who used the resources and perks of office to further his sexual pursuits.
I believe everybody is lying except my Bill.
Michael Kelly is a senior writer for National Journal.