It's said that mortal enemies, in time, come to resemble each other. Perhaps that explains how Hillary Clinton, a staff lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate, is sounding a tiny bit like Tricky Dick himself. As she sought to defend her beleaguered husband last week, Mrs. Clinton charged that accusations against him, of adultery and perjury, are the invention of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" determined to undo the results of the past two elections. What's more, the alleged conspirators--a multitalented cabal including not only Kenneth Starr and Paula Jones but also Senators, judges, publishers, Internet gossips, religious leaders and at least one literary agent angling for a percentage of the action--were thought to have somehow duped the liberal national media.
In a CBS interview, stuttering with fury, James Carville objected to Bryant Gumbel's skepticism toward Mrs. Clinton's conspiracy theory. "It's factual," said Carville. So what are the facts behind these accusations, and what do they add up to? A conspiracy of Clinton haters directed by some sinister Mr. Big (Jerry Falwell? Jesse Helms? That wizard of interconnectedness, Kevin Bacon?) or merely a gleeful chorus of detractors singing, for once, in perfect harmony? One scholar of conspiracy thinks he knows without even examining the evidence. Says Daniel Pipes, author of Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From: "It fits into a familiar pattern where people in trouble turn to a conspiracy theory."
Which isn't to say that paranoids, and the Clintons, don't have real enemies--or that some of those enemies aren't linked, sometimes in bizarre, uncanny ways. Consider the couple's current chief tormentor, independent counsel Starr. Last year, in a decision he later reversed under pressure from Republican lawmakers, Starr announced that he was leaving his job to become dean of the law and public policy schools at California's Pepperdine University. The chair Starr had set his sights on, as it happened, was endowed by a certain Richard Mellon Scaife, an archconservative Pennsylvania billionaire who also happens to publish the Pittsburgh (Pa.) Tribune-Review, a newspaper whose star reporter, Christopher Ruddy (hang in there; this pays off) is notorious for his own conspiracy theories concerning the death of Clinton officials Vincent Foster and Ron Brown. Interestingly, Scaife's billions have also bankrolled the American Spectator, the magazine that broke the Troopergate story--the same one that first identified a certain Paula as one of Clinton's alleged romantic targets.