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As the troopers describe Clinton's scandal-suppression operation, threats were not the only means used to ensure silence. Perry testified that trooper Danny Ferguson told him that after Clinton entered the White House, the President called him to express concern that the troopers might talk and said, "Tell Roger [Perry] he can have anything he wants" in the way of federal jobs. Wright, Clinton's chief of staff in Arkansas, also acted as an informal employment counselor, Jones' lawyers allege. According to Trooper L.D. Brown's deposition, a Wright assistant approached him at a Little Rock tavern in 1992 and said, "L.D., what is it you want? You're not going to say anything about Bill and women, are you? Is it a job? Is it a job that you want?"
Brown said he didn't grab at the job. And when he passed up that carrot, he said, he got the stick. Just before he agreed to go on the record for the American Spectator, Brown was asked to speak to Skip Rutherford, a Clinton friend in Little Rock. He claimed that Rutherford said, "Well, L.D., you know you have to go to sleep at night, lay your head down on the pillow and live with yourself, and you don't want your credit- card receipts all over the front page, do you?" Rutherford told TIME that he "educated" Brown on the perils of media attention but never pressured him. Later, Brown met with Wright, who said it "would be so bad if you talk" and offered to get him a new state job, according to Brown's deposition. Wright, now a Washington lobbyist, could not be reached. Clinton denies a role in all this. "I might have asked somebody to ask L.D. Brown not to lie," he said in his deposition, "but that would be a fruitless request."
It took six years, but the Clinton scandals have finally achieved a certain awful symmetry. With her scheduled appearance on 60 Minutes last Sunday, Kathleen Willey chose a forum that could damage Clinton's presidency as surely as Bill's and Hillary's 1992 appearance on the show helped him win it. On television and in her sworn deposition, the former Clinton volunteer says she went to the President for help in 1993, with her world crumbling around her: her husband, accused of embezzling more than $250,000, would commit suicide that very day. Willey needed a job, but Clinton, she says, had more than Christian charity on his mind. In a passageway just outside the Oval Office, he hugged her, Willey testified, "and the hug just continued longer than I expected," then segued into kissing and groping against her will. Clinton, she said, moved her hand to his genitals, trying to force her to fondle him. When she broke away, "I recall him saying that he had wanted to do that for a long time." Clinton said in his deposition that he "embraced" her, "but there was nothing sexual about it."
Willey's account is damaging not only for what it claims about the President, but also for who is claiming it. Willey, 51, has a dignified manner that the President's other accusers have often lacked. She has not allied herself with the right-wing Clinton haters or boasted about her encounter. Quiet and self-possessed, according to those who had seen a pre-broadcast tape of the show last week, she made a compelling witness, telling her story carefully, with frequent pauses for thought, in long, unedited passages of riveting television.