A Vast Conspiracy (8 page)

It had been two months since Paula’s name surfaced in the
Spectator
, and the efforts on her behalf had ranged from ineffectual to catastrophic. The White House had dismissed her; the press had scorned her; her prospects for a lawsuit were dim and for a book or movie deal nil.

Amid the gloom of that February night in the capital, Cliff Jackson told the group he did have one idea. He had one final hope for keeping Paula’s story alive. There was someone he wanted her to meet.

2

“Isn’t That What Happened?”

I
n the summer of 1987, a new reporter joined the staff of
The Washington Post
and was assigned a desk next to that of Michael Isikoff. The rookie had never worked at a big paper before, and he had certainly never seen or heard anyone like Isikoff. Isikoff was rumpled, in the vanishing mode of old-time newspapermen—an imperfect shave, a mess of tousled hair, a collection of ill-fitting sport jackets, a habit of gnawing on Bic pens when he wasn’t barking at someone on the telephone. But none of this was the real reason Isikoff stood out. What really amazed the newcomer was the subject matter of those high-decibel phone calls.
This
was what people reported on at
The Washington Post
?

Finally, the new arrival couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer and asked Isikoff what he was working on.

I’m second-sourcing a blow job, Isikoff explained.

The story was the biggest of his career to date. In February 1987, a reporter named Charles Shepard of
The Charlotte Observer
broke the news that Jim Bakker, a celebrated televangelist who ran a religion and real estate empire known as the PTL Club, had deposited $265,000 into a trust fund for the benefit of a woman named Jessica Hahn. The purpose of this payment, it became clear, was to try to buy Hahn’s silence about an adulterous encounter
the former church secretary had had with Bakker in 1980. (Bakker’s broadcast partner in the PTL Club was his wife, the famously makeup-slathered Tammy Faye.) Shepard’s story set off one of the great journalistic chases of the era, as reporters began uncovering the corruption that permeated PTL and, as it turned out, several other ministries of the airwaves.

Isikoff—and the
Post
generally—had come to the story late, but he took after it with gusto. By late summer, Hahn had become a public figure herself, especially after she agreed to provide
Playboy
magazine with an interview and a photo shoot for a reported $1 million fee. Together with a similarly aggressive reporter named Art Harris, Isikoff decided to look into Hahn’s background, and they reported on September 30, 1987, that “questions have been raised about the credibility of the ex–church secretary whose revelations toppled a multimillion dollar TV pulpit.… Some of the questions … focus on Hahn’s alleged sexual experience.”

The key source for the story was a thirty-five-year-old electrician from Massapequa, Long Island, Rocco Riccobono, who told the
Post
reporters that he had had a “brief affair” with Hahn. Isikoff and Harris wrote, “Contacted by
The Washington Post
over several weeks, Riccobono said his fling with Hahn was in 1978. Hahn, then 18, had recently been hired as a church secretary and was visiting the apartment of a friend. After his pregnant wife fell asleep in a bedroom, Riccobono said, he plopped down in front of a fire where Hahn ‘seduced me on the couch.’ Riccobono said, ‘I didn’t resist. I couldn’t help it, my flesh is weak … I was with Jessica several times.’ ” (Asked to respond, Hahn said, “I had absolutely nothing to do with Rocco Riccobono.”)

The reporters ran with the story for weeks—Harris found Riccobono and handled more of the sexual material, and Isikoff did more on the financial details—and when they exhausted the
Post
’s interest in the subject, they wrote two long freelance articles about PTL for another publication
—Penthouse
. The PTL story, they wrote, was “a saga of sex, sin and pseudosalvation”—and they emptied their notebooks of material that may have been too racy for their usual employer. In one of their tales about the Bakkers, there was even a foreshadowing of a bigger story in Isikoff’s future. An anonymous former aide identified as Daniel recalled how Jim Bakker told him “about parking with Tammy Faye at Bible college, how they’d first had sex in his car. ‘He was laughing,’ recalls Daniel. ‘He said Tammy had on a black velvet skirt, and he’d messed it up pretty badly by [ejaculating] all over it when they were petting.’ ”

Isikoff had helped to invent an entire new field in American journalism—sexual investigative reporting. His work on the PTL story coincided with an even more famous moment in the history of this new territory. In May 1987, just as Isikoff and Harris were pursuing Bakker and Hahn, reporters from
The Miami Herald
were crouched in the bushes outside a town house in Washington where the presidential candidate Gary Hart was having a tryst with a woman named Donna Rice. The journalists who covered these stories never had any trouble coming up with rationales for their work. For Hart—for any politician—inquiries into sex life were said to reveal “character,” or, in Hart’s case, “recklessness.” For Hahn, it was said that the public had a right to know that she was not as innocent as she claimed to be; it was true, as Isikoff and his partner wrote, that “questions have been raised” about her sex life—if only by the reporters themselves. At each of these landmarks of sexual investigative reporting, there were misgivings expressed inside and outside the journalistic world. But journalists moved in only one direction—toward more investigations and more disclosures about the sex lives of public people. These changes, of course, took place in an ever more competitive business environment for journalists, and sex, it need hardly be said, sold. Whether sexual investigative reporting was rooted in serious questions about character or merely in profitable voyeurism, there was more of it all the time.

Mike Isikoff was perfectly situated to take advantage of this new world. For one thing, he was good at his work. He did second-source blow jobs—and much else besides. Isikoff had journeyed to Washington in the great post-Watergate migration of investigative reporters. A native of Long Island, he had graduated from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in 1976, and he came to Washington to work on a Ralph Nader project. Because many small newspapers could not afford to hire their own Washington correspondents, Nader believed that most members of Congress never received adequate scrutiny from the press. So he founded the Capitol Hill News Service, hired a bunch of energetic kids just out of school, and gave them each a state delegation to cover. Isikoff had Illinois.

A little more than a year later, at the age of twenty-six, Isikoff was being profiled on the front page of
The Washington Post
, his future employer, because of his first big scoop. Isikoff had been monitoring votes on the year’s farm bill when, as the
Post
reporter wrote, “he noticed something funny
about George Shipley,” a congressman from east-central Illinois. Shipley was missing lots of votes that mattered a great deal to his rural district, so Isikoff tracked him down and asked him why. “My back hurts, Mike,” the congressman said. “Sometimes it hurts so bad that I just have to stay in bed. But the folks back home don’t know about it—and I don’t want them to know.” Isikoff wrote the story up for his subscribers, such as the Decatur
Herald
, and Shipley’s missed votes as well as his comments about keeping his constituents in the dark generated a modest tempest back home.

Many reporters might have left the matter there, but doggedness was always Isikoff’s trademark. In the course of following up his investigation of the congressman, Isikoff received a tip that at the same time Shipley was claiming he was too sick to vote, he was actually hosting a golfing fund-raiser for his campaign back in Illinois. The tip checked out, and Isikoff’s story made news across the state.
SHIPLEY ATTENDED FUND-RAISER WHILE TOO SICK TO VOTE
, cried the headline in Decatur. Not long afterward, Shipley announced he would not seek reelection to Congress.

However, it was only when the
Post
profile was published several months later that the full story of Isikoff’s scoop became clear. The tipster whose information ended George Shipley’s political career was an Illinois businessman named Gene Stunkel. “Stunkel had decided, a few months before, to run against Shipley in 1978,” the
Post
’s T. R. Reid reported. “He wanted to give Isikoff a tip that would embarrass the incumbent.” There was a lesson in that, too.

From the Capitol Hill News Service, Isikoff migrated to the
Washington Star
and, when that paper folded, to the
Post
, in 1981. He had done good work over a dozen years, covering a mix of subjects, mostly crime stories of one kind or another. He had never covered much national politics or dealt with the tangled motives of the sources in that unique setting. Cop stories—with clear good guys and bad—were his métier. And still, in more than a decade on the job, he had never made a splash like the one he had with the Bakkers. Isikoff’s pugnacious insistence on doing things his way meant that editors never wanted him around for very long, and he tended to bounce from editor to editor, from beat to beat. He was a valuable reporter, his editors and colleagues invariably said about him, and he was also—the same phrase recurred—a pain in the ass.

Cliff Jackson had met Isikoff during the 1992 campaign, when the reporter
had written some stories about Clinton’s avoidance of military service during the Vietnam War. Jackson liked Isikoff, not least because they shared many of the same views about Clinton. Unlike Jackson, Isikoff was no conservative. But with friends, colleagues, and sources, the reporter never shied away from expressing his view that the new president was a pathological liar. Jackson and Isikoff also shared similar feelings about Clinton’s sex life. Based on the reporting he had done, Isikoff referred to Clinton as a sex addict, and he believed that virtually all of his problems stemmed from this fatal flaw.

Invited by Jackson to the press conference at the Shoreham on February 11, 1994, Isikoff had attended and then filed a fourteen-inch story about Paula Jones’s charges. But the paper didn’t run it and referred to Jones only glancingly—and mockingly—in a story about the CPAC conference three days later.

Jackson knew immediately that the press conference had been a disaster, so while he was still with Paula and Steve Jones in their room at the Shoreham, he told them what he thought they should do next. “You are going to have to give a respected reporter an exclusive,” Jackson said. “Mike is top-notch. He’s honest. You should deal with Isikoff and Isikoff alone.” Summoned to the hotel room, Isikoff met the Joneses and received their promise of full cooperation. Isikoff would have access to Paula, Steve, Debra Ballentine, Pam Blackard, even Paula’s sisters. Paula and Mike hit it off right away. Isikoff had even seen Steve in
Mystery Train
.