Murder to mistresses: Clinton cops the lot

By Roger Franklin

NEW YORK - After five years, $100 million and a library's worth of testimony concerning sex, cigars and a certain soiled blue dress, William Jefferson Clinton is finally poised to go on trial before the United States Senate.

So why are hard-line conservatives grinding their teeth? As Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist prepares to don his robes to preside at the trial, those who hate this President with a single-minded intensity would seem to have won everything they sought.

The charges concern perjury and obstruction of justice - more than sufficient to see Clinton evicted from the White House if the proceedings last long enough to produce a guilty verdict.

Richard Nixon jumped before he was pushed and Andrew Johnson, the only other President to face judgment on Capitol Hill, was acquitted by a single vote. So, survive or fall, Clinton's place in one of history's grubbier nooks seems assured.

But in the furthest reaches of the far right, unhappiness prevails. In those precincts, Clinton is far more than a liar and a philanderer - he is rapist, traitor, blackmailer, dope fiend, murderer and Manchurian candidate all rolled into one.

"Unless all the accusations are explored, this trial will be like charging Al Capone with littering," said Oliver North, the former Marine colonel who plunged Ronald Reagan's White House in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Even among legislators, there are plenty who delight in depicting Clinton as the Arkansas Anti-Christ. Take Bob Barr, for example, the Georgia congressman who was pressing for impeachment long before the world had heard of Monica Lewinsky.

"The Senate must follow the evidence wherever it leads, no matter how unpleasant," Barr said.

And that road may take the case to some bizarre places unless moderate Republicans succeed in their quiet efforts to persuade zealots to back a stinging censure rather than a damning conviction.

Places, for instance, such as a Starbucks coffee shop in the chic Washington suburb of Georgetown.

It was there, in the early summer of 1997, that a former White House intern called Mary Mohane was shot dead behind the counter by an unknown intruder.

To the detectives who investigated the case, it was a simply an armed robbery. To those who paint Clinton as Beelzebub, it was a ruthless hit to silence one of the President's young lovers before Kenneth Starr could take her testimony.

The same folks - who jumped with glee upon this week's allegation that the President fathered a 13-year-old boy with a black Arkansas prostitute - also see the President's hand behind 32 other deaths.

From the wife of an Arkansas state trooper who killed herself to the two boys whose mangled bodies were found near a secluded Arkansas airfield, the haters perceive a President who pursues murder and mistresses with equal zeal.

The theory about the slain teens speculates that since Little Rock financier and Clinton supporter Dan Lassater is also a convicted coke smuggler, the boys must have witnessed one of his shipments being flown in from South America.

Conspiracists claim the pair were executed and their bodies left to be mutilated beneath a freight train in order to hide the evidence - a conspiracy which Clinton then ordered his state officials to hide.

Far-fetched? Every word of it. But don't laugh too much because, in certain quarters, Clinton's complicity is a gospel truth.

His list of alleged sins descends to treason - for selling defence secrets to Beijing in return for campaign cash - to making certain Republican leaders go suddenly soft on a wide-ranging trial by threatening them with dossiers of dirt.

When Republican Senator Trent Lott tried to cut a deal for censure last week, the haters flooded radio shows and the Internet with allegations that he had gone soft because Clinton's investigators had discovered that he was involved in a homosexual tryst with a college gridiron star almost 30 years ago.

Lott's spokesmen angrily denied the claim but, after that, their boss fell suddenly silent.

All the President's men dismiss those and other allegations as beneath contempt and comment - more scurrilous examples of the poison being pumped by the people behind what Hillary Clinton termed a vast right-wing conspiracy.

Yet those blanket rejections would be a lot easier to accept if some of the other charges - the ones which made it into Starr's report only as intriguing footnotes - had not played a big part in persuading the House of Representatives to vote for impeachment.

One of those charges, the one that offers the strongest hope to Clinton haters, concerns a woman identified as "Jane Doe No 5."

After the Judiciary Committee recommended impeachment but before the House voted on the measure, about 40 wavering members of Congress were shown a thick file that relates how, in Starr's opinion, Clinton raped a woman at her Little Rock hotel in 1978.

The woman, since identified by the Washington Post as nursing home owner Juanita Broaddrick, was at a medical providers' conference when Clinton, who was then Lieutenant Governor, invited himself to her room, tore her clothes, bit her lips and forced her on to the bed.

Quizzed by Paula Jones' lawyers, Broaddrick denied the attack. But when Starr's probers confronted her with affidavits by witnesses, including the nurse who treated Broaddrick's injuries, she reportedly recanted after being guaranteed immunity from prosecution on perjury charges.

It was the Broaddrick case, along with incidents involving three other Jane Does, to which Republican counsel David Shippers referred when he told the Judiciary Committee that "other allegations of serious wrongdoing cannot be presented publicly at this time."

"Clinton had better hope he can cut a deal," gloated Mark Levine, a lawyer with the rabidly conservative Landmark Legal Foundation.

"When a trial starts - any trial, not just one in the Senate - you just never know where it will end.

"That's the thing about this President: he makes it very easy to think the worst about him."