As I’ve said, I first met Gennifer Flowers in 1977 when I was attorney general and she was a television reporter for a local station who often interviewed me. Soon afterward, she left Arkansas to pursue an entertainment career, I believe as a backup singer for country music star Roy Clark. At some point, she moved to Dallas. In the late eighties, she moved back to Little Rock to be near her mother and called to ask me to help her find a state job to supplement her income from singing. I referred her to Judy Gaddy on my staff, who was responsible for referring the many job seekers who asked for help with state employment to various agencies. After nine months, Flowers finally got a position paying less than $20,000 a year.
Gennifer Flowers struck me as a tough survivor who’d had a less-than-ideal childhood and disappointments in her career but kept going. She was later quoted in the press as saying that she might vote for me and, on another occasion, that she didn’t believe Paula Jones’s allegations of sexual harassment. Ironically, almost exactly six years after my January 1992 appearance on 60 Minutes, I had to give a deposition in the Paula Jones case, and I was asked questions about Gennifer Flowers. I acknowledged that, back in the 1970s, I had had a relationship with her that I should not have had. Of course, the whole line of questioning had nothing to do with Jones’s spurious sexual-harassment claim; it was just a part of the long, well-financed attempt to damage and embarrass me personally and politically. But I was under oath, and of course, if I hadn’t done anything wrong, I couldn’t have been embarrassed. My critics leapt on it. Ironically, even though they were sure the rest of the deposition was untruthful, this one answer they accepted as fact. The fact is, there was no twelve-year affair. Gennifer Flowers still has a suit against James Carville, Paul Begala, and Hillary for allegedly slandering her. I don’t wish her ill, but now that I’m not President anymore, I do wish she’d let them be. A few days after the firestorm broke, I called Eli Segal and pleaded with him to come down to Little Rock to be a mature, settling presence in the headquarters. When he asked how I could want the help of someone like him, who had worked only in losing presidential campaigns, I cracked, “I’m desperate.”
Eli laughed and came, becoming the campaign’s chief of staff in charge of the central office, finances, and the campaign plane. Early in the month, Ned McWherter, Brereton Jones, and Booth Gardner, respectively the governors of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Washington, endorsed me. Those who had already done so, including Dick Riley of South Carolina, Mike Sullivan of Wyoming, Bruce King of New Mexico, George Sinner of North Dakota, and Zell Miller of Georgia, reaffirmed their support. So did Senator Sam Nunn, with the caveat that he wanted to “wait and see” what further stories came out. A national poll said that 70 percent of the American people thought the press shouldn’t report on the private lives of public figures. In another, 80 percent of the Democrats said their votes wouldn’t be affected even if the Flowers story was true. That sounds good, but 20 percent is a lot to give up right off the bat. Nevertheless, the campaign picked up steam again, and it seemed that at least we could finish a strong second to Tsongas, which I thought would be good enough to get me to the southern primaries. Then, just as the campaign seemed to be recovering, there was another big shock when the draft story broke. On February 6, the Wall Street Journal ran a story on my draft experience and on my relationship with the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas in 1969. When the campaign began, I was unprepared for the draft questions, and I mistakenly said I had never had a draft deferment during my Oxford years; in fact, I did have one from August 7 through October 20, 1969. Even worse, Colonel Eugene Holmes, who had agreed to let me join the program, now claimed that I had misled him to get out of the draft. In 1978, when reporters asked him about the charge, he said he had dealt with hundreds of cases and didn’t recall anything specific about mine. Coupled with my own misstatement that I had never had a deferment, the story made it seem that I was misleading people about why I wasn’t drafted. That wasn’t true, but at the time I couldn’t prove it. I didn’t remember and didn’t find Jeff Dwire’s tape relaying his friendly conversation with Holmes in March 1970, after I was out of the ROTC program and back in the draft. Jeff was dead, as was Bill Armstrong, the head of my local draft board. And all draft records from that period had been destroyed.
Holmes’s attack surprised me, because it contradicted his earlier statements. It’s been suggested that Holmes may have had some help with his memory from his daughter Linda Burnett, a Republican activist who was working for President Bush’s reelection.
Closer to the election, on September 16, Holmes would issue a more detailed denunciation questioning my “patriotism and integrity” and saying again that I had deceived him. Apparently, the statement was drafted by his daughter, with “guidance” from the office of my old opponent, Congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt, and had been revised by several Bush campaign officials. A few days after the story broke, and just a week from election day in New Hampshire, Ted Koppel, anchor of ABC’s Nightline, called David Wilhelm and said that he had a copy of my now famous draft letter to Colonel Holmes, and that ABC would be doing a story about it. I had forgotten all about the letter, and ABC agreed to send us a copy, which they graciously did. When I read it, I could see why the Bush campaign was sure that the letter and Colonel Holmes’s revised account of the ROTC episode would sink me in New Hampshire.
That night Mickey Kantor, Bruce Lindsey, James Carville, Paul Begala, George Stephanopoulos, Hillary, and I met in one of our rooms at the Days Inn Motel in Manchester. We were getting killed in the press. Now there was a double-barreled attack on my character. All the television pundits said I was dead as a doornail. George was curled up on the floor, practically in tears. He asked if it wasn’t time to think about withdrawing. Carville paced the floor, waving the letter around and shouting, “Georgie!
Georgie! That’s crazy. This letter is our friend. Anyone who actually reads it will think he’s got character!” Though I loved his “never say die” attitude, I was calmer than he was. I knew that George’s only political experience had been in Washington, and that, unlike us, he might actually believe the press should decide who was worthy and who wasn’t. I asked, “George, do you still think I’d be a good President?” “Yes,” he said. “Then get up and go back to work. If the voters want to withdraw me, they’ll do it on election day. I’m going to let them decide.”
The words were brave, but I was dropping in the polls like a rock in a well. I was already in third place, and it looked as if I might fall into single digits. On Carville’s and Mickey Kantor’s advice, we took out an ad in the Manchester Union Leader containing the full text of the letter, and bought two thirty-minute segments on television to let voters call in and ask me about the charges and whatever else was on their minds. One hundred fifty Arkansans dropped what they were doing and came to New Hampshire to go door-to-door. One of them, Representative David Matthews, had been a law student of mine and one of the strongest supporters of my legislative programs and my campaigns at home. David was an eloquent and persuasive speaker who soon became my chief surrogate after Hillary. After he warmed up the crowd for me at several rallies, I think some people thought he should have been the candidate. Six hundred more Arkansans listed their names and home phone numbers in a full-page ad in the Union Leader, urging New Hampshire Democrats to call them if they wanted to know the truth about their governor. Hundreds of calls were made.