His story gave Clinton sleepless nights, now he says he’s sorry

WASHINGTON, March 10: In what could surely rank as the mother of all apologies, retractions, corrections and clarifications, a Conservative ...

WASHINGTON, March 10: In what could surely rank as the mother of all apologies, retractions, corrections and clarifications, a Conservative reporter who opened the can of worms about President Clinton’s personal life and exposed a tawdry five-year old international soap opera now says he’s sorry and he did it for all the wrong reasons.

David Brock, a journalist whose Troopergate story in the American magazine Spectator dated December 1993 first detailed Clinton’s alleged sexual escapades that led to the President’s current legal wrangles right down to the Monica Lewinsky episode, is a chastened man. In a public letter to the President, to be published in the April issue of Esquire magazine, Brock, now a free-lancer, writes: “I conspired to damage you and your Presidency… I wasn’t hot for this story in the interest of good government or serious journalism. I wanted to pop you right between the eyes.” Brock now says said he was tipped off to the story by a major contributor to GOPAC, a conservativepolitical action committee founded by Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The donor, who he does not identify, put him in touch with Cliff Jackson, a longtime Clinton rival in Arkansas who led him to the state troopers he eventually interviewed to get the story about Paula Jones. Describing what he calls “my ransacking of your personal life” Brock says in his Esquire letter that “there was an open political agenda at work as well, which must have coloured my judgment at least at the margins… I did regard you, the first Democratic President in my adult life, as an ideological threat.

A self-confessed Conservative, Brock has lately been trying to reinvent himself after being dumped by the Spectator and his right-wing friends allegedly because he is gay. Last summer, he posed for Esquire shirtless and tied to a tree. Before that, in 1996, he surprised everyone with a laudatory biography of Hillary Clinton. His latest mea culpa therefore does not come as a surprise.

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The White Housewelcomed the apology as “an interesting correction of the record”. While Brock does not fully retract the story about Clinton’s peccadilloes (“Sex, after all, is your achilles heel,” he writes), he now says, “The troopers were greedy and had slimy motives.” He says he came to realize that the troopers were upset with Clinton for having failed to share with them the spoils of his electoral victory. They also expected money in exchange for their story.

Brock’s 1993 cover story, based on the account of four Arkansas state troopers, mentioned a woman named only as `Paula’ who, it said, had been propositioned by then Governor Clinton.

The story prompted Paula Jones to file her lawsuit against Clinton. That in turn led to her lawyers and groupies hunting down stories linking the President to other women like Monica Lewsinky. “I don’t know what happened between you and Monica Lewinsky,” Brock now writes to Clinton, referring to his current troubles. “But regardless of how the drama plays out, as thefirst reporter who leered into your sex life, I do know that I didn’t learn a damn thing worth knowing about your character.”

“When I watched the media hoopla as you got hauled into a deposition by Jones’s lawyers, I had a sinking feeling. My ransacking of your personal life had given your political adversaries… an opportunity to use the legal process to finish the job that I started.” “I made Jones famous. And whatever happens to her case, in a way, the people who hate you have already won, and we have all suffered not only from their malice toward you but also from their contempt for the office of the president,” a penitent Brock writes.

Algerian-French artist’s work vandalised at Kochi art gallery over ‘obscenity’ allegations

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