H illary Rodham Clinton

says there’s a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to destroy her husband and reverse the results of the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections. Given no concrete evidence, most pundits have dismissed her accusations as a combination of White House spin and a steely eyed determination by the first lady to stand by her man, particularly if it means keeping him in the White House.

But those pundits don’t know what Hillary Clinton has known. Had they been in Arkansas before the Clintons went to the White House, they might have been less inclined to laugh off her accusations as Oliver Stone-like ravings.

In fact, they might have conceded that while Clinton went a little far, she does have a point: that there were interconnections, originating in his home state, between the president’s bitterest and most

unscrupulous political enemies. That a loose cabal indeed has existed since at least the Arkansas gubernatorial race of 1990 to smear Bill Clinton with sexual innuendo and destroy his political career.

And if the members of the fourth estate were to truly look into their souls — rather than the sham breast-beating we are currently witnessing — they might have to acknowledge their own role in creating an image of a man that is almost wholly unsupported by the facts, but may contribute to his downfall.

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Let’s start with Gennifer Flowers.

She is crucial to a consideration of President Clinton’s current imbroglio, because, as we are being reminded ad nauseam, if he lied about not having had an affair with her, then how are we supposed to believe his denials about the Monica Lewinsky affair?

On Jan. 26, 1992, Bill and Hillary Clinton

appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes” to confront Flowers’ lurid account of a 12-year affair with the candidate in the supermarket tabloid the Star, for which she was paid, according to the Wall Street Journal, upwards of $140,000. Flowers earned another untold sum for an even more sexually explicit Penthouse version accompanied by a pictorial layout. (“I dare Hillary to bare her butt in any magazine,” Flowers taunted. “They don’t have a page that broad.”)

On “60 Minutes,” correspondent Steve Croft asked Bill Clinton about Flowers’

allegation of a 12-year affair. “That allegation,” he replied firmly, “is false.” In response to a follow-up question, Clinton added that both he and Flowers herself had previously denied the affair. He went on famously to acknowledge having “caused pain in my marriage,” adding that he trusted voters to understand what he meant by that.

In effect, Clinton had admitted adultery, although Croft never asked the conclusive “have you ever” question, and

Clinton certainly never answered it. In a contemporaneous ABC News poll, 73 percent of respondents said they agreed with Clinton that whether or not he’d ever had an extramarital

affair was between him and his wife.

The next day, Flowers held a press conference in a

New York hotel ballroom. Dressed in a scarlet dress with matching lipstick, she played excerpts from tape-recordings of several telephone conversations with Clinton, and declaimed, “Yes, I was Bill Clinton’s lover for 12 years, and for the past two years I have lied about the relationship. The truth is I loved him. Now he tells me to deny it. Well, I’m sick of all the deceit, and I’m sick of all the lies.” Soon after that, Flowers set up a 900 number for callers to listen to the famous tapes. In 1995 she published a book, “Passion and Betrayal.” Last year, a sequel, “Sleeping with the President: My Intimate Years with Bill Clinton,” was published, appropriately enough, by Anonymous Press.

Fast forward to January 1998. As a sidebar to l’affaire

Lewinsky, some mischievous sprite leaked to the press a story that President Clinton admitted having an affair with Gennifer Flowers during his deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit. Immediately taken as gospel truth amid the general media freakout over the Lewinsky tapes, it led to the remarkable spectacle of Flowers lecturing the president on sexual morality on “Geraldo” and “Larry King Live.”

A few days later came a counterleak. Time magazine reported Clinton had testified to having had sex with Flowers just one time, in 1977. A dalliance, a fling or a roll in the hay, most would agree, but hardly an “affair.” Flowers propositioned him on a later occasion, the president allegedly testified, but he turned her down.

That Clinton may have caused “pain” — with more than one woman — during the early years of his marriage in the late 1970s is widely believed (although not proven), even among his supporters. But Arkansas locals were always skeptical that Clinton had a lengthy “affair” with Flowers.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist John Brummett, who has covered Clinton for more than 20 years, wrote that according to “my sources … around 1977-78, and maybe a little later, she mentioned to friends that she was having a fling with Clinton … They heard nothing from her after 1979 about a relationship with Clinton.”

In a more graphic version, her ex-roommate Lauren Kirk told Penthouse that she believed Flowers to be lying for revenge and money: “She just can’t accept the fact that he came, wiped himself off, zipped up, and left. He was probably using her, and she just doesn’t like being used. She likes to use.”

There are dark explanations as to why Clinton might have

chosen to admit a one-night stand with Flowers in a sworn deposition 21 years after the fact. Maybe he feared that Flowers had kept a

semen-stained dress, cunningly anticipating the

advent of DNA testing. Or maybe he thought that a not-so-damaging

confession of a long-ago indiscretion would make subsequent lies regarding, say, Monica Lewinsky, seem more credible. But the simplest explanation that fits the available facts is that Clinton’s testimony is far closer to the truth than Gennifer Flowers’, and that Flowers was merely the opening act in a long-running “dirty tricks” campaign to destroy him.

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Larry Nichols is a former high school football star from Conway, Ark., who recorded advertising jingles for a living. For several months in 1988, he worked as a marketing consultant for the Arkansas Finance Development Authority, the state’s centralized bonding agency. Nichols had quite an imagination, telling people, among other things, that he was a CIA operative. In September 1988, the Associated Press reported, Nichols made 642 long-distance calls at state expense to Nicaraguan contra leaders and politicians who supported them. Nichols at first claimed the calls had dealt with Arkansas municipal bond sales, but that story collapsed after reporters made closer inquiries. Gov. Clinton demanded his

resignation. Nichols, it turned out, also faced “theft by deception” charges in several Arkansas counties. He avoided prosecution by promising to make restitution, but later filed for bankruptcy and never paid.

A few weeks before the 1990 Arkansas gubernatorial election between

Clinton and Republican Sheffield Nelson, Nichols held a press

conference at the state capitol. He handed out copies of a lawsuit against Clinton alleging that he’d been wrongly fired from his state job, and appended a list of five mistresses upon whom the governor had allegedly spent state money. One of them was Gennifer Flowers.

Reporters from the two Little Rock papers contacted the

women, all of whom made vehement denials. Flowers and her lawyer threatened in writing to sue anybody who published or broadcast what she characterized as a libel. Faced with denials all round, and Nichols’ reputation for tall tales, every media outlet in Little Rock made the same decision: The women’s names were not published.

Nichols took his case against Clinton into the political arena.

Reporters learned that Nichols held meetings with state Republican Chairman Bob Leslie. Copies of Nichols’ lawsuit against Clinton were readily available at Nelson’s campaign headquarters. Faxed copies began appearing at out-of-town newspapers and broadcast stations all over Arkansas. With one exception, nobody used them. A judge soon dismissed Nichols’ suit for lack of evidence. The Nelson campaign filmed at least two campaign commercials charging Clinton with drug use and sexual misbehavior, but feared they might backfire and never aired them.

Undeterred, the former jingle writer has gone on to become one of the biggest stars of Clinton-phobic talk radio, inveighing regularly against the president’s imaginary high crimes and misdemeanors. Nichols, along with “Justice Jim” Johnson, a bigoted Arkansas pol whose 1966 gubernatorial candidacy was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, is the narrator of two bizarre videos, one called “The Clinton Chronicles,” the other “The Mena Connection.” Produced by a California outfit called Citizens for Honest Government, the tapes make scores of wild charges regarding Clinton’s tenure as Arkansas governor. They include cocaine addiction, rape, gun-running, drug-smuggling and murder. Even the fiercely Republican Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has written articles detailing their near-delusional inaccuracy. Still, the tapes were good enough to be promoted and distributed via Christian television by former Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell.

While Nichols’ lawsuit against Clinton was dismissed by local and regional media, it did find a home on supermarket news racks nationwide. Exactly one week before the Star published Flowers’ account of her alleged 12-year affair with Clinton, the tabloid ran a similar “exposé” based upon Nichols’ lawsuit: “DEMS’ FRONT-RUNNER BILL CLINTON CHEATED WITH MISS AMERICA.”

The Miss America in question was the 1982 winner, Elizabeth

Ward of Russellville, Ark. By no means shy and retiring — she once posed for Playboy — Ward, to this day, vehemently denies the charge, even to her closest friends. So do all the other women on Nichols’ list, including Gannett newspapers columnist Deborah Mathis, an outspoken, witty black woman who once anchored Little Rock’s top-rated TV news program. “If I ever had slept with that fat white boy,” Mathis joked with friends in the Little Rock media, “he’d still be grinning.”

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In October 1991, Bill Clinton announced that he would likely seek

the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992. He and Hillary began a statewide pilgrimage for the laying on of hands. Soon, Flowers began a series of phone calls to Clinton that would eventually serve as her putative “proof” of their 12-year affair. The story she told couldn’t have been better calculated to bring out Clinton’s well-known tendency to empathize with women down on their luck — especially, a cynic might note, good-looking women with long blond hair and long-ago shared secrets.

Flowers’ gambit was that because of the allegations in Nichols’ lawsuit, which he had recently re-filed, she was being pestered to distraction by tabloid newspaper and TV reporters.

The candidate returned one of her calls late one night from the campaign trail. According to a transcript provided by “Clintonwatch,” a newsletter published by the right-wing agitprop organization “Citizen’s United,” the conversation went as follows:

“Gennifer, it’s Bill Clinton.” An odd way for a long-term lover to

announce himself, one might think.

Flowers commented that he didn’t sound like himself. Did he have a

cold? “Oh it’s just my … every year about this time I … my sinuses go bananas.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“And I’ve been in this stupid airplane too much, but I’m OK.”

Clinton’s allergies act up in the spring and fall. His voice gets hoarse and his nose swells up like W.C. Fields’. That and his brother Roger’s cocaine-dealing conviction were the main reasons for persistent rumors of the governor’s own drug habit.

Listening to the tapes, it sounds as if these two people scarcely know one another. Flowers launched into her tale of woe. Forces unknown had broken into her apartment and rifled the joint.

“There wasn’t any sign of a break-in,” she explained, “but the

drawers and things. There wasn’t anything missing that I can tell, but somebody had …”

“Somebody had gone through your stuff?” Clinton asks. “But they

didn’t steal anything?”

“No … I had jewelry here, and everything was still here.”

Possibly that’s why Flowers never reported the purported break-in

to the Little Rock Police Department. In a January 1998 interview with Geraldo Rivera, however, Flowers would pin the blame for the non-burglary upon Clinton himself.

At no point in this, or any of Flowers’ tapes, did Clinton say anything that could reasonably be construed to indicate a long-term sexual relationship. Indeed every one of their taped conversations centered around the same issue: Larry Nichols’ accusations, and Flowers’ fear and loathing of the tabloid press.

In one conversation Clinton advised her that it would be “extremely valuable” if she would sign an affidavit explaining — as she’d

told Clinton, and would repeat at her Star press conference — that an Arkansas Republican had offered to pay her $50,000 to point the finger at the candidate. He repeatedly expressed regret that Flowers had to get dragged into the political maelstrom, and made no bones about who he thought responsible.

“[Sheffield] Nelson called me,” Clinton told Flowers, “and said ‘I

want you to know we didn’t have anything to do with that.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you sent your little lawyer to the prison system to find inmates who would trash me …’ He was calling people off the street, trying to get people to say I’d slept with them.”

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Thanks in large measure to the Clintons’ “60 Minutes” appearance,

Flowers’ allegations failed to sink Clinton in the New Hampshire primary. In Little Rock, she was widely disbelieved. Within days, stories in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which has never endorsed Clinton in any of his election bids, had effectively demolished her credibility. Among other things, Flowers’ résumé claimed degrees from colleges she’d barely attended, membership in a sorority she’d never joined and jobs she’d never held. Her claim to have won the Miss Teenage America crown proved false. Much

was made locally of her claim to the Star that she and Clinton had many torrid assignations during 1979 and 1980 at the Excelsior, Little Rock’s fanciest downtown hotel. The Excelsior didn’t exist until November 1982.