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Patterson said he often drove Clinton to the Quapaw Towers in Little Rock, where Flowers lived, late in the evening, waiting in the parking lot for as long as two hours for Clinton's return. "Every place we ever went, even a private party, we would go in with him, except a woman's house," Patterson said. Perhaps because his relationship with Flowers began long before he began to acknowledge his behavior to the troopers, Clinton had a story to cover his tracks. Clinton told Patterson that he was visiting Maurice Smith, director of the state highway department, who lived in the same building, but Patterson believes that if this were true he would have gone into the building with Clinton, as was usual with business meetings. [FOOTNOTE 6: According to Flowers in a Penthouse interview in December 1992, Clinton often jogged over to her apartment from the nearby governor's mansion, "arriving sweaty but eager." On other occasions, Flowers said, Clinton's driver sat in the car in the complex driveway and waited for two hours or so. In an interview with me, Flowers said she knew Larry Patterson and also knew that Clinton's drivers waited for him in the parking lot. During the initial visits, Clinton entered the building through the lobby and was seen getting off the elevator at the second floor, where Flowers lived. Rumors soon circulated through the building. Thereafter, Flowers said, she waited on her balcony until she saw the governor's Lincoln pull in and then went to the first floor to prop open a fire exit door with a newspaper so Clinton could enter the building undetected.]

Yet despite this cover story, Clinton evidently couldn't resist bragging about his sexual exploits. On one occasion, Perry recalled, Clinton said that Gennifer Flowers "could suck a tennis ball through a garden hose."

According to Patterson and Perry, in the late spring of 1991, as Clinton was seriously considering making a presidential run, Flowers began calling him incessantly, sometimes four or five times a week. Shortly after this spate of calls, Flowers got a job as an administrative assistant for the Arkansas Board of Review's appeal tribunal, which hears unemployment cases. According to published news accounts, Flowers first asked Clinton about obtaining a state job in September 1990, and Clinton turned the request over to his special assistant Judy Gaddy. After applying for one position and being turned down, Flowers complained in a letter to Clinton the following January and mentioned allegations linking the two romantically. Shortly thereafter, Judy Gaddy inquired about a job opening at the Board of Review for Flowers. Flowers applied. Bill Gaddy, Judy's husband and another Clinton appointee, is the director of the state's Employment Security Division, which oversees the review board. According to a state committee which later investigated the matter, with Gaddy's approval, Don K. Barnes, the chairman of the review board who hired Flowers, improperly waived certain hiring procedures, and Flowers got the job. Barnes later said that Gaddy had recommended Flowers for the job, but Gaddy has denied this. Flowers told the Star that Clinton "pulled strings" to secure the job for her, which Clinton has denied. Patterson, however, corroborated Flowers's allegation. "I remember I was driving the car when Clinton got on the phone and discussed that particular job with Bill Gaddy. There is no doubt in my mind that he was asking Gaddy to give it to Gennifer," Patterson said. Gaddy denied ever having a telephone conversation with Clinton about Flowers. (Flowers lost the job for failing to show up for work three days in a row, shortly after coming forward with her story in the Star. She is currently circulating a book proposal in New York.)

Even before the Flowers story broke, Clinton was aware that the issue of his womanizing would plague him in a presidential campaign. "He was walking along one day in 1991 with Bruce Lindsey [now a senior White House aide] and he said, 'If I make the race, I'm going to keep Larry around to deal with all the women,'" Patterson said. ("That never happened," Lindsey said.) According to Perry, Clinton told him in 1990 that he was considering not running for re-election in Arkansas because he feared his history of womanizing would be exposed. As it happened, during that year's campaign, a disgruntled former state employee named Larry Nichols filed a lawsuit linking Clinton to five named women and making the unsubstantiated charge that he had been fired as part of an attempted cover-up involving a secret fund used to facilitate Clinton's trysts. The suit was reported in Arkansas, but neither the precise nature of the allegations nor the women's names were mentioned.

In 1992, the task of "dealing with the women" was ultimately assigned to Buddy Young, the supervisory trooper in governor's security, the troopers said. "Buddy Young specifically told me that he was trying to keep a lid on the other women," Patterson said. "If one more came out, they knew Gennifer would be credible. He said they could weather the storm on one, but not two. He told me he went to Texas to talk to Elizabeth Ward [a former Miss America named in the Nichols suit]. He said that she had told him that she didn't need any money, but he said, 'If the money's right, I know she'll keep her mouth shut.'"[FOOTNOTE 7: When Ward appeared in the May 1992 issue of Playboy, which did not mention the alleged affair, the Clinton campaign quickly circulated a written statement from Ward in which she denied any romantic involvement with Clinton.] Young denied this. "I've never spoken to Elizabeth Ward," he said. Ward could not be reached for comment.

According to Perry, about six weeks before the Star interview was published, Flowers again began calling the residence day and night asking to speak with Bill. Word around the guard house was that Flowers might be trying to blackmail Clinton by threatening to expose their affair. "She was constantly calling, sometimes several times a day. And we were aware that she was up to something. We were told that she might be trying to tape the calls with Clinton, so I called her Gennifer Fowler so it would look like I didn't know who she was." Here is an excerpt from a transcript of the Flowers tapes:

PERRY: Governor's mansion, Roger Perry.

FLOWERS: Is Bill Clinton in please?

PERRY: Ma'am, he's with some people right now. May I ask who's calling?

FLOWERS: This is Gennifer Flowers, I'm returning his call.

PERRY: Gennifer Fowler?

FLOWERS: Flowers.

PERRY: OK. Hang on just a second.…

After the story broke, the damage-controllers went into high gear. Pursuing the story further, reporters began filing requests for various state records, including personnel files and phone records. Up to the time the Star story appeared, the troopers said they kept two logs at the guard house. One was a gate log, produced on a typewriter, noting all vehicles coming into or out of the mansion gates. A second record was a standard telephone message log, with one copy of any telephone message going to Bill or Hillary and one copy retained in the log book.

Patterson said he was told by Buddy Young that Hillary Clinton ordered that the gate log no longer be maintained. And a new procedure was instituted for handling the phone log. Previously, old log books were stored in a maintenance house on the property after they were filled. Post-Flowers, the troopers said, they were told to bring the message log book directly to Buddy Young, who disposed of it. It was Patterson's understanding that the old logs from the maintenance house -- records kept by state employees -- were destroyed on Hillary's orders.

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