His Cheatin’ Heart

I In a remarkable but little-noticed article buried inside the Sunday Washington Post four months before the 1992 presidential election, top Clinton campaign aide Betsey Wright said she had been spending the better part of her time since the Democratic National Convention trying to quell potential "bimbo eruptions." Through the Little Rock gossip mills, the campaign was tracking nineteen potential allegations that had surfaced in the first week following the convention, in addition to seven others that had appeared earlier in the year, Wright said. The extensive effort to short-circuit such stories, Wright said, included the campaign's hiring of a private investigator to obtain information damaging to the credibility of the women involved, which was then used, presumably, to persuade them to stay quiet. Perhaps unintentionally, the phrase "bimbo eruptions" cut two ways. Wright's choice of the epithet "bimbo" -- and a later reference to "gold-digger growth" -- was obviously meant to discredit in advance any reports of sexual liaisons between Arkansas governor Bill Clinton and women other than his wife, Hillary. Yet at the same time, Wright also seemed to be conceding, if not promising, that there was more to come -- i.e., the imminent appearance of an unspecified number of such women, and a subsequent round of stories raising questions about Clinton's private life. Wright was not the first to talk about the campaign's aggressive efforts to discredit sources and lobby reporters and editors to spike emerging news stories. Writing in the New York Times in March, Gwen Ifill reported: There have been constant, though undocumented, reports of articles that were never published because the Clinton damage controllers were on full alert before final publication decisions were made. This works "more often than you think," said George Stephanopoulos. Even the recently released documentary about the 1992 campaign, The War Room, showed Stephanopoulos on the telephone on the eve o...