THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1997:
September
Fall 1997
- Fall: Former president George H.W. Bush asks Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi Arabian ambassador to the US and a close confidant of Bush, to speak to his eldest son, George W. Bush. The younger Bush was completing his first term as the governor of Texas and is contemplating a run for the presidency. Bandar has a social and information network in Washington unrivaled by any other foreign official, and is so close to the former president that he is nicknamed "Bandar Bush." In one sense, like the good intelligence officers they both are, Bandar and Bush had recruited one another. In 1991, in the runup to the Persian Gulf War, Bandar had been a virtual member of the Bush war cabinet. It was Bandar who codged and coddled Bush out of his post-election depression after losing his bid for re-election in 1992. But Bandar was also intensely interested in keeping close ties to the White House for both his own and Saudi Arabia's interests, an ambition that had not cooled during the eight years of the Clinton presidency, where his access was limited at best. He was close to the Reagan family as well; after Reagan aide Michael Deaver left the White House during Reagan's second term, Nancy Reagan asked Bandar to find Deaver a position. Bandar gave Deaver a $500,000 consulting contract and never laid eyes on him again.
- The visit to the younger Bush is as well-planned as any intelligence-gathering mission. Bandar decides to "drop in" during a Bush trip to watch his beloved Dallas Cowboys play, a stop that would give Bandar "cover." Bush meets Bandar on the tarmac of the Austin airport, and talks with the Saudi ambassador on the asphalt. "I'm thinking of running for president," Bush tells Bandar. Though he has strong ideas on a number of domestic issues, "I don't have the foggiest idea about what I think about international foreign policy," he tells Bandar. Bush later recalls, "My dad told me before I make up my mind, go and talk to Bandar. One, he's our friend. Our means America, not just the Bush family. Number two, he knows everyone around the world who counts. And number three, he will give you his view on what he sees happening in the world. Maybe he can set up meetings for you with people around the world." Bandar quickly realizes that Bush is energized to run in part to defeat likely Democratic candidate Al Gore, as if, as Bandar later recalls, Bush wanted to take on Gore and show that Bush was better. Bandar gives Bush a thumbnail sketch of global relations and policies, undoubtedly colored by his own nation's interests and agendas.
- Shortly thereafter, the elder Bush steers his son into a meeting with one of his own favorite former National Security Council staffers, Condoleezza Rice, the provost of Stanford University and an expert on the Soviet Union. When Bush makes his decision to run in early 1999, he asks Rice to be his top foreign policy advisor.
- Around that same time, he asks his close political advisor Karen Hughes to help him articulate the reasons why he wants to be president. "There has to be a compelling reason [for him] to run," he tells her. Hughes decides that his core issue will be tax cuts, supported by his desire to reform the American educational system and his plans to promote faith-based initiatives -- giving federal money to social programs affiliated with religious groups. Shortly thereafter, Bush says to Al Hubbard, who his father has recruited to help him with domestic economic issues, "Can you believe this is what I'm running on! This tax cut!"
- Also advising Bush on foreign policy is Richard Armitage, a former assistant secretary of defense under Reagan and Colin Powell's best friend. Armitage becomes a member of a team organized by Rice jokingly called the "Vulcans," after the statue of the Roman god in Rice's hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. The name quickly sticks, and the team, which includes Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary for policy in Dick Cheney's Pentagon and another member of Cheney's staff, Stephen Hadley, becomes known as a group of fiery neoconservatives with a strong ideological bent towards supporting Israel in the Middle East and aggressively extending the US's military and economic reach throughout the world. At the first Vulcan meeting in February 1999, Bush asks if defense will be a major issue in the 2000 elections. The assemblage decides that it won't be likely, but Bush wants to run on a strong defense policy. He wants to run on the idea of transforming the military to meet the needs of the 21st century, and to introduce the idea of a stronger "homeland security." A September 1999 speech given by Bush at The Citadel, a South Carolina military academy, makes this point, and says that the transformational effects he intends to make will not be realized for a generation. Though Armitage, who will become deputy secretary of state under the newly elected Bush in 2001, supports the candidate, he privately worries that Bush sees himself as a man of destiny, and worse, doesn't understand the implications of America as a world power. (Bob Woodward)
September 1997
- September: A profile of campaign guru Don Sipple proves that Karl Rove is not the only Republican involved in winning campaigns at all costs. Unfortunately, Sipple's private life is studded with charges of spousal abuse. Sipple is a highly successful GOP consultant, who has worked on campaigns for Bob Dole, Pete Wilson, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, among others; he is expected to help manage the 1998 campaign of the younger Bush for re-election as Governor of Texas. A highly skilled operative who specializes in producing emotional and sometimes combative TV ads, in 1992 Sipple turned his skills at manipulation to gaining custody of his son from his former wife Regina. Regina Sipple went to court during Sipple's tenure as Bob Dole's campaign manager to keep her son, and told the court that Sipple routinely beat and physically abused her. Sipple's second wife, Deborah Steelman, a prominent Republican lawyer in Washington, also testified that Sipple had beaten her during their marriage; Sipple denied the charges during the court battle. Friends and colleagues of Sipple have now come forward to verify the charges made by Sipple's ex-wives, in spite of fears of alienating friends and associates in their Republican political and business circles, because they worry about such a violent person having so much political influence.
- Sipple's ads are ironic, appealing as so many of them do to women's inherent fear of violence in their lives. Others are considered "masterpieces" of gutter-level attack ads. But as reporter Richard Blow writes, "his story suggests a specific kind of public-private overlap: A number of those who know him believe that the same qualities that may have led Sipple to the alleged abuse -- his aggression, his obsession with control, his gift at suasion -- are the same qualities that allow him to excel in politics. As David Steelman, Debbie's brother, puts it, 'Was Don Sipple hired despite what he was -- or because of it?'" Don Sipple married Regina Spencer in 1974. Spencer was a devout churchgoer and a dyed-in-the-wool conservative; Sipple, however, was casual about his faith and had recently left working for Democrats such as Eugene McCarthy because he thought he could prosper by changing his party affiliation and going to work for the GOP. (Spencer's father got Sipple a job on the staff of Kit Bond, the Republican governor of Missouri.) Sipple's true colors didn't take long to show themselves: after accusing his new wife of flirting with Bond, he attacked her in their living room, seizing her by the back of the neck and grinding her face into the carpet, according to Regina's testimony in court. The physical abuse escalated. In 1976, his wife's relatives watched in horror as Sipple punched Regina over a disagreement over something they had watched on television. According to her testimony, Sipple became more and more controlling, insisting that her Bible study group always meet at their home so he could watch her. He would time her while she ran errands, and if she took too much time, he would beat her. After every beating, Sipple would apologize, and tell her that if she wouldn't transgress, he wouldn't get so angry at her. In 1977 their son Evan was born; the first night the mother and son were home from the hospital, Sipple threw her out of bed and beat her while they lay on the floor. Regina feared that their newborn would roll off the bed and be injured. She left Sipple shortly thereafter. "I really thought that if she stayed, he would have killed her," says her mother. "Eventually, he would have done it." They were divorced in 1979; Regina's lawyers said he observed bruises on his client.
- In 1980, Steelman met Sipple while working on the campaign of John Ashcroft, a Republican running for Missouri attorney general. Sipple was working on Bond's third gubernatorial campaign. The two began dating, and Sipple hinted to Steelman that his first wife was mentally unstable. In 1981, they were married, and Sipple's propensity for control asserted itself from the start. He frequently called her at home or her office to check up on her. The couple moved to Washington, and Sipple joined the political consulting firm of Bailey, Deardourff & Associates, perhaps the hottest GOP consulting firm on K Street. Sipple began crafting one successful GOP campaign after another, and in 1987 left Bailey, Deardourff to start his own consulting firm. His success continued. Sipple was one of the first political consultants to make "character" a leading quality for political victory, and also showed a propensity for savage attacks against his clients' Democratic opponents. Meanwhile, as her own career flourished, Steelman was the target of more and more abuse from her husband. Once, in a supermarket, Debbie grazed Don's hand with a shopping cart, and he turned and slapped her, in the middle of the dairy section. When she asked why he had done it, his muttered response sickened her: "I was just doing to you what you did to me, you c*nt." Another time, during one of his temper tantrums, Debbie headed upstairs to get away from him, and he grabbed her by one arm and yanked her down the flight of stairs. After they attended her high school reunion in 1983, Sipple punched her in the face in the parking lot. Perhaps the worst night of their marriage occurred in February 1984; after Steelman had worked late, Sipple attacked her the next morning, throwing her onto their bed, screaming obscenities at her, and raped her. She fled the house that day and began divorce proceedings. Sipple retaliated by spreading rumors that his wife had been having affairs.
- Meanwhile, Regina's life was spiraling out of control. Haunted by memories of past abuse, she began drinking, and her son Evan began having problems in school. Evan remembers that he saw little of his father, who never tried to be a major part of his life; he remembers mostly being afraid of Sipple. Regina stopped drinking in 1988. In 1992 Regina heard that her ex-husband had become a millionaire. She had not asked him for alimony, and Evan received a paltry $375 a month in child support. She decided to refile for additional child support; Sipple retaliated with a countersuit demanding full custody of Evan. Sipple was lucky that the trial took place in Calloway County, Missouri, well out of the media limelight; he knew that Regina would bring up the issue of abuse. He also had tremendous financial and legal resources, far more than Regina could muster. Sipple's case turned ugly quickly: he accused Regina of falsifying photos showing her bruised and battered face, and savaged her in court as a lazy, chronically unemployed drunk. His ace card was his calling Missouri Supreme Court Justice Chip Robertson as a witness. Robertson was a fixture in the Missouri judiciary and a rising star in state Republican politics. More to the point, Robertson was trial judge Gene Hamilton's boss. Hamilton refused to recuse himself, though legal scholars say Hamilton was ethically bound to either recuse himself or deny Robertson the stand. Robertson testified as a character witness for Sipple, and testified that he knew Regina was a poor mother, though he admitted he had never met her. Regina countered with the testimony of Steelman, who told the court that Sipple had regularly beaten her during their marriage, just like he had done with his first wife. Sipple's lawyers immediately countered with accusations of Steelman's supposed infidelity. Sipple himself claimed to have far more of an involvement with his son Evan than he had actually had, and blamed Regina's lack of discipline and structure for Evan's academic problems. Sipple's third wife, Joyce, also testified in her husband's behalf, and told the court that Sipple never raised a hand to her. On August 17, 1992, Hamilton issued a brief ruling awarding Sipple custody of Evan.
- Life with his father became a nightmare for Evan; he argued and fought constantly with his father and stepmother, and soon after, Sipple sent Evan to a psychiatric hospital for two months and then to a Massachusetts boarding school for troubled boys. Evan left school to visit his mother in California, and refused to return; Sipple had a warrant issued for Regina's arrest, but it was never executed. Evan was finally back where he wanted to be -- with his mother, and far away from his father.
- Sipple seemed to retaliate through his work. In 1994 he managed or assisted three gubernatorial campaigns -- George Bush in Texas, Pete Wilson in California, and Jim Edgar in Illinois -- where the Democratic opponents were female. Sipple's ads focused on what he characterized as his opponents' "softness" on crime, their inability to bring discipline to their states. Blow writes, "Against all three candidates, Sipple used essentially the same ad. One depicted a man holding up a woman in a parking garage, another showed a woman being chased into her apartment by a shadowy figure. Another ad used that same image, along with a shot of a policeman draping a sheet over a young boy's body. What was striking about the ads was that they seemed to have little basis in objective reality: Ann Richards, for example, vigorously supported tough-on-crime laws, and the crime rate in her state had dropped 8.8 percent in 1993. But Sipple knew how to exploit popular stereotypes about women. In California, he hammered away at Brown's opposition to the death penalty, which was, he told the New York Times, 'a very powerful symbolic issue having to do with one's attitudinal dispositions toward punishment.' After the elections, when all his candidates won, Sipple told the Washington Times that the GOP had succeeded that year because Republicans came across to the public as 'disciplinarians,' while Democrats sounded more like 'therapists.' The election, Sipple explained, 'came down to discipline versus therapy.'"
- In 1995, Sipple began working on Bob Dole's presidential campaign after his original candidate, Pete Wilson, dropped out. At least four of Dole's staffers, including his two top aides, knew of the wife-beating allegations. They dismissed the stories. Regina informed Dole's staff of her ex-husband's ugly history of spousal abuse and poor fatherhood, but the Dole campaign paid little attention. An aide approached Debbie Steelman about working on the campaign, but after Steelman told the aide, Sheila Burke, of her history with Sipple, the job offer vaporized. It remains unclear whether Dole himself ever knew of the allegations, though Blow observes "that four high-ranking members of Dole '96 knew of the allegations in Sipple's past and did nothing is, politically speaking, highly unusual. Keeping Sipple on the campaign was an act of political Russian roulette: Bob Dole was losing to Bill Clinton, and he couldn't afford a scandal like having a top adviser be accused of spousal abuse -- especially since he was losing among women by 20 points. And if it had come out that one of the ex-wives making the allegations, Deborah Steelman, had been considered for a campaign job that was all but offered yet never materialized -- well, that would have looked like a cover-up." Sipple pushed Dole to run a negative campaign on Clinton's perceived moral failings and Dole's own commitment to "reverse the moral decline of the country." Dole and the campaign staff resisted Sipple's push to go negative, frustrating and angering Sipple. He became sullen and withdrawn, and resigned from the campaign in September 1996. Just before the election, Sipple gave an unusually blunt interview to Newsweek in which he criticized Dole. "His clock stopped in the late 1950s or early 1960s," Sipple said. Certainly, Dole would not make a good president. "There's the lack of communications skills, the indecisiveness, the obsession with self-reliance." Sipple's remarks did considerable damage to an already floundering Dole.
- As with most stories of this kind, there are no happy endings, just continuations. Evan Sipple has graduated from high school, and he and his father are still trying to repair their relationship. Regina Sipple is an editor at a computer publishing house and has never remarried. Her mother, Patricia Spencer, began volunteering at a shelter for battered women after her daughter left Sipple. Sometimes, Spencer says, it saddens her to think of how her daughter's life has turned out: "If she'd married someone else she might have had a good life, instead of one that's been difficult. She's frightened, and I think she always will be." Debbie Steelman lives happily with her second husband and their two adopted children in Virginia. Her friends say that she has grown increasingly spiritual, struggling to provide a sanctuary for her children in a culture that seems pervaded by violence. As for Sipple, despite his awkward exit from the Dole campaign, he is prospering. Besides his current campaigns, two of his ongoing clients, Bush and Ashcroft, are being talked about as presidential candidates in the year 2000. (Mother Jones)
- September 12: Conservative columnist Ann Coulter writes in response to the death of Britain's Princess Diana, "Her children knew she's sleeping with all these men. That just seems to me, it's the definition of 'not a good mother.' ... Is everyone just saying here that it's okay to ostentatiously have premarital sex in front of your children?" "...[Diana is] an ordinary and pathetic and confessional -- I've never had bulimia! I've never had an affair! I've never had a divorce! So I don't think she's better than I am." (Washington Monthly)
- September 18: Linda Tripp receives a call from conservative literary agent Lucianne Goldberg; Goldberg, who had discussed an abortive book deal with Tripp the year before, wants to know about the Monica Lewinsky affair. Though Goldberg does not yet know Lewinsky's name, and Tripp does not reveal it, she confirms many salacious details already known by Goldberg, and adds a few more. Tripp reveals that for the last five months, she has pretended to be Lewinsky's friend and confidant, and has been keeping secret notes of everything Lewinsky has told her. Goldberg suggests that someone from the Paula Jones legal team contact Lewinsky, an idea Tripp doesn't believe Lewinsky will go for. The subject turns to Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter who has hounded Tripp for months about details concerning the Kathleen Willey and Lewinsky allegations.
- Tripp has no idea that Goldberg is taping their conversation. She does know that Goldberg is as hard-core and as bitter of a conservative as she is, and that Goldberg bears a visceral hatred of all things Clinton. (She also realizes that, aside from ideology, she can make a considerable amount of money from this situation.) Goldberg played a small but interesting role in the Watergate affair, when, in 1972, she posed as a journalist and spied on the George McGovern campaign for the Nixon re-election team, providing mostly intimate, sleazy gossip -- who was sleeping with whom, which campaign aides smoked marijuana -- and, though Nixon found Goldberg's voyeurism fascinating, the campaign itself found little use for Goldberg's information. Goldberg's posing as a journalist who in reality is a spy is a favorite tactic of her friend Murray Chotiner, a veteran Republican operative who cut his teeth on the 1950 Nixon campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom Chotiner and Nixon successfully painted as a Communist sympathizer. Goldberg also helped Chotiner smear the distinguished Greek journalist Elias Demetracopoulos as a Communist in 1972; Demetracopoulos, who had fled the Greek military coup of 1967 and fought for the restoration of democracy in his country ever since, was anything but a Communist, but because Demetracopoulos was poised to expose the illegal channelling of hundreds of thousands of Greek dollars into the Nixon campaign, and because he supported McGovern's stated goal of cutting off US aid to the Greek military junta, was slandered by a letter that called Demetracopoulos "an obscure Greek communist journalist." Senate Watergate investigators later found that Goldberg had helped write and disseminate the letter. Her organization, the Women's News Service, of which her husband Sidney Goldberg was a senior editor, was later exposed as a front for the CIA.
- For herself, Goldberg, then Lucy Cummings, had gotten her start in the Johnson administration, bragging that her blonde hair, "big boobs" (her words), and tight outfits landed her a job in Johnson's press office. Now a stern moralist, Goldberg then bragged that her entire social life revolved around affairs with married men. She was booted from the Johnson White House after carrying on a too-public affair with one of Johnson's advisors, Dale Miller, and for buying a number of items from a department store and fraudulently charging them to Miller's account. In 1965 she tried to sell at auction a handwritten letter from Lady Bird Johnson that she had apparently stolen; the Secret Service forced her to give it back. She became a Republican after marrying her second husband, Sidney Goldberg, a former public relations flack whose boss had been Nixon speechwriter William Safire.
- Exposed as a Nixon campaign spy in 1973 by the Washington Star, both Goldbergs resign from the Women's News Service, and embarks on a new, dual career: an author of salacious novels such as the soft-core pornographic work Madam Cleo's Girls, and as a literary agent for tabloid, gossipy non-fiction books. "I love dish," she says is her literary motto, "I live for dish." She also frequently publishes gossip items in a number of newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, most notably the New York Post. Her first non-fiction book, a critique of feminism called Purr, Baby, Purr, says that every woman should consider herself "a switchboard with all sorts of buttons and plug-ins for lighting up and making connections." It is hard to see why she was so morally outraged over Clinton's sexual history. In 1982, she made news in the literary community when one of her authors, celebrity gossip monger Kitty Kelley, found that Goldberg had been pocketing the profits from the overseas sales of one of her books without sharing the proceeds with her. Goldberg was convicted of fraud, though the judge overturned the verdict. Kelley later says that Goldberg paid her the money she had stolen from her, around $50,000, before they left the courtroom, but, ironically, Goldberg's lawyer had to sue her for the legal fees he owed her. Twelve years after winning a judgment against Goldberg, she had still not paid her lawyer.
- Goldberg knows that her motives in becoming involved with Linda Tripp will be questioned; when asked later, she will deny that she and Tripp ever considered any sort of book deal, even to Kenneth Starr's sympathetic and cooperative prosecutors. Goldberg's own taped conversations with Tripp will prove that Goldberg lied about the book deal. Goldberg and Tripp worry that if Tripp gives too much information to Isikoff, the journalist will steal their thunder in his own book (though Isikoff later denies it, documentation proves that in the summer of 1997, he himself tried to put together a deal for a book on the Clinton sex scandals). Goldberg advises Tripp to hold off on cooperating with Isikoff until she can make a deal for Tripp's own book. A week later, Goldberg says that Tripp should stop talking with Isikoff altogether and let Goldberg cut a deal for her with either the Globe or the Star, two supermarket tabloids obsessed with Clinton's sexual history. She also tells Tripp to begin taping her phone conversations with Lewinsky. Tripp is receptive to both ideas, agreeing with Goldberg that for her publication deal to be successful, "you've gotta really rat and...you've gotta tape." Goldberg apparently isn't aware that, unlike her home state of New York, one-party taping such as she is advocating is illegal in Maryland, Tripp's state of residence. A single recording can bring a felony conviction with five years in jail and a $10,000 fine. Goldberg then says that she and Tripp should both meet with Isikoff, with Goldberg passing herself off as a media advisor to Tripp, and Goldberg will wear a wire to record the proceedings. Seven months later, Tripp will lie under oath to the OIC grand jury by denying any such book deal was being discussed; though the OIC possesses the Goldberg audio tapes, the OIC lawyers neither contradict Tripp's statements on the witness stand, nor do they provide the tapes to the defense. Both Tripp and the OIC break the law. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
