One more powerful man behaving badly

Paula Jones has come a long way. The 31-year-old born into a poor Bible-bashing household where television was prohibited, miscreant children were disciplined with a good whuppin', and the family clothes were made out of scraps of fabric her father brought home from the factory where he worked, was able to fly her Los Angeles hairdresser, Danny DiCriscio, to Washington for her big day out last weekend.

She has acquired a publicist/fashion counsellor/Svengali-type to organise her book pitches, jewellery purchases and boarding arrangements for Mitzi the dog. Plus the $10,000 new look, wrought by "makeover king" Mr DiCriscio, whose advertised clients include "Pamela Lee and Playboy cover girls".

Last weekend, minus the exploding perm and fishnet stockings, she rolled into Washington looking like a character out of Friends. And all of it thanks to the financier of the Paula Jones circus, wealthy Virginian good ol' boy John Wayne Whitehead and his Rutherford Institute.

That a foundation more commonly noted for its espousal of little local Christian rightwing causes such as promoting prayer in schools should embrace a case so prurient, so vividly precise in its description of the allegedly curiously shaped presidential organ, has caused some head-scratching.

Was there any chance that there might be some political agenda behind his decision to take Ms Jones's case to heart?

"Oh, gosh, no!" he exclaimed.

But Whitehead is a comparatively small player in the orchestrated drive to pull down Clinton from the day he took office. Vast sums from virulent right-wing sources have been pumped into privately employed, fulltime, dirt-digging investigators. The special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, the "Rottweiler" appointed to investigate the byzantine intricacies of Whitewater, has been on full-time official digging duty.

Whether or not Paula Jones arrived in an Arkansas hotel suite in 1991 at the governor's bidding or at her own request will be thrashed out in court in May. To most people familiar with the details her case hardly amounts to a hill of beans, not by contrast with the collapsing Middle East peace process, thwarted arms inspectors in Iraq, or savage embargos on Cuba.

But her name by now is nearly as familiar as Clinton's. The media have seen to that. Thanks to them, the Clinton Presidency has been dominated by Whitewater and his sexual proclivities and the Presidency itself horribly diminished. A story in last Monday's British Guardian described the Clinton effect on a recent gathering of America's brightest intellectuals.

"He was the most adept of us all . . . It was the side he doesn't show in public, the brilliant, scholarship kid, the Rhodes scholar . . . Thrilling and awesome . . . It was everybody's ideal; a national leader listening to ideas, taking them seriously", were the comments afterwards. Yet he will always get far more publicity for his encounters with Paula Jones than with intellectuals like these.

Jones's publicist has made much of the notion that under the US judicial system "a little girl from Arkansas" is equal in law to the US President. But without such coverage and huge financial backing from Clinton opponents, Paula Jones wouldn't have got past the law firm's front door, never mind have them out trawling the nation for women who subjected themselves willingly to the President's rough and ready treatment.

That they managed to land a netful of bighaired fish will not be startling news to anyone who followed the Gennifer Flowers saga before Clinton was ever elected. ("You can take a man out of Arkansas, but you cannot take Arkansas out of a man," went one headline this week over an assertion that he likes "the frolicsome kind, the cheesy type, the smalltown girl equivalent of `a bit of rough.' ")

That many of these fish were "young and dumb" - in the words of writer Suzanne Moore - is probably no news either. But the point is that these were consenting fish. Monica Lewinsky was, allegedly, one such woman, one of a long string. Infidelities always mean lying in some sense, actively or passively.

But why Bill Clinton would ask her to lie under oath about their alleged tawdry but legal affair before the tawdry Jones/ Whitehead axis and risk impeachment is the outstanding question. A man with his knowledge of history knows well that it's the coverup, not the foul deed, that brings you down in the end.

In any event, it would hardly have been the first time that White House residents crossed or were accused of crossing the sexual line. John F. Kennedy will doubtless keep the record for his "in-office" conquests, with Marilyn Monroe's toe-curlingly breathy Happy Birthday serenade a permanent testament to it.

There was Franklin Roosevelt's reported dalliance with a secretary, while John Quincy Adams was called The Pimp for allegedly procuring a young American girl for the Russian Tsar. And back when the US presidency was in its infancy, accusations flew that President Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with a black slave.

Americans don't hold the monopoly on powerful men behaving badly, however. To illustrate that it's nothing new, we could begin with King Henry VIII. But more recently, in 1993, Benjamin Netanyahu, the future prime minister of Israel, admitted to an affair with a PR consultant while on his third marriage to a stewardess.

The late Greek prime minister, Andreas Papandreou, had a very public affair with a stewardess (a different one, obviously) and subsequently married her. The last French president kept two households, and in Germany the putative next chancellor has just married his third wife.

In Ireland, the rumour mill functions on such gossip. That the Irish media have been extremely restrained in such matters has never stopped some politicians yelping about intrusiveness and others conducting themselves in certifiably paranoid fashion. Anyway, although some hostesses within the Pale still grind their teeth to powder at the notion, there is no denying that the most powerful man in the State is in a public relationship with a woman who is not his wife and that this is accepted with equanimity by the citizenry.

But, clearly, there is a vast difference between that and the kind of compulsive philandering alleged against Clinton, Kennedy and the likes of British cheeky chappies such as Alan Clark and Steven Norris.

All week the arguments raged. Are men like this fit to run a country? Probably, say most, unless they're prone to falling in love, which makes most people behave like someone 10 times over the limit. Do they behave like this because they have power, which, as we know, "tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely"?

Are they misogynists? Not necessarily. Bill Clinton never seemed to have a problem with women. He promoted them and he even married one. Or is the truth more simple and broaderranging? Are these men simply the turbocharged version of men generally, who are reputed to think about sex every 11 seconds or minutes or whatever that old statistic is?

So, is the truth about men's sexuality coming out at last? Were our mothers right after all (yet again) when they said that men "were only after the one thing"?

We should be told.