All Too Human: A Political Education by George Stephanopoulos

issue in 1992.
    Which brings us back to Clinton and women. That front had been mostly quiet through the fall, except for “sweet, sweet Connie.” Immortalized in the Grand Funk Railroad classic “We're an American Band,” Connie Hamzy was a Little Rock groupie who was infamous on the rock circuit for her lusty backstage adventures. But in November 1991, she claimed that her favors had also been bestowed upon a certain Arkansas governor.
    My assistant, Steve “Scoop” Cohen, heard about it on a local talk-radio station. They were promoting an upcoming issue of
Penthouse
, in which photos of Connie would be accompanied by her claim that Clinton had propositioned her eight years earlier in a hotel lobby. Hamzy's charge felt like a mortal threat to our embryonic campaign, so we scrambled into action.
    I contacted Clinton on his way to a Texas fund-raiser, but he didn't seem too concerned. Sure, he'd met Hamzy, he recalled, but not the way she said. As he quickly recounted the story over the phone, I imagined his eyes getting wider and detected a little laugh in his voice. They had run into each other in the lobby of the North Little Rock Hilton. The governor was leaving a speech with a few associates when Hamzy, who had been sunbathing by the hotel pool, ran up to him, flipped down her bikini top, and asked, “What do you think of these?” Clinton seemed to take great pleasure in picturing the scene again.
    Hillary was less amused. “We have to destroy her story,” she said from her seat next to him on the plane. I was with her. Hamzy's story didn't sound funny to me either. It was flimsy, but it could still do some damage if we didn't snuff it out fast. Thankfully, the facts seemed to be on our side. This wasn't just a “he said, she said” case. Working with Clinton's gubernatorial staff, I was able to round up sworn affidavits from three people who'd accompanied Clinton, witnessed the encounter, and corroborated his account.
    The story broke before dawn on CNN
Headline News
. Barely into my first cup of coffee, I called CNN central in Atlanta. It took a little while to find someone with responsibility, but when I finally reached a night editor, I started screaming: “You can't run something like this without proof. You have to check a charge before you run with it.”
    Stopping CNN was key. If they ran the story all day, however briefly, other news organizations could cite them to justify running their own stories. Our denials would be folded into the accounts, but the damage would be done. All of the trashy images —
Penthouse
, rock and roll groupie, bikini — would be out there, and they might stick. If a bad joke merited four stories in the
Post
, who knew what this would get?
    When other reporters started calling, I refused to comment on the record. A denial, just like a mention on CNN, could become a pretext to run the story. So I denied it off the record and offered to fax the affidavits rebutting the charge on the same basis. The strategy was to convince legitimate news organizations that Hamzy's charge wasn't credible enough to be aired. It worked. CNN dropped the story after a single mention, and none of the other networks picked it up.
    We'd survived our first bimbo eruption. The Hamzy episode was a test — of Clinton's character, our campaign's competence, and the media's resistance to tabloid trash. We all passed. Clinton was telling the truth, we defended him aggressively on the facts, and the media ignored the story despite the juicy details. Too bad it was only a drill.
    My reward that night was an appreciative phone call from Hillary and the governor, who thanked me between spoonfuls of mango ice cream from the Menger hotel in San Antonio. This wasn't exactly the job satisfaction I imagined getting from a presidential campaign, but the exhilaration at being shot at and missed was tangible, and I told myself that the situation might have spun out of control if I hadn't been there. This first