Morris' Wife Says She'll Stand By Husband

NEW YORK (AllPolitics, Aug. 31) -- The wife of former Clinton political adviser Dick Morris, who resigned Thursday amid reports that he had made a prostitute privy to White House secrets, said she has accepted her husband's apology.

Eileen McGann, a lawyer, told Time magazine she is trying to get her husband through the ordeal.

"This is a 20-year relationship," the 37-year-old woman said. "People have painful times in relationships, and this is one of them.

"When you've had a long relationship, even when you're hurt, you can integrate all the good times with the bad for a complete picture. We're all human, and we all make mistakes."

Neither McGann nor Morris, who is 48, commented on whether the allegations that he had a year-long tryst with a call girl were true.

Morris' relationship with Sherry Rowlands was disclosed after Rowlands sold her story to the tabloid The Star for an undisclosed sum of between $12,000 and $50,000. The report was published Thursday in the New York Post.

'I didn't grill him'

McGann said her husband told her about the affair after the Star called their hotel room in Chicago Wednesday to warn them the story was breaking.

"I felt very upset," McGann said. "We talked about it, but I didn't grill him on the details."

"I thought it would be destructive to ask about the details and try to find out what was true. I'm an adult," she said. "I said, 'Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.'"

Rowlands told the Star that on several occasions when she was with Morris, he would let her listen in on telephone conversations with Clinton. She said Morris also let her read Hillary Clinton's prepared speech to the Democratic National Convention days before it was delivered Thursday.

Morris resigned Thursday, saying he did not want to become an issue in the campaign. He said Clinton, the first lady and Vice President Al Gore all called him personally on Thursday.

"They were all very, very kind," Morris said. "I'm not going to say anymore."

Morris, who spent 10 years advising Republicans, was the key architect of Clinton's "triangulation" policy, in which he positioned himself between the political extremes.

Court of public opinion

The Morris flap apparently has not soured the public on Clinton's campaign.

Two in three voters said the Morris scandal did not make them doubt Clinton's commitment to family values, according to a Newsweek poll released Saturday.

The magazine said Princeton Survey Research Associates, the firm that conducted the poll, interviewed 401 registered voters by telephone on Thursday.

The overall margin of error was plus or minus 5 percentage points.

In a wider Newsweek sample of 862 registered voters taken August 28-29, 54 percent said if the presidential election were held today, they would vote for the Clinton-Gore ticket; 33 percent said they would vote for Republican nominee Bob Dole and his running mate, Jack Kemp; and 5 percent would vote for Reform Party candidate Ross Perot, Newsweek said.

The margin of error for that question was plus or minus 4 percentage points.

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