When Donovan Campbell, Jr. '72 arrived on campus for his 25th reunion last June, he was just your average Princeton success story: a partner in a Dallas law firm with several landmark cases to his credit and -- more importantly -- the father of a soon-to-be Princeton freshman. Who could have known then that Campbell was destined for international notoriety? Or who knew that media bigs like Sam Donaldson, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather would give their blow dryers and makeup kits to sit for a while with Campbell under a reunion tent?

And all because of Paula Jones.

Today, the 47-year-old Texas attorney -- who ate at Tiger Inn, captained the weight-lifting team, and dreamed of becoming an English professor while at Princeton -- is at ground zero of the most sensational political fight since Watergate.

It has pitted him and his six-man Dallas law practice against some of Washington's top legal guns. Last January, Campbell went eyeball-to-eyeball with President Clinton for six hours, asking one of the world's most public men about some of the most intimate details of his private life.

Those were just the preliminaries. Next month, Campbell will be at the center of the media spotlight when the headline-making case known as Jones v. Clinton goes to trial in Little Rock. Campbell is the lead attorney for Jones, a former Arkansas state employee who sued President Clinton for sexual harassment in 1994 and now is about to get her day in court.

Campbell became involved in the four-year-old soap opera/constitutional drama last fall, after Jones fired her attorneys because they were pressing her to settle. Her search for a new legal team attracted the attention of John Whitehead, a onetime campus radical turned born-again Christian, who founded the Rutherford Institute -- a sort of Legal Aid Society with a conservative twist. One of the institute's earliest supporters was Campbell, who shortly after Whitehead established it in 1982 sent in a contribution.

"It was large enough that I called him back," recalls Whitehead. Now a member of Rutherford's board of directors, Campbell handles between two and 10 cases a year -- pro bono -- for the institute. Generally, he says, they involve helping "needy clients who are being oppressed for their beliefs -- usually religious, usually by governmental authorities."

That's not exactly the scenario in the Paula Jones case, but Whitehead decided it was a "human-rights issue" Rutherford should take on. When he began considering which attorney should represent her, he thought of Campbell.

"My immediate response was, 'Oh my gosh, this is the last thing I need in my life right now,'" Campbell says. Nonetheless, he spent two weeks researching the case, then flew all five of his law partners to Los Angeles to interview Jones. After a marathon session with Jones, Campbell phoned Whitehead, accepting the case.

Campbell's firm, Rader, Campbell, Fisher and Pyke, went to work with a vengeance. In an effort to bolster Jones's claim that Clinton made a crude sexual advance to her in 1991 (when she was an Arkansas state employee and he was the governor), the lawyers tracked down a number of other women whom the rumor mill has linked to the President, including Monica Lewinsky, the 24-year-old White House intern whose story of an alleged affair with Clinton has rocked the nation.

When it comes to building a case, Campbell has never been squeamish. He says Jones v. Clinton is tame compared to one of his earlier cases, in which he defended the Church of Christ in Del Rio, Texas, for expelling a woman who left her husband for another man. "We had to do independent discovery of her sexual relations with the man," said Campbell.

Campbell insists he was not intimidated when he interrogated President Clinton earlier this year. "It was like deposing the CEO of a major corporation," he says.

In Texas, Campbell is probably best known for his battles with the gay community. Twelve years ago, he won a long legal battle to reinstate the Texas law making sodomy a crime.

Campbell does not consider himself political. He says he sat out the 1996 presidential election because he could not bring himself to support either Clinton or Bob Dole. "I didn't think either met the standard," Campbell says.

Campbell, who majored in English, decided on a law career after a Princeton adviser clued him in to the fact that job prospects for wannabe English professors were slim. But as he prepares for battle with the President's legal team, Paula Jones's lawyer will be counting on the training Princeton's English department gave him. "Much of law involves thinking clearly and writing clearly," he says.

The oldest of his five children, Donovan Campbell III '01, followed his father's footsteps to Princeton. The younger Campbell is a member of the Tigers' freshman heavyweight crew, and not even a court date with the President is going to stop his proud dad from going back to Old Nassau to watch this spring's regatta.

-- Kathy Kiely '77

Kathy Kiely is the White House correspondent for the New York Daily News.

Art in the eyes of the beholder
Melora McDermott-Lewis '81 is making museum history. As head of the team that reinstalled the permanent collection of American and European art at the Denver Art Museum, she came up with the idea to disregard chronology and region and to hang all the portraits together, the still lifes in one place, landscapes in another.

The new arrangement may be disconcerting to some viewers, but on the whole it's been popular. "A conventional installation implies that you need to know art history to look at these pictures,'" McDermott-Lewis says. "Our installation says, 'You just need to look.'"

She cites the example of the juxtaposition of two pictures in the Places gallery, Picasso's 1909 Landscape of Horta de Ebro (left, top) with Figures by Lake Albano with Castel Gandolfo in the Distance (left, bottom) painted in 1795 by Thomas Barker of Bath. One is Cubist and the other traditional in the manner of Gainsborough, but both use strong diagonals to show mountains. "Each is very different," says McDermott-Lewis, "but they both started from the same place."

In the People gallery, Giuseppe Arcimboldo's 1572 Allegorical Portrait of Summer is next to Renoir's Portrait of Edouard Renoir. Four Madonna and Child paintings from the Renaissance hang together with Benjamin West's portrait of his wife and son.

Among the still lifes in the Objects gallery, Berthe Morisot's Impressionist Soup Tureen and Apple from 1877 is neighbor to Rene Magritte's tiny still life of green apples painted in the 1960s.

A museum brochure points out that by mixing together examples from Europe and America and from various periods, it's easier to see how individual works fit into the continuum of the Western tradition, how artists borrow from other artists, and how they build on the past to create new ways of seeing.

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, as part of its grant program, has given McDermott-Lewis the money to create more labels, audio tours, and activity stations in the new galleries.

She's also responsible for the museum's Discovery Library. "We took odds and ends from the permanent collection that didn't fit anywhere else," says McDermott-Lewis. An Egyptian humaneffigy mummy case covered with decorations and hieroglyphs nods to a glassfronted cabinet holding an Etruscan bronze helmet, a Cycladic head, little Roman glass vessels, and a terra-cotta figure. A threestory 18th-century Dutch dollhouse is completely outfitted. Visitors can try on hats, ring guards, neck ruffs, and bum rolls from the costume closet.

McDermott-Lewis's official title is master teacher for American and European art. (The Denver Art Museum also has collections of Western Americana, Indian art, Asian art, and pre-Columbian art.) She is in charge of all education programs in her field.

The daughter of Jim McDermott '60, McDermott-Lewis majored in history at Princeton. After discovering art history in her senior year, she spent two years at Harvard, taking art history courses, then earned a master's degree from the Center for Museum Studies in San Francisco.

"I went into museum work," she says, "because I was interested in helping people fall in love with art and be excited by it."

-- Ann Waldron
When Peter Bell *64 has cared all his life, and now his life is CARE