Then, while he stroked her face and hair, Monica said to him teasingly that she had done this before, meaning that she knew the rules about having an affair with a married man. “I didn’t want him to be worried, I wanted him to feel comfortable with me,” she says. “I wanted him to trust me.” She was enough of a realist, however, to believe that his regular White House girlfriend must have been “furloughed” and that as soon as the political crisis was resolved he would return to this other mistress. This assumption said less about the situation than it did about “Monica’s low self-esteem—she always saw herself as second best in her relations with men. Just as at school and college, at the White House she assumed that any man who took the slightest interest in her did so out of pity or because there was no one else available. She therefore simply enjoyed the moment, experiencing the thrill of kissing the President of the United States, knowing that there was little realistic chance that the relationship would go any further.
The President and the newly promoted intern chatted for a short time before one of them said that they should get back to work. It was not to be long, however, before they enjoyed a more intimate physical encounter. A couple of hours later, by which time it was about ten P.M., he appeared in the doorway of the Chief of Staff’s office, then walked in, having first made sure that they were alone. She had already written down her name and telephone number, and now passed the note over to him. He looked at it, smiled and said, “If you want to meet me back in George’s office in five or ten minutes you can.” She agreed. After waiting nervously for a few minutes, Monica was relieved when the President opened the door to Stephanopoulos’s inner office, which was dark, and gestured her inside. They smiled at each other, and immediately kissed. Soon, in the intensity of the moment, the encounter had become a good deal more intimate, their clothing unbuttoned, their hands exploring each other. Then, in the unlovely and degrading language of Kenneth Starr’s report, “she performed oral sex on him.”
During that time the President took a call from a Congressman as Monica continued to pleasure him. The American public were subsequently to be especially shocked by this behavior, but what impressed Monica at the time was her realization that Bill Clinton was her sexual soulmate. As she says, “We clicked at an incredible level. People have made it seem so demeaning for me but it wasn’t, it was exciting and the irony is that I had the first orgasm of the relationship.” Later they talked for a while, and before she left the office, the President noticed her pink intern’s pass—she was still not officially on the staff—commenting, “This could be a problem.”
As it happened, Monica was to see him again later that night, though this time in the presence of his personal secretary, Betty Currie and other staff—a curious transformation from the intimacy of earlier to the more usual White House formality. She arrived home on cloud nine, still floating on the smell of his cologne and the intoxication of their first evening alone together. She woke both her mother and her aunt, telling them that the President had kissed her. Both women, thinking that she was referring to no more than an old-fashioned kiss on the cheek, were none too pleased to have been woken from their slumbers for such an apparently tame piece of news.
Next day, it was an anxious Monica who arrived at work, nervously watching the President’s body language. At first he ignored her when he came to the Chief of Staff’s office; then, when she in turn feigned indifference towards him, he became much more interested, so much so that at the end of the day one of the interns who was working in the office said to Monica, “I think the President has a crush on you.” That immediately set the alarms bells ringing: “It startled me and made me nervous,” she recalls.
She felt a certain relief, therefore, as well as anxiety, when the President didn’t visit the office at all on November 17, and as the day wore on she became reconciled to the fact that it had been fun while it lasted. That night the office staff worked late, and Monica ordered pizza for those who were still there burning the midnight oil. Unfortunately, coworker Barry Toil knocked into her with his pizza and Monica had to rush to the bathroom to clean the new red jacket she was wearing. It seems that the President had spotted her in the corridor, for when she emerged he was standing in the doorway of Betty Currie’s office. As she passed him he said, “Here, you can go out this way.”
For the first time, Monica entered the holy of holies, the Oval Office. Then they walked through into the President’s back office, where they talked and “fooled around.” “I was just freaking out, thinking, ‘Oh my goodness I’m walking through the Oval Office. This is so unbelievable.”’
Again they talked for a while, and Monica asked him about calling her at home. When he replied that he was anxious about her parents she reassured him: “It’s OK, I have my own line so you don’t have to worry about that.” Then, insecure as ever, she told him, “I bet you don’t even remember my name,” to which he answered, “What kind of a name is Lewinsky, anyway?” “Jewish” was her immediate riposte.
She left to get him a couple of slices of vegetarian pizza, an errand which enabled her to be alone with him again once she had navigated her way back past Betty Currie. In the latter’s hearing the President then told Monica that she could use the exit through his private quarters back into the main corridor, which meant that she would not be seen leaving by his secretary.
The couple “fooled around” in his bathroom, and it was during that encounter that she first unbuttoned his shirt. “It was such a sweet moment. It was the first time I had seen him without a shirt, and he sucked in his stomach. I thought it was the cutest thing. I said, ‘Oh, you don’t have to do that—I like your tummy.’ It was very endearing and sweet—it made him seem a more real person to me.” It was then, too, that the President took the relationship onto another level by telling Monica that he was usually around at weekends, when the White House was relatively quiet. “You can come and see me then,” he told her, albeit without spelling out how such a clandestine meeting could be organized. “I can hardly come and knock on the door of the White House,” she remembers thinking.
A little later that evening he accepted her suggestion that he join her and the other staff in her office for pizza and conversation, and while he was there she asked to have her picture taken with him. As the photograph shows, Monica, who is adept at putting on a bright public face to mask private unhappiness, for once smiled for the camera and meant it. Already the heady exhilaration of this new relationship, however temporary, was smothering the black moods of depression about her former lover, Andy Bleiler. The affair had come as a welcome pick-me-up, although certainly she had no idea whether it would last for any length of time. Indeed, she was by no means sure that he remembered her first name. She was strengthened in this suspicion after the furlough crisis had ended and she had begun her new job at Legislative Affairs. She passed him in the corridors a couple of times, and while he always acknowledged her, he also invariably called her “Kiddo.”
She did not find that oversight too much of a heartbreaker, however, for, as she says, “There was this real excitement for me of not thinking about Andy. It was, like, ‘There is some other guy to like me now.’ I’m not unusual this way, a lot of girls get over one guy with another. It’s just how it is—except that the other guy isn’t usually the President of the United States.”
Indeed, after that second private evening encounter on November 17, Monica was beginning to see Bill Clinton as a man rather than as the President of the United States, appreciating his human vulnerabilities and foibles rather than being in awe of the office. Furthermore, and again typically, the girl who sees herself as a one-woman fashion patrol now took it upon herself to spruce up Clinton’s image. This is by no means unusual where Monica is concerned. Her brother, father, and assorted boyfriends have all come under her gimlet eye for style.
In November, towards the end of the furlough, Monica asked Betty Currie whose office is adjacent to the Oval Office, if she would pass along a tie to the
President for her. Monica explained that she had sold neckties all throughout college and would love to pick one out for Bill Clinton. Betty said of course. In her mind’s eye Monica saw a tie that was “classy and presidential,” yet at the same time “young, a little kicky, with pizzazz.” She also, of course, wanted it to remind him of her each time he wore it. After hours of searching she finally picked out a hand-stitched silk Zegna tie from Italy and took it to Betty Currie, who assured her that she would give it to the President. Monica was thrilled when, a few days later, she bumped into Currie, who told her that the President, who was then visiting Ireland, had not only said that he “loved” the tie but had had a picture taken of himself wearing it, which he wanted to give to Monica.
Early in December, shortly after the President had returned from Ireland, Monica was walking through the West Wing when she came across him talking to a group of visitors with whom he was having a meeting. Spotting Monica, he turned from the group and asked, “Did you get the picture of me in the tie?” Disconcerted and rather embarrassed that he had broken off discussions to talk to her, she replied that she hadn’t, and passed by. Later that day, however, Betty Currie called and asked her to come over. When she arrived, Currie told her to go see the President as he wanted to sign the picture for her. She went into his office, and he duly wrote on the photo, “To Monica Lewinsky, Thanks for the nice tie, Bill Clinton.” It seemed he knew her name after all.
For Monica, their meeting that afternoon was a very human encounter. Knowing from their earlier conversations how sensitive she was about her weight, Clinton complimented her on how much she had lost since he had last seen her: “You look really skinny.” “He could be so adorable,” she says. “The sweet, little-boy side to him was the part I fell in love with.” They went into his back study, where he fetched her a Diet Coke; they kissed and then began to talk.
Monica says: “He was such a real person, he was much gentler and nicer than Andy … That was how I saw him and that was the part that I fell in love with.” Before they parted that afternoon, she told him, “I’m probably the only person in the whole world who wishes you weren’t President.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“He Was Like Rays of Sunshine”
THE MERCURY in the thermometer was well below zero. Snow billowing in from the west ensured that the Sunday-morning streets remained empty and the highways almost deserted. On TV, the weathermen were predicting that the blizzard hitting Washington that day, Sunday, January 7, 1996, was going to last for a few days—“Stay indoors and stay warm” was the gloomy refrain.
At her mother’s apartment in the Watergate building, Monica was lying on her bed, alternately gazing out at the falling snow and idly flicking through a book, when the phone rang. She reached out to answer it, but the caller hung up. A couple of minutes later the phone rang again, but before she could pick it up the answering machine cut in. As she pushed the button to override the message, a male voice said, “Ahhh—so I guess you are there.” Monica thought it was her college friend Jason Lesner. “Yeah, I am. How are you? What’s going on,” she replied as she snuggled down on her bed, getting comfortable for a long, cozy chat.
Suddenly she realized the truth. She could hardly believe her ears—the President had called her at home! “Oh my goodness,” she said, “it’s you . . Oh, hi. I’m so sorry I didn’t recognize your voice.” After a few minutes of small talk, he told her that he was going in to work in about forty-five minutes. Taking the hint, Monica asked if he would like company. “That would be great,” he replied. She told him her office phone extension and they arranged to speak again in an hour or so.
As she hastily dressed and then cajoled her reluctant brother into driving her to the White House, on a Sunday afternoon and through the relentless snow, she reflected that here she was, going on her first date with the new man in her life. “It was a pretty cheap date, I guess,” she now jokes. Yet the phone call from the President did in fact represent a genuine breakthrough in their relationship. Their first encounters during the furlough could have been dismissed as simply the result of her having been in the right place at the right time. “I don’t think it was different, I’m sure, from the millions of other women that he’s been with or flirted with or seemed to be attracted to. I think it was a combination of the attraction being there and the situation, the timing being right. The situation just happening with the furlough that there was this possibility for us to be alone,” says Monica.
After she had started her new job at Legislative Affairs, on the odd occasions when she had seen the President he had usually called her “Kiddo.” It was a habit that made Monica, who almost invariably looks on the gloomy side of things, think he had forgotten her name. She had even teased him about this when, on New Year’s Eve 1995, a couple of weeks after the affectionate meeting at which he had given her the signed photograph of him wearing the tie she had sent him, they had a chance encounter in the inner study of the Oval Office. One of the White House stewards, Bayani Nelvis, was getting her a Davidoff cigar from the President’s private store as a treat when Clinton himself walked in unexpectedly.
He sent Nelvis on an errand, leaving them alone together, whereupon Monica said to him as though making an introduction, “Monica Lewinsky, President Kiddo.” He reacted defensively, saying that he had looked for her but had lost her phone number; he had, he said, tried to find her number in the book, but it wasn’t listed. His little-boy-lost tone really touched a chord—“It was so cute,” she recalls. Before long they were kissing, and matters advanced from there, although they yet again stopped short of actually making love. Afterwards the President said again that she could see him on weekends. Once more she gave him her unlisted phone number, telling him playfully that it was the last time she was going to let him have it. After he had wished her Happy New Year and given her a lingering goodbye kiss, Monica went home in a mood of high elation.
While that meeting had been fun, it had also been unplanned. On January 7, however, he had made it clear that he wanted to see her. As her brother drove her to the White House, Monica now knew for certain that the President was really interested in her. After Michael had dropped her off, she went to her office; then, as was to become a feature of their affair, she waited for the phone to ring. He was as good as his word. The display on her telephone receiver blinked with the word “POTUS”—the acronym for “President of the United States.” They arranged that she should pass by his office carrying papers, while he would make sure he was in the vicinity, thus engineering a “chance encounter.” Both were acutely aware of the need to be careful, a subject that peppered their private conversations throughout the relationship. At one point the President had mentioned to her that people were saying he had a crush on an intern, a worry that made them doubly cautious.
Carrying her papers, Monica duly walked past the Oval Office, but to her horror the door was closed and Special Agent Lew Fox was standing guard outside. She chatted with him briefly before the President opened the door, greeted Monica, and made an excuse to invite her inside, telling Fox that she would be there for a while.
A “first date” in the Oval Office was as irresistible as it was bizarre. “On the one hand I was excited to see him at just a boy-and-girl level,” she says. “On the other, here am I sitting on a sofa in the Oval Office. It was cuckoo.”
The President asked her if she wanted a drink, which was their cue to go into the inner office and from there to the bathroom, the most secluded area of his private quarters, where, according to Monica’s testimony, they were “intimate” for about half an hour. “It was,” she says now, “getting more intense and passionate.” Afterwards they chatted for a long time in the Oval Office, he at his desk, Monica in what they called “her chair” to his right. She made a suggestive joke about the cigar he was chewing—a precursor, perhaps, of the “cigar incident” later that year.
The report by Judge Kenneth Starr, the Independent Counsel who investigated the Clinton—Lewi
nsky scandal, focused in humiliating detail on the sexual aspects of their affair, but to Monica what mattered most was the emotional side of the relationship. “There was such a little-boy, a childish, quality about him that I found very attractive. I once told him that he was like rays of sunshine, but sunshine that made plants grow faster and that made colors more vibrant.
“At the same time I liked being with him; he made me feel attractive, but I didn’t think I would fall in love with him. It was just fun and I would be lying if part of the excitement was not that it was the President.” Besides that, the more she focused on the President, the less she thought about Andy Bleiler.
Though Monica was now seeing Bill Clinton more as a man than as the President, her nagging insecurity made her constantly doubt her own worth to him, gauging the character of the man she was beginning to know against the constant undercurrent of chatter about his womanizing. “I had a double way of looking at him,” she says. “On the one hand, there was this sensitive, loving, tender person, a needy man who was not getting the kind of love and nurturing he desired, and then there was his reputation as a philanderer with a different woman every day.”
This emotional uncertainty colored her feelings towards him. So when he promised that he would call or that they could meet, and then neither came about, these failures fed both her insecurity about the relationship and her existing anxieties about her appearance or weight. A midnight phone call in mid-January from the President to Monica at home played upon those fears. He chatted to her for a while, and then initiated phone sex for the first time. Monica was nervous, uncertain whether or not he had liked what she had said; afterwards, knowing his reputation and always anxious to please, she worried that if the conversation had not gone well he might never see or speak to her again, and would all too soon forget about her. Even so, he ended the conversation in a way that was to become familiar: “Sweet dreams,” he told her.
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