Monica's Story

by Andrew Morton

  She couldn’t allow herself even to think that her feelings might be reciprocated. In many ways it was easier and safer to believe either that he had forgotten about her, though he clearly hadn’t, or that he didn’t really care about her. Those thoughts stopped her from thinking the unthinkable: that he truly cared about her. There were many signals—from the romantic metaphor of him wearing ties she had given him to the way he would thoughtfully compliment her and remembered so much about her life, for they talked often about her childhood and schooldays—that suggested he did care. But Monica, nursing her insecurities, simply couldn’t bring herself to believe it.

  Nor, for that matter, could anyone at the White House. A handful of Monica’s closest friends, and her mother and aunt, had an insight into the true nature of her relationship with the President, but her colleagues could be excused for seeing only a young woman who seemed to spend too much time around the West Wing and the President. That young women staffers seemed to want to get too close to the President was a well-recognized syndrome; the word “clutch” was used to describe them, and in some people’s eyes Monica was a “clutch”. For her part, Monica soon had a nickname for those she felt were criticizing her—“The Meanies.” Even so, their remarks stung, not least because she genuinely was close to the President.

  The behavior of senior White House staff at the time, and the subsequent “spin” they put on events once the scandal broke, were predicated on the assumption that Monica Lewinsky was a deluded, starstruck ingenue with a penchant for married men, who deliberately entrapped the President. Her Aunt Debra believes she knows why: “One of the most ludicrous and unfair things about this affair is that she is categorized as a stalker, that she chased him or followed him around. That’s what people in the White House had to tell each other, because [to them] it wasn’t possible that this man whom they revered could be having an emotional relationship with her.”

  Ever since, after Jennifer Palmieri’s birthday party and her first intimate encounter with Clinton, a fellow intern had joked that the President had a crush on her, Monica’s caution about the affair had verged on paranoia. Nevertheless, a combination of her own inexperience, the system under which the White House is run and the sheer practical difficulties of seeing the President alone quickly undermined those tactics. In an enclosed world where every minute of the President’s time, every White House arrival and departure, is logged, and where every area of the White House complex is graded for access, Monica soon received a harsh lesson in territorial etiquette.

  In part the problem lay with the nature of her work at Legislative Affairs in the East Wing, which, since she and her colleague Jocelyn Jolley were responsible for administering much of the routine correspondence between the White House and members of the Senate and Congress, involved a degree of trafficking within the White House.

  When she started in her new post at Legislative Affairs after the furlough, on November 26, 1995, she was immediately faced with a huge backlog of work. This in turn meant that there was little time for on-the-job training, and none at all for a gentle introduction to the niceties of moving around the White House. One day that December she was walking past the Oval Office, the direct route from the East to the West Wing, when she was confronted in the corridor by Evelyn Lieberman who told Monica sternly that as an intern she was not allowed in the area. The unexpected rebuke brought the girl to the verge of tears and she went to the bathroom to compose herself. Then, with her self-possession restored and determined to make clear that she was no longer an intern but the holder of a blue pass, which gave her carte blanche to move around the building, she went to Lieberman’s office to clarify the situation. “They hired you?” the Deputy Chief of Staff asked caustically, before telling Monica the correct procedure for getting from the East to the West Wing without passing the Oval Office.

  Other minor incidents added to Monica’s edginess. Once, when she was visiting the West basement lobby, she overheard a senior official asking Bayani Nelvis, “What were you doing talking to that East Wing girl?” On another occasion, when she was with a male colleague, the President himself caused her embarrassment. As he passed her in the corridor he offered a cheery “Hi, Monica.” Her colleague asked how the President knew her name, and said that he himself had worked at the White House for two years, but the President did not know who he was. Monica made light of the incident, saying that she had met the President through a family friend who was a Democratic Party donor.

  Her Aunt Debra says an atmosphere of jealousy and mistrust pervades the White House. “Everyone is so jealous and stabbing each other in the back. They will step on each other, they’ll kill each other to get time with him [the President]. That’s how they are. So these people were already starting to gossip and if we had been more sophisticated the alarm bells would have gone off. We would have said to Monica, ‘Oh no, you’ve got to stop this affair right now,’ because of all the backstabbing. That place is dripping with evil.”

  Undoubtedly the criticism that most irks Monica is that she wore “inappropriate” clothing such as short skirts and low-cut blouses during her time at the White House. In fact, as befits someone who prides herself on her fashion sense and on her well-developed notions of what is appropriate, she almost invariably wore long skirts or pantsuits to work, not least because she tends to be self-conscious about her heavy legs. She also angrily refutes suggestions that she was a presidential “hanger-on” who went to events at the White House and elsewhere uninvited. Correct form matters to Monica—a case in point being her decision as a youngster not to go to Tori Spelling’s birthday party because she had not been properly invited.

  Conscious of the whispering campaign about her, and worried about what the ever-present Secret Service agents were saying, Monica sometimes dampened the President’s enthusiasm for seeing her. (She was right to be wary, as Secret Service agents regularly took bets that the President would arrive from the Residential Wing within ten minutes of Monica being admitted to the White House.) On one occasion he phoned to find out if she was going to the good-bye party of White House staffer Pat Griffin, and asked her to meet him later. Monica told him that people were talking and that they shouldn’t make eye contact or talk at the party.

  On the occasion of the movie invite—just two days before their affair resumed—it was Monica who had had the sense to see how this would have been received by senior staff. “I tried so hard to be careful and still got into trouble,” she recalls. “I should have just done what I wanted.”

  At her prompting, the President worked out how he could use a phone which didn’t make “POTUS” blink on her handset when he rang her, thereby disguising the origin of the call. Given his boyish difficulty in mastering office technology, she was thrilled when he called her on a more anonymous line. Previously she had joshed him about his phone, saying, “Haven’t any of your other girlfriends told you about that?” meaning the dangers of using his dedicated line. Offended, he replied, “I don’t have any other girlfriends. Shut up about that.”

  Their use of the curtained inner office, her entrances and exits from his quarters by different doors, the engineered “accidental” meetings, and her avoidance of key White House officials, were all part of the precautions they took to keep the affair secret. She carried this caution with her even outside her place of work. When she was with her mother or aunt in public and they were discussing White House business, she always lowered her voice, and she invariably spoke cryptically about matters concerning the President.

  Her efforts were in vain, however. Even as she shared private moments with the President in March, the ax was being sharpened. Evelyn Lieberman, who had spotted her around the President or his quarters once too often, told Monica’s boss, Tim Keating, “I want her out of here.” She cited Monica’s “overfamiliarity” as the reason for removing her from the White House.

  On Friday, April 5, 1996, Keating called Monica in and delivered the blow. He did not mention the real reason for h
er departure, saying instead that, as a result of problems in the Legislative Affairs correspondence section, the entire unit was being reorganized and that, rather than being fired, she was being transferred to the Pentagon. He sugared the pill by telling her that the job which had been earmarked for her was far “sexier” than her existing post, but his words fell on deaf ears. Monica was heartbroken. She went home and cried herself to sleep. “I was hysterical all weekend,” she recalls. “All I did was cry and eat pizzas and sweets.”

  Monica’s dismissal came just two days after Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, a trusted friend and aide of the President, was killed when the plane he was traveling in crashed during a trade mission to Bosnia and Croatia. That weekend, as Monica nursed her sorrow in her apartment, her bitter reverie was broken by a phone call from the President. Recovering her composure, she asked how he was coping with his loss. Then, as she was telling him her own news, she burst into tears and asked if she could see him. “Tell me what happened first,” he replied. Between sobs she poured out her distressing news and when she had finished he said, “I bet this has something to do with me. OK, come over.”

  It was Easter Sunday, April 7. Monica had been crying all weekend, and when she arrived at his office that afternoon she looked “a wreck.” For his part, the President seemed genuinely upset by and angry at the news of her departure, and not least by its imminence—her last day at the White House was to be Monday. “Why did they have to take you away from me? I trust you so much. I promise if I win in November I will bring you back here, just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers to emphasize his resolve. “You can do anything you want to do here.” Monica, her gallows sense of humor never far beneath the surface, made a saucy joke about the type of job that would win his approval.

  Emotionally, however, it was a curious meeting. Although they made out after the fashion that had almost become an established routine, for once she felt she was “servicing” him, rather than joyfully sharing an intimate moment. She would have preferred for him to hold and comfort her; moreover, she was determined to tell him how she felt about him.

  Monica’s usual early-morning routine was to visit her local coffee shop, Starbucks, order a skimmed latte and sit and read the newspapers. As she sipped her coffee that morning she had read in her horoscope—her sign is Leo—that she should make known her feelings to someone she cared about. So as she and the President chatted she mentioned what she had seen in her horoscope and for the first time told him that she was in love with him. He hugged her and said, “That means a lot to me.”

  Their romantic reverie, which had been interrupted earlier by a phone call, was further disturbed by Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes calling for the President. As he went into his office, Monica, worried about possible discovery, made a hasty exit through a back door. It was an unsatisfactory conclusion to a strange and unsettling day—even though, as she scurried out of his office, his words of comfort and his promises about her future return to the White House were already emblazoned on her heart.

  In this whole sorry saga, here was perhaps the greatest irony of all. While Monica lost her post at the White House as a result of her affair with the President—whom she was not to see in private again for nearly a year—she was eventually to be accused of getting a job as a consequence of the very relationship which had blighted her career.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Waiting Game

  THE CONVERSATION WAS SERIOUS, intense and went on late into the night—as befitted the discourse of a twenty-four-year-old Rhodes scholar making his way among the dreaming spires of Oxford in 1970.

  As a bearded Bill Clinton chatted to his friend Mandy Merck, the subject of sex and politics rose to the head of that evening’s agenda. The focus of their discussion was the tragic death, in July of the previous year, 1969, of a young Democratic Party campaign worker, Mary Jo Kopechne. A passenger in a car driven by Edward Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator, widely regarded as the Democratic front-runner for the Presidency, she had drowned when the car swerved off a narrow bridge at Chappaquiddick Island and plummeted into the muddy water. The incident ended his presidential hopes.

  Clinton, who had been to Capitol Hill as a student and had a keen sense of the double standards of the political world, meditated on the relationship between power and sex before giving his own verdict. He told his friend, “Politics gives guys so much power and such big egos they tend to behave badly toward women. I hope I never get into that.”

  This was a somewhat surprising comment from a young man who, according to his biographer David Maraniss, had played games of strip poker in which every other player was a woman, had suggestively dangled his hotel-room key at female musicians during a band contest, and was even said to have had an encounter with the maverick feminist Germaine Greer. He had attended one of her lectures, in which she argued that intellectual, brainy men were hopeless in bed and that, at least where sex was concerned, women should only pick relatively uneducated men, preferably working-class. Legend has it that Clinton smoothly asked her for her telephone number in case she ever changed her mind about intellectuals.

  Once the law graduate had become established as a politician, the tales of his easygoing charm and charismatic effect on women multiplied. So when, in emotional disarray, Monica Lewinsky left the White House in April 1996, it would have been natural, if there is truth in the persistent rumors that he is a serial seducer, for him to have effortlessly closed the door on that episode in his life. With Monica banished to the Pentagon, Clinton could have suavely moved on to the next intern, or whoever, to take his fancy.

  That he did not do so offers a different perspective on the character of the man and the nature of the relationship, an insight that echoes the sentiments he expressed that night in Oxford. For a further year and a half he continued to see Monica (though not privately for many months), to call her and to think of her. He accepted her gifts and her love, listened patiently to her gripes, deflected her anger and soothed her wounded pride. By turns obsessional, jealous and hysterical, Monica treated her illicit affair with the President of the United States as though it were a regular relationship; his tacit encouragement, together with her high sense of entitlement, at times bordering on the absurd, demanded no less. For example, she was furious when, on her birthday, he broke a promise and refused to play a tune for her on his saxophone over the phone from Los Angeles, where he was spending a couple of days.

  It is one of the many ironies of the Clinton—Lewinsky scandal that, although the sexual side of their relationship was dwelt on in lovingly prurient detail in Kenneth Starr’s report, that aspect of the affair proved ultimately unsatisfying, inconclusive and somewhat disheartening. True, the emotional affinity between them blossomed, yet they never achieved a mature and full sexual relationship, something that certainly Monica came to find frustrating.

  Far from using her as a mere sexual plaything to be discarded at whim, the fifty-year-old President seemed to have a much deeper need for this girl in her early twenties. As the months went by, Monica came to know the man behind the public mask, a flawed figure riddled with doubt and wrestling with guilt, yet emotionally needy, vulnerable and ultimately alone. The politician who used to play his saxophone late into the night as a refuge against loneliness, would instead pick up the phone to call Monica Lewinsky.

  He seemed to crave the company or conversation of this feisty, argumentative girl who called him “President Kiddo” to his face and the “Big Creep” when she was annoyed with him. She reminded him, he said, of his mother, Virginia Kelley, who sadly died from breast cancer in 1994 before he won his second term in office. “You’re full of piss and vinegar, just like her,” he told her once.

  Aunt Debra remembers her niece confiding details of her conversations with the President: “He seemed to open up to her. He would tell her about his own sad childhood, his mother, and I remember once he told her, ‘We are a lot alike because we’ve both had so much pain in our childhoods.
’”

  To Catherine Allday Davis, it seemed that Monica’s attraction for the President emanated from her youth and her personality. “Monica is fun to be with, bubbly, lively, entertaining and interested,” she says. “Clinton’s political success lay in the fact that he tapped into the youth vote, so I can see why an outsider, particularly a young person, would hold a special appeal.”

  However great the attraction between them, throughout their affair and in its awful aftermath Monica paid a high price for the President’s emotional and sexual angst. Bill Clinton controlled the relationship—inevitably, given his high office—and Monica was always there for him, hoping and yearning, just waiting for him to call. Under those circumstances, her love became an obsession, inhabiting her dreams as well as every waking hour. For a young woman who likes to feel in control, this was a relationship wholly and utterly out of her power, an all-consuming affair that underlined her immaturity and exacerbated her existing insecurities and neuroses. Her aunt also describes the relationship as an “obsession” for Monica: “She was infatuated with him. But given who he is, her age and emotional background, it was understandable. She was Cinderella waiting for her Prince Charming to come along.”

  The truth, however, is that there was no magic in the world powerful enough to help her. For while the Starr Report paints a picture of a sexually precocious woman, in reality Monica Lewinsky is wholly unfitted to coping with a romance of this nature; indeed, her very inexperience and immaturity contributed significantly to the ensuing calamity. As her mother says, “While Monica was comfortable with her sexuality, as many women of her generation are, she was very naive in her relations with men. She was very credulous and unworldly.”