Upon reflection, Monica agrees with her mother, and hints, too, at the indiscretion that brought about disaster. “I feel that he should have shown more restraint and left it as a flirtation and as an unacted-upon fantasy,” she says. “I’m not blaming him for what happened, but it was just too much. It was too much of an emotional burden for someone my age. If I had really understood everything I would have seen him more as a President than a man, and I would have realized the ramifications of ever telling anybody about it.”
The bleak realization of the negligible prospects of sustaining her illicit romance dawned on her the moment she walked into the Pentagon on April 16, 1996. It was a stark and depressing contrast to the White House. Her first impressions were of cheap, shabby furniture, dun-colored walls, crew cuts and severe faces above unfamiliar uniforms—very different from the White House, with its pristine decoration and overriding sense of style.
As ever she put on a sunny smile as she met her new colleagues. After some discussion she had been assigned the job of confidential assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Kenneth Bacon. Her new post brought her a $3,000 raise to $28,000 a year, plus generous overtime, and the prospect of a good deal of foreign travel, but Monica knew from the moment she sat down at her desk that this was not the job for her. If she had little interest in politics, she had no interest in defense policy, the work—endlessly transcribing tapes—was mundane and boring, and the people were neither her type nor from her age group. Gritting her teeth, she grinned and bore her next six months in purgatory, waiting for the moment when the President would call to say that a new job was waiting for her at the White House as he had promised.
The only consolation during that desolate time were repeated phone calls that first week at the Pentagon from “Handsome,” who told her that the reason she had been moved was because Evelyn Lieberman felt that he and Monica were paying too much attention to each other, and that “everyone needed to be careful” as it was a presidential election year. (Lieberman’s own account before the Grand Jury was rather more terse: the President had asked her who had fired an intern. She said that she was responsible, to which he replied, “Oh, OK.”) At least, Monica comforted herself, she hadn’t been moved because her work was poor. The President also told her that if she didn’t like the Pentagon he would get her a job on the presidential campaign team, but Monica was concerned that the very people who were hostile to her at the White House would also be organizing the campaign.
It was, her mother remembers, a desperate time for her. “When she moved to the Pentagon, that’s when the true, true, blackest, darkest, worst of it began. She was miserable. She would sit by the phone and count the days and stay in her room and cry. She didn’t go out because she was afraid she’d miss a call.”
In terms of the rhythm of their relationship, Monica was right to attach so much importance to the President’s calls. For the first few months after her departure from the White House he called every four to seven days, the calls becoming less frequent only when he hit the campaign trail in the weeks before the November election. He seemed as acutely aware of her timetable as she was of his, often calling the day after she had returned home from one of the frequent trips abroad she was required to make with her new boss, Kenneth Bacon—in the spring of 1996, in short order, she visited Bosnia, Australia, Russia and Scandinavia.
Monica came to expect the President to call a day or so after he had returned from a foreign trip, or if he had spotted her at a public event—and she was usually rewarded. It seemed that he missed her as much as she missed him. When he called and left a brief message on the answering machine she saved it, just so that she could replay the tapes to hear his “wonderful” voice. “He was so good about calling,” she says. “He was always worried about me, always saying things like, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to take care of you. I don’t want you to be unhappy.’”
At times she was taken aback by just how much he remembered about their conversations, and by how careful he was of her susceptibilities. It was almost as if not seeing her in person made it easier for the President to be himself. As she says, “The reason why those phone conversations were so important and nourishing to the relationship was because they were safe—neither of us worried that someone would walk in. At the same time we were as passionate as we could be.” Certainly the phone sex was as intense, if not more so, than when they met.
During one conversation in early May 1996, she mentioned that her father and stepmother were flying to Washington for her brother Michael’s graduation, and that she was trying to arrange for them to attend a radio address, a regular event during which the President tapes his weekly “fireside chat” before an invited audience in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. A few days later he called and asked, with some puzzlement, why her family had not been at the radio address. Monica told him that he had mixed the dates up, and gave him the correct date when her family would be coming. Then, only a couple of days after that, Betty Currie called Monica at work and said that she understood that her parents were coming to town and wanted to go to the radio address. Surprised, Monica asked herself, “How on earth does she know? This is cuckoo.” Obviously the President had taken time out from his hectic schedule to brief his secretary. Currie went on to explain that there might not be a radio address that week, but that the President had asked her to give Monica’s family a tour of the White House and had said that he would try to see them then.
In the meantime, Monica had already arranged for her family to be at Fort Meyer, Virginia, to watch the arrival ceremony for the Irish President, Mary Robinson, on June 13. As Clinton walked past the crowd he spotted Monica, who was wearing a straw hat decorated with flowers. “I like your hat, Monica,” he said to her, a comment that astonished her father, who had no idea the President even recognized his daughter, let alone knew her name.
At the radio address the next day, the President was solicitous towards Monica’s family, carefully arranging the group for the standard, albeit greatly treasured, photo with him in the Oval Office. Even though there were many other guests, he made time to talk to them, chatting to Michael, who had just reached voting age, and eliciting from him the fact that he intended to vote for Clinton in the forthcoming election. Barbara Lewinsky, though she had not the slightest inkling of the real nature of her stepdaughter’s relationship with the President, sensed the chemistry between them. At one point during their tour of the White House she noticed how he kept staring at Monica. She nudged her and whispered, “Girl, the President sure has your number—he just keeps looking at you.”
While the phone calls from the President enabled them to engineer occasional, apparently innocent, meetings at more-or-less public events, their conversations were the umbilical cord which sustained—indeed strengthened—their relationship. He sometimes called several times a day, frequently calling back if he was interrupted by official meetings or other business. As Monica says, “A lot of emotion and passion with the President, and the depth of feeling between us, developed when our relationship was mainly on the phone. We spent hours talking about family things and our past. We were being real about each other. It certainly wasn’t just about phone sex.”
When he called in mid-July Monica asked if she could see him even though it was still in the middle of the campaign season. He told her he would see what was going on and then get back to her to let her know if that was possible. However, when he did get back to her, very early one morning, it was to say that things were just too busy. Despite her disappointment, Monica took comfort from the call. “It meant that he woke up thinking of me. That meant a lot,” she says.
There were times when he spoke to her for comfort and consolation, and others when he called just to hear her voice. For example, and significantly, he called her on the night of May 16, 1996 when he learned that one of his closest friends, Admiral Jeremy “Mike” Boorda, had committed suicide. He was in a doleful mood, and felt very much alone
. “I wish you were here to give me a big hug,” he told her sadly. It was noticeable, too, that on the following day he wore one of the ties she had given him.
On other occasions they swapped jokes—Monica regaling him with the latest scuttlebutt from the Internet—talked about their families, the forthcoming election, in fact, according to Monica, “everything under the sun.” During one chat she asked if the campaign was difficult for him, as this was the first he had undertaken without the help and support of his mother. He appreciated her sensitivity in recognizing that his mother’s death had left a gap in his life. “She would have liked you,” he told her. “You are very much alike.”
Doubtless Virginia Clinton (later Kelley) would have recognized in Monica a drive and ambition similar to her own. While Virginia’s energies had been directed to seeing her son make his mark in the world, Monica worked hard simply to see the President. To her mind, if she was seen by him, she hoped that a personal encounter, however brief and public, would prompt a phone call, a hope usually fulfilled.
One Sunday, she and her mother were driving to their apartment when she saw the President’s motorcade and realized that he was on his way to church nearby. Monica was tanned, had lost weight thanks to a new slimming drug, and thought it would be fun to see him. Hastily, she got her mother to stop the car and let her out; then she found a place from which she would get a good view of the slow-moving line of cars. The ploy worked. As the motorcade passed by, the President saw Monica on the sidewalk and started waving furiously at her. That afternoon, still convinced that seeing her had been a happy accident, he called and was effusive in his compliments. “You looked stunning,” he said. She did not tell him she had stage-managed the encounter.
On another occasion, she told him that she would be at a ritzy public function at Radio City Music Hall in New York in August 1996, which was being held to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. “Look for me, I’ll be wearing a sexy red dress,” she added. At the party they enjoyed a secret erotic encounter, for in the crush of people around him she was able briefly to brush his crotch with her hand as he was greeting wellwishers. She stayed in the same hotel as the President and First Lady, later joking with him that this was the first time that they had spent the night under the same roof. Next day she hung around, waiting for him to pass in the motorcade. Again he saw her, and he later remarked that she reminded him of a female character in the TV detective series, Mike Hammer, who always seemed to turn up unexpectedly. She did nothing to shatter his illusion that their chance encounters were anything other than serendipitous.
However, Monica strongly repudiates the notion that somehow she was stalking the President, arguing that they were in a genuine relationship, but that communication was, by the very nature of his position, an entirely one-way traffic. It was not possible, nor would it have been sensible, for her simply to pick up the phone and call him to say that she wanted to talk. At the same time, however sustaining any one particular conversation or meeting—even the briefest of meetings—might have been, the familiar anxieties, the sense of slights, real or imagined, soon kicked in when he was not on the line to soothe her. That summer, as his campaign to win a second term in office got into full swing, he was often too busy to call regularly, much to her chagrin. As an aside, during the long hours of waiting that inevitably accompanied the election campaign, she would play Billie Holiday’s soulful “I’ll Be Seeing You” when she was missing him and feeling blue. “It kind of sustained me,” she says. “My favorite line that reminded me of us and our situation so much was ‘I’ll be seeing you, in all the old familiar places that this heart of mine embraces.”
Inevitably the relationship, already hamstrung by his high position and the need for secrecy, suffered, although Monica admits that she had a hand in the process. She recalls: “I would sit by my phone every weekend, waiting, because I didn’t know when he was going to call. I worried, too, that if he called and I wasn’t there he would forget about me and speak to someone else. So often my insecurity got the better of me.” In late April, for instance, soon after she had moved to the Pentagon, she decided to go to a public function, a fund-raising event in Washington, in the hope of seeing him there. It was the first public event, apart from arrival and departure ceremonies at the White House, that she had attended, and she waited patiently behind the ropes to shake his hand and say “Hi.” While she achieved that objective, she left the event in a temper because he had embraced an attractive Russian woman standing nearby, who was, as it happened, a good friend of his. He could see that Monica was upset, however, and on the following morning he called her. The message he left on her machine simply said “No answer”; then, as he hung up the phone, he added in a whisper, “Shucks.”
He called again a couple of days later, and this time they got into a fight, Monica tearfully asking him why he had embraced his friend and not her, all the pent-up anxieties of the last few weeks spilling out. “I was just trying to be careful,” he told her. “The cameras were there and she’s a big donor.”
However, the next time they met, at a Saxophone Club event in May 1996, when he saw her he gave her a huge hug; later, as he was leaving the room, he pointed over to her and mouthed “I miss you.” Amusingly, the man standing next to Monica, a former White House staffer, thought the President was saying it to him.
Yet as much as Bill Clinton cajoled her or tried to placate her, in her heightened emotional state it took very little for Monica to take offense. Just as, in July, she cried herself to sleep when he broke his promise to play the saxophone for her twenty-third birthday, so she became upset when she heard that, during a visit to Los Angeles, he had been out carousing with actress and singer Barbra Streisand and TV reporter Eleanor Mondale. Such childish spats were, however, but a drop in the ocean compared with the single overriding obstacle that ran as a counterpoint to the relationship. Above everything else, the usual tensions and misunderstandings generated by the dynamics of a secret affair with a married man were multiplied a thousand times by the fact that her lover was the President.
Her friends tried in vain to stop Monica from torturing herself. “When she hadn’t heard from him for several days she became insane and crazy,” recalls Catherine Allday Davis. “She would say, ‘I’m so angry at him because I can’t see him.’ My response would be on the lines of ‘I’m glad he can’t see you.’”
On one occasion in September, the President phoned Monica from Florida during the election campaign, and she asked him when they were going to consummate their relationship properly. When he said that he was not going to have sex with her, she voiced her disappointment and anger. He never properly explained why, but Monica and her friends believe that he felt that to consummate their relationship fully would be dangerous. This time, however, she overstepped the mark. “If you don’t want me to call you anymore, just say so,” he answered curtly, an ultimatum that immediately chastened her.
Even when they met and were able to talk, it was never quite enough, Monica finding it difficult to conceal her frustration at the barriers raised by the briefness of their encounters and the ever-present need for caution. As a reaction to this, in October, after they had enjoyed a really intense and highly erotic phone conversation, they fell to discussing her possible return to the White House. The President also talked about her visiting him that week, when, he promised, they would share a kiss. The following night she went to a public function at which he was present. Once again he was warm and affectionate, publicly embracing her. Yet despite his efforts, she felt that he was not paying her enough attention and stormed out. “I was upset,” she says now, “and it was not fair to him, but everything seemed to come to a head.” That night when he called her again, she vented all the mounting disappointments of the last few months. “Oh come on now,” he told her, “I’m too tired for you to be mad at me.” About their proposed meeting, he went on to suggest that she come to his secretary’s office so that he could see her, since he knew that Monica was visit
ing the White House to see Billie Shaddix about some photographs. Betty Currie duly contacted Monica and asked her to come to her office. In the end, however, she was kept waiting for nearly an hour in the West Wing reception area. When Currie finally arrived she told Monica that the President had already left, and explained that she was afraid to bring the younger woman into her office because Evelyn Lieberman, the woman who had had Monica moved from the White House, was in the vicinity.
Monica’s ill-disguised disappointment, and her general sense of frustration, were matched only by the increasing concern of the tightly knit circle of friends and family who watched the drama unfold from the sidelines. As Neysa DeMann Erbland recalls: “I was worried about her in the same kind of way as [I was about] her relationship with Andy Bleiler. I was not worried that America would find out about it, but that he [Clinton] would splatter her heart. I told her that so she would get out of there, get a life outside of him.”
It was easier said than done. The less Monica socialized, the lonelier she became and the more she focused on the affair, circumstances which inevitably became a vicious circle. A naturally gregarious and outgoing personality, she had made some new friends in Washington, in particular Ashley Raines, a young woman from Clinton’s hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, who had been a coworker at the White House, where she was Director of Office and Policy Development Operations and Special Liaison. The two of them went shopping or to the movies or restaurants together, becoming firm friends. Even though they talked about everything under the sun, Monica’s mind was constantly on the President. On at least one occasion Ashley, who had learned of the affair in the summer of 1996, asked her to change the subject.
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