Monica's Story

by Andrew Morton

  Months later that conversation was to take on greater significance when Monica and Tripp quarreled over whether Willey had phoned Tripp, or vice versa. By then Tripp was telling Monica a different story, and was claiming that it was she who had contacted Willey, a claim that altered the emphasis of the whole meeting with Isikoff. For Tripp to have called Willey, rather than the other way around, implied that she had warned her of Isikoff’s interest, whereas if Willey had contacted her to see how the interview had gone, the clear implication was that the two of them were colluding on the story. Over the next few months Tripp changed her story about Willey so much that Monica didn’t know what to believe.

  By the time Tripp was approached by Isikoff in March 1997, Monica had learned, from her experience as “gatekeeper” for Ken Bacon, how to deal with journalists. She was therefore more than a little surprised that Linda Tripp, a woman with considerable experience of dealing with the media, should have apparently handled the encounter with Isikoff in such an amateurish fashion. “It seemed to me,” Monica recalls, “that it was stupid for her to have said that the President messed around with someone and it wasn’t sexual harassment.”

  Furthermore, she thought that, as a political appointee, Tripp should inform the White House of Isikoff’s approach, so that they could take the appropriate action. Monica suggested that she contact either Nancy Hernreich, Director of Oval Office Operations, or one of the White House attorneys, Deputy Counsel Bruce Lindsey, with whom Tripp had previously claimed a close working relationship. Like her stories of her familiarity with the President, however, her closeness to Lindsey seemed to exist more in her imagination than in reality.

  Eventually Tripp did page and then e-mail Lindsey, saying that she needed to speak to him about a media-related issue. As a result of her previous Grand Jury appearance over the Vince Foster affair, however, Tripp and Lindsey had been instructed not to contact one another. Lindsey therefore ignored her attempted contacts, a snub which deeply offended the prickly Ms. Tripp. As far as Monica was concerned, there the matter rested—at least for the time being.

  In any case, Monica had something else on her mind—her career. When she arrived back in Washington in mid-April after her trip to Asia, she called Betty Currie and said that she needed to talk to the President. All weekend, the usual time for him to call, she waited, but he never phoned. It was the same the following weekend. Something was wrong, but she couldn’t understand what.

  Taking matters into her own hands, on April 28 she applied for a position in the White House Press Office, an action which her boss, Ken Bacon, facilitated by dropping a note to Lorrie McHugh, Deputy Assistant to the President, in which he praised her as “bright, energetic and imaginative.” Monica considered contacting Betty Currie, so that she could let the President know of these plans, but Linda Tripp discouraged her from following this route, arguing that the President still had problems dealing with the idea of Monica returning to the White House. “It’s really weird, I just understand him so well” was Tripp’s constant refrain. Monica was granted an interview, which took place on May 1, 1997, but though it went well she was not offered the Press Office post.

  At last, on the final Saturday in April, the 26th, the President spoke to her. When Monica voiced her disappointment that he had failed to call earlier, they got into a row, the President telling her that his knee was still giving him a lot of pain and that he didn’t need her complaining as well. As with all their fights, they made up before the conversation ended, and yet again made plans to meet soon.

  On May 17, the President, who was out of Washington for much of that month, managed to call her again, calling several times because he kept being interrupted by official business. He said he had been going to ask Betty Currie if she could come in the next day, a Sunday, so that he could see Monica, but as he couldn’t reach his secretary, he called Monica at home. She told him about her unsuccessful efforts to land the job in the Press Office. The President, who frequently told her that her search for a job in the White House was “being worked on,” seemed annoyed with her for not informing him of her application. “Why didn’t you tell Betty? We could have tried to help you,” he said. “Promise me that if you hear of something again you will let us know, OK?”

  There were other matters on his mind, as became clear in the course of the conversation. As he had said during their meetings in February and March, he was worried about people knowing about their relationship. “This wasn’t unusual,” says Monica. “What was unusual was that he acted differently between March and May, and I couldn’t figure out why.” He then asked if she had told her mother about their affair, to which she replied, “Of course not. Why would you even say that?” She added that, so far as her mother knew, the reason why she had been transferred to the Pentagon was simply because of her friendship with the President.

  In reality, of course, Monica’s mother, aunt and closest friends had known about the affair for many months. When she talked to Catherine and Neysa on the phone, she had even played them the messages the President left on her answering machine. “This wasn’t bragging to my friends about the relationship. It was more like just treating him and talking about him like a normal boy. I’m from a generation where women are sexually supportive of each other—I know all about my girlfriends’ boyfriends, for example, and the President was no different. The information would never have gone beyond my friends.”

  The President went on to tell Monica that the Deputy Director of Personnel, Marsha Scott, whom Monica had yet to meet, had been checking into matters, and had gained the impression from Walter Kaye, her mother’s friend who had helped Monica get her internship, that Marcia had spoken to him about the relationship.

  This remark is intriguing, for in their respective Grand Jury testimonies neither Kaye nor Scott recalled ever having spoken to each other about Monica. In February 1997, however Monica’s aunt, Debra Finerman, had had lunch with Kaye, who has the reputation of being a lovable but incorrigible gossip, and he alluded then to the fact that Monica had something of a name for being aggressive. Debra’s angry response, according to Kaye, was to inform him that the President actually called Monica at home late at night. This set Kaye’s mind racing, for he had been told independently by two New York Democrats that Monica was having an affair with the President.

  It does seem possible, therefore, that Kaye, who was a great friend of Debra Schiff, a receptionist in the White House’s West Wing tobby—she once complained to Evelyn Lieberman about Monica’s “inappropriate attire”—had passed on what he knew, or thought he knew, about the relationship, to those around the President. That information had in turn filtered back to Clinton—hence his mentioning Kaye to Monica.

  The matter was more serious than whether or not the President was mistaken in his use of Marsha Scott’s name, or whether he was using it as a smokescreen to tease from Monica details of any indiscretion she may have made. It seemed obvious from what he was hearing that news about their affair had leaked, and he was worried about it.

  It was an unsettling conversation and, even though they arranged to meet on the following Saturday, Monica felt that something else was amiss, something that went beyond the President’s fear of discovery. At the same time, even though this would be only the third time she had seen him in private that year, their previous two encounters had been of such emotional and sexual intensity that she had high hopes that their relationship would reach even greater levels of intimacy.

  On the Saturday they were due to meet, May 24, Monica arrived bearing gifts as she usually did—on this occasion a golf puzzle and a casual shirt from Banana Republic. In her straw hat she sported the pin he had given her during their last meeting. She was shown into the Oval Office and was greeted by the President, after which they moved to the dining room, where she gave him the gifts. They then went on into the back study, Monica fully expecting that they would begin to “fool around.”

  It was then that he dropped the bombshell. Her in
stinct that something was amiss had proved absolutely sure. The President told her that he no longer felt happy with their relationship, and that he wanted to end it. It was not right for him, or his family, nor did he believe it was right in the eyes of God. He went on to describe the pain and torment that having an extramarital affair gave him as a married man. Then, as his wife and daughter Chelsea, played nearby in the White House swimming pool, he began to reveal the anguish in his soul.

  For all his life, the President said, he had lived a secret existence, a life filled with lies and subterfuge. As a little boy he had lied to his parents, and, even though he was a smart kid and knew the consequences of his actions, he had maintained that hidden life, safe in the knowledge that no one knew about it, knew the true Bill Clinton. After he married in 1975, when he was twenty-nine, his secret life continued. The number of his affairs multiplied and Clinton became increasingly appalled at himself, at his capacity not only for deceiving others, but also for self-deception. By the time he reached the age of forty, he was unhappy in his marriage and hated what he was doing to himself and others, the struggle between his religious upbringing and his natural proclivities ever more pronounced. He had considered divorcing Hillary and leaving politics forever—at the time he had been re-elected for his fourth term as Governor of Arkansas. “If I had to become a gas-station attendant to live an honest life and be able to look myself in the mirror and be happy with who I am, that’s what I was prepared to do,” he confessed to Monica.

  At that stage in his life, feeling miserable, downcast and directionless, he had made a momentous decision—it would, he believed, be better for his beloved daughter if he and Hillary stayed together and worked on their marriage. He said that since then he had tried to make his marriage work and had kept a calendar on which he marked off the days when he had been good.

  Monica, who refers to that Saturday, May 24, 1997, as “D-Day” or “Dump Day,” recalls, “I could see on that day and at that time that this was really a struggle for him and it was painful to talk about. It reminded me of my own struggles with my weight. Of course there was the usual flattery and bullshit when you break up, and it did make me feel better. But it was an incredibly intense meeting. I cried and he cried too.” She recollects that the President went on to tell her that he still wanted her in his life, saying, “If you and I are just friends I can tell them to go to hell and you can come here and spend time and it won’t matter what they think because nothing is going on. I want you to do whatever it is you want to do. I want you to be happy. I can be a very good friend for you and help you in a lot of ways that you don’t even realize.”

  Monica, understandably, clutched at this straw. “When we finished our discussion I had the overall feeling that he still wanted me in his life, still wanted me to be a friend. He wanted to help and take care of me.”

  Even so, she felt, as everyone does when a relationship ends, utterly crushed and demoralized. Betty Currie came in to fetch her and, in her distress, Monica forgot to mention to the President the brewing Kathleen Willey situation as she understood it from Linda, Tripp. She went with Currie out into her office, and when the secretary asked if she was all right, Monica burst into tears. Sympathetically, Betty told her, “You are like me, you just can’t hide anything. Your face shows everything.”

  Monica walked home in a daze, her high-heeled sandals blistering her feet. “I was crying, I was distraught, I don’t know how I got home without being hit by a car,” she remembers. “I stayed in bed and cried all weekend. I was so upset and confused. It didn’t make sense. When I look back I was so young, so foolish, so trusting. How could he have messed with me so cruelly?”

  Just three days after that emotional breakup the Supreme Court unanimously rejected Clinton’s claim that he was “immunized” from civil lawsuits under the Constitution.

  The Paula Jones case was now in play, big time.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “To Have Him in My Life”

  MONICA’S SPIRIT was almost broken after the President ended their eighteen-month affair, but her family and friends breathed an audible sigh of relief. At long last, they thought, she could move on.

  For the last year Marcia had tried all kinds of tricks and ruses to wean her daughter off her improbable love affair. She signed her up for various social groups, sending away for brochures, in a vain attempt to widen her circle of acquaintances and enable her eventually to meet a decent single man. She even bought her a book on how to end an obsessive love affair. So she was pleasantly surprised when Monica started dating Doug Wiley, a thirty-five-year-old lobbyist. The romance, such as it was, soon faded, though.

  Monica’s emotional difficulties were compounded by loneliness. Her closest friend, Catherine Allday Davis, had moved to Tokyo, so that contact with her was now by e-mail; and Neysa DeMann Erbland, who had been living relatively close by in New York, was soon to return to Los Angeles. This meant that, apart from Ashley Raines, she had no close friends in Washington.

  It was not only her friends who were leaving. That summer of 1997, her mother also decided to move—to New York—to be close to the new man in her life. Marcia had met Peter Straus, a wealthy and charming New York Democrat liberal, at the launch of her first book, The Private Lives of Three Tenors, a biography of José Carreras, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti. In early September, she moved to a studio apartment off Fifth Avenue; Monica stayed on alone in the Watergate apartment for the time being.

  Monica could still turn to Aunt Debra, of course, but family and other commitments often kept Debra at home in Virginia. In any case, Debra saw her role not as that of advisor, or moral counselor, but as that of sounding board, someone in whom Monica could confide freely, knowing that her aunt would listen sympathetically and non-judgmentally. Further than that, Debra believed, she should not go. What Monica came to miss more and more was the advice, and the active involvement in her emotional welfare, of her mother and her closest friends.

  Marcia knew how lonely Monica was and was deeply worried about her. “I kept trying other things, repeating a familiar pattern. So either geographically or emotionally we would move her, rather than confronting her problems. We tried to get her to move to New York, we asked friends if they knew any decent young men, and I tried to get her involved in other activities.

  “Everything I did—typical of me—was in a non-confrontational, passive way, trying to pull the strings in the back. Let’s go on a trip, visit a museum, join a group . . and so it would go on. I would have given anything for her to have had a loving relationship between two equals.”

  In spite of all the warning signs, the rebuffs and disappointments, Monica still dreamed of securing a job—any job—back at the White House, in order to be near the man she adored. She said as much in her testimony to the Grand Jury on August 6, 1998, and also said that the President knew it: “I did make this clear to him, that it was always more important to me to have him in my life than to—than to get the job.” If necessary, she was prepared to take a job at a lower grade and therefore a lower salary; by no means a minor matter for Monica, who has never had a great deal of money. It was a road which, over the next few months, inevitably led to frustration, anger and despair, not least because she continued to clutch at the forlorn hope that the President’s rejection of her might not be final. After all, Andy Bleiler had more than once ended their affair, only to return to her soon afterwards. If she could just get back to the White House, where there was a good chance that Bill Clinton would see her from time to time, might he not do the same?

  Late in May, just before Clinton had ended their affair, the job opportunity she had been waiting for arose. The post was in the National Security Office at the White House, and meant working for Sandy Berger, the National Security Advisor. Among other benefits, it brought the prospect of traveling on Air Force One. Monica was excited by the challenge and, at Tripp’s urging, made sure she was considered for the post.

  An interview was arranged
for May 30, just a week after the President’s sad farewell to her. She remembered his insistence that she should let him or Betty Currie know when she was applying for positions in the White House. And only a week earlier, he had said they could still maintain their friendship, even if she were again working at the White House. Not for a moment had she doubted that he had meant every bit of what he said—for her, his words, no matter how casual, were tantamount to promises, and could not have been more binding had they been carved on tablets of stone. Armed with these reassurances, she contacted his office, only to find that both the President and Betty Currie were away.

  After her initial interview for the National Security Council (NSC) job, in the first week of June she contacted the Deputy Director of Personnel at the White House, Marsha Scott. She was shocked and upset when the latter’s assistant told her that Scott, who, according to the President, had since March been handling Monica’s transfer to the White House, had never heard of her.

  Monica’s insecurity and natural pessimism at once rose to the surface. Not only had she always believed implicitly in the President’s promises, but she had not contacted Scott before precisely because she had believed that the President and Scott were in direct touch about a job for her. (Moreover, she was constrained by the fact that she did not know exactly how much Marsha Scott knew about her relationship with the President.) Now, faced with Scott’s avowed ignorance of her NSC job application, Monica began to wonder if his promises were hollow, if he was merely fobbing her off in order to keep her quiet. The thought was almost unbearable.

  Worn down by emotional strain, and believing that her adored “Handsome” was not trying to help her, Monica was near the end of her tether. Not surprisingly, in her uncertainty and unhappiness, which were made worse by her growing loneliness and feeling of isolation in Washington, she turned increasingly to the one person whom she could rely on to encourage and comfort her: Linda Tripp. During the summer of 1997, bereft of the companionship of her mother—who, naturally, was often away in New York, preparing for her move and visiting with Peter Straus—Monica became more and more in thrall to Tripp.