When Tripp did so, Lindsey suggested that Tripp should meet with Clinton’s attorney, Bob Bennett, who was handling the President’s defense in the Paula Jones case, and a meeting was duly arranged for the end of July. Tripp was nervous about seeing Bennett, afraid that he was going to be unpleasant. She went for a hair appointment to calm herself down, and then met with her own attorney, Kirbe Behre. In the event, she did not keep her appointment with Bennett, explaining to Monica that her own lawyer had advised her to remain neutral and not to become involved.
Monica was baffled. Tripp was a political appointee, so she was by definition working for the President, and therefore not neutral. Nor could Monica understand why Tripp subsequently gave a named quote to Isikoff for his story on Kathleen Willey.
At Newsweek, meanwhile, the importance of the as yet unpublished story had come into sharp relief only after Kathleen Willey was subpoenaed in late July by Paula Jones’s lawyers. This gave the magazine a legitimate public-interest peg upon which to hang Isikoff’s tale of presidential peccadilloes, and in early August 1997 the story was duly run. In it, Linda Tripp was quoted as saying that when Willey emerged from the Oval Office she was “disheveled, her face was red and her lipstick was off. She was flustered, happy and joyful.” This confirmed the meeting between the President and Willey, but it also contradicted Willey’s claim that she had been sexually harassed, a claim she elaborated upon when she appeared on the TV show 60 Minutes in March 1998.
President Clinton later emphatically denied any sexual impropriety, saying that Willey had come to him in an emotional state because of money worries. They had sat at the table in the dining room off the Oval Office, and, after they had discussed her request to him for a paid job, he embraced her, and might have kissed her on the forehead. Clinton’s version rings true with Monica. Reviewing the whole sorry business, she says, “I now find a lot of things about the Willey story strange. I couldn’t imagine the President letting her leave the office looking like that. Maybe her lipstick was off, but her shirt untucked? No way. No way. In fact, we were always concerned about appearances. I would always leave with a Diet Coke; it looked a little more friendly and less sexual.”
When the Newsweek story appeared, Bob Bennett dismissed Tripp as a woman who was “not to be believed,” a comment that enraged her. Equally damaging to her credibility were allegations that it was Tripp who, earlier that year, had anonymously tipped off Paula Jones’s lawyers about Kathleen Willey.
Filled with self-righteous indignation, yet excited by the attention she was receiving, Linda Tripp now saw herself, according to Lucianne Goldberg’s son, Jonah, as a major player—an echo of Monica’s own words—in a drama she had been instrumental in constructing. “Linda tends to view her role in things as much more important than it is,” he says. “She was both thrilled and terrified by the play Isikoff gave her in this piece. She thought the whole world was now watching her and she thought she also could come center stage with what she knew about Monica.”
Despite her unease about Tripp, Monica was still loyal, and she worried that her friend might lose her job because of her indiscretions. Tripp already had a reputation for being disruptive, churlish and uncooperative, as Pentagon internal-management memos attest. Tripp’s and Monica’s boss, Ken Bacon, had been upset with Tripp when there was a media uproar involving her and the Whitewater affair and he had asked her to inform him in the future if her name was going to be taken up by the media. Monica therefore pushed Tripp to tell him that the Newsweek article was going to be published and, in this climate of suspicion and hostility, characteristically went all out to help her friend. She anonymously called Tripp’s attorney, Kirbe Behre, and made it clear to him that his client had been misquoted in the Newsweek article. She urged him to make a more complete statement, which, after consulting Tripp, he duly did.
When Tripp got back to the Pentagon, she admitted to Monica that she was worried about losing her job. She therefore decided to write a letter to Newsweek, complaining that she had been misquoted, and showed a draft to Monica. Monica suggested several amendments and even found the fax number so that Tripp could dispatch her letter to the magazine’s editor. Though it did not contradict any facts about the Willey scandal, it did make the point that “Whatever happened in the Oval Office, if anything, is known only to two people.” (Ironically, it was not until the scandal involving Monica herself hit the headlines, that Newsweek published Tripp’s letter.)
There was more to come, however. Tripp, still in high dudgeon about Bob Bennett’s attack on her veracity, told Monica that if she was fired she was going to write a “tell-all” book. “That made my spine curl,” says Monica, and she worriedly asked Tripp if she would ever reveal the story of her affair with Clinton. Tripp—the woman who had told Michael Isikoff about the “young intern” and the President—replied soothingly, “Of course not. I would never hurt you.”
Anxiety about Tripp’s behavior was an added strain on Monica, at a time when she was still on tenterhooks about securing her return to the White House. On July 16, two days after she had seen the President about Kathleen Willey, and then met with Linda Tripp, she had met Marsha Scott for the second time. After an hour-long discussion, Monica had felt much more confident about her future. It was her understanding that Scott had offered her a post as a “detailee,” in Scott’s own office, starting on September i. She recalls, “It wasn’t a done deal but very close. I just thought, ‘I’m going back.’”
Once again, Catherine Allday Davis sensed that a storm was brewing, and on August 4, she e-mailed her friend: “I hope things get straightened out and you don’t get dragged into anything too sketchy. Please don’t forget to look after yourself Monica, no matter how tantalizing it is to put someone else in front of your needs.”
The warning was justified. As so often in Monica Lewinsky’s story, her high hopes were soon dashed. In August, Marsha Scott told her that there were now doubts about the post of detailee, and that in any case Monica would have to wait until Jody Torkelson, another of her “Meanies,” left the White House in December before she could return. Once again Monica’s suspicion that she was simply getting the runaround seemed to be confirmed.
She raised the issue with the President when she saw him in his study on August 16 to give him her presents for his fifty-first birthday on the 19th. This was the first time she had seen him since a brief meeting on July 24, the day after her own birthday, when he had given her presents of an antique hat pin in a little wooden box and a porcelain objet d’art from Norway. She had taken considerable trouble to find out what he wanted for his birthday. Sometime previously she had seen a newspaper report saying that he had spent time browsing in a bookstore in Baltimore that dealt in rare and fine editions. So she had driven to the store and told the staff a fake story about how her uncle knew someone who knew the President, and how they wanted to buy him a book he liked from among the volumes he had examined. It emerged that the President had shown considerable interest in an 1802 biography of Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia from 1682 to 1725. The book was expensive—$125—but Monica had bought it.
When she arrived at the White House, she was shown into the Oval Office, although the President was not yet there. She went into the back study, lit a birthday candle in an apple square (she knew apple pie was one of his favorites), and set out her gifts; besides the book, she had brought a game, “Royalty,” and one of her psychology texts from college, Disease and Misrepresentation.
Eventually the President arrived—in a foul temper. His knee was hurting and his schedule had gone haywire. Even so, Monica sang “Happy Birthday” and he opened his presents, although he was distracted and irritable. They then proceeded to get into a huge fight about Marsha Scott. Monica complained that Scott was actively hindering her return to the White House, and argued so vehemently that at one point the President ordered her to lower her voice. Eventually they calmed down, although the President made it clear to her that he did not want any intim
acy, telling her, “I’m trying not to do this, and I’m trying to be good.” Monica could see that he was upset, and she hugged him close before they shared a birthday kiss. The President was about to go on vacation to Martha’s Vineyard, and before he left Monica sent him a card wishing him a good vacation and a copy of the book The Notebook. The book, she felt was significant because in it, Leaves of Grass was mentioned and quoted. In return, she asked, in her card, if the President would bring her back a T-shirt from Martha’s Vineyard.
A few days later Monica received another metaphorical kick in the teeth. In the first week of September she had what she calls a “pissy” phone conversation with Scott, who told her there was no opening at the White House for her. Monica voiced her bitter disappointment in a handwritten note to a family friend, Dale Young, whom she and her mother had met at a health spa in 1995. “Unfortunately,” she wrote, “I came back to DC only to learn that the detailee slot in Marsha’s office is no longer available. I had a long conversation with her and it is clear to me now that I won’t be able to come back any time soon. I think the end of this whole trauma is over. I just wish my heart didn’t have to be broken in all of this.” As Dale Young says: “Despite constant disappointments, she always had faith that his word had meaning and she expected him to produce the results he promised. One way of looking at her blind faith in him was that she expected him to be as honest with her as she was with him.”
After she received the bombshell news from Marsha Scott in early September 1997 that there was no job for her at the White House, nor even the hope of one, a blow only marginally softened when Betty Currie gave her a bagful of goodies, including a cotton dress, which the President had brought back for her from Martha’s Vineyard
The roller coaster was now on a steep downward dive, and Monica plunged once more into unremitting depression. She constantly called Betty Currie, begging her to ask the President to speak to, call or see her about her job prospects. Every time, Betty put her off, saying that he was too busy, or in a meeting. Hurt and angered at being continually fobbed off, Monica was again vulnerable to Linda Tripp’s insistence that she should not give up hope. Monica felt otherwise. In a sad note to the President which she drafted but did not send, she talked of throwing in the towel: “My conversation with Marsha left me disappointed, frustrated, sad and angry. I can’t help but wonder if you knew she wouldn’t be able to detail me over there when I last saw you. Maybe that would explain your coldness. The only explanation I can reason for your not bringing me back is that you just plain didn’t want to enough or care about me enough.”
On Friday, September 12, knowing that the First Lady was out of town, Monica called Currie and asked if she could see the President after he had recorded a radio address that day. She even went to the South West gate of the White House, from where she phoned Currie endlessly, begging her to tell him she was waiting for him. After Monica had waited for forty-five minutes, Currie spoke to her: the President, she said, had a date with Chelsea, and couldn’t see her. “I was crying,” Monica remembers, “I was angry, I was frustrated, I was out of my mind. I was such a moron—I should have walked away from it all much sooner.”
Currie did, though, agree to let Monica come and talk to her, saying, “You really worry me when you are like this.” When the two women sat down in her office, Currie, in her motherly way, gently explained that the President was doing all he could to get Monica a job, but that his hands were tied. She promised to talk to him and see if she could arrange a meeting between him and Monica that Sunday, promising that she would herself come to the White House specially on her way back from Chicago to aid their rendezvous.
That Sunday, September 14, Monica stayed in her bedroom all day and waited by the phone. She called Currie repeatedly and frantically, desperate to find out if it was possible to see the President. As the minutes lengthened into hours, she became increasingly hysterical, until her condition began to cause real concern to her mother, who was visiting from New York. “It was one of those moments,” Monica remembers, “where I said, ‘Forget it, I’ve had enough, I can’t take this any more.’ I cried so much it hurt. I was in so much pain and confusion. I didn’t understand him, why he couldn’t be straightforward and tell the truth.”
It is one of the endearing things about Monica that, even in her darkest moments, her self-deprecating humor is never far away. In the midst of her “pain and confusion,” she joked to Catherine that the job she would really like would be that of the President’s dresser. When the phone did eventually ring that day, for a short while the clouds parted and sunshine poured into her life. Late in the evening Currie called to tell her she had spoken to the President, who had suggested that John Podesta, the Deputy Chief of Staff, be tasked with finding Monica a job. The involvement of a heavy hitter like Podesta was a major cause for optimism.
In a calmer mood, Monica also realized that every recent conversation and meeting with the President had been punctuated by an argument. Resolving to turn over a new leaf, she decided to send him a “cute” note and laid it out to resemble an official memo. Dated 30 September, it was addressed to “Dear Handsome” and signed with an “M”, and the subject was given as “The New Deal.” Monica promised that if he would let her visit him “sans a crisis” she would be on her “best behavior and not stressed out,” and would not cause a scene. In a postscript, she added that Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States for a record four terms, would never have refused a visit from his long-standing mistress, Lucy Mercer.
But if Monica was for the moment on an upswing, her mother, who had lived for years with the dramatic oscillations in her daughter’s moods, was at her wits’ end as to how to resolve the emotional torture Monica was putting herself through. Feeling lost and helpless, Marcia called her friend Dale Young at her home in Westchester, New York, to ask her advice. The latter thought that a direct approach, mother to mother, to the President’s secretary might work. If Currie agreed not to let Monica speak to the President again, that would effectively cut off her supply of hope—and it was hope that was fueling her dreams. Marcia thought long and hard about the suggestion, but in the end just couldn’t summon up the courage to make the call.
Monica’s friends were also alarmed about her. “Unlike the Andy Bleiler relationship, her affair with the President got totally out of control, so that she couldn’t get back down to normal life,” remembers Catherine. “It was scary, it was disturbing and it really bothered me because I knew it wouldn’t end until she moved. So I was really an advocate for her to leave.” Ashley Raines, the only true friend Monica had made in Washington, echoed these sentiments in an e-mail to her boyfriend: “I’m glad I didn’t keep in close contact with her over the last month because she told me she was pretty messed. And when she says that, it’s scary.”
Even the President’s unflappable personal secretary was startled by Monica’s behavior. The girl she had once thought of as someone who had been “maligned improperly” was fast becoming a “pain in the neck” because of her tears, her tantrums and her endless phone calls. Yet when Currie reluctantly advised the President against bringing Monica back to the White House, he insisted that the matter be pursued and, according to Currie’s Grand Jury testimony, instructed her and Marsha Scott to continue their efforts to find her a position. Indeed, when he called Monica soon after receiving the “New Deal” memo of 30 September, he promised to speak to Erskine Bowles, the Chief of Staff, about bringing her back.
By now, Monica’s desire to return to the White House was fueled as much by the need to prove she could do it as by any career goal. And, of course, above all else there was her overwhelming longing simply to be close to the President. “I still had the hope that our relationship could get back to normal,” she says, “and remember, he was always very affectionate and loving towards me. At the same time I had a level of desperation: I wanted a job at the White House, I felt entitled to a job after all I had been through.”
Understandably, Monica had become extremely skeptical about supposed attempts to help her get a White House job. She heard nothing from John Podesta in spite of badgering Betty Currie about the matter, and had become convinced that there was a cabal of senior White House staff, particularly women who had once been close to the President, working against her return. She heard all the time of low-level jobs at the White House, for which she would have been eminently suitable, being filled. Monica’s suspicion that the President was giving her the runaround flared up again—indeed, it seems still to haunt her: “If he wasn’t going to bring me back,” she says, “he should have said so and been up-front about it. He should have told me that he couldn’t do it. Instead, he strung me along month after month.”
In fact, she was doing him an injustice: Clinton had indeed ensured that the question of a White House job for her was raised with both Erskine Bowles and John Podesta. For discretion’s sake, though, he had asked Betty Currie to contact them for him, and Bowles and Podesta, believing that the job was for a friend of Currie’s, rather than for someone in whom the President took an interest, naturally did not give the matter the top priority.
At this desperate time, just when Monica needed all the support and comfort she could get, suddenly the behavior of her friend, guide and advisor, Linda Tripp, changed completely and inexplicably. From the beginning of October, she became hostile and argumentative, and, far from encouraging Monica to keep trying to return to the White House, argued forcefully that she should not. Monica, she now said, should move from Washington, and the President should find her a job elsewhere. Monica was bewildered and deeply hurt by this change in one whom she believed a close friend.
Monica's Story Page 18