Monica's Story

by Andrew Morton

  It was a light-hearted meeting, the President smiling affectionately at her as she talked about her career ambitions. When she finished her spiel she noticed that he was beaming at her, and asked, “What’s so funny?” “Nothing,” he replied, “I’m just happy to see you. Come over and let me give you a hug.” As Monica remarks, somewhat ruefully, “This was part of the relationship that people never focus on. It was very tactile, very warm and very affectionate. He was always tender and loving and there was always a chemistry between us, even at the end.” Before she left, the President, who was due to visit South America the following week, asked her to send over a “wish list” of jobs so that he could study it when he returned.

  Monica left the White House wrapped in a warm glow of love and affection for her “Handsome,” and when she eventually arrived in New York later that day she pottered around the flea markets looking for a Christmas present for him. Knowing that he collected White House memorabilia, she was delighted to find, for just $10, an antique glass paperweight with a painting of the building. Then her generosity overcame her budget, and she splashed out on an expensive antique cigar stand for him as well.

  That weekend, as she considered her options, she realized that she did not want to work at the United Nations; it would be too much like the Pentagon. When she sent the President her wish list of jobs, therefore, she made it clear that she had changed her mind about the UN, instead emphasizing her interest in jobs in public relations, where she would feel “challenged, engaged and interested.”

  She was too late. For once, the President had already gone into action, telling Betty Currie that he could place Monica in the United Nations “like that.” During the South American trip the Deputy Chief of Staff, John Podesta, who had previously been involved with Monica’s request to return to the White House, spoke briefly to the US Ambassador to the UN, Bill Richardson, about possibly finding an “entry-level” job at the UN in New York for a friend of Betty Currie.

  So Monica was alarmed to receive, one weekend in late October, a call from a woman who told her, “Please hold for Ambassador Richardson.” Then, she recalls, this “jolly guy” came on the line. “Hi, Bill Richardson here,” said a friendly voice. “I understand you want to come and work for me.” After talking for some minutes they arranged to meet on October 31; then, puzzled and rather annoyed, Monica called Betty Currie and said that she needed to talk to the President about this latest twist in the job saga, worried that he would try to railroad her into working at the UN.

  He did call her, and for once there were no harsh words or hysterics. According to Monica, they enjoyed a “sweet” conversation, during which she told him that she didn’t want to work at the UN. “I want you to have options,” he said in answer to this. “Bill Richardson’s a great guy.” Then, referring to his promise to talk to Jordan, he added, “Vernon’s out of town but I’m gonna talk to him soon.”

  Then they started swapping dirty jokes—a Lewinsky specialty—mainly on a Jewish theme. One of Monica’s ran, “Why do Jewish men like to watch porno films backwards? So that they can see the hooker give back the money.” The President responded in kind: “What do you get when you cross a Jewish-American Princess with an Apple? A computer that won’t go down on you.” They also laughed about the latest batch of raunchy e-mail jokes she had sent him. As they were signing off, she said, “I love you.” Then, realizing that this was too serious a comment in a light-hearted conversation, she added quickly, “Butthead!”

  Monica did not speak to the President again until October 30, the night before her interview with Ambassador Richardson. As the big day approached, she became increasingly nervous, so asked Betty Currie if the President would call her to “prep her” on the correct approach for the interview. He responded to her appeal, telling her that she was going to be “just great,” and soothing her fears that the White House staff who believed her to be a “stalker” would give the Ambassador a misleading impression of her worth.

  As they finished their chat she asked if he was going to wear a Halloween pin she had sent him, and he promised her that he would. So she was delighted when next day, in a speech during a visit to a school, he made a point of saying that he had been relegated to just a tiny pin for his Halloween costume. One youngster asked if he could have it, but the President refused: “A friend of mine gave it to me.”

  Monica’s pre-interview nerves had been aggravated, however, by a “bizarre” conversation with Linda Tripp, during which the latter became furious when Monica said she was due to meet the Ambassador at his suite in the Watergate complex. “Over my dead body will you go to that hotel room. They are trying to set you up,” said Tripp, a paragon of protective concern. She repeatedly insisted that Monica should ask for the interview to be held in the hotel’s dining room, in order to forestall a potentially compromising situation.

  Monica thought her friend’s insistence rather extreme, but did not question her motive. In fact, Tripp’s insistence was part of an attempt, devised with Michael Isikoff, to compromise both Monica and the President. Isikoff had arranged for another Newsweek reporter to sit in the dining room, pretending to be just one more guest. The reporter would see Monica and Richardson together, thus verifying Tripp’s contention that the President was misusing his position to secure a government job for his girlfriend.

  It was around this time, too, that Paula Jones’s lawyers received several anonymous phone calls from a woman, believed to be Linda Tripp, saying that they should subpoena both Monica and Tripp. The Jones legal team was in a much stronger position in October, having earlier that month won two crucial judgments under which they secured the right to ask the President for information about his “sexual relations” with other women, and to name any person with discoverable information.

  Blithely ignorant both of these legal developments and of Tripp’s Machiavellian scheming, Monica was worried that her only option at this point was a job at the United Nations. Her interview had gone well, and a few days after meeting the Ambassador she was offered a junior post with the US delegation to the UN.

  Still concerned that she had not yet met with Vernon Jordan, she sent a “hurry-up” note to Betty Currie, expressing her misgivings about the UN job and her desire to meet Clinton’s Mr. Fix-It. Currie called Monica and told her to phone Jordan’s secretary and arrange a meeting. Monica did as she was asked, and an interview with Jordan was duly scheduled for November 5.

  Before she met him, all Monica knew about the President’s lawyer friend was that he played a lot of golf with Clinton, was prominent in the African-American community and, most importantly, had a reputation as a “can-do” individual. Much later, she discovered that one of his close friends was Peter Straus, Monica’s future stepfather, whom he had known for over twenty years.

  Monica was nervous, not to say a little scared, about meeting the attorney, and at first found his stern gaze and taciturn manner intimidating. He asked her why she was there to see him, and she launched into the “vanilla” story once more, telling him that she wanted to leave Washington, and explaining that she had wanted to get back to the White House, but that senior staffers, notably Evelyn Lieberman, were hostile to her. “Oh, she doesn’t like me, either—don’t worry about that,” Jordan said with a smile. Then, after they had talked for some twenty minutes, he announced, “Well, we’re in business. I’m going to help you get a job in New York,” adding cryptically, “You come highly recommended.” It was a comment that Monica interpreted as a reference to previous conversations he had had with the President. They agreed to meet again in two weeks.

  The following day Monica wrote Jordan a thank-you note saying, “It made me happy to know that our friend has such a wonderful confidant in you.” While Monica was much impressed by the charismatic Washington lawyer—she told Catherine Allday Davis that she had never met such a “real person in all her life”—Jordan was apparently less taken with her. Indeed, he later told the Grand Jury that he did not recall meeting h
er at that time, a memory lapse that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr ascribed to the “low priority” Jordan attached to Monica’s job search. This contention helped Starr’s case against the President by suggesting that Jordan only became interested in helping Monica after she was served with an affidavit in the Jones v. Clinton case. Yet while Starr has focused exclusively on Vernon Jordan’s role in obtaining Monica a job, in reality he was just one weapon in her armory, only becoming involved in the first place at her own suggestion.

  There were many others riding out in the quest for a job for Monica. Most prominent among these was Marcia Lewis, who, since she had moved to New York in September, had constantly urged Monica to join her, extolling the virtues of the Big Apple. So there was understandable celebration at her mother’s Fifth Avenue apartment when, in October, Monica made her momentous decision that enough was enough.

  Once Monica had made her mind up, her mother needed no further bidding to take steps to ensure that there was no backsliding. She lobbied friends in the city to see if they knew of any possible openings, and contacted a career counselor, Marilyn Ullman, to help in the job search. Monica duly met with Ullman in early October (the same weekend she bought the President’s White House paperweight). She had learned a harsh lesson over the last year. No longer was she going to rely on other people’s goodwill, not even the President’s. She discussed with her contacts in Washington and the Pentagon correspondent at NBC the possibility of working full-time in the media. She even applied for a job working with broadcaster Connie Chung, although she was unsuccessful because the post had been filled internally.

  During this process her mother constantly encouraged her, realizing that every step that Monica took on her own was a stride away from Washington and the President. Remembering that time, Marcia reflects, “Her decision to willingly move away from Washington was, as far as I was concerned, a victory. It meant that she was letting go of this fascination for him, coming to terms that it was a self-destructive, going-nowhere relationship.”

  Besides putting Monica in touch with Marilyn Ullman, Marcia asked her fiance, Peter Straus, if he would help. Later that fall, Straus spoke independently to his old friend Vernon Jordan, and also sounded out other people in his social circle, notably Edgar Bronfman, chairman of the liquor giant Seagram. “I called a bunch of people we know,” Straus remembers, “to say, ‘Have you got a place for a bright young intern who wants to get away from the White House?’” He stresses that each year his friend Vernon Jordan regularly places a couple of dozen ambitious young people into private-sector jobs, although Straus concedes that, where Monica was concerned, his own friendship with Jordan and the President’s influence would have encouraged the attorney to go the extra mile.

  Indeed, Monica’s circle felt that presidential help on her behalf was no more than she deserved. Since she had lost her job at the White House because of her affair with the President, it was only just that, after a year of giving her the runaround, he should do the decent thing and help find her another position. “We all thought that it was fair and reasonable that the President would help her find a job,” her Aunt Debra remarks. “So when he started putting in some effort to make things right for her we thought that was terrific.” It is a view echoed time and time again by her friends. “I was so happy when she decided to get out of Washington away from that scene,” says Catherine Allday Davis. “I didn’t think it was a big deal that the President would help her find a job: everyone gets a job with a little help.”

  It was not only Monica’s friends and family who favored her move to New York. Linda Tripp, too, argued strongly that she should leave Washington. Although the knowledge that Tripp was the source of the leak about Kathleen Willey, and the sudden change in Tripp’s behavior, had made Monica uneasy, she still trusted her and confided in her. With hindsight, perhaps Monica should by now have begun to question the true nature of Tripp’s friendship, but the loyalty that is one of Monica’s key characteristics would not allow her to do so.

  She took it as just another an act of friendship when Tripp suggested using a cheaper and more efficient courier service to deliver her packages for the President to Betty Currie at the White House. Once again, though, Tripp was concealing malevolence behind her smile. The recommended service was owned by the Goldberg family, who later supplied Michael Isikoff with receipts and other documentation as tangible evidence of Monica’s closeness to the President.

  However, there were other straws in the wind which did alarm Monica. She and Tripp had begun to have frequent fights, which the latter seemed to trigger deliberately, then flying into a towering rage. Monica was sometimes frightened of her and of what she might do. “I could see at this point that she was quite a vindictive person,” she remembers, “so I started to kiss her ass because I was worried that she might go public about the relationship. What really concerned me was that if that happened, then the President would know I had told someone about our love affair.”

  As she mused on this thorny problem, she began to make “worst-case” contingency plans in her own mind. If Tripp did go public, Monica decided, she would call a press conference and categorically deny Tripp’s allegations. If need be, she would even say that she herself had made up the whole story about an affair with Clinton, and would accept the resulting public ridicule and humiliation.

  During the year Tripp, with Monica’s encouragement, had gone on a long-term diet that had proved so successful that her weight was now at a point where she could fit into some of Monica’s larger dresses. As a result, and by way of a congratulatory gesture, in September Monica had invited Tripp to her Watergate apartment to choose clothes from what she calls her “fat closet.” As they went through her wardrobe, picking out suitable clothes, Monica had showed her friend the now notorious semen-stained blue dress.

  Far from having kept the dress as a trophy—or as evidence—as has sometimes been suggested, she had not worn it since February because she could not. Monica’s weight has always fluctuated widely, and when she next tried the dress on she found that it did not button up properly. Being both a carelessly untidy young woman and one who has to keep a strict eye on her budget, she had seen no reason to have it cleaned immediately: doing so when she couldn’t wear it would be a waste of money. By November, however, she had lost enough weight for the dress to fit her again, and she decided to wear it for a Thanksgiving dinner in San Francisco with her father’s side of the family. Monica was—and is—always worried about what she should wear, particularly so in this case, as all her cousins are slim. The blue Gap dress was both slimming and attractive, and she therefore decided to send it to the cleaners.

  She then made one of the biggest blunders of her life. On 16 November, she told Linda Tripp about her plans. The latter, knowing that one day the dress might be a vital piece of corroborating evidence, desperately tried to get her to change her mind. Their conversation, which Tripp recorded, reveals how she manipulated, even entrapped, Monica into incriminating the President. Tripp strongly, even vehemently, cautioned Monica to leave the dress alone, telling her, “Now, all I would say to you is, you have a very long life ahead of you and I don’t know what’s going to happen to you. Neither do you. I would rather you had that in your possession if you need it years from now.”

  She went on to say that she had a cousin with a background in genetic fingerprinting who had told her that DNA samples can be matched simply by removing a sample of dry semen using a wetted Q-Tip. Not surprisingly, this “cousin” was nothing of the sort. He was Mark Fuhrman, the detective stigmatized for racism in the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995, who was now a client of Lucianne Goldberg. Faced with the prospect of losing such valuable evidence, Tripp urgently advised Monica, for her own protection, to save the dress in a plastic bag and keep it with her “treasures”. When the girl seemed baffled as to why she should do so, Tripp remarked ominously, “It’s just this nagging, awful feeling I have in the back of my head.”

  Since Monica had no
intention of keeping the dress as a souvenir—all she wanted to do was wear it—she was not wholly convinced. Tripp therefore changed tack. When the two women talked later at the office, she again derided Monica’s plans to wear the dress, but this time argued that she thought Monica looked really fat in the dress, and suggested she wear something else. This tactic was more successful. Monica, ever anxious about her figure, decided to take her friend’s advice and leave the dress in her closet.

  The matter did not rest there, however. At around that time, Monica had one of her more bizarre conversations with Tripp. As they chatted in the office, the latter, complaining that she was short of money, said she had decided to sell some of her old clothes to raise cash. She claimed that a friend wanted to buy the very suit she was wearing that day, and asked if she could go to Monica’s Watergate apartment to borrow a sweater and skirt to wear instead. Monica offered to go with her, but Tripp would have none of it, saying that she would go alone to save her friend any trouble. Monica demurred at this, but Tripp became ever more insistent, accusing her of a lack of trust when Monica said that she felt uncomfortable about letting anyone into her apartment without her being present. In the end, Tripp haughtily dropped her demands and Monica, rather bemused, resumed her work.