Monica's Story

by Andrew Morton

  In bewildered tones, he echoed her question, complaining, “I don’t understand—this has become your everything.” Then he added, “You told me when this affair started that when it was over you would not give me any trouble.” Monica, with extraordinary, if unintentional, prescience, replied, “Trouble? You think I have been trouble? You don’t know trouble.”

  As in all their fights, they eventually turned the corner and calmed down, the President even agreeing that she could come and see him. Needing no second bidding, Monica returned to the White House, arriving at about 1 P.M. She took with her his Christmas gifts, which included the antique cigar holder she had bought in New York, a “Santa Monica” Starbucks coffee mug, and a tie she had found during her recent visit to London. She left her “Farewell, my lovely” letter at home.

  When they met, the mood was very different from their fight on the phone. The President was affectionate and open, sitting in his rocking chair and stroking Monica’s hair as she sat at his feet. Monica was adoring and winning, expressing many of the sentiments in her letter. They chatted about all manner of topics, including his attractiveness to women. He modestly demurred when Monica told him that millions of women find him good-looking, and went on to tell her about his own battle with weight. When he was a small boy, he said, he had been so heavy that in the annual Easter-egg race he couldn’t run as fast as the others, so there had never been any chocolate eggs left when he finished. He added that his problems with weight had continued throughout high school. “It was so sad,” recalls Monica. While he managed to resist discussing her ideas on education reform, which she had set out to him in an earlier memo, he did tell her that while he was in Vancouver he had bought her a present, which he would give her nearer Christmas Day, and promised to give her a Christmas kiss as, he said, kisses at Christmas were allowed.

  For Monica, this was a breakthrough—the promise of a further meeting, when only the previous night she had thought she would never see him again. As she prepared to leave, the President told her solemnly, “I promise I won’t jerk you around like I did before, and I won’t abandon you. I will call you and you can come and get your Christmas present.” It was an interesting choice of words, admitting his responsibility for her distress and implying that their relationship would continue.

  Monica left the White House and, in a haze of mixed emotions, flew to New York to spend the rest of the weekend with her mother. Though still raw about what she felt was the President’s deception over her job, she was intuitively aware that here was a man, who, if he would but admit it to himself, was her soul mate. As she wrote in one of her musings on the relationship at this time: “For the life of me I can’t understand how you could be so kind and so cruel to me. When I think of all the times you filled my heart and soul with sunshine, and then think of all the times you made me cry for hours and want to die, I feel nauseous.”

  Later that afternoon, President Clinton learned from his lawyers that Monica’s name was on the list of possible witnesses supplied by attorneys acting for Paula Jones in her long-running sexual harassment case against him. It remains a mystery why it took him nearly two weeks to tell her.

  Innocently unaware of these developments, a couple of days later Monica sent him a funny card on which was printed: “Nothing would make me happier than seeing you again, except to see you naked with a lottery ticket in one hand and a can of whipped cream in the other.” Inside, she added a note saying that she felt bad about their fight and that she wanted to be a source of pleasure rather than pain for him. She also pinpointed the cause of their conflicts—the miscommunication between herself, Betty Currie and the President. Then, as she says, “I threw my two cents in about something that was none of my business—the Paula Jones case.”

  Concerned as ever to protect her man, Monica suggested that, besides his attorney, Bob Bennett, the President should hire a female lawyer to ridicule Jones’s arguments and evidence. She felt a woman’s touch would play better than a man’s with the American public. Little did she realize that all too soon she herself would be cast, albeit unwillingly, in a central role in this unfolding saga. Her personal emotional drama was about to reach a wide audience, wider even than that same American public.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Enter Kenneth Starr

  WITH A LIGHTED CIGARETTE in her hand and tears brimming in her eyes, Linda Tripp stood with Monica in a back alley outside the Pentagon, braving the early December chill. As she puffed nervously on her Marlboro Light, she uttered the contrite words Monica had longed for weeks to hear: “I’m sorry.” “Oh, I’m such a shitty friend,” she wailed. “I’m such an awful person that I did that to you. I think of how mean I was. I’m so sorry—I’ll never do it again.” This meeting, on Monday, December 8, was the first time they had spoken since their late-night quarrel on November 21.

  One of the most attractive things about Monica is that she is never mean-spirited. Despite that quarrel, before she had left for the Pentagon mission to Europe, she placed Tripp’s birthday present on her chair at work. Inside the carefully wrapped package was an antique bookmark inscribed, ironically, with a sentimental Victorian poem about the virtues of friendship. The contrast between Tripp’s “mean” behavior and Monica’s generosity is notable.

  Monica was due to leave the Pentagon shortly, and there were several matters, besides her personal life, that she wished to resolve before her departure. She was particularly anxious, and with good reason, that her search for a job should not end up in the usual Glinton black hole. During her meeting with the President the previous weekend, he had told her that Vernon Jordan was working on a job for her—a new player, but the same old, old story.

  Just to make sure he did not forget her, Monica sent Jordan a baseball cap, a box of chocolates, a short note and a copy of her resume, as a friendly reminder. It seemed to do the trick. On December II, she met him at his office, where, over a working lunch of turkey sandwiches and Diet Coke, they discussed her job options. Jordan gave her contact names at three companies—MacAndrews & Forbes (the parent company of Revlon), Young & Rubicam and American Express—that he wanted her to write to, and promised to phone several other business contacts. They discussed the structure of the letter she should write and he asked her to send him a copy.

  They talked, too, about their mutual friend—and the reason why Jordan was seeing her in the first place—the President of the United States. Monica said that she saw Bill Clinton more as a man than as a president, and that she treated him like a regular guy and got angry with him if he didn’t call or see her enough. For once the urbane Mr. Jordan was taken aback: “Monica, you can’t go yelling at the President when he’s dealing with Tony Blair [the British Prime Minister] on issues of Iraq. He can’t hang up the phone and then have you yelling at him. From now on, when you’re mad at him I want you to call me and yell at me, and I’ll deal with it.” Then he teased her about her behavior, telling her, “Don’t deny it: your problem is that you are in love.” Monica blushed but said nothing, assuming that Jordan knew more about her relationship than he was saying.

  They went on to talk about his friendship with Peter Straus, Jordan even trying to call him there and then to report on Monica’s progress. Certainly, after this meeting the wheels rolled, for Jordan called all three of the contacts whose names he had given her. Before long, Monica had lined up interviews for the week before Christmas with New York-based companies, among them American Express and MacAndrews & Forbes.

  Yet even as she tried to escape to a new life in New York, the city that had broken her heart was about to crush her spirit. Soon after her meeting with Jordan, she discovered that Linda Tripp had been subpoenaed in the Paula Jones case—in fact, the subpoena had been served on November 24, Tripp’s birthday. Although she had discussed the possibility constantly that year, Tripp did not mention the subpoena during their kiss-and-make-up conversation in December; a sign of how much she was keeping from her friend. In fact Monica discovered it more than
two weeks after it had been served.

  Tripp had always said that she would never tell anybody about Monica’s affair with the President, so at first Monica did not worry about that. Instead, her instinctive reaction was concern that Tripp might lose her job if she had to testify. At first, her fears seemed groundless. Tripp told Monica that she was seeing her attorney, Kirbe Behre, who advised her that she could take the Fifth Amendment—that is, decline to say anything in the matter. She even left a message on Monica’s answering machine saying, “I talked to Kirbe and don’t worry, everything’s OK.”

  The reunited friends went to the concourse at the Pentagon later that week to buy a Christmas present for Behre. As they shopped, Tripp dropped her first bombshell. She told Monica that she had written down the details of her relationship with the President, placed them in a sealed envelope and given them to her attorney to be opened in the event of her death. Monica was horrified. “That was one of the most startling things that had ever come out of her mouth,” she recalls. “That really frightened me, and I began to see that this woman was really, really dangerous.”

  Tripp’s second missile soon followed. “You know,” she told Monica, “if they ask about you, I’m going to have to tell.” Stunned and now very scared, Monica reminded her that she had always promised to keep her friend’s trust, even to protect her. Monica added that she thought it was “ludicrous” that anyone would even ask about her. Tripp stood firm, though, and said that if she was asked whether she knew of anyone else who had a relationship with the President, she would have to give that person’s name. The reason, she said, was that if she denied, or failed to declare, that she knew of such a person, and Paula Jones’s lawyers had independent proof that in fact she did know, she might be charged with perjury and could even face jail.

  All this was worrying enough for Monica, but worse was to follow. At around 2.30 A.M. on December 17, she was awakened by the phone. Fumbling for the handset, she heard a familiar voice, her “Handsome.” Although used to him calling at strange hours, this time she was startled, for she followed Hillary Clinton’s daily movements on the news, and knew that the First Lady was in Washington; the President rarely called when she was around. This must be important; and he sounded concerned and upset.

  Without preamble he announced, “I have two things to tell you. Betty’s brother has been killed in a car accident.” Shocked by this awful news—Mrs. Currie had already lost her sister that year, and her mother was then in the hospital—Monica burst into tears. They talked about Betty for a while, and the President suggested that Monica call her in the morning. Then he unveiled the second piece of bad news. “I saw the witness list today for the Paula Jones case and your name is on it. It broke my heart when I saw your name on the list.” The President had originally learned that Monica’s name was on the list almost two weeks earlier, on December 6, when it had been faxed to his lawyers but, inexplicably, did not tell Monica.

  Although someone whose name is on a witness list is not automatically subpoenaed, Monica was seriously alarmed. But the President played down the risks, saying it was unlikely she would be subpoenaed. Monica asked what she should do if she was subpoenaed, and he told her she could maybe sign an affidavit to avoid testifying. In the unlikely event that she were subpoenaed, he said, she should contact Betty.

  Ever ready with a suggestion, even though she knew nothing about the legal technicalities, and very little about the political implications, Monica told him she had read that as Paula Jones had reduced her claim to $500,000 he should end the case by making a statement that he was tired of spending the energy on the case and that it was taking a toll on his family. (In the event, although he admitted no guilt, he settled with Jones in January 1999, paying her $850,000)

  At the end of their forty-minute conversation he said that if she wanted to come for her Christmas gift, he could arrange for Betty to come into the White House. However, Monica turned down the date with a mild reprimand: “Don’t you dare bother Betty this weekend when she is grieving.”

  Feeling physically sick, Monica burst into tears the moment she hung up. “The President is not very good at giving bad news,” she says. “It was straight from the shoulder and I was really freaked out. I was scared, I was nervous—I didn’t know then, but this was the start of my waking nightmare.”

  Unable to get back to sleep, she badly needed to talk to someone. For once she hesitated before calling Linda Tripp, but in the end decided that, as they were both in the same boat, they should talk the problem over. So a tearful Monica phoned Tripp in the early hours of December 17 and told her that she too was on the witness list in the case of Jones v. Clinton.

  Monica passed what was left of the night in restless anxiety. In the morning she went over to Betty Currie’s house to offer her condolences. She spent a few hours there, comforting Betty, and helping with the arrangements for her brother’s funeral. But, even as she tried to help, Monica could not help thinking of the latest turn of events, which weighed very heavily upon her. She simply couldn’t understand how her name could have been obtained by Paula Jones’s lawyers, and strongly suspected that her phone might have been tapped or her apartment bugged.

  On the following day, December 18, she had two job interviews in New York. Before she flew out on the evening of the 17th, she rang her mother and begged her to meet her at the airport. She wanted to discuss the awful last twenty-four hours, but feared her mother’s apartment might also have been bugged, and so decided that the only safe place for a confidential conversation was in Marcia’s car. In the event, Marcia collected her in a taxi, and since neither of them knew or understood the legal jargon, Monica spoke in general terms about the fact that she might be called as a witness in the Jones case. Privately, she was deeply concerned about Linda Tripp’s about-face, and her own growing suspicions about the latter’s behavior.

  The first of the interviews was with MacAndrews & Forbes, the second with Burson-Marsteller, a public relations company. She did especially well at the latter, and was invited to take a formal written test a few days later. Even this encouraging start could not make her happy, however. In the taxi on the way to the airport to return to Washington, she burst into tears. It truly hit home that her dream of working at the White House was over. She had lived with the idea for so long, had had her hopes of a return raised and then dashed, and had accepted at face value Tripp’s claim that she had been blacklisted; but always, however deeply buried, a small ray of hope had persisted. Now, seeing another office in another city, and being considered for a post involving a wholly new line of work, that hope had finally been extinguished. “I realized then that no office atmosphere would ever compare to the White House,” she says. “It was very painful to come to terms with that bitter disappointment.”

  If the President’s early-morning call to Monica had been a bad dream, the true nightmare began two days later at 3.30 P.M. on December 19, 1997, when she received the message she had been dreading. The phone rang. “Monica Lewinsky?” said the voice on the other end. “I have a subpoena to deliver to you in the Jones versus Clinton case.” She put on a show of surprise and indignation, but that did not delay the moment of truth.

  She picked up the subpoena from the process-server at the Metro entrance of the Pentagon and walked away in a daze, tucking the papers into her bag. “I was just tense and hyperventilating and freaking out,” she recalls. “I just burst into tears—I didn’t know what to do.” She had no way of contacting the President except through Betty Currie, whom she could not bother while she was mourning her brother Teddy. In desperation she went to a pay phone and called Vernon Jordan.

  She sobbed so much over the phone, however, that in the end an exasperated Jordan, complaining that he couldn’t understand a word she said, told her to come to his office at five that afternoon. Monica calmed herself down, washed her face and returned to the office, where she told her boss, Ken Bacon, that she had to leave early because of an emergency. He was so concer
ned at her demeanor that he told his wife, Darcy, who called her later to check that she was all right.

  To make matters worse, when she arrived at Vernon Jordan’s office he was brusque and unsympathetic. He said he thought the subpoena was not much of a problem, as it seemed to be a fairly standard document. Even so, they agreed that she needed a lawyer, and Jordan called Frank Carter, a top Washington attorney, and made her an appointment with him. Monica told Jordan that what made her really nervous about the subpoena was that it specifically mentioned the President’s gift to her of a hat pin, something only a few people knew about.

  At that point Monica had no idea what Jordan knew about the true nature of her relationship with the President. Every time she had spoken to Linda Tripp about the attorney, Tripp had blithely stated that he knew what had happened. Yet during their conversations he had given Monica no real clue that he did. So when, during their meeting, he asked her bluntly, “There are only two important questions. Did you have sex with the President? Or did he ask for it?” she gave him the “vanilla” answers. “No,” she said, believing that if Jordan in fact did know about the relationship he was testing her to see how she would stand up as a witness.

  Since Jordan was seeing the President that evening, Monica emphasized that the lawyer should tell him about the subpoena, as Clinton had asked, adding, “Will you give him a hug for me?” He replied, “I don’t hug guys,” then patted her on the backside in a gesture that meant “Get out of here, kiddo.”