He had come a long way from the dark days of January, when he had told senior aides that Monica was hardly more than an infatuated stalker whose claims to have had a relationship with him had little basis in reality. Understandably, Monica considered his tardy apology “a day late, and a dollar short,” although “I was pleased he did acknowledge the anguish felt by myself and my family.”
That he did indeed understand something of what they had been through became clear when his video testimony to the Grand Jury was released on September 21. Watching it, Monica was surprised and even “shocked” by the extent of his support for her. “I was shocked because for once it was not just the politician talking. There were glimpses of the Bill Clinton I had always known. It was a refreshing change.” In that testimony, she believes, he was speaking as a man, not a president, when he criticized the way Starr’s prosecutors had treated her: as if she were a “serious felon.” He accused Linda Tripp of “stabbing her in the back,” and added that “it broke my heart” that she had become involved in the Paula Jones case, which he described as a bogus lawsuit funded by his political enemies.
As a politician, however, he was far more circumspect in acknowledging both the sexual and romantic dimensions of his relationship with Monica. He did not, he said, attach any significance to the ties she had given him, and, though he admitted to “inappropriate intimate conduct and sexual banter” with her, he refuted the notion that his behavior had constituted sexual relations as he understood the term. It was this contention, parsing sentences and wriggling around definitions of the words “is” and “alone,” which left most people incredulous. It also gave comedians a field day.
The President’s support for her, and his contrition, were balm for Monica’s soul, but nothing and no one could heal the emotional wound gouged in her by the Starr Report. Monica was in New York with her mother when the text became available on the Internet. When she saw it, she voiced her alarm, commenting on passages as she surfed the document. Her mother asked her to read out loud what Starr had said, but Monica was too embarrassed. “The whole world is reading about my daughter,” Marcia remarked in amazement, “and yet you can’t tell your mother?”
Monica’s embarrassment is wholly understandable. The report makes vile reading, both because of the extent of sexual detail, including the incident with the cigar, and because of its use of even the most deeply personal and private material. Her unsent letters to “Handsome,” which Karin Immergut had indicated might be omitted, were printed in all their sentimental, self-indulgent glory. Furthermore, although she did not know it then, her “sex” deposition, another supposedly confidential interview, was to be published in full a few weeks later.
Then, too, the report contained a number of errors. Monica had pointed them out but, because of the haste with which it had been written and hustled into Congress, they were never corrected. For instance, her friend Catherine called her in puzzlement, wondering why she had never said that she had been on medication since 1995, as the Starr Report stated. Monica explained that this was a typing error; she had only started medication after the scandal erupted in January 1998. Such errors may seem trivial, but in fact they were sometimes extremely important: some Democratic politicians later argued, wholly erroneously, that Monica’s testimony differed from the President’s because she had been on anti-depression drugs for three years. In Vanity Fair journalist Renata Adler publicly expressed contempt for the Independent Counsel’s magnum opus: “The six-volume report by Kenneth W. Starr . . is in many ways an utterly preposterous document: inaccurate, mindless, biased, disorganized, unprofessional and corrupt.”
During his investigation, Kenneth Starr had not once met Monica Lewinsky, and yet she felt that he had defiled and molested her—not physically, but by using his legal and constitutional power to strip away every last vestige of her dignity and her humanity. “As a result of his report I felt very violated. I really felt raped and physically ill with myself, as if anybody who looked at me would only think about me performing oral sex. I just felt that the world looked at me as a whore.
“It was very painful and humiliating. It confirmed to me even more that no one cared for me as a person, no one saw me as a human being. I was just a pawn used to get the President.”
She was virtually inconsolable in the first few days after the report’s publication on the Internet. Her mother and stepfather, anxious to help, took her to dinner in New York with Rabbi Mark Gollub, who spent a few minutes talking with her privately, offering her spiritual counseling. She needed a great deal of help and guidance during the next few weeks, especially as it seemed that Congress was intent on releasing not only the transcripts of Linda Tripp tapes, but also the audio version. Ever since she had heard the recordings of herself sobbing and swearing over the phone, this was what she had dreaded most.
Monica wanted to make a statement before the tapes were released, publicly apologizing to her family, to the President, to Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, and to the American people for the trouble she had caused—at least then people would be able to hear her voice when she was in control of what she was saying. But the plan was dropped because the Office of the Independent Counsel wanted to approve her words.
Surprisingly, the tapes were not released by the House Judiciary Committee until after the November 3 elections to Congress and the Senate. It had been widely expected that the voting would reflect the scandal’s adverse effect on the Democratic Party—in September, Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, although a Clinton supporter, had earned a standing ovation in the Senate when he attacked the President’s behavior as “disgraceful and immoral.” In fact the elections resulted in a remarkable reversal for the Republicans and the subsequent resignation of the flamboyant Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich; a fierce long-term opponent of Clinton, Gingrich was also a member of the House Judiciary Committee.
Knowing that the tapes were about to be made public, and distraught at the knowledge of how much hurt they would cause, Monica had intended to take a sleeping pill and spend the day in bed. In the event, her friend Neysa came to her emotional rescue, treating her to a day out in order to take her mind off the inevitable publicity.
As she had feared, the very people about whom Monica cared the most about were those most deeply hurt, not just by Starr’s report, but also by Tripp’s tapes. One of the saddest results was that the divisions between father and daughter, which had seemed healed, were reopened. Bernie had vowed never again to read or listen to anything about his daughter, but whenever he turned on the TV or radio he could not help hearing more distressing details. Especially painful for him was the recording of a conversation during which Monica had told Tripp about learning to lie to her father when she was growing up. “She said things about the family,” he says, “that I hope I will never hear in full. What bits I have heard have shocked me, and I am still very distraught at some of the things that she said.”
Marcia is less judgmental, for she had been so worn down by the constant carping criticism of Monica and her family that there was little on the tapes that could upset her. “I know Monica and I know how much she loves her family. The kinds of things that hurt very deeply six months ago now have less effect because I have given up expecting humanity from anyone. The lack of privacy has been so total and so violating that today there is nothing that anyone could say or reveal about our family that would shock me.”
One passage on the tapes, in which when she heard Monica crying, she did find distressing, however, because it reminded her of those awful days in the fall of 1997 when her daughter’s world was falling apart. “It is,” she acknowledges, “something that few people know or care about. I know, her friends and family know, how much pain she suffered. This whole episode in her life caused her so much torment, some intentionally inflicted by others, some of it self-inflicted in that she invested so much into something she should not have done.”
The passing of the days did little to dim M
onica’s guilt and anguish. Sometimes she was caught unprepared, and then the pain burned afresh. Over breakfast one morning, she heard popular psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers, who was talking about the Starr Report on the Today TV show, ask the viewers, “Can you imagine a young man bringing home Monica Lewinsky to his parents and saying, ‘I’m going to marry Monica Lewinsky’?” This scathing comment was too much for Monica. She collapsed into hysterical sobs, inconsolable.
Over the last year her privacy, her sexuality, her mind and her soul had been explored and exploited by Kenneth Starr, by the White House, and by the mass media. Listening to Dr. Brothers, she realized with neardespair that even her future had been taken away from her.
CONCLUSION
Girl on a Swing
AS I WRITE, it is just over a year since Monica Lewinsky last met with the President, and yet he still haunts her nights and her waking hours. Indeed, he appears frequently in her dreams, ever present yet always elusive. “I wake up some mornings and I have an instant moment where I miss him with every ounce of my being, my head, heart and body,” she says. “I miss the way he used to hold me, so much.”
He generates a kaleidoscope of emotions ranging from tenderness and longing, to remorse, guilt and anger. “There was a moment recently,” she admits, “when I closed my eyes real tight and imagined myself back in my little office in the East Wing of the White House. The phone rang I held my breath and sure enough, it was that voice, a voice so familiar to many but private to me, a voice suffused with longing, sadness and hunger.
“It was so strange. My heart was beating loudly and I felt like I was really there. Sometimes I miss the joy that I felt as I walked towards the Oval Office after I got ‘the call.’ My pulse would race and my face would be flushed; I got excited just thinking about his smell, his touch and the warmth of his body when he was close to mine. I couldn’t wait for that first moment of a delicious kiss from my ‘Handsome.’
“I cannot believe that my relationship with the President is over. The soft touches and strong hugs are gone for ever. I still miss the adoring look in his eye, and that broad grin that always greeted me.”
Yet her sentimental musings upon Clinton the man easily give way to anger against the President who jabbed his finger and told the world that he had never had sexual relations with “that woman.” This is Monica’s paradox, an inner battle that leads her to say, “While there are some days when I miss his presence there are others when I never want to see him again, times when I have to turn off the TV because I feel sick looking at him.” Yet however torn she may be emotionally, these days Monica sees Clinton far more as a politician than as a man, a politician, moreover, who lied to her and the nation. She says: “I always knew he wasn’t a very truthful person but the events of the last year have shown him to be a much bigger liar than I ever thought. Now I see him as a selfish man who lies all the time. That makes me very angry and resentful.”
This sense of outrage is, understandably, shared by her family and close friends. Thus one of the rare sources of dispute between Monica and Catherine Allday Davis is the fact that while Bill Clinton was Monica’s boyfriend, he was also her President. Catherine is unforgiving, declaring: “He’s my President, twice her age with a daughter almost the same age, and I cannot excuse his behavior.”
Throughout the scandal, Monica’s father resolutely refused to criticize the President, stonewalling TV-show hosts Barbara Walters, Larry King, and Katie Couric when he appeared on their programs. Since the publication of the Starr Report and the release of the Tripp tapes, however, he has hardened his heart. Today he states unequivocally: “I hate his guts for what he did. I find it difficult to call the President of the United States a louse, but that is what he is. I’m very angry about what he did to my daughter, who is just few years older than Chelsea. I don’t think he would enjoy anybody doing that to his daughter. His cover up was cowardly, not having the guts to take responsibility for what he did.”
Just as Monica is deeply angered by the way the President abandoned her in her hour of need, so she feels a profound loathing for Linda Tripp, and her cohorts, the people who betrayed her and the President. “I have a lot of anger to go round,” she says ruefully, her ruefulness an acknowledgment that until she puts those feelings aside she will never move on as a whole person. So while she considers suing Linda Tripp for illegally taping their conversations, she also knows that such a case would involve reliving the past, a past she is trying to put behind her, a past that constantly overwhelms her present, denying her the chance of a purposeful future.
Hand in hand with her sense of anger is her overwhelming feeling of guilt, shame for the trouble and anguish she has caused not only her family and friends, but the President and his family, and particularly Chelsea Clinton. She still cannot quite believe, and far less accept, that what started as an exciting, if furtive, fling three years ago has ended with the first ever impeachment of an elected President of the United States.
When, in mid-December 1998, Congress voted by a narrow partisan majority to impeach Clinton, Monica put herself on trial. “I felt really, really bad for him,” she says. “I cried so hard, I felt so wretched, I just couldn’t believe it was happening.” She blamed herself for the President’s woes, telling herself that if she had never confided in Linda Tripp, then the whole disastrous sequence of events would never have come about. Her argument is, as the lawmakers on Capitol Hill like to say, a “hypothetical,” the President himself contributing to his own downfall by dint of his testimony in the Paula Jones case and before Starr’s Grand Jury.
While an inconsolable Monica spent the day in bed, unable to bear the news, the American people reacted in bemused horror as the House of Representatives elected to impeach the President even while that official, as Commander-in-Chief, had engaged the nation’s armed forces, with those of Britain, in a major bombing operation against Iraq.
The whole partisan affair bore the hallmark of the political show trials that marked Stalin’s regime in Communist Russia; state prosecutors launching a reign of terror, pitting mother against daughter, lover against lover, relative against relative, friend against friend, in a case where the verdict was known before the evidence was heard. More charitably, other observers have compared it to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which the Queen of Hearts cries, “No, no! . . Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
By any standards, the impeachment debate was surreal, a trial that managed to be both the high-water mark of the American legal system and, arguably, the nadir of natural justice, the triumph of the system over common sense. For Congress, which voted on party lines, decided to impeach the President on the ghost-written report of a man who had not even met, let alone interviewed, the key witnesses. In turn, that report was based on testimony before a one-sided Grand Jury. Yet, as they like to point out in legal circles, a smart prosecutor could “indict a cheese sandwich” before a grand jury.
Any such reservations were cast aside, however, when Congress voted that the President should be impeached on two articles; namely, that he perjured himself before the Grand Jury, and that he obstructed the administration of justice. These “articles of impeachment” were then sent from the lower legislative chamber—that is, the House of Representatives—to the Senate, where a full trial began on January 7, 1999. The senators, all one hundred of them, were sworn in as jurors, of whom just over two thirds needed to accept the House’s case in order to remove the President from office. As the Republican Party does not have the requisite majority in the Senate, this was seen by many observers as a pointless, indeed absurd, exercise that would serve only to damage the country.
For Monica, the historic trial of President Clinton in the Senate provoked not only anxiety and guilt, but also resentment as the upper house of Congress debated whether witnesses were to be called, something for which the Republican prosecutors and Clinton’s opponents devoutly wished. Every day she waited in trepidation to see if she would b
e called as a witness, and thus to be grilled before the Senate live on prime-time television. She kept a bottle of vodka on ice to drown her sorrows if she were called, and a bottle of her favourite Veuve Clicquot champagne to celebrate if the Senate simply voted not to have witnesses called.
At the same time, she felt a deep hostility towards the way in which a private relationship had been turned into a political vendetta. “This was my love—my spirit and my body—[and it] has been turned into this vile political creation,” she laments.
It is this progression from illicit affair to full-scale impeachment proceedings that is perhaps the most striking feature of the whole saga. At root, it is a human story of love and betrayal, guilt and remorse, and yet it has been explained almost entirely in legal terms, the debate conducted by journalists, lawyers and politicians, professions defined by an adversarial rather than a conciliatory philosophy. Sentiment and romance do not figure high on their agendas.
After compelling judicial arguments by managers from the House of Representatives and the White House legal team, it was left to a member of that team, Dale Bumpers, a former Senator and Governor of Arkansas and a close friend of the Clinton family, to remind the house, and the nation, of the scale of this human tragedy.
In his ninety-minute closing address, Bumpers spoke of the five years of sleepless nights suffered by the Clintons since the start of Starr’s White-water inquiry, of the huge legal bills, and above all of the emotional fallout since the Lewinsky scandal had broken. The investigation, he said, had put a huge strain on “the relationship between husband and wife, father and child,” adding that the President’s rapport with his daughter Chelsea, had been all but destroyed. “There is a total lack of proportionality, of balance in this thing,” he concluded. “The charges and the punishment are totally out of sync.”
Monica's Story Page 38