My heartfelt thanks to them as well as to Barbara Lewinsky, Peter Straus, Michael Lewinsky and Debra Finerman; all their memories of a young woman they love and know so well have greatly enriched the text.
Just as her family have sustained Monica during her ordeal, so too her friends have been a source of comfort and support. Catherine Allday Davis, Neysa DeMann Erbland, Linda Estergard, Carly Henderson, Leonore Reese, Nancy Krasne and Dale Young all spoke openly and affectionately about Monica, her many virtues and her imperfections. My appreciation too, to the Lewinsky legal team, Jake Stein, Plato Cacheris, Sydney Hoffmann, Preston Burton and, of course, Billy Martin, for their insights.
As ever, thanks to my publisher Michael O’Mara who was with me from the moment I started this journey to the end, as well as the publishing team, Jacquie Wines, Toby Buchan, Emma Haynes, Martin Bristow, Helen Simpson and Hope Dellon, who worked tirelessly to finish the book against tight deadlines.
Finally, thanks to my wife Lynne and daughters Alexandra and Lydia who kept their cool while I was losing mine.
ANDREW MORTON
London,
February 1999
POSTSCRIPT
“Sometimes I Miss Him So Much”
I THOUGHT I had written the last chapter of this book. Then, on Friday, January 22, 1999, I received an anxious, middle-of-the-night phone call from Monica Lewinsky. She was frightened, more frightened than I have ever heard her sound, her soft girlish voice filled with fear.
She told me that Kenneth Starr had obtained a court order forcing her to fly from Los Angeles to Washington, there to be interviewed by the House Republican managers prosecuting the case for impeachment against the President in the Senate. If she failed to do his bidding, she could end up in jail.
Over the last few months I have become used to reading the varying inflections in her voice; the barely controlled anger when she speaks of Linda Tripp, the sentimental tone she uses when she talks about the President, and the flinch of fear that infects her speech when she refers to Starr and the Office of the Independent Counsel. The nearest comparison to the relationship between Starr and Lewinsky is the reaction of an abused child in the presence of the abuser, or that of a badly-beaten animal to its bullying owner.
“All of a sudden this whole impeachment thing is back on my shoulders,” she said, “I am anxious that Starr thinks I’m going to turn this around for him, which I don’t want to do and can’t do. It’s not my fault that there’s not really a case here. So I’m nervous about what he will do to me if he doesn’t get what he wants.”
Ever since the Senate trial had begun in early January, Monica had taken only a passing interest in the day-to-day events, preferring to ignore the arguments in the Chamber as a way of keeping up her own spirits. When we had discussed the possibility of her being called as a witness it had been in the context of her being examined along with Betty Currie, Vernon Jordan and several others. Now she had been ordered to go on her own.
The move was seen by the Democrats as the last throw of the dice by House Republican prosecutors, who had consistently demanded that witnesses be called to testify before the Senate—a move which the White House legal team bitterly opposed. All that week the prosecutors had seen their arguments for impeachment dissected and diminished with forensic skill and precision by the White House lawyers, of whom Cheryl Mills, a young attorney, perfectly complemented the leader of Clinton’s legal team, the seasoned Charles Ruff.
In desperation, the prosecution used Starr to ask a Federal judge, Norma Holloway Johnson, to grant an emergency order forcing Monica to cooperate with them, although the phrase employed was that she was to “allow herself to be debriefed.” The decision caused an uproar, Democrats and the White House attorneys attacking the way the House Republican prosecutors had singled out Monica because she was legally beholden to Ken Starr by virtue of her immunity deal with the OIC. Other potential witnesses who had no need of immunity, like Jordan, had refused to become involved with the trial unless or until the Senate itself voted to call witnesses.
Essentially, the House Republican prosecutors, fearing that they were losing the argument to call witnesses, used Starr to strongarm Monica Lewinsky by threatening her with jail if she failed to comply. Yet on the floor of the Senate they spoke in beguilingly genial terms about having a friendly chat with the former intern, simply so that she could get to know them and they could find out what she had to say.
The reality was very different, however. Not only was Monica obliged to cooperate, but under the same order her family and friends were banned from speaking out in her behalf. As her attorney Plato Cacheris said, “This was the low point for us. She should not have been required to go through this yet again. While Monica did a very good job, it was burdensome and traumatic for her.” Monica’s father, Dr. Lewinsky, became so distressed at the news that his blood pressure, for which he already needs medication in order to keep it stable, rose to such dangerous levels that he almost had to go to the hospital for attention. “I am finding it very hard to get my anger under control,” he said. “This latest episode will prove to the whole world that Monica is nothing more than a pawn in a vicious political struggle. It is scary how much power Starr now has in this country.”
For Monica herself, all the fear and agony of the last year—emotions that had been gradually subsiding—came flooding back; her deep terror and suspicion of Starr, her guilt about betraying the President, and her dread that she was being watched and bugged by the FBI. As an extra irony, at the time her father was attending the same annual conference on cancer as he had been when he first heard about the sting operation against Monica.
Having been told by her attorney, Plato Cacheris, that she was obliged to follow Starr’s orders, Monica found it difficult to sleep that night, so consumed was she by anger and fear. Her father got up at four the following morning to take her to Los Angeles airport to catch the seven o’clock United Airlines flight to Washington. As they tearfully hugged, he told her to be strong for the ordeal that lay ahead. To add insult to injury, while Starr’s office had booked her flight, they had not paid for it, leaving Monica to pick up the tab for the ticket.
There were scenes of mayhem at the airport in Washington and later at the hotel, as security men hustled Monica, who was wearing a baseball cap advertising the independent film company, The Shooting Gallery, where her friend Jonathan Marshall works, through the media throng to the safety of her room. She wrestled her way past the cameras to find that her mother, Peter and Aunt Debra and Uncle Bill had all arrived to support her. Marcia was especially proud of the way her daughter handled herself amidst the frantic media attention and under Starr’s pressure, remarking, “She was a Daniel thrown into the lions’ den and she came out strong and truthful.” One benefit of the media attention was that her baseball hat became a hot fashion item, Marshall’s company ordering thousands more to cope with the demand, giving a portion of the profits to charity.
Once in the $200-a-night hotel, Monica immediately changed her room, assuming it had been bugged, and from then on conducted all sensitive conversations with the shower in the bathroom running. Almost the only light moment came when she read an article in a tabloid, The National Enquirer, which stated that she was pregnant; among the potential fathers the magazine listed was her female fitness instructor Kacy Duke. “I’ve got bad news for you, Andrew,” she joked to me when I called her. “You’re not on the list.”
She was nervous about meeting the House Republican managers, and more so about seeing Starr’s deputies again, resolving that she would stick to her sworn testimony. After all, more than two thousand pages comprising her testimony and the transcripts of the Linda Tripp tapes had been published in the Starr Report, and the House Republican prosecutors themselves had commended her for her fine mind and her capacity for remembering details. Why then, if they believed she had such a remarkable memory, did they need to see her in the first place?
In the blaze of TV lights
three House Republican prosecutors, Asa Hutchinson, Bill McCollum and Ed Bryant, as well as Starr’s deputies, including Mike Emmick, arrived at the Mayflower Hotel to meet Monica and her legal advisors, Plato Cacheris, Preston Burton and Sydney Hoffmann. In the event, she was pleasantly surprised. She had expected them to be aggressive and confrontational; instead the meeting was cordial and friendly, everyone sipping coffee in casual conversation. She even joked to Emmick, once her tormentor-in-chief, “We should stop meeting in hotel rooms like this.”
Not every outcome of the meeting, which lasted an hour and three-quarters, was so funny, however. While the House managers went away suitably impressed by her poised and intelligent demeanor, Monica was distinctly underwhelmed. Not only had she been forced to run the media gauntlet yet again, but her weekend in Washington had cost her around $15,000 in legal fees, quite apart from what she had spent in upgrading her air ticket and on hotel and security expenses.
So Monica, a woman of modest means, was being forced to fund the Republicans’ case against the man she had once loved, at a cost of about two hundred dollars for every question they put to her. Nor was it as though they had asked anything incisive, or followed any new and unexplored line of questioning. Instead, among other incidentals, they quizzed her about when she had started as an intern, and went over the same ground about the President’s gifts, wanting to know just whose call to whom had led to Betty Currie coming to Monica’s Watergate apartment to collect the boxed-up presents. She had, too, answered all their other specific questions before, either during her Grand Jury testimony or in her FBI statements, leading her attorney, Plato Cacheris, to say afterwards that she had “added nothing to the record that is already sitting before the Senate.”
Nor were her responses to a series of hypothetical questions particularly encouraging for the Republican cause; for example, she did not, she said, know how she would react if President Clinton were sitting in the Senate if she was called as a witness. When they asked her how, in her opinion, the trial should be concluded, her answer reflected the views of more than 70 per cent of Americans. She told them that she thought Clinton was an “incredible” President who should not be removed from office, arguing that his behavior could not be construed as “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
For the next couple of days Monica remained in her hotel room, spending long hours knitting and watching the trial of the President on television. The fact that the media continued to mill around in the lobby was an all too painful reminder of the months she had spent as a virtual prisoner when the scandal first broke; “It makes me feel very scared and agitated,” she admitted, before turning her thoughts to one of the constant themes of her life, commenting, only half in jest, “How am I going to find a boyfriend with all this going on?”
Briefly reprieved from Starr’s attentions, she was allowed to return to Los Angeles, only to learn that she was required to testify to the Senate yet again, via video cameras, on Monday, February 1. Before her ordeal she did manage a night out with Jonathan Marshall and his friends when she flew back to LA later in the week. There she was a guest at a dinner party—which included British actor Julian Sands, star of the Merchant-Ivory movie A Room With A View—and was pleased, if disconcerted, when the assembled throng raised a glass to wish her well in the trial that lay ahead.
Once again, at 4.30 in the morning on Saturday, January 30, her father, feeling rather helpless that he was unable to protect his daughter, took her to the airport to catch the early-morning flight to Washington. It seemed that the bonhomie of the night before when Jonathan’s friends had wished her well signified a sea change in the national mood towards Monica. At long last people were realizing that she was the victim in this political fight, a young woman who had shown remarkable reserves of strength in her battle with Starr and her degradation by the media.
The flight steward handed her a touching note, telling her how his own teenage daughters had learned lessons from Monica’s story. “You could be like Princess Diana and do good in the world,” he told her. A woman passenger gave her another good luck message while fellow travelers wished her well and hoped that her ordeal would be over soon.
Even when she arrived at the Mayflower Hotel and ran the media gauntlet she emerged into the lobby to find guests lining up and applauding her. “I was embarrassed, but flattered,” she remarked. For a girl who likens her life to a movie, the last reel was hinting at, if not a happy ending, at least a new beginning.
The final showdown came on Monday, February 1, or MON day as several TV shows called it. She was due to meet the House prosecutors, the White House legal team and a Senator from each party and spend the day going over her affair with the President.
There had been endless speculation in the media about what she would say and whether she would provide the ‘smoking gun’ that would spell High Noon for President Clintons. In reality she intended to stay as closely as possible to the testimony she gave under oath, principally to the Grand Jury. She spent the day before reading through her testimony, going back over events she has spoken about twenty-two times in either FBI depositions or sworn statements. As she said: “Nothing puts you to sleep faster than reading your own testimony.”
While her legal team took her through some of the key events that she was bound to be quizzed on—the affidavit, the gifts and job search—Monica was so nervous the night before that she couldn’t eat dinner which, as she jokes, is a sign of just how scared she was. She barely slept, waking at seven in the morning and dressing with care, wearing a formal navy blue blazer, navy skirt and pearls.
Her father had suggested that she eat protein for breakfast so she sat down with her legal team and tucked into a mozzarella cheese and mushroom omelette. Then at 9.00 sharp, they took the elevator to the tenth floor of the hotel where, appropriately, the Presidential suite had been prepared for the deposition.
Monica sat at one end of a starched-white-clothed mahogany table, the video camera crew facing her. On her left were her inquisitors for the day, Republican Congressmen Ed Bryant and Jim Rogan, on her right the White House team, David Kendall, Nicole Seligman and Cheryl Mills, the young lawyer much admired by Monica for the way she argued Clinton’s case. The two Senate referees were Republican Mike DeWine and Democrat Patrick Leahy—during one of the breaks Monica told Leahy that she hoped his planned legislation to give parent-child privilege, like attorney-client privilege, would one day be approved so that no family would have to undergo the torment that Starr had put her mother through.
Outside the hotel was Monica’s fan club, including a man from Cincinnati who called himself the “Naked Cowboy,” striding up and down Connecticut Avenue in nothing but a pair of briefs, cowboy boots and hat, playing his guitar.
While the mood ouside was jovial, inside, Monica’s three-hour-and-twenty-minute questioning was rather more serious, the former intern very much aware that her every utterance could have deadly consequences for the President. “I was so nervous, I had knots in my stomach,” she told me later.
Monica had warned the House Republican prosecutors the previous week that she could parse a sentence as well as the President and she was as good as her word, considering every utterance before she replied. “I had to pay much more attention to my answers than in the Grand Jury,” she says. “I felt that the whole world was watching.”
On occasion Bryant became peeved with her answers, rather testy when she stuck to her Grand Jury testimony about the disposal of the gifts from the President. Nor was she simply accepting of everything thrown at her. When Bryant characterized the first sexual encounter between the President and Monica in November 1995 as ‘salacious’ she determinedly pointed out that she didn’t see it that way.
As her lawyers predicted, the majority of the questioning concerned the job search, the gifts and the affidavit, Monica sticking pretty much to the sentiments in her Grand Jury testimony. “I think I gave them more of a flavor of the human dimension of the relationship,” she says. �
��People will see that the President hurt me but that he wasn’t committing a crime, he was committing adultery.”
Her attorney Plato Cacheris, who sat with her during her deposition, described her testimony as a textbook example of how to behave as a witness. He said: “It was a difficult and stressful situation and she came across as articulate, poised and intelligent, yet vulnerable.” Most people who saw her evidence televised on February 5 agreed with his verdict.
The questioning, which ended in the mid-afternoon, was not entirely sober, Monica’s comments occasionally lightening the atmosphere. She says: “You know me, I can’t be serious for too long.” As the questioning began she was assured that her body mike would pick up her every remark. “Oh, the Linda, Tripp version,” she quipped. When she was asked if she considered the President to be an intelligent man she replied that she thought him an intelligent President, a response which earned guffaws from the assembled politicians. Her growing assurance was shown when prosecutor Bryant retracted a question he was asking her. “See, I’m making my own objections,” he said. “Sustained,” joked Monica, to much laughter.
After Bryant finished quizzing her, the White House legal team indicated that they had no questions for Monica, Nicole Seligman reading out a short statement that went straight to her heart. “On behalf of the President we want to let you know that he is very, very sorry for what happened.”
When she told me about the proceedings, for the first time in all our months of interviews, Monica wept openly as she spoke of her “mixed feelings” for him. “It was so hard, it was an emotional day and with his statement I was hit by the fact that I don’t have him in my life anymore. I felt his spirit was with me and it’s hard to know that it’s all gone.
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