1995
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The next morning’s New York Daily News seized on Gingrich’s peevishness in a memorably devastating caricature on its front page. The speaker was drawn as a chubby toddler in diapers, stamping his foot and howling. Above the sketch was a huge headline that declared: “CRY BABY. Newt’s Tantrum: He closed down the government because Clinton made him sit at back of plane.” The caricature was an immediate sensation. Democrats brought to the House floor a poster-size blow-up of the Daily News front page and made it their centerpiece as they ridiculed Gingrich. Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder of Colorado held up a model of an Academy Award statuette and proclaimed that the speaker had “sewn up the category of best performance by a child actor this year.”28 The spectacle on the House floor turned into a bizarre farce when the Republican majority approved a measure ordering the blown-up front page removed from the chamber.29
FIGURE 19. Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House of Representatives, committed the political gaffe of 1995 by complaining about his treatment aboard Air Force One and saying it contributed to the impasse that closed the federal government. The New York Daily News turned Gingrich’s peevish outburst into a memorable, front-page caricature. (Photo credit: New York Daily News/Getty images)
The devastating send-up helped to cast Gingrich as the obnoxious poster boy of the federal budget crisis,30 and it deepened the public’s unease about the speaker and his blustering ways. Gingrich may have been a gifted political strategist, but he was a flawed leader who often came off as arrogant, petulant, and needlessly high-handed. But resolving the government shutdown took more than a stunning faux pas, of course. After five days, Clinton and congressional Republicans agreed to balance the federal budget by 2002, provided that entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid were protected. It was shaky compromise, but it led to reopening the government.31 Gingrich once again turned to hyperbole, calling the compromise “one of the great achievements in the history of America.”32
The partial government shutdown in November was preliminary to an even longer closure that began December 15, following the collapse of negotiations about how to calculate a balanced federal budget. The second shutdown lasted twenty-one days, until January 6, 1996. By then, the tactic of closing the government to force Clinton into an agreement on the budget had thoroughly backfired on Republicans.33 Opinion polls showed that most Americans blamed them, not Clinton, for the shutdowns.34 Gingrich’s national favorability ratings dropped to 27 percent—rivaling those of President Richard Nixon at the depths of the Watergate scandal.35 While Time magazine chose Gingrich its “man of the year” for 1995, the speaker never fully recovered from the blunder of forcing the government shut down.36
The government closure of November 1995 had even greater and more stunning consequences: it made possible an otherwise impossible liaison, one that would explode twenty-six months later in an extraordinary scandal of sex and lies, a scandal that dogged the president to his last full day in office. The scandal would humble Clinton, imperil his presidency, and deepen partisan cleavages to such an extent that they have never fully closed.
The shutdown had temporarily trimmed the number of full-time employees in the White House executive office to about 90 from 430.37 Into that gap stepped a cadre of young interns who, given their unpaid status, suddenly found themselves working closely and quite unexpectedly with some of the most senior officials in the administration. Among them was Monica S. Lewinsky, who was six-and-a-half years older than Clinton’s daughter.
Lewinsky began her White House internship in July 1995, two weeks before her twenty-second birthday and two months after she graduated with a degree in psychology from Lewis and Clark College, a small liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. Until then, in writer Jeffrey Toobin’s uncharitable assessment, Lewinsky had “spent most of her brief life obsessed with her weight. . . . Before she became obsessed with the president of the United States, her only other serious interest in life was dieting.”38 To land the internship, Lewinsky tapped a family connection—that of Walter Kaye, a retired insurance magnate and a generous contributor to the Democratic Party. Kaye was a friend of Lewinsky’s mother and an acquaintance of Hillary Clinton. Kaye recommended Monica Lewinsky,39 who was hired and assigned to the correspondence section in the office of the White House chief of staff, Leon Panetta.40 The internship was to last six weeks.
Lewinsky worked out of the stately Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House. She saw the president a few times that summer, at events on the White House lawn to which interns were invited. They included a departure ceremony on August 9 at which Clinton shook hands with guests along a roped-off line. On that occasion, Lewinsky later told her biographer, Andrew Morton, the president spotted her and gave her an intense flirtatious look—or what she called “the full Bill Clinton.” Lewinsky said: “When it was time to shake my hand, the [president’s] smile disappeared, the rest of the crowd disappeared and we shared an intense sexual exchange. He undressed me with his eyes.”41
The next day, the interns were invited to a Western-themed party on the South Lawn of the White House, an occasion to mark Clinton’s forty-ninth birthday before he left on vacation in Wyoming. It was a casual and light-hearted event. Panetta and his top deputies showed up as cowboys on horseback. Vice President Al Gore arrived in a beat-up station wagon. George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s senior adviser, spent time playing in a sandbox.42 The president wore a checked shirt and jeans. He kept looking and smiling at Lewinsky, who took a place in a line of well-wishers to shake Clinton’s hand and wish him happy birthday. As she did, Lewinsky later recalled, Clinton “looked deep into my eyes and I was hooked.” As the president moved on, Morton wrote, “his arm, casually but unnecessarily, brushed against her breast.”43 As the party was wrapping up, Lewinsky blew a kiss to the president. He laughed and tossed back his head, as if catching her air-smooch on his cheek.44
Lewinsky extended her internship, but her flirtation with Clinton lacked any chance of gaining intensity or intimacy. Then came the government shutdown. The closure allowed her “more access to the West Wing than she would have had, typically, as just a run-of-the-mill intern,” McCurry noted.45 Indeed, the shutdown produced extraordinary circumstances that gave rise to intimate sexual encounters that eventually tarred Clinton with the ignominy of impeachment.
By mid-November 1995, Lewinsky had secured a full-time, paid position in the correspondence section of the White House legislative affairs office. The paperwork authorizing her hiring had not been completed before the government was shut down. Nominally, therefore, she was still an intern and eligible to keep coming to work, despite the closure. Lewinsky was assigned to Panetta’s West Wing office, answering telephone calls and running errands.46 Just down the corridor was the Oval Office.
On November 15—the day Gingrich uttered his self-destructive complaints about his treatment aboard Air Force One—Clinton and Lewinsky had their first sexual encounter.47 They had seen each other in passing that day, carrying on what Lewinsky called their “flirtation relationship.”48 At one point, as Clinton left Panetta’s inner office, Lewinsky lifted the back of her jacket, showing him the straps of her thong underwear.49 No one else noticed.50 The risqué gesture “was over in an instant,” Lewinsky’s biographer wrote, and she “was rewarded with an appreciative look” as the president walked past.51
Later that evening, as she headed to a bathroom,52 Lewinsky passed the office of George Stephanopoulos. Clinton was inside the office, alone, and beckoned her inside.53 Their conversation was stilted at first. Clinton asked her where she had gone to college. Lewinsky blurted, “I have a crush on you.”54 That was his cue, she later said, “to proceed . . . in what he wanted and what he was feeling.”55 The president led her to his private office, behind the Oval Office. Lewinsky and Clinton spoke briefly, in her recollection, and “sort of acknowledged that there had been a chemistry” between them, that they were “attracted to each other.” The president asked if he could kiss her.
Without hesitating, she consented.56 His kiss, Lewinsky told her biographer, was “soft, deep, romantic.”57
She reckoned there was little chance of developing a relationship with Clinton. The president, she suspected, had a White House girlfriend who had been furloughed during the government shutdown, and soon he would be back with her.58 But before returning to her desk, Lewinsky gave Clinton a slip of paper on which she had written her name and telephone number.59 Lewinsky was alone later that night in Panetta’s office when the president came in. He invited her to meet him down the hall in a few minutes, in Stephanopoulos’s office. She agreed. They met in the windowless hallway connecting Stephanopoulos’s office to the Oval Office. “For all that Clinton may have wanted to pursue women during his presidency,” Toobin noted, “his encounters with Lewinsky illustrated the logistical challenges. It took not only a determined partner, but one who didn’t mind awkward and degrading circumstances. Monica Lewinsky fit the bill.”60
FIGURE 20. If not for the partial shutdown of the federal government in November 1995, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky would have lacked the opportunity to pursue a dalliance at the White House. Their intermittent affair lasted until March 1997—and led to Clinton’s impeachment in December 1998. (Photo credit: Getty images)
She and the president kissed. She unbuttoned her jacket and his hands wandered, fondling her breasts and genitalia. Soon, a telephone call came for the president. He took it. While on the phone, the president kept his hand in Lewinsky’s pants. She performed oral sex on him.61 Ending the call, Clinton told her to stop. He said he needed to trust her before she brought him to a climax. The president also said, jokingly, that he “hadn’t had that in a long time.”62
The stealthy assignation at the White House that night was the upshot of happenstance, guile, and a measure of mutual desire. A canceled trip to Asia contributed to the improbable dalliance, too. Clinton had intended to travel in mid-November to Osaka, Japan, to attend a meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. Because of the government shutdown, Clinton stayed at the White House and sent Vice President Gore in his place.63 Clinton would vaguely blame inner “demons” for his extramarital affair with Lewinsky. “During the government shutdowns,” he wrote, “I was engaged in two titanic struggles: a public one with Congress over the future of our country, and a private one to hold the old demons at bay. I had won the public fight and lost the private one.”64
He and Lewinsky took pains, of course, to conceal their flirtation and to keep their meetings covert.65 Even so, others at the White House commented about what seemed to be an unlikely attraction. Barry J. Toiv, a senior adviser to Panetta, mentioned to Lewinsky that she seemed to be the recipient of a good deal of “face time” with the president.66 On November 16, a fellow intern told Lewinsky, “I think the president has a crush on you.” The comment, Lewinsky said, surprised and startled her.67
She and Clinton met next on November 17, after pizza was delivered late that night for the staff working in Panetta’s office. Toiv accidentally bumped into Lewinsky, soiling her jacket with pizza toppings. She went down the hall to the restroom to wipe away the mess. Upon emerging, she saw Clinton nearby, standing in the doorway to the office of his personal secretary, Betty Currie. “You can come out this way,” Clinton told her, and led Lewinsky through the Oval Office and into his private study. In the hallway or bathroom outside the study, they paused to chat and to kiss.68 “I bet you don’t even know my name,” Lewinsky told him. Clinton replied: “What kind of name is Lewinsky, anyway?”69
After a while, Lewinsky said she had better go back to her desk. The president suggested that she bring him some slices of pizza. She did, returning in a few minutes. Currie opened the door and said, “Sir, the girl’s here with the pizza.” Clinton told Lewinsky to come in.70 She and the president went to the area of Clinton’s private study. There they kissed, and Clinton fondled Lewinsky’s breasts. He unbuttoned his shirt and sucked in his stomach,71 a reaction that struck Lewinsky as “very real and very human.”72 “You don’t have to do that,” she told him. “I like your tummy.”73 Soon, Currie was at the door leading to the hallway, saying that the president had a telephone call. It was a congressman, and he took the call. While on the phone, Lewinsky said, the president “unzipped his pants and exposed himself.”74 She fellated him.75
Before their rendezvous ended, Clinton told her that he was “usually around on weekends, no one else is around, and you can come and see me.”76 Except for a brief meeting in early December, however, they were not together for six weeks, until the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. Lewinsky by then was no longer an intern. She had begun her full-time White House job in the legislative affairs office. That afternoon, Lewinsky was in the pantry of the president’s private dining room, in conversation with Bayani Nelvis, a White House steward. She told him she had just recently smoked her first cigar. Nelvis offered her one of the president’s cigars. At that moment, Clinton walked down the hallway from the Oval Office and spotted Lewinsky. He sent Nelvis on an errand to Panetta’s office, and gave Lewinsky a cigar.77
Under the impression he had forgotten her name since their mid-November encounters, Lewinsky told Clinton her name. He had called her “Kiddo” when they had passed in the hallways.78 The president said he knew her name and had lost the slip of paper bearing her telephone number. He said he had tried to find her number in the telephone directory but it was not listed. They soon moved to the study and kissed. According to Lewinsky, the president “lifted my sweater and exposed my breasts and was fondling them with his hands and with his mouth.”79 She performed oral sex on him.80 Afterward, Lewinsky said, Clinton renewed his invitation that she visit him on weekends.81 Later that day, Clinton, his wife, and their daughter traveled to Hilton Head, South Carolina, for a year-end retreat called Renaissance Weekend.82 As the New York Times reported, the Clintons marked the occasion with 1,000 friends; on New Year’s Day 1996, he attended a “seminar on personal growth and family values.”83
Clinton and Lewinsky had seven other intimate encounters over the next sixteen months, most of them in early 1996. Although Lewinsky wanted to, they never had vaginal intercourse.84 Usually, she fellated him and he fondled her, sometimes bringing her to orgasm. Their furtive encounters typically were in the president’s private study near the Oval Office, or in the hallway or bathroom nearby—secluded places that permitted them the greatest privacy. But being discovered was a constant worry. On one occasion, Lewinsky noticed that the president was kissing her with “his eyes wide open.” She thought kissing that way “wasn’t very romantic” and expressed annoyance. “Well,” Clinton told her, “I was just looking to see to make sure no one was out there.”85 Another tryst in 1996 was interrupted by Harold Ickes, a presidential aide, who arrived at the Oval Office for an appointment. “Mr. President?” Ickes called out. Clinton and Lewinsky were in the study off the Oval Office and looked at each other in surprise. The president rushed—“jetted,” she said—into the Oval Office to meet Ickes. Lewinsky left by a back door.86
Sexual activity did not figure in every meeting between Lewinsky and the president. “We enjoyed talking to each other and being with each other,” she recalled. “We were very affectionate. We would tell jokes. We would talk about our childhoods; talk about current events. I was always giving him my stupid ideas about what I thought should be done in the administration, or different views on things.” Clinton, she said, “always made me smile when I was with him. It was a lot of—he was sunshine.”87
Clinton broke off the relationship on President’s Day in mid-February 1996,88 only to renew it at the end of March 1996. Their final sexual encounter was on March 29, 1997. By then, Lewinsky had been moved to the Pentagon, where she was a confidential assistant to the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. Her persistent efforts at the White House to get close to Clinton, and to ingratiate herself with senior officials, had become obvious and disquieting89 and had prompted her transfer.
/> Evelyn Lieberman, the deputy White House chief of staff for operations, a formidable presence,90 and a confidante of Hillary Clinton, saw to it that Lewinsky was moved out of the White House. Lieberman called Lewinsky a “clutch”—a hanger-on who was “always someplace she shouldn’t be.”91 According to Lewinsky, Lieberman had encountered her in the West Wing of the White House in December 1995 and chided her, saying interns were not permitted near the Oval Office unescorted.92 Lewinsky told her that she was not an intern but a full-time staff member. Lieberman replied: “They hired you?”—but then said she must have mistaken Lewinsky for someone else. Lewinsky took to calling her one of the White House “meanies.”93
It was remarkable how much time the president devoted to Lewinsky, in person and on the phone. Lewinsky estimated that, in all, she and Clinton spoke by phone about fifty times, usually late at night and early in the morning.94 During his campaign for reelection in 1996, Clinton sometimes called Lewinsky when his wife was not with him. In several calls that year, Clinton and Lewinsky engaged in steamy phone sex.95
Lewinsky was told of her transfer to the Pentagon in April 1996, and took the news badly. In tears, she offered to continue work without pay if she could stay at the White House job. No chance: Lewinsky said she was told that writing news releases at the Pentagon “was a sexier job” than her position at the White House.96
The Clinton-Lewinsky affair might never have been revealed—and never have become a vehicle for impeaching the president—were it not for a unanimous decision in 1997 by the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices agreed to allow a pending sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton to move ahead while he was in office. The lawsuit had been filed in May 1994 by lawyers for Paula Corbin Jones, a former state clerical worker in Arkansas. She said that Clinton, while he was governor of Arkansas, arranged for a state trooper to bring her to meet him alone at a room in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock. During the encounter, Jones said, Clinton lowered his pants and asked for oral sex. She refused and left the room.