Monica's Story

by Andrew Morton

  Monica with her first boyfriend, Adam Dave, at Natalie Ungvari’s 21st birthday party. Monica was upset when he discussed details of their relationship on tabloid TV.

  Moreover, Tripp seemed convinced that Monica would return to the White House and that, once she was again ensconced there, the President would find her irresistible. “Being away from him, those words and sentiments were sustaining,” Monica recalls. “It helped restore my confidence in the relationship, though at that time Linda did not know I was seeing the President.”

  As October turned into November and the election approached, Monica became more and more agitated, her days an ecstasy of anxiety and hope, dreaming of the moment when the President would call to end more than six months in purgatory at the Pentagon. Throughout the summer she had ticked off the days to the election on a calendar, knowing that it signified her return to the White House. “All she ever talked about was ‘I can’t wait to go back there, I can’t wait to go back to the White House,’” recalls Aunt Debra. The night before the election Monica anticipated that the President would call her, and that she would then be able to wish him good luck. It didn’t happen and she plunged back into despair.

  On Tuesday, November 5, 1996, William Jefferson Clinton was reelected to the Presidency of the United States of America, convincingly defeating his Republican opponent, Senator Robert Dole. On the day after the victory the Clintons returned to the White House in triumph, the President and Vice-President greeted by politically appointed staff, including Monica, on the South Lawn. Knowing that “Handsome” liked her black beret, she decided to wear it for the reception. In the jubilant crush of advisors, Secret Service agents, well-wishers and hangers-on they were able to do no more than exchange meaningful looks, but Monica returned home fully expecting that the President would call that weekend and ask her to come to see him so that he could tell her what he had in mind for her when she returned to the White House.

  “I got everything ready,” she remembers. “I put out what I was going to wear and had my hair cut. Then I sat—and I sat and I sat. I waited all weekend for him to call and it didn’t happen. I was beside myself, I was throwing things, I was crying uncontrollably. I was just so frustrated. I felt I had left the White House like a good girl, I hadn’t made a fuss. A lot of women who had had a relationship with the President may not have been so compliant. So I felt so betrayed and so disappointed. I was just crushed.”

  Depressed and demoralized, Monica went through the motions of doing her work at the Pentagon, trying to come to terms with the fact that the dreams she had nursed for six months had been dashed. That point marked the most miserable period of her life up till then.

  Not long after the election, in late November, Monica was walking into the cafeteria at the Pentagon when she saw Linda Tripp. Raw, miserable and forlorn, Monica simply couldn’t bear the thought of having to listen to Tripp’s nasal whine as she said yet again, as Monica knew she would, that now that the election was over Monica could go back to the White House, and that she was just the girl for the President. Sure enough, as soon as she sat down, Tripp launched into her familiar spiel. For once, Monica cut her short. “Look Linda, I’m going to tell you this and I hope you don’t tell anyone. I already had an affair with him and it’s over. Just leave it alone—it’s not going to happen.”

  It was the cue Linda Tripp needed. “I knew it, I knew it! I knew you were the type of girl he would like. Now don’t think I’m really weird, but my grandma and I get witchy psychic senses about things. I just get senses about people and I just knew it with you. Now, tell me what happened.” And Monica, who had been cautious and secretive about the affair for so long, found herself reliving the events of the last year. As for Tripp, far from telling her young friend to forget Bill Clinton and move on, she could barely suppress her excitement. “It’s not over,” she said. “You have longevity. He’s still talking to you after all this time, he’ll call again—it’s just that he’s busy with the election. It’s a crazy time.”

  Monica remembers that conversation vividly and with acute embarrassment. “It was like she was brainwashing me. I was so hurt, I was still so in love, I was so confused and I was so young. It was like my life was beginning and ending at such a young age and I didn’t know what to do.”

  When she poured out her story to Tripp, Monica thought she was confiding in a friend. Instead, she was gently being lured into a trap, the unwitting bait with which to catch a president. According to Lucianne Goldberg’s testimony, as early as May 1996, within weeks of first meeting Monica, Tripp had contacted Goldberg and told her about a “pretty girl” with whom she had become friendly and who had confided that she had a boyfriend in the White House, something which Monica, whose memory is first-rate, vehemently denies. Much later, presumably after Monica’s November confession, Tripp spoke to Goldberg and told her that “the boyfriend” was in fact Clinton himself.

  Looking back, Monica’s mother realizes that it was from this time in November 1996 that Linda Tripp began to manipulate her daughter’s life. “Here’s this young woman who desperately wants to believe what you are saying. She wants to hear that there is hope, that there is true love. She was at the point where she had resigned herself to it being over when Tripp comes along and uses all these psychological tricks to play with her head—‘Say you need a job—fight—I see it in the stars—don’t give up.’

  “Her real friends were telling her to move on and get over this, but Linda Tripp created false hope in someone very young, very vulnerable, in a depressed state where she could easily be influenced by someone so overbearing, strident and strong.

  “Yet all this was building up to betrayal. It’s horrible to contemplate and you have to wonder what kind of human being could do this. Presumably someone with no compassion, no humanity and no sense of moral responsibility.”

  All this lay in the future, however. Back in November of 1996, Monica continued to see Tripp and for a brief period talked about her relationship with the President, constantly hoping to be reassured, and equally constantly plagued by pessimism. Every time she doubted that the President would call and decided that the relationship was over, Tripp boosted her hopes. “He’ll call, he’ll call,” said her friend with the “witchy” psychic powers, confident that he would call in the next couple of days.

  Meanwhile, Monica had other things on her mind. She was taking a break from Washington to attend the wedding of her best friend, Catherine Allday Davis, in Hawaii. On the way she planned to see her father and stepmother in Los Angeles and then travel on to Portland to join up with Catherine before heading west.

  She was due to fly out to LA on December 2, but then discovered that for the first time since the election the First Lady would be out of town. With Linda Tripp’s words still fresh in her mind, she decided to change her airline ticket and give the President one more chance. “He gets this one night,” she told herself, “and if he doesn’t call I am changing my phone number.”

  With her bags packed ready for her trip, she sat in her room and waited. Once again her instincts proved true. That night the phone rang, and even before she answered it she knew it would be the President on the line.

  “Hi, it’s Bill. I have laryngitis,” he told her in an unusually gruff voice. With those three words Monica sensed that her long wait was finally over. Moreover, any doubts she may have had about the virtues of her personal oracle, Linda Tripp, evaporated at the sound of his voice.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Not Right in the Eyes of God

  FOR ONCE, Monica was feeling good about herself—her personal demons about the President, her weight, Andy Bleiler and her job prospects were for the moment laid to rest. She also had faith that her new confidante, Linda Tripp, whom she admired as a true Washington insider, would help find the key to unlock the door back to the White House and to a place in the President’s heart. As the New Year, 1997, started, Monica looked forward to a new beginning. Her optimism did not last long.

>   Ironically, in the run-up to Christmas 1996 she had found contentment of sorts and had, by a combination of happenstance and absence, turned the tables on the men in her life. Unusually, she was in control. When the President called her in early December they had enjoyed a long and predominantly lighthearted exchange. She had even told him that her summer romance with Thomas, her lover from the Pentagon, had ended although she did not tell him about the abortion. “I wish I was there and I could put my arms around you,” he said, and he was, she recalls, sweet and tender, telling her that he missed her and speaking as though the six-week gap since he had last called had been but the blink of an eye.

  Again unusually, she had to turn him down when he invited her over to the White House. She told him of her LA—Portland—Hawaii trip and that she was due to fly out early the following morning. They joked that Monica would send him a postcard from Hawaii with a voluptuous girl in a bikini and that Monica should send it to Betty Currie to ensure that he got it. They talked long into the night, the President falling asleep during their final conversation. But though she could not make her date with the President, she had another assignation planned in Portland: a rendezvous with Andy Bleiler.

  She had not seen Andy and Kate Bleiler for more than a year, but they had talked frequently on the telephone, Monica letting them have a steady stream of gossip. When she first joined the White House she had given them a rundown on the inside buzz, telling them about the women who were supposed to have had affairs with the President. On one occasion, she had mentioned to Kate that one senior White House staffer had the nickname “Kneepads” because of her alleged sexual liaison with the President. It was an off-the-cuff remark that would come to haunt her.

  She had also sent the Bleilers a variety of presents from the Secret Service gift shop in the White House, including a picture of the President with his autopenned signature on it, and when Monica was working in the correspondence section of Legislative Affairs, she sent Andy Bleiler a photocopy of a letter of congratulations, signed by the President, which had originally been destined for a Congressman whose first name was also Andy. Bleiler enjoyed the joke and pinned the letter to his bulletin board at work. Monica’s actions were silly rather than sinister, and her intentions harmless, if inappropriate, but once again these gestures were to backfire badly when the scandal broke.

  While she prepared for her short stay in Portland, Bleiler phoned her constantly, anxious to know that she was definitely coming—a complete reversal of their established roles. At the same time, Monica had her own reasons for wanting to see him alone.

  Ever since she had put herself through the emotional and physical pain of the abortion, Monica had worried about going to bed with another man. If she was to sleep with someone, she wanted it to be a lover who was familiar and safe, who would understand if she became distressed. For this reason, during her time in Portland she went to bed with Andy Bleiler for the last time. It was an emotional experience for Monica but she now knew that she could continue with her love life without any physical fears. Monica left Portland with very warm and romantic feelings towards Andy, but she also realized that he no longer had any hold over her.

  Later, when they talked on the phone, he confessed that he had been seeing another woman for over a year, that his marriage to Kate was on the rocks, and that he was thinking of leaving her for his new lover—all of which merely confirmed what Monica had long suspected. Bleiler admitted, too, that he now recognized how much Monica had meant to him; he apologized for his behavior during their affair and told her that he truly valued her as a friend.

  Hence, at this point, Monica was finally feeling good about her relationships. She also knew that she was looking good. She had picked up a tan in Hawaii, and had lost weight—in fact she was slimmer than she had ever been before, something that did not escape the President’s notice. They met briefly when she attended the White House Christmas ball in mid-December, and he took time out from another reception the following evening to call and compliment her. “I just wanted to tell you that you looked really beautiful last night,” he said, adding that he had bought her a Christmas gift—a hat pin—when he visited Albuquerque in New Mexico, and that he intended to give it to her before Christmas.

  Monica was disappointed when they didn’t meet, as they had planned, on the weekend before Christmas, but she did see him purely by chance when she and her mother attended a Washington performance of The Nutcracker, in which Chelsea Clinton was dancing. The President, who was with his wife, spotted Monica as he was about to leave and beamed at her. That brief encounter sustained her, as did other fragmentary connections such as the brief phone messages he left on her answering machine. There was, too, an encounter at the 53rd Inaugural Presidential Ball held at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in January 1997, where she patiently waited for five hours behind the rope line so that she could see him on stage with the First Lady. Seeing her, he mouthed, “I like your dress,” and kept smiling and looking at her.

  Even though her contact with him in the New Year was minimal, Monica’s confidence in herself remained high. “Normally,” she says, “when I get ready to go to a hoity-toity event I become a basket case, down on myself, thinking that I look fat and ugly in everything. This was the first time in my entire life that I had ever got dressed for something and not thought about my weight for a moment. It was a very liberating feeling, a liberation from my personal demons.”

  Moreover, by early January her job prospects, as well as her relationship with the President, seemed to be very much on the rise. Before Christmas she had heard that her bête noire, Evelyn Lieberman, was leaving her post as Deputy Chief of Staff in the New Year to head the Voice of America radio network. This news gave Monica the sense that the main obstacle in her path back to the White House had been cleared. As a result, when the President called her in January and February she talked to him about her return to the White House. He was encouraging, and told her he would speak to Bob Nash, Director of Presidential Personnel, about the matter.

  There were other indications that her hopes would be fulfilled. When she went to see Betty Currie after Christmas to drop off seasonal gifts—she bought Clinton, who was away from Washington at the time, a Sherlock Holmes game, knowing his penchant for puzzles—Monica had discussed with her a possible return to the White House. Currie seemed to know all about it, replying, “I know. The President said to me when you left the White House that we should bring you back after the election—that you were a good kid.”

  Monica now assumed that the wagons were rolling, an understanding bolstered not just by her conversations with the President and Betty Currie, but by the views of her new Svengali, Linda Tripp. “She became my personal diary, someone to confide in, bounce every idea and concern off,” Monica recalls. “I came to need her approval for everything—and she came to control me. There were several times in the next few months when I said, ‘Forget it. I’ve had enough. I give up.’ But Linda would say, ‘No, keep going,’ and she was often right. It was a sick, sick relationship.”

  Looking back now, she explains her dependence on Tripp as the result of the combination of her youth, the after effects of her abortion, her hatred of her job at the Pentagon, and her lack of contact with the President. Furthermore, almost all the people who mattered to her—her mother, her aunt and her closest friends—were virtually insisting that she leave Washington and find a new life, neither of which she wanted to do. The one voice that encouraged her to persevere was that of Linda Tripp.

  In February 1997, Tripp began to insist that Monica, who had compiled her own diary of dates when the President had called or seen her, should go over the affair in detail in order to try to work out a pattern to Clinton’s behavior; she even encouraged her to make a spreadsheet of all her contacts with the President. Monica realizes now that Linda Tripp was letting her “ramble on and on” about her affair with the President for her own duplicitous purposes.

  Very soon, the hope that h
ad inspired her at the beginning of the year had evaporated, and Monica returned to the front seat on her personal roller coaster of optimism and despair. As the weeks without even the sight of a job at the White House turned into months, her frustration grew, especially as a variety of White House staffers, none of whom seemed to know anything about her desire for a job, kept fobbing her off. Marcia Lewis, worried as ever by her troubled daughter, perfectly described these tactics: “She was so sure that they were going to let her come back and let her work at the White House. No one ever told her that she wasn’t coming back. They would just play her, month to month, speak to this one, speak to that one.”

  This policy of prevarication seemed to echo the President’s own feelings about their affair. He would tell her that it was over, and then shortly afterwards would call her or even see her, his every action, however casual, perhaps unintentionally renewing her belief that they did, after all, have a future together. Catherine Allday Davis, who kept in close touch with Monica during these months, could see the harm this behavior did to her friend: “I used to respect him, and so couldn’t work out why he couldn’t see that he was destroying her. He would try to end it, which was fair and good. Then he would call her and he kept it up, he kept on stringing her along, a kind of Chinese water torture. He never drew a line and said, ‘It’s over, and if you call again you won’t get through.’”

  The ambivalence was well illustrated during February, as the President tried to end their affair yet found himself, both emotionally and physically, drawn back to Monica, his feelings of guilt wrestling with his desire for her; the politician and husband in conflict with the man and erstwhile lover.

  Early in February they had a long conversation about their romance. Monica started brightly, telling him to look in the Washington Post on Valentine’s Day; she had placed there a message for her “Handsome,” headed by a quotation from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: