With love’s light wings did I o’er-perch these walls;
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do, that dares love attempt.
Though the President appreciated the sentiments, he spoke to her again about ending the affair, this time saying that he didn’t want to harm her. “You have been hurt so much by so many men. I don’t want to hurt you like all the other men in your life have,” he told her, sentiments which suggest that he was sensitive to her emotional vulnerability. Yet as the conversation continued they ended up having phone sex and he promised to call her again.
That Valentine’s Day found Monica in London with her mother. However, when she returned, she was dropping something off at the White House when she saw Betty Currie, who told her that she had tried to get hold of her the week before. From this, Monica deduced that the President had been trying to get in touch while she was away. Then Currie called again to invite Monica to the radio address that week, on February 28; to which Monica wore the now notorious navy-blue dress from the Gap, which she had just got back from the dry cleaners.
There were only six other people present at the address, but throughout Monica nervously wondered if she was going to be alone with the President for that long-promised embrace. Once the recording was over they had their photograph taken together, after which the President told her to go to Betty Currie’s office because he had something for her. Unfortunately, presidential aide Steve Goodin, who was very protective of his boss’s time, was also present. As Monica learned from Betty Currie, Goodin had issued a warning that the former intern should not be left alone with the President. Monica was surprised, therefore, when, after waiting for some time, the President’s secretary walked her through the Oval Office and into the private office with the President. Currie then excused herself, and left them alone.
For the first time in ten months Monica found herself alone with “Handsome.” As they went into his little study she said, “Come here—just kiss me.” He was, however, far more circumspect than usual, and instead of kissing her he said, “Wait, just wait. Be patient. Be patient,” before handing her a small box decorated with gold stars. She opened it, and there was the blue glass hat pin he had promised her. Then, with a slightly embarrassed air, he gave her a book, which he put into her handbag with the words “This is for you.” Monica, who enjoys the ceremony of giving and receiving presents, wanted to savor the moment and took out the beautifully bound volume, an edition of Leaves of Grass by the American poet Walt Whitman. “It was such a compliment as a gift,” she says, “and meant the most of anything that he gave to me,” not least because the sentiments expressed in the poetry spoke to her profoundly about the nature of her relationship with the President.
In that romantic mood, they moved to his bathroom, the most secluded area of his inner office, where they started to “fool around.” After he had kissed her for the first time in nearly a year, he pulled away from her and said, “Listen, I have to tell you something really important. We have to be really careful.”
Yet, their caresses continued, becoming more intimate, and this time, when in the middle of oral sex the President pushed her away, Monica told him that she wanted him to come to completion. He told her, “I don’t want to get addicted to you and don’t want you to get addicted to me.” Whatever his own rationalizations, so far as Monica was concerned, it was much too late for that. She told him that she “cared about him so much” and they hugged. It was then that he agreed to go on with their embrace until, for the first time in their affair, the President found sexual completion in her presence, a tiny sample of his semen staining her Gap dress. For Monica, this marked a new chapter in their relationship, an intensity of feeling that would, she felt, bring them closer to the day when they would properly consummate their relationship. In the past he had always held himself in check, at first saying that he didn’t know her well enough, and later arguing that he would feel guilty about it. That moment, on February 28, 1997, signaled to Monica that at last he truly trusted her.
Monica went out for dinner that night. Afterwards, being her typically messy self, she simply threw the blue dress in her closet. It was not until the next time that she went to wear it that she noticed the marks on it. While she was not absolutely sure that the tiny stains on the fabric were from the President, she did joke with Neysa and Catherine about it, saying that if he was responsible, he should pay the dry-cleaning bill.
Such thoughts were far from her mind, however, after her romantic interlude. She sent the President a Hugo Boss tie and an affectionate letter of thanks for his gifts. She genuinely believed that they had a future together, viewing the President’s caution and physical hesitation as merely an echo of the relationship she had enjoyed with Andy Bleiler.
The President had other ideas. In his videotaped testimony to the Grand Jury on August 17, 1998, he said, “I was sick after it was over and I, I was pleased at that time that it had been nearly a year since any inappropriate contact had occurred with Ms. Lewinsky. I promised myself it wasn’t going to happen again.” Yet on March 12, a couple of weeks after their assignation in the Oval Office, Betty Currie called Monica at work and told her that the President wanted to speak to her, and that it was important. When she called, he said that there was a problem with the tie (this was the tie that Monica believes he cut with scissors) and asked whether she could come over before he went on a trip to Florida the next day. She agreed, and he then put her back in touch with Betty to make the necessary arrangements.
Sensing that he wanted to tell her something important, Monica became frustrated when Betty said merely that she would call in the morning and tell her at what time she should come to the White House. This phone call marked the point at which Betty Currie, a motherly figure, well liked in the White House, became the interface between the President and Monica. Since the latter no longer had a White House pass and the President did not want her visits to him entered in the log, from then on it was always Betty who coordinated their meetings. For Monica, the arrangement was a frequent source of unintended obstruction, and therefore of disappointment.
It seemed that fate had its own means of obstructing them, as well. Before they could meet, news of a terrorist outrage in Israel, a serious threat to the fragile peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians which Clinton had helped to broker, meant that the President had to make an immediate public statement; during this he was wearing one of Monica’s ties—the tie which Bayani Nelvis would later wear before the Grand Jury. Monica’s visit had to be canceled. That night, while “Handsome” was staying with the golfer Greg Norman in Florida, Monica had a vivid dream about him. She woke with a start, turned on the TV and discovered that he had badly injured his knee in a fall. It was a strange coincidence, which, in her elevated emotional state, seemed to her another sign that they shared a spiritual bond.
Monica soon moved into action. She assembled a get-well package of presents that included a card featuring a little girl saying to a frog, “Hi ya, Handsome,” a magnet in the shape of the Presidential Seal of Office for his crutches, a license plate reading “Bill” for his wheelchair and a pair of “presidential” kneepads which she had adorned herself. Yet beneath the surface humor, she was troubled that he had not yet revealed what he had seemed to want to tell her on the telephone the day he had asked Betty Currie to arrange the now aborted meeting.
She finally got to see him on March 29, on the pretext of replacing the damaged tie. As well as the new tie, she brought a bagful of goodies including a copy of Vox, a novel about phone sex, a medallion with a heart cut out of it, and a framed copy of her Valentine’s Day ad. Once again, Betty Currie showed her through the Oval Office into the President’s back study and then returned to her own office, leaving them alone.
An initial, sudden kiss from the President swiftly developed into much greater intimacy, although, since he was still on crutches, the sight was as farcical as it was romantic. With a poetic flou
rish that goes rather beyond the legal necessities, the Starr Report describes the scene thus: “A ray of sunshine was shining directly on Lewinsky’s face while she performed oral sex to completion on the President. The President remarked about Lewinsky’s beauty.” This description provoked much public mirth, but Monica stresses that the moment was a very private, intimate and romantic one, during which for the first time they enjoyed brief genital contact, “without penetration,” as the Starr Report, less poetically, puts it.
As they sat in the dining room afterwards, Monica says, she felt very “mushy” towards the President. She told him that she had been thinking of him, and that she had this vision of them together as “Little Bill and Little Monica,” walking hand in hand in the sunlight. In her sentimental way, she told him that their relationship really nurtured the little girl in her, making her life seem complete. She felt, too, that she brought out the “little boy lost” in the President. Today, she is rather more clear-eyed about her dreams: “When I first started the affair, it was the excitement and the fact that it was the President that was the attraction. That changed over time. By this time I wanted to marry him, wake up with him each day and grow old with him. At times it was more realistic than others. Looking back now, though, it was a pretty foolish dream.”
The need to exercise caution was again stressed by the President as he and Monica talked. Throughout their affair she had always said that she would never tell anybody, and that she would always protect him. He told her that, if she were ever questioned about it, she should simply say they were friends. He also urged circumspection when they spoke over the phone, saying that he believed that a foreign embassy—he did not say which one—was listening in to his official phone calls.
Betty came to collect Monica from the back study. The President hobbled over to Betty’s office with her, and, before she left, gave her a hug and a kiss on the forehead in front of his secretary, to signify that his relationship was paternal rather than intimate. Then he started singing the popular classic “Try a Little Tenderness,” looking directly into her eyes when he got to the soulful line “She may be weary.”
Also during this visit, when Monica handed over her resume to the President, he mentioned that the matter of a job at the White House for her was being handled not only by Bob Nash, Director of Presidential Personnel, but also by Marsha Scott, Deputy Director of Personnel and a friend from his student days in Arkansas. It seemed that the Clinton cavalry was riding to the rescue—though none too soon.
She felt comforted after that conversation, as she always did, and yet the doubts soon crowded back in. Every day she faced the dilemma of whether she should resign her job at the Pentagon and look for work elsewhere, or be patient, a virtue which is not high on her list of attributes. Though she liked and respected her current boss, Ken Bacon, she hated the long hours at the Pentagon and the dull, repetitious work. Even so, she was a conscientious worker, gaining an outstanding achievement award that year. A trip to Asia in April, which to some might have seemed glamorous, in reality meant endless days of typing and nights spent in anonymous hotel rooms. On the way home from that “nightmare” tour, she told herself that the President would have to act quickly, or she would go her own way.
The nightmare in Asia turned into family trauma the moment she returned home in mid-April. She was greeted with the news that her beloved brother, Michael, had been involved in a serious road accident. He had fallen asleep at the wheel, and his car had left the road, turned over and landed in a ditch. He had gotten out of the car only moments before it burst into flames, miraculously sporting nothing more than a few cuts and bruises. For Monica, whose sense of the dramatic is never far from the surface, the event was probably more emotional than it was for her unruffled younger brother.
Then, as she absorbed this misfortune, she was at the Pentagon one day that same month when she received a frosty phone call from Kate Bleiler, who angrily accused her of having had an affair with her husband. Not wanting an angry conversation at work, Monica cut short the call. Then, furious that Andy had not warned her that their secret had been discovered, she called him at work. He told her that his current lover had confronted Kate and told her that she was pregnant with his baby. In the ensuing emotional drama, Bleiler had admitted sleeping with Monica—but only while they had still been in Los Angeles. Monica continued the lie, explaining to a distraught Kate that the relationship had only come about because of her insecurity about her weight. The game was up soon enough, however, when Kate discovered Valentine cards Monica had sent her husband that year. She returned them to their sender with a terse and angry letter.
It emerged that, when his wife had confronted him, Bleiler had put most of the blame on Monica, saying that she had pursued him when they moved to Portland and had pressured him into continuing the affair. His story was a blatantly self-serving misrepresentation, and Monica was so angry at his behavior that she told him never to speak to her again. Her anger persists to this day: “Instead of taking responsibility and being a man, he lied. It was very distressing.”
All through this period, Monica had had Linda Tripp egging her on, at times angry with her, at others annoyed with the President, but always encouraging her to keep trying for a job at the White House, even when she considered giving up. “Some people bring out the best in you; she brought out the worst. I was so negative about myself, so nasty, so catty . .” Monica admits.
The much-dreaded uncovering of her affair with Bleiler stirred up afresh the turmoil in Monica’s soul. To make matters worse, as she brooded day after day on her chances of getting a job, her friend and oracle Linda Tripp heated up her brew of paranoia and resentment, especially in helping to plan strategies whereby Monica would both win back the President and acquire a post at the White House. “She would excite and incite me, encourage me to be hard-headed and demanding, whereas my mother would always try and pull me back,” Monica recalls. “Linda made me feel more entitled to things than the President thought I was. But I see now that those were my own actions, so I have to take responsibility for them.”
In March, Tripp had told Monica that she had learned from a friend of hers, whom at the time she named only as Kate, that there was the possibility of an opening at the National Security Council office in the White House. Since no specific job was mentioned, Monica sent her resume and a short covering letter expressing her interest in any opportunity which might become available.
The efforts she made in March to help Monica with her job search coincided with a meeting Tripp had with a Newsweek reporter, Michael Isikoff, known as “Spikey,” who specialized in the case of Paula Jones, the Arkansas secretary who in May 1994 had filed a suit against President Clinton alleging that he had sexually harassed her in a Little Rock hotel three years earlier, when he was Governor of Arkansas. Clinton vehemently denied these allegations; further, he challenged the legal right of a private citizen to bring a lawsuit against a sitting President. The matter was being pursued by attorneys for both sides.
In a potential new twist, Jones’s lawyers had tipped Isikoff off about a volunteer worker for the Democratic Party who alleged that she had been groped by Clinton in November 1993 when she went to see him in the Oval Office to ask for a job. The journalist tracked down the woman, Kathleen Willey, who told him during an off-the-record interview that the President had groped and kissed her against her will. She cited Linda Tripp as someone who would confirm that the incident had taken place.
Isikoff claims that when, in March 1997, he talked to Tripp about Willey, she told him that he had the “right idea” but steered him away from the White House volunteer. They met again a few weeks later in a bar near the White House where Tripp, who had come across Spikey Isikoff during her days at the White House Press Office, once more dangled the notion of a sexier story in front of him, a tale of the President and a young intern.
In a town where knowledge is power, Tripp seemed to be enjoying the excitement of toying with a senior Newsweek
journalist. Isikoff was unimpressed, however. To him, a story about sex and the President was nothing more than that: the Willey angle added fuel to the still-tiny flames of the existing Paula Jones case, and indicated a pattern of behavior by the President as well as hinting at misuse of his position. At the same time, Lucianne Goldberg had earlier made it clear to Tripp that to have her book published, she must get details of what she knew published in a nationally known publication. So the pressure was on Tripp to ensure that the Willey story surfaced in the press, and with her name linked to it.
Unsurprisingly, the story Tripp told Monica was rather different. In their previous conversations, when she was encouraging her young and trusting friend to persevere in her efforts to woo and win the President, Tripp had often referred to another of Clinton’s paramours who, as she put it, did not have “longevity.” Though she had never mentioned the woman by name, she always contrasted what she alleged was the latter’s short-lived fling with the fact that she, Tripp, knew Clinton loved Monica and would stick with her through thick and thin. The woman to whom she kept referring was in fact Kathleen Willey.
In March, an over-excited Linda Tripp told Monica that she had been approached in her office by a Newsweek journalist who had asked if she could corroborate claims that Kathleen Willey had been sexually harassed by the President. In her panicky state, Tripp said, she had tried to play down the issue of harassment but generally confirmed that there had been a relationship. The two friends discussed the matter further at the office, and later that night Tripp phoned Monica at home. She said that Willey had called her and that during the conversation Tripp had told the other woman that she was lying, that there had been no sexual harassment. Willey rebutted this, saying that Tripp was not remembering the incident properly. The issue in question was Willey’s claim that Tripp had seen her shortly after she emerged from the Oval Office looking disheveled and upset, and could therefore provide corroboration of her physical state and her mental distress.
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