There was one positive side to being subpoenaed—it let Linda Tripp off the hook. That night, therefore, Monica called Tripp to reassure her that she would not be the only one who would have to take the witness stand. Worried that her phone was bugged, Monica talked in cryptic terms about the “flowers” being delivered, referring to her subpoena. When Tripp finally got her drift, they had such a guarded conversation that neither really understood what the other was saying.
What Monica really needed was to see her friend in person, and the opportunity arose at Tripp’s Christmas party at her home the next night. It was a strange affair. When Monica arrived to help set up, she discovered that, even though only a few people were due to attend, the refrigerator was groaning with food and drink. For a woman who constantly complained that she barely had enough money for the bus ride to work, this seemed odd. Indeed, far from selling her clothes to raise cash, as she had said she was doing the previous month, Tripp had recently been splurging on new outfits. It seemed to a puzzled Monica that she had suddenly come into some money. “I thought, ‘Gee, how can you afford a $500 party?’” she recalls.
It was only as she was leaving the party, however, that she got the chance to talk to Tripp. They sat outside in Monica’s car and Tripp read the subpoena, which required that Monica produce every one the President’s gifts to her, and specifically cited “hat pins.” After expressing surprise and wondering just who could have put the Jones legal team onto Monica, Tripp seemed receptive when the girl argued that she, Tripp, would now no longer be alone in saying under oath that nothing had happened between Monica and the President. Before she left, Tripp insisted that Monica call her after her meeting with Frank Carter, scheduled for 11 A.M. on Monday, December 22, so that they could discuss their strategy.
Worried about the subpoena, anxious about Linda Tripp and concerned about finding a job, Monica took the sensible course that weekend and took Saturday off to drown her sorrows. She spent the next day recovering from a hangover and deciding which of her gifts from the President to take to Frank Carter’s office.
Before meeting Carter, she saw Vernon Jordan, to whom she now admitted that she and the President had had phone sex. When Jordan asked what phone sex was, Monica had to explain. He then drove her to Carter’s office. Like Jordan, he did not seem unduly concerned, and thought that Jones’s lawyers were on a “fishing expedition.” She told him that she had never had sex with the President, but had met him a few times, and had delivered documents to him at the weekend. She also made it clear that she was on the President’s side in the Jones case.
Back at work later that day, she finally realized that she could no longer rely on the support of a certain fair-weather friend. During another conversation in the Pentagon alley, it became clear that she faced enormous difficulties and that Linda Tripp’s promises were worthless. “Monica, don’t ask me to lie. If I’m asked about you, I’m gonna tell,” Tripp said.
As worried and alarmed as she was, Monica felt a brooding sense of outrage that Paula Jones’s freedom to sue the President for money should take precedence over her right to privacy. As she says, “It was nobody’s business what the President and I did. I was never harassed. I lost my job because I was his girlfriend and the bottom line is that my affair with the President hampered, rather than helped, my job prospects. In fact, my experience ruined Paula Jones’s arguments about sexual harassment.”
Such arguments cut little ice with Linda Tripp as she talked and taped her way through the gathering storm. In one conversation before Christmas she told Monica, “I am being a shitty friend and that’s the last thing I want to do because I won’t lie under oath. How do you think that makes me feel? I can make you stop crying and I could make your life so much easier if I could just fucking lie . . I feel like I’m sticking a knife in your back, and I know at the end of this, if I have to go forward, you will never speak to me again and I will lose a dear friend.”
Monica was frightened, more frightened than at any time in her life. In particular, she feared that the President would find out that she had in fact told someone about their affair. She was prepared to use almost any means to make Tripp agree to keep quiet.
Over the last few months, as their relationship deteriorated, Monica had realized she might be able to take advantage of Tripp’s strange obsession with Monica’s mother. Tripp was always asking what Marcia thought about any given situation, and often deferred to her judgment, even though they had never met. The perpetually broke Pentagon secretary was so keen to glean financial details about Marcia’s wealthy fiance, Peter Straus, that at one point Monica suspected that Tripp might try to blackmail her in return for her silence. In a moment of desperation, Monica, who had a half share with her brother in a condominium on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia, even offered Tripp, on the phone, her part of the $50,00 apartment if Tripp would stay silent. She recalls: “I would have done anything at that stage. I was desperate.”
By invoking the name of Marcia Lewis—who most times knew nothing about these conversations—Monica was often able to smooth over an argument or resolve a problem. In their conversations Marcia acted as a kind of unseen referee, a talisman to be waved as a means of appeasing Tripp. Monica would say, for example, that her mother had told her that she had been wrong to get into a fight with Tripp, thereby making it easier for them to kiss and make up. When Tripp mentioned that she might go to California for foot surgery to avoid testifying, Monica told her later that Marcia thought it was a great idea and had even offered to help pay for the operation. “All I wanted her to do was keep my secret,” Monica reflects. “I would have given her my left arm for her silence. That’s how my mom got into trouble, because I kept talking about her on Tripp’s tapes.”
The consequences of talking to Tripp were equally dire for Monica. In one now notorious chat, she confessed that she had got along in life by lying, and that she had perfected that dubious art after her parents’ divorce. “I was brought up with lies all the time,” she said. That exaggerated reference to her childhood was part of an overall argument designed to make Tripp feel comfortable about maintaining her silence to protect her friend. Taken at face value, the remark, like many of her comments on the tapes, was far more incriminating and damning than the context in which it was uttered should have allowed.
Because Tripp was all too well aware that their conversations were being taped, many of her own comments appear as sanctimonious as they are self-serving. When Monica reported the results of her first meeting with Frank Carter, as Tripp had requested, the latter’s answer is consistent with her preparing the ground for the impression she wished to make upon a third party: “Look, Monica, we already know that you’re going to lie under oath. We also know that I want out of this big time. If I have to testify—if I am forced to answer questions and answer truthfully—it’s going to be the opposite of what you say, so therefore it’s a conflict right there.”
In context, therefore, the contents of the Tripp tapes—more than twenty hours’ worth—take on an entirely different complexion. It is also significant that the tapes themselves are a partial and deeply misleading account of the events of October, November and December 1997. This became crucial when Tripp approached Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr in January 1998.
In many respects the conversations which do not appear on the tapes are just as important as, if not more important than, those that did. Tripp evidently did not produce recordings of conversations with Monica in which they talked about important meetings or discussions; nor conversations—particularly about Vernon Jordan—which, by a strange coincidence, would have considerably diluted any case Starr might have had for “hotwiring” his Whitewater investigation to Monica’s affair with the President, by way of the Paula Jones case.
Just as the tapes take on a different complexion when considered in context, so too does a photograph of Monica and Linda Tripp taken on December 23 at Monica’s farewell party at the Pentagon. The distraught girl had spent much of the previous n
ight on the phone, attempting to persuade Tripp to stand by her, though with little success. She had been crying before the party began, and felt wretched, but in typical Monica fashion she put on her happiest face and thanked her colleagues for their gifts and good wishes.
During the party, Tripp insisted that a picture be taken of her with Monica, a photograph that was duly published within days of the scandal breaking. With hindsight, it is entirely possible that her motive was to have a photograph that would enable her to prove to others that they were friends. In fact, she had spent most of Monica’s last day at work dodging her, so as to avoid having to resume their anguished conversation of the night before. From then on, Tripp stopped returning Monica’s increasingly frantic phone calls.
The only bright spot in a cheerless Christmas was a date with Washington journalist Jake trapper, who recalled her as a young woman “looking for a decent, challenging job, and a happy life to go with it.” She spent a lonely Christmas Day at the Watergate apartment, pondering her problems. At this point in time she had no job—a couple of days earlier, she had been turned down by American Express—and no boyfriend, and was entangled in a legal and personal dilemma of hideous proportions. “I remember feeling really sad, nervous and alone,” she says. She found consolation only in a TV re-run of her favorite childhood movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Uppermost in her thoughts was the President. She debated endlessly whether or not to tell him that she had betrayed the secret of their affair to Linda Tripp. In the end she decided not to, a decision made more difficult because she was due to see him shortly. Remembering that he had said, during his early-morning call to her on December 17, that she could come to the White House to collect his Christmas presents to her, Monica rang Betty Currie after Christmas, and they arranged for her to go there at 8.30 on the morning of Sunday, December 28. Despite her decision not to confess to him, she spent the night before she went to the White House in an anxious and agitated state.
When she arrived at the White House, she was shown into the Oval Office, where she, Betty and the President played with the President’s dog, Buddy, who kept scampering around the carpet as though it were a racetrack. Later, when she and the President were alone in the back study, Buddy insisted on putting his head between her legs and Monica joked: “You are better at this than your dad.”.
Meanwhile, Clinton produced a large canvas bag from the Black Dog shop in Martha’s Vineyard. Inside it were her presents, an odd but endearing assortment—a Black Dog stuffed animal, a Rockettes blanket from New York and a small box of chocolates, plus a joke pair of sunglasses (which they both laughed about and modeled) and a stone bear’s head which he had bought in Vancouver. The fact that he was giving her presents after she had been served with a subpoena that mentioned his gifts to her displayed a certain insouciance in the face of legal adversity, as well as an unspoken trust in Monica.
His choice of gifts reflected something of the history of their two-year relationship. The silly plastic sunglasses referred to a long-running private battle between them over his own sunglasses. Monica always complained he looked “dorky” in them, for which he offered the explanation that he borrowed them from Secret Service agents. Typically, she bought him a pair of trendy designer glasses from the Barney’s outlet store and then pestered him to wear them; later she sent him a note to remind him, followed by a picture of him wearing “dorky” glasses which had appeared in the New York Times. When she sent the picture, she said that she would continue harassing him with these pictures of him “looking like a geek” until he wore the cool sunglasses. “If you don’t think they’re cool, ask Chelsea,” she said in a note after she had given them to him. From then on he kept them in his briefcase, and they went everywhere with him. It therefore gave her a certain grim satisfaction to see, a few days after the scandal broke in January 1998, a picture of the President in her sunglasses on a magazine cover; the caption was “Presidential Style.”
Perhaps the most meaningful gift was the stone bear carving, which he gave her with the comment, “When you need to be strong hold onto the bear.” The Special Prosecutor interpreted the President’s meaning as being that she needed to be strong in relation to the Paula Jones case, but to Monica it was a reminder of their conversation on Independence Day, when “Handsome” had lectured her about controling her temper.
After handing over her presents, the President gave her what she really wanted—a kiss. Their not quite final embrace, which took place in the back study hallway, epitomized the passion and guilt of their two-year affair. As they embraced, Monica opened her eyes slightly and noticed that his eyes were wide open and that he was looking out of the window. Angrily pushing him away, she said, “Don’t kiss me if you don’t want to.” The President soothed her, replying, “No, I’m just worried, I want to make sure no one sees. It’s hard to go from being good and telling myself I can’t do this and change that pattern and kiss you.”
For once, Monica took control. “Come here,” she said, and led him into the bathroom, where she ordered him to close his eyes. As she recalls, “We then shared a fabulous, emotional and passionate kiss that reminded me of how good it was between us.” This moment of yearning, passion, regret, and a host of other emotions, is reduced in the Starr report to one of sleazy banality.
During their hour-long meeting they did briefly discuss the issue that was so troubling Monica, her subpoena in the Paula Jones case. “We didn’t spend very much time talking about it,” she says. “I was resigned to the fact that I was going to deny it, I assumed that he was, and so I thought, ‘Whatever happens, happens. You can’t control everything.’”
They also talked about how her name could have got on the witness list in the first place, and discussed the specific reference to the hat pin which, he said, “sort of bothered” him as well. When he asked Monica if she had told “that woman from last summer,” meaning Linda Tripp, she denied it, and then went on to ask if she should put away the other gifts he had given her, or perhaps get Betty Currie to hold them. He replied with something on the lines of “I don’t know,” or “I’ll think about that.”
He was more definite when they talked about her move to New York, and asked how he would be able to contact her. Monica told him that Betty had her phone and pager numbers, adding hopefully that they would therefore be able to talk soon. Then, as they walked back into the Oval Office, he put his arm around her, kissed her on the forehead, and said, “OK, Kiddo—good luck in New York and be good.” She has never seen him in person again.
That afternoon Betty Currie called and said, “I understand that you have something for me,” a reference, Monica thought, to the gifts to be handed over for safekeeping. She packed some items, including the hat pin, in a box which she marked “Do not throw away” (later, Betty picked this up and put it under her bed at home). But she could not bear to part with her treasured copy of Leaves of Grass, and so hid it in her closet. It was a decision that epitomized her state of mind: she longed to get away from Washington, but could not bring herself to let the President go.
When, early in the New Year, she and her friend Ashley Raines went to watch the blockbuster movie Titanic, Monica cried her eyes out. The story of the doomed love affair between two passengers from different social classes and backgrounds touched a deep chord within her. It seemed to parallel her own unfulfilled relationship with “Handsome,” reminding her of the angst and anger she had endured during their bittersweet affair.
She wrote him a “mushy” note in which she lamented the fact that they had never truly become lovers; she would always wonder about what might have been. It was part of the romantic tragedy of their love, she said, that they had never been together for so much as a single night of passion. That this was but a sentimental pipe dream was forcibly brought home to her a few days later, when she saw TV pictures of the President and First Lady dancing romantically together in their swimsuits during a beach vacation. As in her affair with Andy Ble
iler, she had to face up to the bitter reality that she loved a man who was not free.
On Sunday, January 4, 1998, Monica called Betty Currie and said she had something for the President. They agreed to meet at Currie’s home later that day, and when they did so Monica handed over a parcel containing the “mushy” note and a book, The Presidents of the United States, which she had picked up in an antiquarian bookstore.
Because she still felt angry, jealous and sad, she did little to hide her feelings when the President called her in the evening of January 5, responding to a request she had made, via Betty Currie, that afternoon. Monica was spoiling for a fight. Still smarting over the TV images of the Clintons cavorting on the beach, she grudgingly apologized for sending the “embarrassing” note—he had told her not to write down such thoughts—but was pleased that he liked the book.
Earlier that afternoon Monica had had a meeting with her attorney, Frank Carter, at his office. She agreed to sign an affidavit, which he would draft, hoping thereby to avoid being called as a witness in the Paula Jones case. Since she was due to pick up the draft affidavit the following day, she went over with the President a couple of points that bothered her, particularly the reasons behind her transfer to the Pentagon. They also discussed what might occur in a deposition. She was especially concerned about White House staff getting her into trouble by saying that she had acted “inappropriately” around the President. Clinton simply suggested that it was colleagues in Legislative Affairs who got her the job, an answer that was true if evasive. Then, still annoyed with him, she abruptly ended the conversation after about fifteen minutes. She did not think for a moment that she would never speak to him again, and it remains a source of sadness to her that their relationship, which had lasted so long and survived so much, should have ended so brusquely.
The truth was that by now Monica felt utterly lost and, more than ever, alone. The combined and juxtaposed effects of the TV pictures of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Titanic story and an unexpected conversation with Vernon Jordan had merely added to her emotional turmoil.
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