Bernie Lewinsky has the greatest admiration for her: “The more they attempted to squeeze and intimidate her the stronger she became. I admire her tremendous strength—I don’t know how many kids could go through what she went through. It was incredible that she was able to stand up to these bullies carrying a silver shield.”
Their dinner over, Monica and her shadows returned to Room 1012 to wait for her mother. The FBI agents morosely flicked through the TV channels, carefully going past any news stations, before hitting on the 1954 musical There’s No Business Like Show Business, with Ethel Merman, Donald O’Connor and, in a minor role, Marilyn Monroe. For a while Monica talked brightly about how she had been in school musicals, then she lapsed into agitated silence, taking up the room’s Bible to read over and over again the Ninety-First Psalm, the psalm for divine protection that the Christian Science counselor had recommended. She found some small comfort in the lines: “I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.”
Finally, at sixteen minutes past ten, the doorbell rang. An agent went to answer it, and suddenly Marcia appeared, like a guardian angel. “I have never been so happy to see her in my entire life,” says Monica. “It was like being a little girl again and your mom was going to make everything all right. She was my lifeboat because for the last few hours I felt I had been swimming alone in the the vast ocean. I was alone in this dark, scary place and she rescued me.”
Marcia, who had told her sister and mother to go to Debra’s apartment in the Watergate complex when they got off the train, had steeled herself to be calm and composed for her daughter’s sake. Even so, she quailed when she saw the state her daughter was in: “Monica was standing by the window, her eyes swollen from crying and her face was so full of pain and fear. She was holding a Bible in her hand and her whole body was shaking. Who did this to my daughter?”
Running to her, Marcia flung her arms around her and murmured the words all mothers comfort their children with—“Everything will be all right.” Then, with all the calm and dignity she could muster, she introduced herself to the assembled agents and deputies sprawled around the room.
Starr’s prosecutors had already agreed to give mother and daughter a few minutes together before speaking to Marcia Lewis on her own. Monica, who was convinced the room was bugged, insisted that she and Marcia be allowed to talk in the hallway. Once they were alone, Monica urgently told her mother, “I can’t do this. I can’t wear a wire, I can’t tape record phone calls, I can’t do this to the President.” She insisted that they leave and try to contact Betty Currie so that the President could be warned. She wanted to explain to him the mess she was in, and to let him know that she would tell everyone she had made up the whole story of their affair. By this time she was so agitated that her mother had great difficulty calming her down.
After a few minutes, the two women were interrupted and told that they had had long enough alone. Marcia Lewis was whisked off to another room, where Starr’s deputies explained Monica’s predicament. “They told me that she faced twenty-seven years in jail for lying, and they were using all these words—‘suborning perjury’ and so on—phrases ordinary people never hear. I thought they were pretty fancy words just for telling a lie, for wanting to protect the man she was in love with.
“Part of me didn’t believe what was happening, and I wanted to explain to these people that they had made a terrible mistake and that there was no way she should spend twenty-seven minutes in jail, much less twenty-seven years.”
Faced with the prosecutors’ hostility, Marcia began to tell them anything that came into her head which, she felt, might persuade them to let Monica go: she was young for her age; she had been suicidal six years before (which was an exaggeration, if a pardonable one in the circumstances); she was highly emotional. They listened to her, but insisted that Monica should decide whether or not to cooperate quickly, as the whole issue was—that term again—“time sensitive.”
Marcia remembers looking at the clock, which by then showed eleven o‘clock, and wondering what office could possibly be open at that time of night whose work or requirements would make the issue of Monica’s cooperation “time sensitive.” She even tried to compromise by pleading with them to let her hire a nearby room so that she and her daughter could both rest; they could, she said, station armed guards outside so they couldn’t escape. The suggestion cut no ice with her daughter’s accusers. Looking back now, Marcia vividly recalls the desperation with which she tried to resolve matters. “I didn’t think that we would ever leave and I thought that the next stage would be arrest. There was no option. They said criminal charges would be filed unless Monica cooperated, and she refused to cooperate. It wasn’t a case of ‘You can go home and live happily ever after.’
“I said anything because I was desperate for them to let her go. In my naïveté I thought these men might go into conference and say perhaps we shouldn’t do this to this girl, ‘Perhaps it isn’t right.’ At this point I wanted them to pause, to say, ‘Wait a minute, this is not Linda Tripp, this is not some middle-aged, hard-bitten woman who we’re going to push around. This is a baby.’
“Were there no mothers working at the FBI? Was there no compassion? Who heard Monica’s voice on Linda Tripp’s tape, this young, innocent creature, and said it would be a good thing to get her? Who said, ‘Let’s sting her, put her in a hotel room, threaten her with jail and she will cooperate with our quest?’”
Cooperation was the key. Time and again they emphasized that, if Monica did as they asked, they would not file criminal charges against her. During her conversations with Starr’s deputies that night, Marcia, who still did not understand what the whole thing was about, asked what would happen if Monica just told them what she knew, or if the Paula Jones case were to be settled, or if her daughter had lied in her conversations with Linda Tripp? For of one thing she was certain: “I know my daughter, and there was no way in the world that she would wear a wire to betray someone. That was simply a waste of breath arguing about it.”
Marcia had sufficient wit not to be gulled into trusting these men. She had followed the case of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who was arrested by the FBI after a tip-off from his brother David. The latter had turned him in only on condition that the FBI promised not to seek the death penalty. They agreed, and David Kaczynski, who had agonized over the decision, led them to his brother. Once in custody, the terrorist was charged with a crime for which the penalty on conviction was death; the FBI claimed that they had never promised anything.
In the light of this, and deeply mistrusting the motives of the men who were pressuring her daughter, Marcia told Mike Emmick that she would like to have one other person, her former husband, hear them repeat their promise that no charges would be filed if Monica cooperated. Emmick replied that they could not possibly call Bernie. Marcia, staying calm for her daughter’s sake, explained that she wanted them to make that call so that there would be independent proof of the OIC’s offer to Monica. Rather sarcastically the prosecutor responded, “You want it in writing?” After a moment’s thought, Marcia accepted his unguarded offer. Flustered, Emmick left her, and went to confer with his colleagues. When he returned he told her that he could not give her a note as he did not have a typewriter. “At that point warning bells went off in my head,” Marcia remembers. “Nobody uses a typewriter anymore. He could have scribbled something on a piece of paper. It was then that I realized that this was much scarier and more dangerous than I could ever have imagined.” So now, well after eleven at night, she began firmly to insist that she call Monica’s father.
Since receiving the emergency call from Marcia during her train journey, Bernie Lewinsky had been busy. He had managed to track down Bill Ginsburg, who was in court, presenting a case. When he was told that Bernie wanted to speak to him, Ginsburg announced, with a theatrical flourish that was to become his trademark, that a radiation oncologist had an urgent call for him, and asked for the hearing to be
suspended.
Once Ginsburg had heard from Bernie what little he knew, he told him gravely, “Don’t say anything more on the telephone. I’ll see you as soon as possible.” “After that,” Bernie remembers, “I started shaking.” He respected Ginsburg’s judgment, knowing that his reputation as a trial lawyer, particularly for his cross-examinations in complicated medical cases, was second to none. He had been the malpractice lawyer for Bernie’s practice—Western Tumor Medical Group—for some years, and the two of them got along fine, not least because they were the same age and had attended Berkeley in San Francisco at the same time, although they had only become friends during the mid-1990s when Bernie remarried. He and his second wife, Barbara, made up regular foursomes with Bill and Laura Ginsburg, going on wine-tasting weekends and for short holidays out of state. Most Friday nights they got together to watch a movie and eat sushi. With his trademark bow ties, avuncular manner and voice like a sober W.C. Fields, Ginsburg was to become an instant national celebrity.
That night, however, as far as Bernie Lewinsky was concerned, Bill Ginsburg was the man riding to the rescue of his daughter. The two men met in a club in downtown Los Angeles where, after what seemed like an eternity, Bernie at last received a call on his mobile phone from Marcia, who told him where she was and who she was with. As the reception in the bar was poor, he went outside and stood in the street trying to make sense of what was going on. Amid the traffic noise, he spoke briefly to Monica and, in between her hysterical sobs, told her, “Monica, don’t say another word. We’ve got Bill Ginsburg here—don’t say another word.” Since the signal on his mobile kept breaking up, he found a pay phone on the street corner so that he could talk to Mike Emmick without the static interference. Emmick told Bernie, who had Ginsburg standing silently at his side, that anything he said was totally confidential and should not be communicated to anyone under any circumstances. “I was shaking in my shoes,” Bernie admits. “I had never spoken to an FBI agent before and I was scared stiff.”
Once again Emmick explained that Monica was in very serious trouble. As far as the investigators were concerned, she was involved in perjury, a conspiracy and a cover-up involving the President, and unless she cooperated she faced twenty-seven years in jail. Still baffled, her father asked, “What do you mean by cooperate?” So Emmick told him that Monica had to agree to wear a wire and record conversations with Vernon Jordan, Betty Currie, and possibly the President.
Despite his shock and alarm, Bernie had the presence of mind to ask, “Isn’t she entitled to an attorney?” When Emmick asked whether she had an attorney—though he had known all day that she was represented by Frank Carter—Bernie said that she had, and that his name was William Ginsburg. Monica, who had met Ginsburg briefly a couple of years before, confirmed to the prosecutor that he was her attorney in Los Angeles. Emmick was wary, and advised Monica that she did not have to accept an attorney she had not selected. Bernie, of course, knowing nothing of his daughter’s affair, or her putative link to the Paula Jones case, did not know that she had already engaged a lawyer. “At that point we knew nothing about Frank Carter,” he says. “I was just trying to help my daughter in a difficult spot.”
Bill Ginsburg, having spoken to Monica to establish a formal attorney-client relationship, then discussed his new client’s legal options with Emmick, in particular the possibility of securing “transactional immunity” for her, which prevents any prosecution relating to any matter surrounding the testimony. Just as Marcia’s instincts had shouted caution, so Ginsburg’s legal antennae now began to twitch when Emmick told him that they might perhaps be able to offer Monica immunity.
That answer, Ginsburg believed, meant they were trying to pull a fast one. He covered the mouthpiece and whispered to Bernie that they were not allowed to offer transactional immunity without authority. He therefore decided to call their bluff: he asked them to put the agreement on paper and fax it to him. Once again Emmick demurred, this time saying that he didn’t have access to a computer on which to type it, whereupon the attorney asked him to write it out longhand, sign it, and then fax it. Emmick kept asking Ginsburg to trust him, to which he received the dry answer, “I put my trust in God, not US attorneys.” Finally, Emmick admitted that he was not empowered to offer anything in writing. His bluff had been comprehensively called. Furthermore, the OIC’s questionable methods had been exposed. As Ginsburg says, “One of the persistent themes throughout this investigation has been high-handed, tough tactics to get people to say what they want.”
Monica remembers that, during the exchange between Emmick and Ginsburg, the former offered to fax her new attorney a copy of her false affidavit. The two FBI agents, however, pulled him roughly away from the telephone. They realized Ginsburg would instantly understand that the OIC had seen a copy of her affidavit before it had been filed, which meant that in all probability it had come from Paula Jones’s lawyers, to whom Frank Carter had sent a copy. The OIC knew, when they picked her up, that technically Monica had not committed any serious offense. Furthermore, by preventing her from contacting Carter, they effectively ensured that the serious offense—filing a false affidavit—was committed later in the day. Understandably, Starr’s strong-arm tactics have been a matter for grave public concern.
The whole exchange about immunity was a waste of time, except in so far as it exposed the dubious methods employed by Starr’s investigators, for Monica had absolutely no intention of wearing a wire and thereby betraying the man she loved. Her behavior moved her father to comment, “She showed tremendous presence of mind not to cooperate, and it certainly rankles that so few people have acknowledged that if she hadn’t been so strong, if she had worn a wire tap, she would have done to the President what Linda Tripp did to her. No matter what it meant to her own safety, she was never going to betray anyone like she had been betrayed.
“Whatever faults she may have—a lack of appropriateness and discretion, perhaps—when the chips are down she sure comes through. People don’t give her enough credit for that. They treat her like a bimbo, when the last thing she is is a bimbo. Many women would be taken in by the most powerful man on earth, and while I don’t approve of what she did, she is not a bad person for having done what she did.” It is a quality of steadfastness recognized by family friends. Dale Young observes: “She refused to benefit by betraying others. At that moment, knowing she would go to jail, she showed her true character. I will always be proud of Monica for that.”
Once Emmick’s bluff had been called, Ginsburg spoke to Monica again, and told her that he was flying to Washington the next day to see her. He told her and Marcia not to say another word, and to leave the hotel. “Just trust me,” he said. “Everything will work out fine.” After the two women informed Starr’s deputies of their decision, they were each served with a subpoena prior to leaving the hotel complex.
Before they parted that night, Bernie Lewinsky asked Bill Ginsburg if he was qualified to take on such a daunting legal task; after all, he was primarily a medical attorney. The other man assured him that he had experience in civil litigation, and that he would have no difficulty in putting together a team of suitable Washington lawyers. Then Bernie asked what the bottom line was. “If it’s an easy case, $150,000. If it goes to trial, it will be $1 million,” Ginsburg told him. Furthermore, he wanted $25,000 for starters, before he even caught his plane to Washington and his meeting with Monica. That night Bernie and Barbara barely slept, their thoughts constantly turning to Monica, three thousand miles away and facing the threat of jail. “We held each other,” Barbara remembers, “crying and shaking with fear and thinking that she is going to jail. It was just awful.”
It was after one in the morning by the time Monica and Marcia reached their Watergate apartment. Wide awake from the adrenaline rush, yet fearing that the apartment was bugged, they barely dared to say a word to one another. Monica’s mind raced with the awful dangers facing the President. Somehow he must be warned. Careless, as ever, of the consequences
to herself, she allowed all manner of wild plans to form and re-form in her head. She considered taking a taxi to wake Betty Currie and warn her, or calling the President’s attorney, Bruce Lindsey, even though she had never spoken to him. Even as Monica talked about warning the White House, her mother made her swear to stay silent, fearing that any such action would jeopardize whatever chance her daughter might have of securing immunity in the future.
At two in the morning, they drove to the Four Seasons hotel to phone Bill Ginsburg. They talked of leaving the country, of fleeing across the border to Canada, but that idea was discarded as soon as it was mentioned, because they believed that the FBI would have every airport and border post staked out. An indication of just how terrified they were came at the hotel when a young couple entered the lobby. The two women were instantly convinced that they were FBI agents sent to spy on them. “This absolute fear of being followed began immediately,” Monica says.
By now Monica, who was veering between manic activity and an unnerving silence, had closed down again. When they returned to the apartment, Marcia had become so terrified that her daughter would commit suicide that she made her leave the door open when she took a shower, so as to be sure that she did nothing untoward. For what remained of that night, Monica lay on her bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, while her mother watched over her to see that she did not take her own life.
The horror had begun.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“I Didn’t Matter Anymore”
THE IMAGE of President Clinton’s friend Susan McDougal, handcuffed and fettered, leaving a courthouse in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1996 has come to symbolize the iniquities of Kenneth Starr’s ruthless pursuit of the President and First Lady. McDougal’s refusal to testify before a Whitewater grand jury in Little Rock because, she claims, Starr was seeking to ruin the lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton, rather than impartially investigating Whitewater, earned her an eighteen-month jail sentence for contempt of court, much of it spent in solitary confinement, and a place in the pantheon of all-American heroines: she became known wryly as “Joan of Arkansas.”
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