Before letting him off the leash, the President cautioned Morris to be careful, since, if that were the case, there was a slight chance that Monica might not be cooperating with Starr, and he did not want to alienate her. It was a revealing exchange. The man Monica loved for his vulnerability and humanity was now a creature of the past. Here was the President as lawyer and politician, fighting for survival.
Truth and Monica Lewinsky were the first casualties in this war. As Dick Morris, now a TV talking head, says, when the story broke the White House immediately adopted a strategy of “deceit, denial and delay.” Clinton’s denial of the charge that he had had an affair, made to his wife, his cabinet and leading Democrats, set the tone for the White House counter-attack.
Early on, the President told one of his senior advisors, Sidney Blumenthal, who was later to testify to the Senate, that Monica was a stalker who had tried to blackmail him into having sex. This was soon translated into public whispers that Monica was flirtatious, obsessed with the President and emotionally unstable. From there it was but a small step for the “stalker” notion to become fixed in people’s minds.
The first stage of this campaign culminated in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 26, five days after the scandal was first reported in the mainstream press. President Clinton stood before the cameras and the American people and declared with a jab of his finger: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman—Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time . . never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people.” It was a soundbite that came to haunt him.
Almost all those who knew the truth watched in angry disbelief as he lied to the nation. Monica herself had mixed emotions. “I was pleased that he had denied it, because everyone was saying that he was going to have to resign if this was true. I didn’t want him to resign. But I was very hurt when he said, ‘that woman.’ His distance and coldness were a very direct message to me of how angry he was.
“At the same time, if the President had come out and acknowledged the improper relationship, that would have taken a lot of pressure and attention from me. But he didn’t do that and the consequences are plain to see.”
Others were less charitable. When they saw Clinton’s performance, both Neysa DeMann Erbland and Catherine Allday Davis yelled expletives at the TV screen. Bernie Lewinsky was more hurt than angry: “It was very painful when I heard him call her ‘that woman.’ When he denied an affair I knew he was lying—not from anything I knew but because it was clear that he had that liar’s look in his eyes. He was acting and he did a lousy job of it.”
After the President had spoken to the nation, the First Lady went on the attack. On the day, January 27, that a grand jury was convened in Washington to hear evidence about the Lewinsky affair, Hillary Clinton declared on the Today morning TV show that Starr was a “politically motivated prosecutor,” part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” of “malicious” and “evil-minded” people. These are sentiments with which Monica, in the front line of the war, entirely agrees.
While the White House was trashing her reputation, the Starr team were squeezing Monica, the President and Vernon Jordan, with a series of leaks to the media designed not only to up the ante in any negotiation, but to make Monica’s legal team bow under the remorseless pressure.
Meanwhile, Lucianne Goldberg was feeding the media with Tripp’s distorted account of Monica’s relationship, portraying Tripp as the “truthteller.” Indeed the latter, in a statement made through her lawyer on January 29, declared nobly that she had “chosen the path of truth.” She evinced an Olympian pity for Monica’s plight: “She is a bright, caring, generous soul, but one who has made poor choices,” although, she added darkly, “Monica’s moral compass is her own.”
Thus fact and embroidery were woven into a single tapestry that depicted Monica in the worst light possible. For example, Tripp ascribed the authorship of the “Talking Points” memo to others, notably the President, because, she said, she did not believe Monica capable of such subtle thought. Jake Trapper, a Washington journalist who dated Monica just before the story broke, has remarked, “The overriding characteristic that has unfortunately allowed her to become used as a pawn by every single player in this tragedy—Clinton, Starr, Linda Tripp, the media—is that she is too trusting.”
Just as the White House were now singing to the tune of Presidential denial with orchestrated leaks saying that Monica was a besotted fantasist, so, by uncanny coincidence, a duet from Monica’s past took up this chorus. A hurriedly called press conference on the front lawn of Andy Bleiler’s Portland home on the evening of the President’s State of the Union address on January 27, 1998, drowned any voices speaking for Monica.
Andy and Kate Bleiler, who have since separated, had tried to sell their story to the press, but when their negotiations leaked they decided to speak to everybody about Monica, saying that they intended to tell Starr’s deputies what they knew. As Monica, her family and her friends watched in horror, the Bleilers painted a picture very different from the one that everyone else in Portland and Los Angeles had observed. Their tale finally fixed her image in the public mind as a sex-mad stalker with a penchant for married men who had “infiltrated” the Bleiler family. They claimed that Monica, having followed the couple to Portland, had threatened to tell Kate of her relationship with Bleiler, and had thereby forced her lover to continue their affair.
She was described as a “manipulative” young woman who had left Portland for Washington with an agenda—to earn her presidential “kneepads.” They even claimed that soon afterwards Monica, who they said had a tendency to twist facts, had boasted about having oral sex with a “high-ranking person” in the White House, never using the President’s name but always referring to him as “the Creep.” She had even had an abortion while in Washington, they said, implying that the child might have been the President’s. What was more, they added that, during her days at the White House, she had sent them documents, some “extremely important,” which the public-spirited Bleilers had kept in a safety deposit box. In fact, as has already been noted, with the exception of the joke memo to “Andy”, the “documents” were from the White House gift shop, while Monica’s crack about “kneepads” was a reference to the nickname for one of the White House staffers.
While the couple looked on, their attorney, Terry Giles, told astonished journalists, “When this story first broke, like many Americans I assumed that this was a twenty-one-year-old intern that was taken advantage of by a very powerful man. I also assumed, by virtue of the way her story came out—she’s confiding in a friend who tape recorded it—it didn’t seem that she had an agenda. I took it from there her story was probably true. After having a chance to talk to Andy and Kathy, I have to say that I am less certain about that.”
When Monica learned that the Bleilers planned to hold a press conference, she had hoped against hope that they would at least tell the truth, even if Andy did have to reveal that they had a relationship. She was wholly unprepared for the way they twisted the truth. “I was devastated. I was so angry, hurt and embarrassed. I felt helpless.” In many ways, she found the lies to which Andy Bleiler put his name harder to bear than Linda Tripp’s treachery. “I gave Andy my soul, my body, my heart and my virginity,” she says. “I just gave Linda Tripp my confidences. In a way my relationship with Andy was more real than the one with Linda, as I wasn’t my normal self when I confided in her.” Nor could her other “relationship” escape the taint of the Bleilers’ self-serving falsification. Still in love with the President, Monica was both upset and deeply worried that the couple’s abortion slur would reflect badly on him. “I felt so horribly guilty, I was just suicidal. I was hysterical, I was screaming and crying. I couldn’t go outside, stuck in this small apartment with my mom.”
Marcia’s reaction to Bleiler’s lies was to fight fire with fire. She wanted to contact the mothers of the other schoolgirls whom they believed
he had romanced, and ask them to come forward to set the record straight. Monica, however, would not hear of it. She could not bear to see two other young women being put through the sort of media attention that she was then facing. For Marcia, “that showed remarkable moral strength—she wouldn’t use another human being to save herself.” Yet the incident also reveals Monica’s chronic lack of self-esteem, consistently thinking herself unworthy of her friends’ help, a mindset that merely exacerbated her feelings of despair and isolation.
Other friends were just as horrified as Monica. Former Lewis and Clark student Lenore Reese—another who screamed abuse at Bleiler’s image on the TV—got together with other friends, including Linda Estergard, and sent a letter to ABC Television outlining the real story. Unsurprisingly, it was never aired. Linda Estergard says of the Bleilers’ media performances: “There were so many times when they went on TV and lied. It wasn’t true, for example, that she followed him to Portland—she was here a year before he arrived. In fact, he was having an affair with a student younger than Monica when she left California.” Catherine Allday Davis, who now lives in Portland, highlights the moral bankruptcy of the couple’s betrayal: “They just decided that she was fair game, even though they knew her. The country was having a field day destroying her and they just helped that process. It reached the stage where she was treated as though she wasn’t human.”
Carly Henderson, another friend who knew the truth, says, “It was untrue that Monica forced Andy to continue the relationship because she threatened to tell Kate. In fact, it was another of his string of lovers who exposed the whole thing.”
In an atmosphere in which conspiracy theories multiplied by the minute, Monica’s father saw the White House behind the timing of the revelations. “It is very likely,” he believes, “that the White House forced Bleiler to come out at that time. It was a tactic to make Monica look like a slut. Bleiler took advantage of her for his own financial gain, saying things that were untrue but salacious.” Allegedly, the Bleilers earned enough from their round of TV interviews to make a down payment on their house.
They were not the only ones cashing in on Monica’s misfortunes. Her first boyfriend, Adam Dave, was for a time the toast of tabloid TV, his stories about her becoming more lurid with each media appearance. In one interview he claimed that Monica enjoyed being handcuffed to the bed during sex—even though they had never been lovers. Astonishingly, his mother, Larraine Dave, wrote to Monica boasting that Adam had paid for a trip to Brazil on the proceeds of his TV fame, as though she should be glad for him. “That, to me,” Marcia scathingly remarks, “symbolizes Beverly Hills values.”
It seems that such values command a high price. The Lewinskys’ former neighbor Robin Wyshack, who said that she was able to buy a pair of boots from Saks Fifth Avenue with the money she received for media interviews, commented unfavorably on Monica’s parents, particularly Marcia. She cited an incident when Marcia had allowed Wyshack’s children to pick only one lemon from the Lewinskys’ tree, apparently laden with fruit. What Wyshack did not mention was that she had sued another neighbor after allegedly falling while cutting across their lawn, and the Lewinskys didn’t want a lawsuit from their awkward neighbor if one of her children was injured while picking lemons. Michael Lewinsky says of the former “friends” who now began to crawl out of the woodwork, “I thought it was disgusting that Adam Dave was trying to get a dollar for every word he could spit out. Former neighbors, who we didn’t like then, were trying to make a buck on the back of Monica’s misery.”
Some of the offers from the media were very tempting. Neysa DeMann Erbland was offered $100,000 by the tabloid The National Enquirer for a picture of Monica in a bikini, but turned it down. Others were not so scrupulous. One former student allegedly paid for her wedding with photographs of Monica that she sold to the press. As that disastrous January of 1998 drew to a close, it seemed that there was no one to speak out for Monica and her family, no one to set the record straight, no one to insist that the media ignore the lurid and concentrate on the truth. As has already been said, however, there was reason for this, and it lay within the concept of legal jeopardy.
The problem was that, on Bill Ginsburg’s advice—indeed, insistence—neither Monica nor her mother could allow their true friends to speak out on their behalf. Anyone who had spoken would themselves have come under Starr’s inquisition, facing the real possibility of a subpoena to find out what they knew—and the attendant legal bills.
Though protecting their friends meant that Marcia and Monica were painfully isolated, they were prepared to pay that price, telling their friends to hold their tongues for their own good. “When good friends called,” says Marcia, “we would make the conversation as quick as possible. We would say the same thing: don’t call us, don’t talk to anyone, be careful. So this left a void, and those people who hardly knew you then spoke, mainly for money. You can’t defend yourself as you are in legal jeopardy.”
Almost engulfed by the tidal wave of accusation, vicious speculation and pure falsehood, the captain of Monica’s craft, Bill Ginsburg, steered the vessel skillfully at first, making a considerable impression on television. As the weeks passed, Monica began to feel that he should spend less time on TV and more on the case.
There were occasional moments of decency in the ferocious rush to denigrate Monica and her family. One was particularly heartening. Before the scandal broke Peter Straus, then seventy-six, had discussed the prospect of marriage with Marcia, although no formal announcement had been made. Fearing the worst, she believed that once the story became public he would want nothing more to do with her or her family. Indeed, she didn’t even give him the telephone number of her mother’s apartment in the Watergate, so convinced was she that the scandal would end her chance of happiness.
She was wrong. Peter Straus announced their engagement in the newspaper without telling her. A gallant gentleman of the old school, he observes, “If you love somebody and they have a problem you don’t walk away. That’s not how civilized human beings behave.” Coincidentally, though equally happily, a quotation from a Walt Whitman poem that Monica discovered in a book at Peter’s house helped sustain her during the scandal:
All these—all the meanness and agony without end, I sitting look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.
She had to remain silent when, at the end of January, she left the apartment for the first time. That initial encounter with the press was a frenzied cacophony of a thousand lens shutters and motor drives, and the shouted questions of sweating reporters. Amidst this surreal circus, Bill Ginsburg arrived in a limousine to take her to the downtown office of Nate Speights, where she was due to answer more questions from the Office of the Independent Counsel through her attorneys. Only the day before, she had thought she was out of their clutches because Judge Susan Webber Wright, the US District Judge presiding over the Jones v. Clinton hearings, ruled that Monica was not central to the Paula Jones case, and had therefore excluded all her evidence. Monica’s euphoria was shortlived, however. The fact that she was no longer “material” to one case, her lawyers explained, didn’t preclude her from being central to Starr’s investigation.
As they left for the question-and-answer session with Starr’s deputies, Ginsburg advised her to smile, adding that she should not let the photographers intimidate her. “It was this blitz of lights and everyone crowded the car,” Monica remembers. “It was crazy, paparazzi on their motorbikes taking pictures and then falling off. I had to bite my lip to stop myself from laughing because I was so nervous.”
Although she resented doing so, she took Ginsburg’s advice and invariably smiled for the cameras, the theory being that Starr would see that he was not going to browbeat her into submission. Unhappily, this tactic backfired, for it led to media pundits sneering that her smiles meant that she was enjoying all the publicity.
Starr’s deputies were not laughing, though. That day they posed questions to her attorneys about the co
ntents of files of her home computer, suspicious also that pictures had been removed from the walls of her apartment as though in an attempt to conceal evidence. They seemed to have forgotten that she was in the process of packing up to go to New York. Nor, during their search of her apartment, had they found the most treasured of all the President’s gifts to her, the copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
As animosity and antagonism developed between Monica’s legal team and Starr’s deputies, the distrust the latter had shown became mutual. Ginsburg and Speights felt that they were constantly given the runaround by the OIC, which kept changing the rules of engagement. They offered Monica a deal they christened “queen for a day,” under which she would tell them everything, letting Starr decide whether to grant her immunity. This was changed to “queen for a month,” essentially the same deal except that Monica would have to take a lie-detector test as well. On one occasion the investigators said they wanted Monica to meet Kenneth Starr in person, so that he could give her the once-over. After Ginsburg and Speights agreed, the OIC changed their minds. After days of toing and froing, during which Starr formally notified Monica that she was a target for investigation as prelude to indictment, Ginsburg delivered an ultimatum: transactional immunity, or go to trial.
After much discussion and head scratching, the OIC agreed to his demand—albeit grudgingly. In late January two FBI agents appeared at the Cosmos Club, where Ginsburg was now staying. Because they feared that the document setting out the immunity deal might be leaked, instead of handing it over they read it out while Ginsburg and Speights wrote it down in longhand. Known legally as a proffer, it boiled down to a half-page statement, containing four main points. Monica, however, felt that the document was too vague, and therefore handwrote a comprehensive alternative, representing what she was prepared to say under oath in exchange for immunity from prosecution. As she later testified, she thought it would be a road map, not a perfect document.
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