Truth or...Consequences
The worst week of Clinton's presidency brought tales of sex and cover-ups that threatened to sink even the Comeback Kid
By Nancy Gibbs
(TIME, February 2) -- Americans like to bring their children to the White House, maybe
get a picture, take a tour, hear a story. This is where one man
decided to free 4 million slaves, others to wage a just war, to
build a Great Society, to topple an "evil empire." Great men,
when they take custody of the presidency, make the Oval Office
shine, stake their claim to a portrait on the creamy walls.
Lesser men, at the very least, are expected not to smear mud on
them. When Bill Clinton got the keys six years ago, the voters
knew he brought a lot of debris with him, joints he didn't
inhale and truths he didn't tell and women he hadn't slept with
("They were awake at the time," his aides privately explained).
It was a leap of faith by the voters that put him there. At the
very least, they wanted him to keep the office clean.
That is why last week the allegations of a President spotting a
fresh face in a ripe dress at a White House party, and
eventually inviting her into a private study off the Oval Office
for oral sex, and remarking that if she never told, no one would
know, was enough to inspire first dizziness, then a regicidal
rage. Through Clinton's peaceful, prosperous tenure he has been
forgiven a world of winks and wiggly answers about youthful
indiscretions and adult lapses of judgment. Last week even his
apologists didn't know where to begin.
The only image as troubling as the spectacle of a teetering
presidency was the possibility that a flirtatious, love-starved
girl given to bragging about her conquests might have been
spinning some ruinous fantasy about a love affair with the
President. Monica Lewinsky's story was so tawdry, and so
devastating, it was hard to know which was harder to believe:
that she would make up such a story, or that it actually might
have happened.
Without proof, both possibilities were left to squirm side by
side. Either Lewinsky was lying when she swore under oath that
she had never had a sexual relationship with the President, or
she was lying through the hours of conversations she had with
her friend Linda Tripp, who would later betray her, keeping a
tape running to spin a web that would catch a President. As each
new tape surfaced, each new detail arose, of Secret Service logs
showing late-night visits when Hillary was out of town, of
presents sent by courier, of a dark dress saved as a souvenir,
spattered with the President's DNA, the American public began
stripping Bill Clinton of the benefit of the doubt. A TIME/CNN
poll last week found half of Americans saying he lacks the moral
character to be President and should be impeached if the charges
prove true.
That assessment was already looking generous by the weekend, as
Americans resigned themselves to turning on the news or picking
up their papers and having to read stories that painted the
White House as a harem, the President as a lecher and the
government as a hostage to his libido. No matter what he does,
the President now faces a steady flow of ugly leaks from the
conversations Tripp recorded or recalled having with Lewinsky.
In those conversations, Lewinsky is graphic in detailing, and at
times denigrating, the President's sexual characteristics and
performance. Clinton, she claimed at one point, had a strict
rule: oral sex only. "At my age," she says he told her, "you
can't take the risk of intercourse." Lewinsky jokes that if she
ever got to leave her job at the Pentagon and return to the
White House, she would be made "Special Assistant to the
President for b___ j___."
Speechless Defenders
Even White House soldiers trained by years of muscular damage
control staggered last Wednesday when they picked up their
morning papers. The first few hours were horrible, easily the
worst day in a presidency with more than its share of bad days.
Within the hour they faced a parade of hyperventilating
talk-show hosts clutching the Constitution and handicapping the
prospect of impeachment proceedings; of psychologists explaining
how to tell children that the President might be a liar and a
serial philanderer; of network anchors jetting back from Havana,
where they had thought maybe the big story of the week would
occur; and of Clinton explaining that yes, the American people
had a right to hear an answer about whether he had seduced an
employee, but no, he wasn't ready to give it just yet. The
normally surefooted White House spokesman Mike McCurry couldn't
get through the daily press briefing without getting stuck in
the contrivances of strict legalese over what was meant by
denying any "improper relationship." "I'm not going to parse the
statement," he said, not once, but five times. "It speaks for
itself."
"It's like we're standing under Niagara Falls, looking for a
boat to get us out of here," McCurry said privately. Many in the
White House had the air of experienced planecrash
investigators going about their business with grim efficiency.
As with past scandals like Whitewater and Travelgate, the White
House operation divided cleanly between the President's legal
team -- Charles Ruff, David Kendall, Bob Bennett -- who didn't want
Clinton to talk, period, and his political strategists, who
wanted to send him out to calm the waters. And so, true to form,
the President did both: gave his interviews but didn't say
anything. And that only made matters worse.
By this time everyone has learned that a Clinton denial must be
decoded. The man who once said he had "never broken the laws of
my country" when answering questions about his marijuana
inhaling (he was at Oxford at the time), and who claimed to have
"caused pain in my marriage" to avoid having to use the singular
or plural when discussing his love affairs, now faces an
audience no longer naive about presidential double-talk. Thus
when Clinton sat down with Jim Lehrer on Wednesday afternoon and
repeated, in heavily lawyered cadences, that "I didn't ask
anybody not to tell the truth," reporters pounced on the use of
the double negative as another linguistic trapdoor. Try as it
would, the White House could not seem to manage a believable
denial all day.
Hillary Goes To Bat, Again
And so by Wednesday night it was time for someone to take
charge, and it was certainly not going to be the President. He
was wiped out, flat on his back, depressed by the enormity of
what faced him. That collapse was by itself taken as a
confession of guilt even by those who had kept the faith for
years. While the President lay dead tired on the sofa, Hillary
went to war.
It all had a familiar feeling. Six years ago this past weekend,
just after the Super Bowl, Hillary Rodham Clinton held up her
head with the velvet band, nodded like Nancy Reagan in her
mother-of-the-bride sea-green outfit and saved her husband's
dying presidential candidacy on 60 Minutes. Choosing his words
carefully, Bill denied he had had a "12-year affair" with
Gennifer Flowers; Hillary's expression of faith in him was far
more persuasive than his answers; and Clinton went on to
victory. To those who wondered why she didn't walk away then,
and hasn't since, a close Clinton friend for two decades
replies: "They do not have the kind of marriage you and I have."
Whatever the latest charges against her husband, he is protected
by her utter loathing of the man who brings them: Independent
Counsel Kenneth Starr. Hillary has always seen Starr as a deeply
compromised, highly partisan enemy appointed out of political
vengeance by a three-judge panel headed by conservative Appeals
Court Judge David Sentelle. The Clintons have been dodging his
searchlights for nearly four years now, as he rooted around old
Arkansas land deals and Vince Foster's death and Travelgate and
other alleged White House transgressions. The only consolation
was that however much Starr tried to stretch his jurisdiction,
some things were still out of bounds.
But they weren't off limits to Paula Jones and her lawyers. They
have spent the past three years focused only on the President's
love life, tracking every woman the President ever worked with,
leered at, was alone in a room with, to try to prove a pattern
of sexual harassment. Last week they let on they were
considering deposing the President's cousin many times removed,
Catherine Cornelius, to see if their relationship went beyond
kinship. They have suggested that the list of women in their
sights is a mile long.
Up until now, the whole Jones operation always had a burlesque
quality to it; however plausible her charges that then Governor
Clinton tried to seduce her in an Arkansas hotel room, her
affiliation with avowed Clinton haters helped the White House
dismiss her crudely as just another book-deal-hungry gold
digger. The catastrophe for the White House last week was that
all the charges that were manageable when they were separate had
suddenly become one scandal, indivisible. When Monica Lewinsky,
subpoenaed to testify in the Jones case, whispered to Linda
Tripp that Clinton had urged her to deny the affair, Starr wired
Tripp up for confirmation. Then he went to the Justice
Department to demand a skeleton key that would give him access
to the whole ugly universe of sexual misconduct. It was
Hillary's worst nightmare; the man she hates most in the world
now has the right to probe the issues most painful to her. Even
if the Jones case were somehow settled tomorrow, which it won't
be, Ken Starr will never go away, and all the dark corners of
their marriage will now be his for the hunting.
So while others whispered resignation and worried about felony
charges, Hillary decided the Clintons would both come out
swinging. "We need a field general," she declared. None lives at
the Clinton White House anymore. The Old Guard, always spoiling
for a good fight, was gone long ago. Many people who are left
want to leave. Most wouldn't dream of asking the President
whether the charges were true, and wouldn't get an answer if
they did: many aides were simply too stunned and tired to trust
their judgment about what to say. While the nasty spin said
Monica was too fat, too dumb, even for Clinton, those with a
pulse murmured privately, as one put it, that "she fit the type
too well."
So there was really only one person who could muster the troops,
just as she had in Arkansas in 1980, in New Hampshire in 1992
and in the Executive Residence in 1994, when the Democratic
Party died. By Thursday, Hillary was putting together a new,
combative team. She wondered if her old, ousted alter ego Harold
Ickes could come back, and she added Mickey Kantor to the legal
team, more for his political skills than his legal ones. Adviser
Sid Blumenthal created a gigantic diagram inside his office
outlining with circles and arrows the byzantine Republican
conspiracy surrounding the tapes. A fierce argument raged over
whether the First Couple, singly or together, should sit down
for some big, cathartic confessional on the state of their union
before Tuesday's State of the Union. But that idea was rejected,
and by Saturday Hillary was fighting on several fronts at once.
First, she asked attorney Bob Bennett to try to move up the
trial date of the Paula Jones case, now scheduled to start in
May, to keep that scandal from dragging out any longer. Besides,
even if Jones has a case, it's a hard one to prove; and were
Clinton to emerge victorious from that trial, he could try to
spin it into a big, warm blanket vindication. Then she decided
that she would be the one to do the talking; she agreed to sit
down for a Tuesday Today show interview. If she had lost faith
in everyone else's ability to do damage control, she still had
faith in her own. "They are digging in for the fight of the
century," said a senior official tonight. "They are rolling out
artillery, antiaircraft guns, and talking about never
surrendering."
No Dearth of Interns
There are at any given time 250 interns strolling the 18-acre
White House campus, enrolled in the ultimate political science
class; and much of the staff is not much older. In the early
years it felt like a children's crusade: the President was in
his forties, most of his staff were in their thirties and the
rest in their twenties. One full-time staff member in the press
office was 19. Kids and Cabinet officers seemed to have equal
standing in the meetings that went on forever and ever. This was
the land of the adolescents who dissed Air Force generals, wore
multiple earrings and squeezed into every photo op with the
President.
The interns didn't just work at the White House; they seemed to
live there. And Clinton was known for hanging out at the offices
and cubicles where the prettiest ones worked. "It's a group of
men who look," said a female aide. "They all look. It's a
construction-worker mentality." Clinton made fun of George Bush
for not having a phone line that he could dial out on; last week
a White House official said, "There was a reason."
It sometimes seemed as though ambitious West Wing staff members
made a point of recruiting the prettiest interns -- not only for
their own aesthetic pleasure but in hopes that it would inspire
the boss to come around more often. That tactic did not go
unnoticed by the few senior women on the President's staff. A
former White House aide tells TIME that on several occasions
late in 1995 and early 1996, attractive young women were
transferred to the nether reaches of government because Clinton
kept dropping by unannounced to flirt with them. When Clinton
"got too chatty with somebody," explained the former aide, "a
couple of the older, more senior women on the staff would see
that these women got moved."
Ms. Lewinsky Goes To Washington
And that is just what happened to Monica Lewinsky. She had
arrived in Washington in the summer of 1995, the daughter of a
Beverly Hills cancer doctor and a sometime Hollywood gossip
writer. Lewinsky had just graduated as a psychology major from
Lewis and Clark College in Oregon and had come to the White
House to seek her fortune filing and photocopying and answering
the phones. Maybe get invited to a party. Maybe even get to meet
the President.
Interns would usually see the President's schedule a day ahead
of time but were told to keep their distance. "We were briefed a
number of times about what to do if the President is going to be
in the building," says a fellow intern. "They'd say, 'Follow
protocol. Get out of the way.'" A plum assignment was anything
that required a blue pass for the West Wing, which allowed an
intern to roam the West Wing more or less at will. Betty Currie,
one of the President's private secretaries, was "an
untouchable," off limits for networking, and any unsolicited
conversation at all from interns.
But Monica was not just any intern. The portrait that was
painted last week, by the tapes and the tabloids, was of a
rather insinuating, flirtatious young woman with a habit of
walking into bosses' offices with coffee they did not ask for.
She told her friend Tripp that she met the President at a party
that November, where she appeared in a fetching dress and caught
the President's eye. Soon after, they began their relationship,
she claimed, around the time she was hired as a regular White
House staff member, working in the East Wing office of the
legislative affairs shop, blue pass around her neck.
But by the following April, she was out of the White House,
moved to a job at the Pentagon in spokesman Kenneth Bacon's
Office of Public Affairs. As fate would have it, however,
Bacon's office was the wrong landing pad for a young woman who
loved to gossip. Sitting not far away was Linda Tripp, another
former White House aide, who had joined the Bush Administration
as a secretary and later ran afoul of the Clinton team. Though
Tripp was earnest and efficient, with good instincts and a gift
for prose, few White House staff members had good things to say
about her last week. "She was awful," says one former official
who worked with her in the White House counsel's office. "She
was surly; she was sullen; she had a chip on her shoulder and a
nasty look on her face." She routinely fought with the other
assistants. "We thought she was a Bushie," says one official,
"but the real problem is that no one liked her. She was
difficult, contentious; the other secretaries just hated her."
The Odd Tale of Linda Tripp
How Tripp came to start taping her young friend is itself a
cautionary tale for White House damage controllers. Tripp had a
history of befriending women who told tales of intimate
encounters with the President. She certainly shared the view of
those who disapproved of the frolicsome Clinton culture, and was
pleased by the 1996 publication of former FBI agent Gary
Aldrich's book in which he alleged that sex toys dangled from
the White House Christmas tree. Tripp was annoyed by the efforts
of the President's men to discredit the author.
When she was still at the White House, she saw a volunteer named
Kathleen Willey not far from the Oval Office, her makeup
smudged, her blouse untucked. Last summer, when Newsweek ran a
story about Tripp's account of Willey's saying that Clinton had
kissed and fondled her, lawyer Bennett publicly challenged
Tripp's honesty. But lawyers for Paula Jones saw Willey and
Tripp as golden witnesses and aimed subpoenas at them. Tripp
anticipated that she would be asked about Lewinsky and that the
White House would challenge anything she had to say. So last
August she sought the advice of a friend, a literary agent and
former Nixon operative, Lucianne Goldberg. Goldberg has
represented the Arkansas state troopers who went public with
stories of Clinton womanizing, as well as a woman named Dolly
Kyle Browning who has been trying to sell an account of her own
alleged affair with the President. The agent had approached
Tripp through an intermediary months before to suggest she
participate in a book on former White House lawyer Vince Foster;
Tripp had been the last to see Foster before his suicide. The
women never struck a deal, but they became close, and Tripp
followed Goldberg's counsel on what to do about Lewinsky: she
went to RadioShack and bought a tape recorder.
Tripp's conversations with Lewinsky -- some taped, some just
recalled -- tell a steamy story of sex and power, pressure and
confusion. The women spoke all the time, in the Pentagon
corridors, over coffee, when they met after work for a drink or
drove home together. Lewinsky spoke of at least a dozen sexual
encounters with Clinton, perhaps as many as 20. She claimed she
would go to the White House, usually in the late afternoon or
evenings, and be cleared in by Currie. When Lewinsky and the
President couldn't rendezvous in person, they allegedly did it
on the phone. The phone sex picked up in frequency as her
invitations to see Clinton tapered off after the Willey story
broke last August.
Monica's Account
Lewinsky's account alternates from puppy love for the man she
refers to as "handsome" to sorrow that she didn't get to see him
as much as she wanted, to eventual bitterness at "the Creep" who
let her be banished to the Pentagon. Talking to Tripp, she
referred to his intrusive staff as "the protectors" and to
ex-girlfriends in the White House as "graduates." At times the
very amount of detail strains credulity. In one exchange,
Lewinsky laments that when she tried to get into the White House
one night to visit the President, the guard turned her away,
saying another woman had got there first.
There is throughout the account the sweet-and-sour scent of a
high school romance. Lewinsky talked of presents they exchanged:
he gave her a dress and a volume of Walt Whitman's Leaves of
Grass; she gave him ties and a statue of a frog (an old Clinton
obsession), along with love letters and a sexually explicit
tape; the packages were addressed to Currie and delivered by
private courier.
Lewinsky also brought at least three microcassettes from her
home message machine and played them for Tripp at the Pentagon.
The President can be heard saying hello, but leaving no lengthy
messages and certainly nothing incriminating. But in her
conversations with Tripp, Lewinsky referred to the President's
legal coaching: when she expressed fears about records of her
comings and goings and what Currie might say one day in a sworn
deposition, Clinton supposedly replied, "There's no proof. Look
them in the eye and deny it."
Even more damaging are the conversations that occurred after
Lewinsky was subpoenaed by Paula Jones' lawyers in December. She
said Clinton told her to see his friend Vernon Jordan, and he'd
help her out. She met him in his Dupont Circle office, and she
presented Jordan a list of public relations firms she'd like to
work for. The next time they met he picked her up at the
Pentagon to go meet a lawyer and draft her affidavit. "Take your
anger and frustration with the President and vent them on me,"
he told her at the time, adding that perjury in a civil case is
rarely prosecuted. Jordan confirmed last week that he had indeed
helped her find a lawyer and guided her toward several job
possibilities in the private sector, at American Express or at
Revlon, where he serves as a director.
In his statement explaining how one of the most powerful men in
Washington came to be job hunting for a 24-year-old secretary,
Jordan maintained that he helped Lewinsky because he himself
stood "on the shoulders of many individuals who have helped me"
and that "to whom much is given much is required." He also said
that in their conversations Lewinsky had adamantly denied having
an affair with the President, which begs the question of how
that subject came up in the first place.
The Deposition
By last month the corridor conversations between Tripp and
Lewinsky had gone from girl talk to a deadly serious question
about whether to lie under oath about the behavior of the
President of the United States. Lewinsky apparently told Tripp
she intended to deny the affair in her deposition and urged
Tripp to do the same. Lewinsky warned Tripp that if she
testified about the affair while Lewinsky and Clinton continued
to stand fast, she would be isolated and vulnerable and her job
would be in jeopardy. Excerpts of a small portion of the tapes,
released by Newsweek, quote Lewinsky discussing whether to lie
about her relationship with the President. "I would lie on the
stand for my family," she says. "That is how I was raised... I
have lied my entire life." She adds, "I will deny it so he will
not get screwed in the case, but I'm going to get screwed
personally." She also discusses Tripp's faking a foot accident
to delay the deposition, and quotes her mother as saying the
idea is "'brilliant.'"
In a sworn affidavit on Jan. 7, Lewinsky reportedly denied
having a sexual relationship with Clinton. But Tripp meanwhile
was pursuing a very different strategy. Lawyer Kirby Behre,
retained by the White House to prepare her for congressional
committees and grand jury investigations into Travelgate and
Vince Foster's suicide, did not seem to Tripp terribly
interested. So she decided it was time for a more aggressive
defender. She brought her tapes to James Moody, a solo
practitioner who specializes in fighting regulations, whom she
had met during the Bush Administration. Moody had little faith
in Janet Reno's Justice Department and agreed with Tripp that
they should turn the tapes over to Starr.
For Starr, whose investigation had been going heaven only knows
where for four years, Tripp was a gift from God. They met on
Monday, Jan. 12, and Moody was stunned by the speed of Starr's
response. The next day, Tripp was outfitted with a body wire so
they could tape her meeting with Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton in
Pentagon City. Once again Lewinsky discussed her plans to cover
up the affair, and her hopes that Jordan would help her land a
good job.
That Wednesday, Lewinsky drove Tripp home from the Pentagon and
offered her a mysterious set of "talking points" about how to
handle her deposition. It was clear Lewinsky hadn't written the
document herself, but she didn't say who had given it to her.
The document recommended that Tripp change her story about
Willey, suggest that she could have smeared her own makeup and
messed up her clothes. And it recommended that Tripp dismiss
Lewinsky as a liar and a stalker of the President, in effect
supporting Lewinsky's sworn statement that there was no affair.
But Starr now had evidence that would potentially support
charges of perjury, suborning perjury and obstruction of
justice. He approached the Justice Department and received
formal permission to expand his inquiry. When Newsweek called to
say it was preparing to run the first detailed account of the
Lewinsky affair, Starr pressured the editors to hold off, to
allow him time to enlist Lewinsky's aid in stinging Jordan and
potentially the President as well. When Lewinsky met Tripp at
the Ritz-Carlton again on Friday, she quickly found herself
surrounded by FBI agents and prosecutors and directed upstairs
to confront her predicament.
Let's Make A Deal
And so began the strangest and most pivotal chapter in the whole
drama: the Getting to Know You duet between Ken Starr and Monica
Lewinsky. In exchange for immunity, he wanted her to tell him
all the details of the affair, and most important, to agree to
wear a wire that would let him catch Jordan trying to keep her
quiet. Otherwise, he had the tapes that would allow him to
prosecute her for perjury. Faced with this choice, Lewinsky fell
apart. She cried. She asked for her mother. "My life is ruined,"
she said.
It would take a while for her mother to reach Washington by
train from New York City; Monica was frantic, and Starr's team
had to calm her down. They bought her cookies. They watched
Ethel Merman with her on TV. They took her shopping in the mall
downstairs at Crate & Barrel. Lewinsky's father back in
California had reached a longtime family friend, a medical
malpractice lawyer named William Ginsburg, and Ginsburg reached
Starr's team by phone around 10:30 that night. Ginsburg asked
them to write down the terms of an immunity deal and fax it to
him. We have no computer, they replied. Write it on hotel
stationery, he suggested. They refused. Ginsburg offered to fly
to Washington that night by charter if they would just put
something in writing. No deal.
By the next evening, Ginsburg had arrived in Washington and gone
to Starr's offices, where they told him the deal was off. And so
the big squeeze tightened. Starr had been burned before,
offering Clinton buddy Webb Hubbell a light sentence if he would
sing about Whitewater, and getting little in return. This time
around, Starr needs Lewinsky in order to make his case work, but
knows that she alone is not enough. He needs some corroborating
evidence of obstruction of justice to head off a
he-said/she-said battle, in which the Leader of the Free World
would have the advantage. Starr was prepared to immunize Monica
before the story broke; she would have had a chance to produce
new evidence by secretly taping or gathering statements from
others to support her obstruction story. But by the middle of
last week, when the cover had been blown, she may have had
nothing left to give but old trinkets and a stained dress.
So it became all the more vital to portray her as a vulnerable
victim of an ugly power struggle. Ginsburg may not be a criminal
lawyer, but he knows how to do p.r. The bearded, besweatered,
avuncular lawyer, looking every inch the indignant father
figure, gave a string of carefully chosen television interviews.
He directed his fire both at Starr and the President for
"savaging" a "child." "My client...is at the vortex of a storm
involving three of the most powerful people in the United
States: President Clinton, Vernon Jordan and Kenneth Starr."
The "immunity dance" proceeded in fits and starts through the
week -- part flirtation, part bluff, part intimidation, which will
need to end in an embrace for both sides to survive. It was
clear by week's end that Lewinsky herself was now a target of a
criminal investigation. Starr told the FBI he was going to need
"additional resources" to do all the legwork. And he began
issuing subpoenas that would send agents throughout the city
with a vacuum cleaner.
By this time the historical echoes were so loud, it was time for
a flashback: it came when FBI agents descended on the Watergate
to search Lewinsky's apartment. They knew what they were looking
for: her black and dark blue dresses; some T shirts Clinton
allegedly gave her; a gold pin and trinkets from the Black Dog
gift shop on Martha's Vineyard, where the First Family
vacations; some hats; the volume of Whitman; a computer.
Meanwhile, Starr subpoenaed the Pentagon and the White House for
phone, computer and personnel records on both Tripp and
Lewinsky. He served Lewinsky with a subpoena to appear before a
grand jury this Tuesday.
The Hill Response
Certainly no audience to the spectacle was more entranced than
the G.O.P. lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who shared the general
belief that when your opponent is shooting himself in the foot,
you don't get in the way. Early on, the Republican leadership
spread the word to members not to comment or get involved in the
scandal lest they lend credence to the idea that this is just
another Republican attack. "We're trying to keep the fruitcakes
under control," said one G.O.P. staff member. "For us it's
better if this thing drags on for a while," the staff member
joked. "At least we don't have to come up with an agenda."
Thus Newt Gingrich said he wanted to wait until all the facts
were in; Trent Lott said that the allegations were "very
serious" but that he'd been in Mississippi for two days and
wasn't sure about the details. The political calculation among
Republicans could be that a wounded Clinton who serves out his
term is better than an incumbent President Gore who has put all
this ugliness behind him. It was a measure of the President's
free fall that his own former chief of staff Leon Panetta told
the San Jose Mercury News that if the allegations are true, it
might be better "if Gore became President and you had a new
message and a new individual up there. The worst scenario is if
there's substance to it and it drags out." For their part, other
leading Democrats were loudly silent.
In the midst of last week's public carnage, it's hard to
imagine, but there were those who could see a strategy forming.
Clinton will never resign, they insist; he will fight every inch
to avoid becoming the second President in history to resign in
disgrace, as opposed to one of several tarnished by sexual
scandals that future historians might just decide to ignore. He
will try to change the subject, with lots of purposeful
activity, outlined in the State of the Union, a new balanced
budget, a response to Saddam Hussein. Let people get used to
some further degradation of the public discourse; spread the
word, quietly, that Lewinsky was a flighty, gossip-mongering
groupie. Above all, trust that if the affair ever wound up being
tried before the Senate, that is the last body that would
comfortably sit in judgment of a man who believes that a
relationship based on oral sex is neither sexual nor a
relationship.
That doesn't mean that there will be anything left of his
presidency. Clinton's grandest ambitions for his have already,
repeatedly fallen prey to his scandals; one reason the whole
health-care initiative fell apart was that it was a bad idea,
but the other was that lawmakers could just ignore him as long
as he was in deep trouble over Whitewater. A leader without
ideology, with no movement to lead or party to follow, has only
his stature and powers of persuasion to move an agenda. And
those are dwindling fast.
--Reported by Jay Branegan, Margaret
Carlson, Michael Duffy, J.F.O. McAllister, Viveca Novak, Douglas
Waller and Michael Weisskopf/Washington
What Starr Wants
Starr's office is busy sending out subpoenas, some for documents
and some for personal appearances. Vernon Jordan, Bill Clinton's
consigliere, received one, as did his secretary Betty Currie.
Starr issued similar demands to the White House; to Bill
Richardson, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., who had offered
Lewinsky a job; to the Pentagon's p.r. department, where Monica
Lewinsky worked; and to the Rutherford Institute, supporters of
Paula Jones' sexual-harassment case against the
President--because Lewinsky had been subpoenaed for their case.
Among the items sought pertaining to Lewinsky:
E-mail messages
Phone records
Travel records
Credit-card charges
Letters
Memos
Security logs
Monica's Odyssey
>
May 1995
Monica Lewinsky graduates with a degree in psychology from Lewis
and Clark College
June 1995
Lewinsky joins the White House staff as an unpaid intern in the
office of chief of staff Leon Panetta
November 1995
Lewinsky, wearing a fetching dress, meets Clinton at a
Washington party
December 1995
She is given a salaried position in the White House Office of
Legislative Affairs. At around this time, she begins her alleged
trysts with Clinton
April 1996
Lewinsky leaves the White House to work in the Pentagon for
spokesman Kenneth Bacon
Autumn 1997
In phone calls with her friend and Pentagon co-worker Linda
Tripp, Lewinsky says she has had a sexual relationship with the
President. Tripp secretly tape-records the conversations
December 1997
Lewinsky leaves government service
Jan. 7, 1998
In a sworn affidavit provided for the Paula Jones sexual-
harassment suit against Clinton, Lewinsky denies that she ever
had a sexual relationship with the President
Jan. 12, 1998
Tripp tells independent counsel Kenneth Starr about the tapes
and turns over 20 hours' worth of phone conversations
Jan. 13, 1998
Lewinsky spends several hours at a Virginia hotel talking with
Tripp, who has been wired by FBI agents working for Starr
Jan. 16, 1998
Starr gets the go-ahead from a federal panel to look into
allegations that Clinton and Vernon Jordan had urged Lewinsky to
lie under oath about her relationship with the President
Jan. 17, 1998
In his deposition in the Jones lawsuit, Clinton denies any
affair with the former intern
Jan. 20, 1998
Existence of tapes becomes public
Jan. 21, 1998
In interviews, the President denies a sexual relationship with
Lewinsky
Jan. 24, 1998
Lewinsky's lawyer says that "everything is on the table" in
discussions over immunity
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