A Vast Conspiracy (18 page)

For Bill Clinton, the political showdown with the Republicans in 1995 paralleled another moment four years earlier. Clinton had endured several rocky months in 1991 when he was trying to make up his mind about whether to run for president. In his last reelection campaign for governor of Arkansas, he had pledged not to seek higher office, and he was struggling to climb away from that promise. President Bush was still basking in the success of the Persian Gulf War. In the midst of these troubles, Clinton traveled to Cleveland to give the keynote address at the national meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council, the collection of moderate Democrats he then chaired. Speaking from only a handful of notes, Clinton gave what was widely regarded as the best political speech of the year. “We’re here to
save the United States of America,” he said. “Our burden is to give the people a new choice rooted in old values. A new choice that is simple, that offers opportunity, demands responsibility, gives citizens more say, provides them with responsive government, all because we recognize that we are community.” The national press corps gave the speech rapturous reviews. On this day, more than any other, Bill Clinton became a realistic possibility as a presidential candidate. It was a day, like the one in November 1995, of the most powerful kind of adrenaline rush an American politician can enjoy. It was May 6, 1991, two days before Bill Clinton appeared at the Governor’s Quality Management Conference at the Excelsior Hotel.

Henry Kissinger’s observation that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac has become a cliché because it made the obvious sound original. Politicians have led charged sexual lives through all of history. In some cases, no doubt, they have used their power to coerce unwilling partners, but just as surely many women have sought them out. In the twentieth century alone, the ranks of presidential adulterers include, among others, Warren Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy—a terrible president, a great president, and one viewed ambivalently by history. In other words, their sex lives revealed little about their presidencies—or their “character.” Clinton, too, strayed during his long marriage—a damning fact about him as a husband but one with no bearing on his record as a public man.

In part because of his status as a symbol of sybaritic baby boomers, Clinton developed the reputation of a kind of Lothario, somewhere between a suave seducer and a relentless conqueror. If his dealings with Monica Lewinsky were any indication, however, both descriptions seem wrong. To be sure, few relationships would shine under the kind of microscopic attention that was focused on the president and the intern, but Clinton appeared more miserable than joyous in his sexuality—guilt-ridden, selfish, compulsive. Bob Bennett once told Clinton as much. Having surveyed private investigators’ reports and interviews with dozens of purported lovers, the lawyer told the president, “This stuff would kill your reputation.” Clinton never hid his interest in sex. His handshakes with pretty women lingered, and he leered without apology. But there was a lot more talk than action.

Once the squalid details of the Lewinsky story broke, some of his old friends shared a rueful memory. During the early days of the 1992 presidential campaign, when Clinton’s staff was small and the circumstances intimate,
one young woman confided to another that she had had an erotic dream about one of their colleagues—George Stephanopoulos, whom she barely knew. Somehow this story reached the candidate, and it prompted him to initiate a series of late-night conversations with staffers about sexual fantasies. Clinton never laid a hand on anyone during these talks in airplanes and hotel rooms, but they occurred in an atmosphere thick with sexual tension. When it was Clinton’s turn to talk, he often returned to the same scenario: that he was standing in a doorway as a woman kneeled before him and performed oral sex.

When Monica Lewinsky gave a deposition during Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999, she was examined by Tennessee congressman Ed Bryant, one of the House impeachment managers. Bryant decided to break the ice with a few questions about Lewinsky’s background. “Tell me about your work history, briefly,” he said, “from the time you left college until, let’s say, you started as an intern in the White House.” Lewinsky looked at the congressman as if he were crazy (not for the last time in their interview, either).

“Uh, I wasn’t working from the time …” she said.

“Okay,” her nervous inquisitor replied and turned to another subject. Bryant had forgotten that Lewinsky had no real “work history” before she came to the White House. Lewinsky graduated from Lewis and Clark College in May 1995 and began her internship two months later, shortly before her twenty-second birthday. (Lewinsky was six and a half years older than Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea.)

Lewinsky had been raised in Beverly Hills, the daughter of a moderately prosperous oncologist and a socially ambitious housewife. In a home, and a town, where learning mattered less than looks, Lewinsky had spent most of her brief life obsessed with her weight. She drifted from one high school to another, from a mediocre junior college to a modestly regarded university, and made little impact anywhere she went. By the standards of most Americans, her life was privileged—expensive schools, private lessons, powerful friends, and plenty of money for clothes and vacations. Yet once she became famous, Lewinsky did little but dwell on her supposed privations—that her parents divorced, that a mean boy had called her “Big Mac,” that she lacked “self-esteem.” Before she became obsessed with the president of the United States, her only other serious interest in life was dieting.

Indeed, even beyond the fact that Lewinsky and Paula Jones both entered Bill Clinton’s life at politically exhilarating moments for him, the two women had a great deal in common. Owing to differences in social class, Lewinsky appeared more sophisticated and worldly than Jones. Still, their similarities were considerable, starting with their ages (Monica was twenty-two, Paula twenty-four) and their personalities—both bubbly, outgoing, and friendly. They also lacked talent, learning, wit, great beauty, interest in the outside world, or knowledge of politics. The most important thing they shared was an apparent sexual availability. Clinton told his trooper Danny Ferguson that Paula had “that come-hither look.” Lewinsky just said to Clinton, Come hither.

Before November 15, 1995, Clinton and Lewinsky had never had an actual conversation, though she later asserted they had engaged in “intense flirting” through eye contact. During the shutdown, all but ninety of the 430 employees of the White House were furloughed, so unpaid interns took up the slack. Lewinsky was assigned to the office of Leon Panetta, the chief of staff, just down a corridor from the Oval Office. Clinton spent most of the day negotiating with congressional leaders, and he popped in and out of Panetta’s office several times. To Lewinsky’s credit, she never portrayed herself as any kind of victim of Clinton’s advances. Indeed, her own account of that day demonstrated how hard she tried to seduce the president. Her efforts began with a now-famous gesture. Noting that Clinton was alone for a moment in Panetta’s office, she lifted her jacket and gave the president a quick glance at the top of her thong underwear, which showed above the waist of her pants. Clinton, Lewinsky recalled, smiled enigmatically.

A little later, according to the methodical accounting of the Starr report, “En route to the rest room at about 8
P.M.
, she passed George Stephanopoulos’ office.” In fact, Starr’s sleuths failed to note that this venture alone was a pretty bold gesture. To cross Clinton’s path, Lewinsky had chosen the bathroom that was closest to the president’s domain in the West Wing. As she had hoped, Lewinsky found the president alone in Stephanopoulos’s office. (Stephanopoulos himself was lobbying on Capitol Hill.) Clinton noticed Lewinsky, beckoned her in, and made small talk, asking her where she had gone to school. Instead of answering, Lewinsky blurted out, “You know, I have a really big crush on you.” Clinton invited her to his private study, a few steps away. There they kissed for the first time. Lewinsky recalled breathlessly that “his eyes were very soul-searching, very
wanting, very needing and very loving.” They soon parted, but before the end of the evening, Clinton found Lewinsky alone in Panetta’s office and invited her to meet him in Stephanopoulos’s office again. To prepare for this second meeting of the night, Lewinsky removed her underwear.

There was a kind of poignancy in where Clinton chose to take Lewinsky at that point. The couple went to the tiny hallway that ran from the closed door to Stephanopoulos’s office to the closed door to the Oval Office. On one side of this hallway was a tiny bathroom, on the other a door to Clinton’s private study. It was the only place in the White House where the president could pretty much guarantee that he would not be seen by anyone. For all that Clinton may have wanted to pursue women during his presidency, his encounters with Lewinsky illustrated the logistical challenges. It took not only a determined partner, but one who didn’t mind awkward and degrading circumstances. Monica Lewinsky fit the bill.

In the protected hallway, Clinton and Lewinsky began to kiss again, but they were interrupted by the telephone ringing in his study. In the surreal deadpan of the FBI summary of Lewinsky’s interview on the subject, the agent recounted: “The President began kissing her and she unbuttoned her jacket. The President pulled her bra up (he only unhooked her bra once in subsequent sexual contacts) and put his hand down into her pants. The President received a phone call from a Congressman or Senator. While talking on the telephone, the President kept his hand in
LEWINSKY’S
pants to stimulate her, thereby causing her to have an orgasm or two.”

As the Starr report described what followed, “While the President continued talking on the phone, she performed oral sex on him. He finished the call, and, a moment later, told Ms. Lewinsky to stop. In her recollection: ‘I told him I wanted … to complete that. And he said … that he needed to wait until he trusted me more.’ ” (At that moment Clinton could not have known how right he was to worry about the consequences of what became known, delicately, as “completion.”) The Starr authors concluded their description with one of the report’s several gratuitous and cruel observations about the Clintons’ marriage. “And then I think he made a joke,” the report quoted Lewinsky as saying, “that he hadn’t had that in a long time.”

Sixteen months later, on March 29, 1997, Clinton and Lewinsky had their final sexual encounter. But it would be a mistake to think of their affair as lasting nearly a year and a half. They never had more than sporadic contact,
and they had “sex” with each other—using the term in a loose, colloquial sense—only about a dozen times. Moreover, nearly all of the physical intimacy between them took place within a few months of the government shutdown. Indeed, there was only one month when they had sustained contact. (Their relationship can be reconstructed with this kind of precision because Lewinsky possessed an extraordinary memory, and her friend Linda Tripp persuaded her to make a computerized matrix of all of her contacts with the president. In addition, the Starr prosecutors forced Lewinsky to supply minute-by-minute accounts of all of her dealings with Clinton.)

The month of glory for the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship was January 1996. After their first encounter on November 15, they had another two days later, while the government shutdown was still in effect. Clinton orchestrated this second rendezvous by asking Lewinsky to bring him a slice of pizza. As on the first occasion, Clinton was lobbying congressmen on the telephone while Lewinsky performed her ministrations. Lewinsky, who moved to a junior position on the president’s legislative staff after the shutdown, worried that with the return of the normal White House operations, the president would forget about her. Lewinsky recalled for her friend Linda Tripp, in one of their taped telephone conversations, “You know, I mean, when this first happened, I mean, I said to my mom, I said, ‘Well, I think he just fooled around with me because his girlfriend was probably furloughed.’ ” But around lunchtime on New Year’s Eve, Lewinsky engineered a visit to Bayani Nelvis, one of the president’s Navy stewards, and she succeeded in running into Clinton. At that meeting, Lewinsky quizzed the president about her actual name—he had been calling her “kiddo”—and when he passed the tests, she performed oral sex on him. For the first time, he was not on the telephone.