MONICA’S LOLLIPOP

WITH THE MONICA LEWINSKY AFFAIR, we entered an era in which a
politician’s sex drive and misconduct could bring the government low. When the news
alleging a sexual affair between the president and a White House intern first broke, in
January 1998, my husband, Art, and I were in Paris, on our way to the airport. Early on,
it was hard to gauge how much trouble this would mean for the Clinton administration
and America, but I realized that it meant immediate trouble for me. I called artists
from Paris asking them to fax cover sketches to my house in time for my arrival. After a
recent submission of Art’s had been rejected, he had sworn that he would never attempt
another cover, yet on the flight home he seemed unable to resist sketching. I swept up
his sketches along with those of the other artists and went directly to my office, which
was, as I’d expected, in an uproar. Art’s cover, titled “The Low Road” (opposite), was
published in mid-February. By the end of the summer, Tina had left and we had a new
editor, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Remnick. It was all Monica all the time
when Anita Kunz proposed the image below for the most innocent of topics, back to
school. Meanwhile Art jokingly offered “Clinton’s Last Request” (right), which ended
up running in the online magazine Salon, instead.

When Esquire published a cover portrait of
Clinton by Platon (above) everyone cried
foul, but the photographer asserted that all
the image showed was “Clinton loving the
fact that he was the president.”

32