Chapter Twenty-one

SEEDS OF DISASTER

She had fixed her gaze on him for months, desperately hoping to draw attention. He had noticed her vaguely, on the periphery of his consciousness. This shadowy flirtation continued for several months after Monica S. Lewinsky’s arrival at the White House, fresh from college, for an internship in the summer of 1995. She had been recommended to the White House by Walter Kaye, a friend and major political contributor to the Clintons, and also a friend of Lewinsky’s mother. Lewinsky was smitten from the outset. When the president left on trips, the interns would be invited to gather on the South Lawn to watch him board Marine One for the short helicopter ride to Andrews Air Force Base. Lewinsky would be there, always at the front of the crowd, a buxom young woman who knew how to make herself noticed. There were precious moments of eye contact, she later recalled, when she felt certain she was making a connection. Her intuition was correct. Later, there was a chance meeting in a White House hallway. She stuck her hand out and formally introduced herself to Clinton for the first time when she wasn’t in a crowd. Yes, he said, I know who you are.

Under ordinary circumstances, the fantasy that was preoccupying her thoughts and was percolating at the margins of his would have remained unspoken—and unrealized. The extraordinary circumstances of the government shutdown that November gave Clinton an opportunity to get into trouble. On the first night of the shutdown, November 14, Clinton had escaped the pressures of the moment with a brisk walk around the White House grounds with Gene Sperling. Later, Sperling’s friends would joke ruefully: Where were you, Gene, on the second night? For it was on the night of the fifteenth that Clinton and Lewinsky found each other alone. Because of the shutdown, the White House was operating on a skeleton staff, while most people remained home on furlough. People in the chief of staff’s office, however, were considered essential workers and remained on the job. This included the chief of staff’s unpaid intern, who was delighted to be put to work now answering phones in the West Wing, instead of sitting at her usual desk next door in the Old Executive Office Building. All through the afternoon, she saw Clinton several times, always with others around. They kept catching each other’s gaze. That evening, Clinton walked into the chief of staff’s office when there was no one there but Lewinsky. She seized her chance. In a flash, Lewinsky pulled up her dress to show Clinton the straps on the thong underwear she was wearing. She later described the moment as “a subtle, flirtatious gesture.” Somehow, he interpreted this delicate signal as an invitation.

A few minutes later, he beckoned the young woman into George Stephanopoulos’s darkened office, which was connected through a back door to the president’s private dining room and a hallway that led past a small study and into the Oval Office. She told the president she had a crush on him. He laughed and invited her to see his study. In the hallway outside, he asked if he could kiss her. She said yes. After this embrace, she wrote down her name and telephone number, gave them to Clinton, and returned to work.

One can imagine the guilty negotiation between desire and conscience in Clinton’s mind over the next hour. Around nine-thirty that night, the president approached Lewinsky in Panetta’s office and invited her to meet again in Stephanopoulos’s office. There was another kiss, hands wandering as the couple partially disrobed. In the president’s study, as the intern later recalled, Lewinsky performed oral sex on him for the first time. Clinton did not allow pleasure to interfere with business. During the encounter, he talked on the telephone with two members of Congress. Aware of how reckless he was being, Clinton apparently rationalized his behavior by drawing arbitrary lines. As he approached climax, he stopped Lewinsky. He did not know her well enough yet for that, he explained. He complimented her, joking that it had been “a long time” since he had enjoyed anything like that. Then, turning more serious, he tugged at the pink intern pass hanging from her neck. “This could be a problem,” he said.

There was another sexual encounter two nights later, when Lewinsky arrived at Clinton’s suggestion with some pizza that had been ordered to Panetta’s office. “I’m usually here on weekends,” Clinton told the young woman, “no one else is around, and you can come and see me.” But there were no more meetings for another six weeks. Then, on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, before the Clintons were to make their annual sojourn to Renaissance Weekend at Hilton Head Island, Clinton bumped into Lewinsky again in a West Wing hallway. She had by now been hired from her internship as a junior employee in the Office of Legislative Affairs. She introduced herself again, certain that Clinton had forgotten her name since he called her “Kiddo.” There was another hurried furtive liaison that day, followed by another a week later, followed by another two weeks after that. Their affair, at once exhilarating and pitiful, was under way.

Few people who knew Clinton, or followed his career in any detail, were surprised eventually to learn that the president had succumbed to temptation. Rumors of his itinerant ways had followed him his adult life. Yet there was genuine surprise among many of his friends and associates that he would slip in the way he did. At a practical level, many people had assumed that there was little opportunity to carry on an adulterous affair in the confines of a modern White House, with all the staff and scrutiny that follow a president. At a more personal level, they were distraught over the particular circumstances of this affair. Lewinsky, after all, was not much older than his own daughter. She was a bright young woman, not without charm, and pretty despite her lifelong struggle with weight. But she was also immature, prone to insecurity and flights of self-absorption. That Clinton would find comfort in such company was dismaying.

It also left friends groping for an explanation. Why did this dangerous and degrading relationship happen? One answer explained the Lewinsky infatuation as a rebellion by a man against the confines of his office. This view, espoused by several old Arkansas friends, held that a sprawling and spontaneous personality had become progressively more contained and isolated under the demands of the presidency. He no longer went running when he wanted, for it had proven to be such a logistical hassle that increasingly he didn’t bother. He no longer called up friends and went out to dinner on a moment’s notice. He hardly controlled his own schedule at all anymore. In addition, some of his Arkansas friends were regarded as intruders and potential troublemakers by the West Wing staff, who labored to keep them away. Clinton could not put his arms around an attractive woman and flirt, the way he did back in Arkansas. His staff had fits when this happened, and took pains to ensure that attractive women who might cause gossip were kept away from him. Marsha Scott, a perceptive Arkansas friend working in the White House, complained to Erskine Bowles when he was deputy chief of staff that the president, in the name of a more organized White House, was being cut off from friends and his own ebullient nature. This was not healthy, she warned. You need to open the windows and let him be himself. Bowles told her that a more orderly West Wing was for Clinton’s own good, and coolly suggested that Scott leave well enough alone.

Dick Morris, too, had observed a man whose personality seemed trapped in a bottle. “He had been forced to change his basic nature, the way his mind worked,” recalled Morris. Self-restraint came at a psychic cost, the consultant believed, leaving Clinton sullen and isolated.

This was particularly true when Clinton was feeling under assault. The Lewinsky relationship blossomed at a moment when the president was besieged on two fronts. In his political life, there was the pressure of the showdown with Republicans over the budget and government shutdown. In his personal life, late December and early January was an especially unhappy time for the Clintons in their confrontation with Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who had replaced Robert Fiske. Legal records of Hillary Clinton’s that Starr had long since subpoenaed were suddenly discovered, as the first lady awkwardly explained it, in a crowded storage closet in the White House residence. The circumstances did indeed smell a little fishy, and a disbelieving Starr decided it was time to get tough. Previous depositions with the Clintons had always been held discreetly in the White House. This time, he subpoenaed Hillary Clinton to appear in person before the federal grand jury to explain her story about the records—a public spectacle, the clear purpose of which was to embarrass the first lady. The Clintons could do nothing but take it.

The president had taken steps to address the isolation that people like Morris and Scott observed. Early in his first term, he set up a fax line outside his office and even a special zip code that allowed old friends to stay in touch with him without their messages being lost in the shuffle of some fifteen thousand letters a day that came into the White House. Old Hot Springs friends like Carolyn Staley and David Leopoulos regularly sent in pick-me-up notes or offered informal advice about how his policies were playing back home.

Still, Clinton sometimes confessed that his White House life left him feeling an emotional void. One day with Lewinsky he said, “I have an empty life except for work, and it’s an obsession.”

“Well, don’t you get any warmth?” Lewinsky asked, meaning from the first lady.

Turning defensive, Clinton abruptly shut the conversation down. “Of course I do,” he said.

All through the winter of 1996, the president’s liaisons with Lewinsky continued. He was plainly guilt-stricken. On February 19, the President’s Day holiday, he called her Watergate apartment, in a voice that made clear to her something was the matter. Without invitation, she soon showed up in the Oval Office. What they had been doing was wrong, he told her, and they had to stop. He hugged her, but refused to kiss her, and assured her they could still be friends. This restraint lasted a little more than a month. Late in March, Lewinsky passed the president in the hallway; he was wearing a tie she had given him. Where did you get that? she asked coyly. “Some girl with style gave it to me,” he responded. Two days later, while Hillary Clinton was overseas on a foreign trip, Lewinsky was back in the Oval Office for yet another sexual encounter. There was another a week later, on Easter Sunday.

One of Clinton’s illusions during this period was that he and Lewinsky were being scrupulously clandestine. They relied on Betty Currie, a kindly woman who was one of Clinton’s two secretaries, to be Lewinsky’s ostensible point of contact when visiting the Oval Office. Currie was purposely incurious about the nature of the visits. Beyond her, the president presumed he was being properly discreet. In fact, he was surrounded by a widening circle of people who had little doubt about what was transpiring. When Lewinsky showed up at the White House gate on weekends, Secret Service officers would amuse themselves by placing bets on how many minutes it would take until they saw their computers flash that the president was leaving his residence for the West Wing. Some West Wing personnel resented being put in what they felt were compromised positions. Harold Ickes and a uniformed Secret Service officer once entered the Oval Office, trying to alert the president that he had a phone call. The officer saw Lewinsky hastily leaving after what had apparently been an interrupted intimate encounter. She learned to sneak around such hostile staff members as Nancy Hernreich, Clinton’s other secretary, and Steve Goodin, the president’s young personal assistant, both of whom tried their best to keep the young woman away from the Oval Office. One Secret Service officer was so troubled by Lewinsky’s frequent and plainly inappropriate appearances around the Oval Office that he complained to the deputy chief of staff, the tough-minded Evelyn Lieberman.

Lieberman tried to put an end to the Lewinsky problem in early April. Get her out of here, Lieberman ordered the staff. A devastated Lewinsky was quickly told her West Wing days were over, and she was going to take a job at the Pentagon.

In tears, she complained to Clinton, who said he was as upset as she was. “Why do they have to take you away from me?” he asked. “I trust you.” He promised to investigate.

He went to Lieberman, a longtime operative for liberal groups as well as a close friend of Hillary Clinton’s. Years earlier, she had been a high school English teacher on Long Island. Clinton approached her like a student nervously trying to protest a mediocre grade.

“Do you know anything about this?” Clinton asked.

“Yes,” Lieberman said.

“Who fired her?”

“I did,” Lieberman said.

Clinton retreated, knowing the conversation was over. “Oh, okay,” he said sheepishly.

There were no more Oval Office visits for a while, but there were frequent phone calls in which the two would entertain each other with steamy conversation. “Good morning!” Clinton exclaimed, beginning a day that was to take him to the Summer Olympics in Atlanta with a six-thirty call to Lewinsky. “What a way to start the day.”

The next month, Lewinsky managed to get invited to a New York fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall to celebrate the president’s fiftieth birthday. As they chatted in the crowd, she later recalled, she “playfully” reached her hand to his groin. At this point, the presidential election was less than three months away. As hard as the White House staff tried to keep Clinton and Lewinsky out of trouble, the two had a way of getting back in it.

The nervous gossip that swirled around the West Wing in 1996 about the president and Lewinsky was not an anomaly. An abundance of other rumors echoed. There was a dazzling West Wing receptionist who had been a flight attendant on the 1992 campaign plane. Several Clinton aides and Secret Service officers reported witnessing scenes between her and the president that strongly suggested an affair. Some agents said she had boasted to them of her presidential relationship.

Most White House aides had no direct knowledge and could only guess about the truth of various purported presidential relationships. But the fear of sexual gossip and scandal was a pervasive reality with which senior presidential advisers constantly had to reckon. Leon Panetta once got word about a scheduled presidential meeting with entertainer Barbra Streisand, who had been the subject of speculation before. He struck it from the schedule. One day in San Diego, Clinton’s plane was met by Shelia Lawrence, an attractive woman whom West Wing aides called “the widow Lawrence.” Before his death, her rich, elderly husband had been appointed ambassador to Switzerland. In view of the press, she embraced Clinton warmly on the tarmac and hopped into his limousine. A few moments later, White House aide Bruce Lindsey raced out of the backup car in which he had taken his seat and hopped into the president’s limousine. Back in Washington, Panetta was alerted to the close call.

One of Steve Goodin’s assignments was to avoid similar embarrassments. When Clinton gravitated toward an attractive woman in a crowd, or vice versa, Goodin would try to angle his way close to make sure that he was in the line of sight of any cameras. While aides fretted constantly, it often seemed to them that Clinton was intentionally, even delightedly, oblivious to appearances. The day after the incident with Lawrence, Clinton was in Santa Monica, where both Streisand and Eleanor Mondale, the former vice president’s statuesque daughter, were in his hotel suite until well after midnight. The next morning Mondale, who had been the subject of rumors, went jogging on the beach with the president at 7 a.m. White House press secretary Michael McCurry scolded reporters to keep their prurient speculation out of print.

For the most part, they did. There were exceptions along the way. Early in his term, a tabloid reported that socialite Patricia Duff, who had socialized with Clinton, was boasting to friends that he was a “full-service president.” Clinton was smoldering, his eyes squinting with anger, when Dee Dee Myers told him about the story. “That’s a lie,” he hissed.

Later, her successor, McCurry, had to delicately explain to Clinton why reporters were suspicious that he did not release his full medical records instead of just a summary. “Sir, they think you have the clap.” The president smiled and shook his head, as if to say, what won’t those guys think of. It was all a bit surreal—characteristically, McCurry took refuge in humor. Later, during a well-lubricated evening with reporters, McCurry rode in an open convertible through Beverly Hills shouting, “Attention, everyone! My boss does not have the clap!”

Still unknown at this early stage were stories that would have been harder to laugh off. One that did eventually come to light was the allegation of Kathleen Willey, a White House volunteer who accused Clinton of suddenly thrusting himself on her during a personal conversation in his study adjacent to the Oval Office. Clinton vehemently denied her claim. There were several women who had worked around Clinton who were shaken by the allegation and had trouble believing the denial. That is because they had heard similar stories before. One woman, a senior White House official, had heard from two colleagues who had experiences uncomfortably similar to what Willey described: innocent conversations that pivoted in an instant into fervid advances. The women were left angry and embarrassed, asking themselves if they had somehow sent a wrong signal to a man they in most respects admired. Neither of these encounters was ever publicized. But they highlighted how the controversies over Clinton and sex that did spring into public view were not strange aberrations. Concern about his behavior had been a percolating anxiety in the West Wing from the early days of the administration. There was a disaster lying in wait.