These were, to say the least, melancholy scenes. For the SS Clinton seemed to be sinking–fast–and no one was in need of political salvation more than the president. Kenneth Starr was papering the White House with subpoenas. Monica Lewinsky was negotiating with the Feds. TV reporters were discussing whether Lewinsky’s purportedly semen-stained dress might be evidence at trial. Gennifer Flowers gloated over the reports that Clinton, under oath, had finally admitted to his affair with her–reports that cast new light on hordes of other alleged liaisons.
Amid the din of accusation, presidential allies were silent; more ominously, so were his enemies. His poll numbers were eroding, sobbing staffers were calling home and former aides were publicly contemplating the possibility of his impeachment. Former chief of staff Leon Panetta openly speculated that Clinton might have to step aside for Vice President Gore. The presidency, in short, was looking like a certain oceanic-disaster movie–as cast by Jerry Springer.
New dangers are ahead, NEWSWEEK has learned. The president, his lawyers say, insists he never obstructed justice–never told Lewinsky to lie about her alleged sexual liaison with him. But his advisers now think that Clinton may eventually be forced to admit that he indeed had relations with Lewinsky: more than a dozen episodes, investigative sources say, in which he received oral sex from a young woman barely older than his daughter. NEWSWEEK has learned that Lewinsky visited the White House as recently as the night of Jan. 15–just days before her story surfaced. It’s not clear what she was doing there, but she didn’t see Clinton.
Even if he admits to the sexual episodes, escaping legal trouble may not be easy. At the direction of special prosecutor Starr, the FBI placed a “wire” listening device on Lewinsky’s friend Linda Tripp. The resulting tapes of Lewinsky-Tripp conversations could be especially strong evidence in a federal court. And on one of them, to which NEWSWEEK gained access, Lewinsky gives clues to what might be an effort to silence her, involving the president and his close friend Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan.
At one point, Lewinsky says that Clinton told her to “see Vernon.” She then relates to Tripp her tale of what happened when she in fact did “see Vernon”–apparently to discuss what to say when called to testify in the Paula Jones civil suit against the president. “He says it doesn’t matter what anybody said, you just deny it,” Lewinsky tells Tripp. “As long as you say it didn’t happen, it didn’t happen. You’re not going to jail, you’re not going to jail [because this is a civil case].” Jordan last week publicly denied that he had told Lewinsky to lie.
The new FBI tapes are evidence of something else: the aggressive tactics of Starr, a former judge who’s ranging far from his first mandate, to examine the Whitewater land deal. NEWSWEEK has learned that the Justice Department last week considered not granting Starr the authority to look into the Lewinsky accusations. Instead, Attorney General Janet Reno and Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder first wanted to recommend the appointment of a new independent counsel. They even considered letting the department’s own lawyers handle the matter–a decision that would have provoked an immediate firestorm. Now Starr’s investigators, NEWSWEEK has learned, are pursuing what they regard as strong new evidence in the case.
Inside the White House, there was no blind panic–at least not out on deck, in public view. Bill and Hillary Clinton went about the business they have always known best: survival. They were rather alone, however, as they contemplated their predicament. A recent court ruling has made it difficult for aides to rely on the old principle of “executive privilege” to shield their conversations with the president from discovery. So for legal reasons, as well as reasons of respect (“Who wants to ask?” said one official), aides were reluctant to commiserate in too much detail.
The Clintons are at their best when they are moving forward. On Tuesday the president informed his wife of the breaking Lewinsky story. The next day, insiders say, he looked less than chipper. “Let’s just say he wasn’t his normally ebullient self,” said one longtime friend. But he soon regained his stride, taking refuge in prep work for his speech and in the comfort of the rest of his routine. Hillary, meanwhile, took charge of the defense–and counterattack. “We’ve been through worse than this,” she told a top aide she chanced to meet in the hall. “We’ll be OK.”
Brave talk–or profound self-delusion. Bill Clinton’s undisciplined sex life, which nearly ruined his chance for the presidency in the first place, now imperils his hold on the job. When Flowers accused him of sharing a long affair, he spun himself out of danger. But now the venue is law, not political theater. And a deadly combination of two proceedings–the Paula Jones civil suit and Starr’s vast criminal probe–have put Clinton at greater legal risk than any other president since Richard Nixon. “An absolute nightmare,” said a former top legal adviser to the president.
Sex, per se, isn’t the only reason. It’s what Clinton said about it and what he is alleged to have told others to say–or not say. In his recent long deposition in the Jones case, NEWSWEEK learned, the president flatly denied under oath that he’d had sexual relations with Lewinsky, who’d been a young White House intern. If he had any reason to hesitate, he may have been reassured by an affidavit, signed by Lewinsky, that backed his denial.
But, unbeknownst to the president, Lewinsky’s lawyers were telling investigators that she might be willing to tell a different story from the affidavit in exchange for immunity from prosecution: that she had indeed had sexual relations with the president. Starr’s attorneys wanted more: Lewinsky’s help in developing evidence that Jordan was involved with Clinton in an effort to encourage her to lie. Tripp had given Starr some 20 hours of tapes in which Lewinsky had poured her heart out about an affair with Clinton–and discussed ways to lie about it. And prosecutors obtained a memo Lewinsky had given to Tripp on how she could lie in the Jones case.
Now, according to NEWSWEEK sources, Starr is pursuing evidence of at least four possible felonies: simple perjury (if the president lied under oath in his deposition in the Jones case), suborning perjury (if he advised Lewinsky to lie about their alleged relationship when called to testify in the Jones case), obstruction of justice (if he worked to keep her quiet) and witness tampering (if the memo, called “Points to make in an affidavit,” was part of a plan to script testimony).
Legally, the president is in the most immediate danger on the perjury charge. The only actors involved are Clinton and Lewinsky–and one of them apparently is lying. Starr promptly inundated the White House–and later the Pentagon, where Lewinsky also worked–with requests for any information about her movements, phone calls or messages. The aim was simple: to prove that Clinton wasn’t telling the truth under oath.
For that, and for everything else, Monica Lewinsky’s testimony will be crucial. The daughter of a wealthy oncologist from Beverly Hills, the 24-year-old Lewinsky was said to be frightened and distraught as her family’s California lawyer, William Ginsburg, tried to negotiate a deal with Starr that would allow her to escape a perjury charge–but require her to tell everything she knows. It wasn’t Washington melodrama to say that, late last week, the fate of the Clinton presidency was in her hands.
The legal situation was dangerous but could take months to play out. The political situation was moving at warp speed–against the president. Former aide George Stephanopoulos, who helped Clinton spin his way out of sex-linked perils in 1992, was the first leading Democrat to broach the topic of impeachment. Panetta was the first to say that the vice president might have to step in. If Clinton can’t convince the country of his case, Panetta said, it would be better for Democrats “if Gore became president and you had a new message and new individual up there.”
Big-time Democrats who raise the money and buy the ads were privately uniform in their assessment: Clinton is the Houdini of politics, but this may be his last trick. In a sad display last Friday, the president’s handlers trotted out a clutch of cabinet members to declare the existence of business as usual. The funereal looks on their faces betrayed what might have been their real thoughts. “All I can say is this,” one cabinet member said later. “It looks like a bad situation.”
The Gore camp was most silent of all. He publicly–and, by all accounts, genuinely–expressed his friendship and belief in the president. He kept to his schedule last week, and will do the same this week. Gore and Clinton are scheduled to travel together to the Midwest after the State of the Union, in fact. None of the veep’s inner circle dared to talk, even privately, about what might happen if worst comes to worst. Indeed, even the most ruthless don’t want Gore to ascend to the presidency by way of a Clinton scandal. “We want to win the White House on our own, not by climbing across the body of somebody else,” said a Gore adviser.
The NEWSWEEK Poll offered little good news. The president had never been more popular than he was on the day the Lewinsky story broke. Now the public is on notice again, and wary. The president’s overall approval rating had declined to 54 percent, from its record high of 61 percent. Only 40 percent of the public thinks Clinton has the “honesty and integrity” it expects of a president, his record low. Nearly half of those polled (49 percent) think that if Clinton did indeed tell Lewinsky to lie, he should be impeached. “I’d like to tell you that there is an easy way out,” said a top Clinton political adviser. “But I don’t see one.”
Still, the Clintons have begun to look. As a team, they know the drill. In an odd way, friends say, they’re never more close, or loving, than when in danger of losing the power they have worked all their adult lives to acquire. It’s Bill’s job to use his strengths to advance their career; it’s then Hillary’s to keep his weaknesses from ruining them both.
The first order of business is studied silence. Clinton’s team of legal advisers, NEWSWEEK has learned, has counseled him to remain silent until Lewinsky’s charges are known in their entirety. If he speaks out, they fear, Starr will pressure the woman into specifically contradicting his version of events. Clinton isn’t happy with the advice–some of his political aides have wanted him to “speak to the nation” soon–but he accepted it, at least for the time being.
Meanwhile, it’s time to make fine rhetorical, grammatical distinctions. Clinton is an old hand at this. On marijuana, it was “I didn’t inhale” and “I have never broken the laws of my country” (he tried pot in England). In the Flowers crisis of 1992, Clinton denied that he had had “a long affair” with her. After he admitted under oath that he had indeed had sex with Flowers, the subsequent spin was that he’d denied only the length of the affair, not its existence. As the Lewinsky charges surfaced, Clinton may have been trying the same thing. In the past, sources say, he has privately argued that oral sex isn’t sex at all.
Next comes the campaign to discredit the accusers. Not long after Clinton launched his presidential bid in 1991, his handlers set up a team of investigators whose sole job was to gather incriminating information about women who might allege that they had had an affair with Clinton. The person in charge of controlling these “bimbo eruptions” was Betsey Wright, Clinton’s former gubernatorial chief of staff. Wright hired a San Francisco gumshoe to unearth dirt on Flowers and others. In the Jones case, Clinton’s attorney followed the same line, publicly denigrating the credibility of Jones and other female witnesses called in the case.
Clinton’s aides and lawyers have been careful to avoid what one calls the “nuts and sluts” strategy in dealing with Lewinsky. They express sympathy for a woman they say became enmeshed in a conspiracy against the president. Using terms of concern, they leaked word that Lewinsky was so infatuated with Clinton she would arrive at fund-raisers hours early so she could find a place on the rope line to see him. Clinton aides are also being careful not to publicly attack Linda Tripp, though they privately noted her Republican ties and her clear dislike of the president. Late last week the Clintonistas finally found someone on whom to focus their loathing–and who would embody the notion that there is a plot to destroy the president.
She is Lucianne Goldberg, a friend of Tripp’s: a 62-year-old Republican activist and book agent whose resume includes a stint as a GOP spy in the 1972 George McGovern presidential campaign. Goldberg claims to have advised Tripp to tape her telephone conversations with Lewinsky–an assertion Tripp denies. Goldberg did serve as an informal adviser to Tripp during the months in which she was taping conversations with Lewinsky, and Goldberg relished hearing what she called the delicious “dish” about the president. It wasn’t much to go on, but the Democratic National Committee did what it could, blast-faxing derogatory information about Goldberg around town. Goldberg was unapologetic about her animus toward Clinton. “If it took this to get him, fine,” she said.
The Clintons are also hoping to rely on the age-old American distrust of elites–including the Washington media. The NEWSWEEK Poll gives them some hope, at least temporarily. By a wide margin–48 percent to 18 percent–voters are more interested in whether a president can carry out his agenda “effectively” than in whether he has the “personal character you and your family can respect.” The media overkill on this story almost inevitably will produce a backlash–as voters insist that Clinton be given a chance to explain himself and the legal system be given time to work. They know Clinton, after all, knows that he’s far from perfect–and they have elected him twice. “Monica’s Story” has gone from a rumor to a cancer on the presidency. Can that really happen?
Maybe. A majority of Americans in the NEWSWEEK Poll–57 percent–think that the allegations facing Clinton are as serious as or more serious than the ones that drove Nixon out of office. At some point, the motives of those who are accusing Clinton of lying will fade as an issue, and the president must confront a stark question: is he telling the truth? All the legal questions aside, can a president survive in office if Monica’s Story is really true? Americans don’t expect an apostle in the White House. But they do expect an adult.
Well-connected and enthusiastic, Monica Lewinsky was an intern at the highest levels at a very young age. What’s known of her 2 1/2 years in Washington–and what went wrong:
1 June 1995 Lewinsky’s White House internship begins. She works in the Old Executive Office Building for Leon Panetta, Clinton’s chief of staff, opening and sorting mail.
2 Dec. 1995 Lewinsky is hired full time to work at the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. Her job involves deliveries to the president’s office.
3 April 1996 Reprimanded for lingering around the White House, Lewinsky is reassigned to a job at the Pentagon. She meets Tripp.
4 Oct. 1997-Dec. 1997 Messenger-service receipts indicate Lewinsky sent eight packages to the White House, care of Betty Currie, Clinton’s secretary.
5 Dec. 24, 1997 Lewinsky resigns from the Pentagon, prepares to leave her Watergate apartment and head for a new job in New York.
Jan. 7, 1998 In an affidavit for the Paula Jones case, Lewinsky denies a sexual relationship with Clinton.
6 Jan. 12, 1998 Tripp tells Starr’s office she has taped conversations in which Lewinsky says Vernon Jordan encouraged her to lie about her affair with Clinton.
7 Jan. 13, 1998 Wearing a wire from the FBI, Tripp meets with Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton bar at noon. The next day Lewinsky gives Tripp “talking points” on what she should tell Jones’s lawyers.
7 Jan. 16, 1998 Starr has Tripp lure Lewinsky to another meeting at the Ritz-Carlton. FBI agents take her up to a room where she is questioned for hours.
