An Intern Who Became an Intimate

“Politics gives guys so much power and such big egos they tend to behave badly toward women. And I hope I never get into that.”

--Bill Clinton to woman friend during Rhodes scholar year at Oxford, soon after Chappaquidick

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It was two weeks before Christmas 1996. Bill Clinton and Monica S. Lewinsky were alone at the White House, and he was trying to end their furtive relationship.

In the stilted language of federal agents who interviewed her about it later, “the president told Lewinsky that he had been with hundreds of women in his life until he turned about 40 years of age. The president told Lewinsky that when he turned 40 his life was falling apart . . . that it was difficult for him to resist being with other women. The president struggled with it daily. The president told Lewinsky he kept a calendar on how long he had been good.”

Moving from room to room to avoid others, Clinton told Lewinsky that she was not to blame, but he needed to go cold turkey. For most of his life, she said he told her, “he had been two people and kept up two fronts.” Starting in the third or fourth grade, he said, “he was a good boy with his mother and stepfather, but also began telling stories and leading a secret life.”

Imploring him not to end the affair, a weeping Lewinsky offered the argument that other presidents had needed girlfriends. Clinton became angry, saying he “did not want to be like that.”

She had the impression he was telling her “he wanted to be right in the eyes of God.”

At the same time, she told the agents, she did not know if he meant what he said.

Is every life as circular as Bill Clinton’s? So repetitive it seems as though the person just keeps playing certain scenes over and over?

Not just the women, though the threat of what former aide Betsey Wright called a “bimbo eruption” was always there. Not just the deception, though as Clinton told Lewinsky, that too had a long history.

More than that, there was also the continual snatching of victory from the jaws of defeat, and defeat from victory. He could not stop climbing and achieving. Nor could he stop putting it all in jeopardy.

If there is any way to understand what made a man as successful as Bill Clinton behave as recklessly and irresponsibly as he did with Lewinsky, his life before the White House, when there were so many echoes of the current crisis, is the place to look.

On one level, Clinton’s statement to Lewinsky that he had begun a secret life when he was in grade school sounds like something almost anyone might say about growing up.

With Clinton, however, that sense of a double life seemed to carry forward beyond childhood. It was present in his parents and most of the other adults he grew up with. So was the extraordinary ability to compartmentalize the mind, a trait that later associates would remark on in the president.

In her autobiography, written shortly before she died, Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley, offered this description of how she dealt with life:

“Inside my head, I construct an airtight box. I keep inside it what I want to think about, and everything else stays beyond the walls. Inside is white, outside is black. The only gray I trust is the streak in my hair. Inside is love and friends and optimism. Outside is negativity, can’t-doism, and any criticism of me and mine. Most of the time this box is strong as steel. I just tell myself I’m going to be OK--I am going to be OK. And I get up every day and I push ahead, and I never quit.

“This is not the same as denial. This is choosing how you want to live your life.”

Accusations of Affairs Among Parents

Kelley’s mother, an angry, disapproving woman, regularly accused her husband, an affectionate man who delivered ice door to door in Hope, Ark., of having affairs with women on his route. The man Clinton believes was his father, who died before Clinton was born, concealed previous marriages from Virginia. Clinton’s stepfather, the abusive alcoholic Roger Clinton, constantly accused his mother of having affairs.

Virginia acknowledged that, while working hard to build her nursing practice, she also liked to spend evenings at nightclubs in Hot Springs, a freewheeling resort town where she settled with Roger. She would drink, dance and flirt with other men while Roger gambled and drank in the back-room casinos. She loved the spotlight. More than once she got up and joined a singer on the bandstand; she once helped Frankie Lane belt out “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”

“I’m not one for rules, and the only rule in Hot Springs was to enjoy yourself--a rule I could handle quite nicely, thank you,” she wrote. One of the most striking features of Hot Springs was that “you could carry a drink around with you downtown, even on Sundays.”

Against this background, Clinton began his climb. His mother took him to Sunday school at Park Place Baptist Church. By the time he was 8, about the time he told Lewinsky his double life began, he was getting himself up, putting on jacket and tie and walking to church alone, Bible in hand.

As for his eye for women, it seems to have been apparent in high school. Carolyn Yeldell, a neighbor and daughter of a minister, who had a crush on Bill, told Clinton biographer David Maraniss:

“He’d go to band camp in Fayetteville and there’d be this sort of be-still-my-beating-heart if he saw a good-looking clarinetist. . . . He had an eye for the girls everywhere. He had a global vision even then.”

Several years later, when she and Clinton had developed a relationship she thought might lead to marriage, she found him in the arms of one of her sister’s bridesmaids. At the time, Clinton was also involved with two women at Georgetown University.

As the Golden Child of the communities where he grew up, first in Hope, then Hot Springs and beyond, Clinton seemed to march effortlessly from success to success, honor to honor.

He was probably the brightest boy in every classroom he entered in Hope and Hot Springs, and quite possibly at Georgetown too. Several times he was elected class president. He scooped up a Rhodes scholarship and a Yale law degree.

All the while, he was making friends and cementing contacts by the hundreds and thousands--the foot soldiers and brigade commanders of his adult career, from Robert B. Reich, a Rhodes classmate who would serve as Clinton’s Labor secretary, to Gregory Craig, a Yale Law friend who would defend him from impeachment charges on the Senate floor.

He was at ease with all kinds of people. He told funny, down-home stories about where he came from, but he was also a good listener who seemed to share other people’s feelings.

At every stage, a few people were put off by what struck them as a too-facile way of currying good opinion. The word some used was “slick,” and sometimes, they noticed, it involved bending the truth. That was not the majority opinion about Clinton. More than one predicted he would become president or at least a senator; many were ready to help him do so.

Maraniss, who called his biography “First in His Class,” thought the endless achievement fit a pattern often seen in the children of alcoholics: the Family Hero who goes out into the world to excel and win public honors that offset the family’s private shame.

The circle Clinton had joined by the time he returned from Oxford had earned places in the best schools, built networks among the most important people, worked for the most serious causes.

In late 1991, he was ready to lead them to the White House.

By that time, the “bimbo factor” had grown so menacing that the would-be candidate for president had begun calling friends and acquaintances around the country to ask a startling question:

“What is the statute of limitations on adultery?”

The thing about Monica Lewinsky was that she was not one of the back-home girls, or the graduate school girls, or the political campaign girls, or somebody else’s wife. Unlike all those women, Lewinsky did not come vetted, self-selected for attitudes and values akin to Clinton’s and reasons of her own to be discreet.

Instead, she was an emotionally needy, fragile young woman accustomed to getting her way. She was by turns naive and guileful; she asked Clinton friend Vernon E. Jordan Jr. if Clinton would leave Hillary for her after his presidency, yet she kept meticulous records and saved the blue dress with the semen stain.

Lewinsky got her White House internship because a friend of her mother, retired New York insurance man Walter Kaye, had given the Democrats so much money.

She came to Washington at the tail end of an affair with a married man who had been her high school drama teacher; she reduced that marriage to tatters, seemingly so insensitive to the magnitude of the damage that she later called the wife to ask whether she would mind if she sent Christmas presents to the two children.

Lewinsky Talked About Her Affair

Moreover, she needed to talk about her affair with Clinton almost more than she needed to be in it; by the time it was over, at least a dozen people knew about the encounters, many from Monica’s own lips. Among those she talked to were Andy Bleiler, the former drama teacher and still sometime-lover in Portland, Ore., and his wife, Kate.

She would call as often as five times a day to recount her purported exploits, said the Bleilers’ lawyer, Terry Giles. “And when she’s talking to Andy about this, she’s talking to somebody she’s having an affair with, so she’s pretty graphic,” Giles said.

Lewinsky harbored deep doubts about herself, especially her attractiveness to others. Deeper down there were the wounds inflicted by her parents’ bitter divorce in Beverly Hills, and by the manipulative way of living she learned there.

“I was brought up with lies all the time. That is how you got along in the world--by lying,” she would tell Linda Tripp as they discussed the prospect that she might have to talk to Paula Corbin Jones’ lawyers.

“When my parents were married, my mom was always lying to my dad for everything. Everything. My mom helped me sneak out of the house. I mean, that’s just how I was raised.”

Tripp testified that on the eve of Clinton’s second inauguration, Lewinsky wanted to go to one of the balls. Her mother helped her find a stunning red dress; she looked like Snow White, Tripp said.

Later, when another dress--a blue one--was the subject of attention and Tripp was urging Lewinsky not to have it dry-cleaned, it was practicality, not sentiment, that led Lewinsky to disagree. The dark color was “slenderizing” and Lewinsky wanted to wear the dress again.

When Tripp explained the evidentiary value of the stain in terms of DNA, Lewinsky responded: “So why can’t I scratch that crap off and put it in a plastic bag?”

Lewinsky had disaster written all over her, if only Clinton had had eyes to see. The fundamental puzzle in the whole affair has always been that someone as bright and politically street-smart as Clinton could have been so foolish.

As one of Lewinsky’s college friends in Portland put it:

“The bottom line for me, from where I’m sitting, is it’s unbelievable to me that Monica Lewinsky could bring down a president . . . . If he slept with her, it’d be such a silly act on his part. My roommate wouldn’t do it, you know? And he wasn’t running any country. He didn’t even have a job at the time.”

But Clinton had been blind from the beginning, less a lover than a man lurching between weakness and conscience.

In the fall of 1980, in the last, flailing days of his first campaign for reelection as governor of Arkansas, when he finally realized voters were about to turn him out of office, Clinton had turned to Dick Morris. The controversial political consultant whose readiness to work for Republicans made many Democrats uneasy could do nothing; the race was already lost.

But a year later, when Clinton was not sure how to ask his state’s voters for a second chance and launch a comeback, he had turned to Morris again. And again early in 1996, when winning a second term as president was very uncertain. Even after Morris was fired from the 1996 campaign because of his own sex scandal involving a prostitute, Clinton kept in touch.

On Jan. 21, 1998, the world began to learn more than it wanted to know about the president and Lewinsky. Once more, Clinton was on the telephone to Morris.

This time, he was not looking for professional advice so much as a kindred spirit. This time, it was like one alcoholic reaching out to another, a “been-there” conversation between two married men who had histories of involvement with other women.

“You know,” Morris would later quote Clinton as saying on the telephone that day, “ever since the election, I’ve tried to shut myself down. I’ve tried to shut my body down, sexually, I mean. . . . But sometimes I slipped up, and with this girl I just slipped up.”