Bill Clinton by Michael Tomasky

Author:Michael Tomasky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

8

That Woman

The murmurings started, strangely enough, on a Saturday night—a time when even in media-obsessed Washington not many people are following the news. It was January 17, 1998; that day, Clinton, in a first for a sitting president, had testified in the Paula Jones lawsuit, taking questions under oath from her lawyers for six hours, and returning to the White House, the New York Times reported, “to check on the Asian fiscal crisis and on a daylong staff meeting about his State of the Union speech later this month.” That night, the Drudge Report, a conservative online news aggregation site, posted a headline:

NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN, BLOCKBUSTER REPORT;

23-YEAR-OLD FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT

There was, as yet, no story, just this salacious headline. The next day on ABC’s This Week, Bill Kristol, now the editor of the Weekly Standard, made the first reference to it on national television. That night, Drudge posted the ex-intern’s name: Monica Lewinsky.

Though fairly new, the Drudge Report at that point had already gained a following among Washington journalists, and its proprietor, Matt Drudge, was celebrated on the right and despised by the left. The year before, when Sidney Blumenthal left journalism to join the White House staff, Drudge had published an unfounded and false rumor about him, and Blumenthal had sued him for libel. (The case was settled.) In a different era, that might have finished off a highly partisan publication run by a man with no journalistic background. But the mores and folkways of Washington were such that Drudge’s influence merely grew. When Drudge decided to elevate a story, complete with a graphic of a blaring siren, Washington journalists eagerly picked up on it, seduced by the power of this new medium to spread news and gossip at barely comprehensible speeds.

Sometimes, as in the Blumenthal case, what Drudge promoted was just untrue. Other times, it was factually true but an obvious partisan hit job and dismissible on those grounds. But with this mind-bending headline, it turned out, he was onto something.

In June 1995, Lewinsky, then twenty-one years old, had come to work at the White House as an unpaid intern on the staff of Leon Panetta, the president’s chief of staff. Those who watched her noticed that on those occasions when interns got to meet the president, Monica usually somehow made it to the front of the line. She managed once to introduce herself to Clinton, as the two passed each other in a hallway.

Then, that November brought the first government shutdown. Since some White House staff had to stay home, interns like Lewinsky, who normally toiled in the Old Executive Office Building next door, were imported to the West Wing to answer phones. Thus it was that on the night of November 15, Lewinsky found herself alone with Clinton. She pulled up her dress, giving him a peek at her thong underwear. Matters proceeded as they often do in such cases. She performed oral sex on him, although

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