Uncovering Clinton; Uncovering Clinton; A reporter’s story by Michael Isikoff

Author:Michael Isikoff [Isikoff, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81398-5
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2011-12-21T08:00:00+00:00

The meeting with Richardson was the culmination of weeks of intense developments in Lewinsky’s job search that had been triggered by her October 7 letter to Clinton. The letter itself was in part the contrivance of Tripp. With her apparently phony story about Kate, Tripp had essentially tricked Lewinsky into petitioning the president for job assistance outside the White House. But if it was a trap, Clinton walked right into it. Upon receiving her letter, he called Lewinsky at two A.M. on Friday, October 10, and at first yelled at her about her seemingly presumptuous demands that he find her employment. “If I knew what kind of person you were, I never would have gotten involved with you,” he said. Then, after Lewinsky burst into tears, Clinton calmed down and promised to do what he could. It was an important promise. Was this a case of humane concern for the travails of his ex-girlfriend? Was it guilt? Or was it a calculated decision that, with the Paula Jones lawsuit facing him, he could not permit Monica Lewinsky to stray too far off the reservation?

They met at the White House the next morning, and Clinton asked her to give him a list of jobs in New York that might interest her. Meanwhile, acting on Lewinsky’s request in the October 7 missive that she be anointed with a position at the United Nations, Clinton asked Betty Currie to talk to John Podesta about placing the former intern there. Lewinsky, at the same time, started to have second thoughts. In a letter she sent Clinton on October 16, she listed five public relations jobs in the private sector she wanted to pursue. She had spent enough time working for the government, she wrote, and the UN held “no interest” for her. But by then it was too late. Podesta had already told UN ambassador Bill Richardson that there was a former White House intern, a friend of Betty Currie’s, he wanted him to consider hiring.

This seemed to make a big impression on the ambassador. Richardson returned to New York from a presidential trip to Latin America on Sunday, October 19. Although it was a hectic time (a crisis was brewing over Iraq’s restrictions on UN inspectors, and he was scheduled to leave for a trip to the Congo later in the week), the next day, he asked his staff assistant, Isabelle Watkins, to look out for the résumé of a former White House intern Podesta had spoken to him about. When it didn’t arrive by Tuesday, Richardson asked Watkins to call Podesta’s office. On October 21, at 3:09 P.M., Betty Currie faxed Lewinsky’s résumé to Richardson’s office in New York. That evening, at 7:09 P.M., Lewinsky later testified, she got a phone call at home. She was shocked. It was Bill Richardson himself, and he wanted to know if she would be available for a job interview at the Watergate—where he also had an apartment—the following Friday.3

Early on the evening of October 29, two days before the interview, Tripp tried to draw Lewinsky out on the upcoming meeting.

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