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By Root 1731 0

Pentagon. Some Clinton aides, particularly Deputy Chief of Staff Evelyn Lieberman, had believed the young intern was spending far too much time around the commander in chief. These protectors of the president resolved the problem, or so they thought, by sending Monica packing to become confidential assistant to the assistant secretary of defense, in the austere surroundings of the Pentagon, just prior to the 1996 election. For Monica, it had meant a pay raise and important foreign travel assignments—much more prestigious than the jobs that most recent college graduates could dream of attaining. But this particular former intern was bouncing on an emotional seesaw. She wanted desperately to be back near President Bill Clinton. The election was over now. Why had “Handsome” not yet made good on his promise to “bring me back”?

There were additional reasons the former intern felt on edge: Monica had recently received a heads-up from a Pentagon colleague, Linda Tripp, that the president was in danger. The husky-voiced Tripp, who (like Monica) had worked in the White House until recently, confided that Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff was working on a story alleging that the president had groped a woman named Kathleen Willey in the White House. This development—not a good thing under any circumstances—was an especially bad one, given the precarious status of the Jones case in the Supreme Court. Monica had taken it upon herself to warn the president about this problem. The last thing the president needed was another flap in the media about his alleged extramarital affairs. The young woman felt that she could help avert a disaster. She always had a magic touch, she told herself, when it came to dealing with people.

Monica Samille Lewinsky had been born at the Children’s Hospital in San Francisco in the eventful month of July 1973. It was the same hot summer that the Watergate scandal had reached a boiling point during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, with Judiciary Committee hearings chaired by Senator Sam Ervin capturing the nation’s attention. Marcia Lewinsky, Monica’s mother, watched snippets of the Watergate hearings on television that summer. Like most Americans, she harbored serious questions about the ethical propriety of President Nixon’s behavior. Yet her focus was on bringing home her new baby, not on the dark drama of Watergate. Bernie Lewinsky, the proud father, was just finishing his medical internship at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London. The couple’s plan was to move to Beverly Hills, where Bernie would build a practice specializing in oncology. Marcia’s singular goal was to give their daughter all the best things Southern California could offer, plus more.

Bernie and Marcia Lewinsky understood the importance of financial success and the need for security. Bernie’s family had fled Nazi Germany in the 1920s, having settled in a Jewish enclave in El Salvador, before moving to California during Bernie’s teen years. Marcia’s family, likewise Jewish immigrants, had left Lithuania to escape the ethnic purges of Joseph Stalin. Their backgrounds allowed them to understand both success and pain. The birth of the couple’s first child, Monica Samille (her middle name was a French derivative of “Samuel,” in honor of Marcia’s late father), was a hopeful beginning in a country that promised unbounded success for those who worked tirelessly for it. Bernie settled into the busy life of a doctor starting a new practice; Marcia and Monica quickly grew accustomed to the finer things that a Southern California lifestyle could offer.

Twenty years later, in 1995, with her marriage fallen apart and her fashionable home on Hillcrest Road in Beverly Hills sold as part of the settlement agreement, Marcia Lewinsky (who by this time went by the nom de plume Marcia Lewis, writing for Hollywood Reporter and other glitzy publications) was ready for a change of scenery. Later stories in the tabloid press suggested that Monica had consciously plotted to move to the nation’s capital to get a job in the White House and to ensnare the president