Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [155]
The next day, all interns were invited to a surprise forty-ninth birthday party for the president on the South Lawn. Monica worked her way to the front of the greeting line, wearing her “lucky green suit.” Here, like many others, she held up a sign that said “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” Clinton was dressed casually, wearing a pink short-sleeved shirt and blue jeans. As he moved down the row of young well-wishers, Clinton stopped and fixed his eyes on Monica. A photographer captured them briefly on film as they squeezed hands. She would later tell a writer that the president’s arm brushed up against her breast; as he walked forward, Bill Clinton did a double take as if to memorize the specifics of her face. Monica would later elaborate for the Office of Independent Counsel, in the presence of the grand jury, that this was the beginning of a “flirtation that went on at a distance.” At this brief birthday-party encounter, it was clear that a scattering of sparks had transferred themselves from one person to the other during the fleeting physical contact. Monica told the grand jury, “I mean, he’s a charismatic person and so—just when he shook my hand—there was an intense connection.”
That night, Monica rushed home and told her mother and aunt Debra about the day’s excitement. She also went to a bookstore and purchased a copy of Gennifer Flowers’s autobiography—the life story of the blond-haired woman with whom Clinton had confessed to having a long-term affair during the governor years in Arkansas. Monica spent the night reading.
Yet Monica Lewinsky later insisted that there was no sense of destiny that she would meet Clinton personally or that she would follow in Flowers’s footsteps. “No. Not at all,” she said. “I think it was a changing experience for me. But there was no point where it was sort of inevitable that something was going to happen.” In fact, as Monica saw it, the relationship evolved as the result of unplanned chemistry. As painful as it would be to analyze these events after the relationship had fallen apart, she asserted that she connected with President Bill Clinton, and they began their secret affair, simply because they were attracted to each other. “I think that’s [true] in any situation between two people. You have to always remember that. That as much as—yes, he’s the president—and yes, I was an intern, it’s also two people. And this is something that happens all the time.”
Monica sent letters back to California, enclosing pictures and reporting on the remarkable events transpiring in Washington. After the president’s birthday party, she sent a photo snapped by a White House photographer to her father and her stepmother, Barbara. The image showed her shaking hands with Bill Clinton as the president stared deeply into Monica’s beaming face. Bernie Lewinsky, who devoted much spare time to photography and was a near professional at the art, recalled experiencing a strange feeling when he opened the envelope and saw that photo. “I, as a father and as a photographer, was really taken aback at the look in his eyes,” said Bernie. “And what I did is I took a crop, I cropped the picture like a photographer, and just cropped it down to him looking at her. And I said to Barbara, ‘He has lascivious eyes.’ He looked at my daughter in a weird way.” Bernie later admited, “That was, you know, just an impression that I kept and I never expressed it until this thing broke.”
In November 1995, Clinton’s nemesis, Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, staged a shutdown of all federal government offices in an effort to force the president to approve huge budget cuts in Medicare, education and other items to push through Gingrich’s aggressive Contract with America. Gingrich ultimately lost the showdown. Yet during this episode, a brief moment in the darkened