Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [157]
President Clinton also began making phone calls to Monica’s home phone at night. To her surprise, Monica’s caller ID would light up with “POTUS,” shorthand for “President of the United States.” At times, these conversations would escalate into sexually playful banter. On weekends (especially Sundays), the president would invite her to sneak into the White House when only a skeleton crew and a few Secret Service agents were present. She would enter one door of the Oval Office and then exit a different door, so that the rotating shifts of Secret Service agents would never know “exactly how long I had been in there.”
Two misconceptions that media accounts later propagated, that Monica would be quick to correct, related to the nature and location of their intimate activities. First, she insisted, there was never any sexual activity, of any kind, in the Oval Office. The liaisons always took place in the president’s back study, in the bathroom off the main office, or in the hallway between rooms. Monica emphatically told the grand jury, correcting the inaccurate reports of the media: “No, no, we were never physically intimate in the Oval Office.”
Second, Monica never believed that the relationship was purely physical. She made this clear to Ken Starr’s attorneys in front of the grand jury:
PROSECUTOR: Did the relationship with the President develop into or also have a non-sexual component to it?
LEWINSKY: Yes, it did.
PROSECUTOR: Could you describe sort of that aspect of the relationship for the grand jury?
LEWINSKY: We enjoyed talking to each other and being with each other. We were very affectionate.
PROSECUTOR: What sorts of things would you talk about?
LEWINSKY: We would tell jokes. We would talk about our childhoods. Talk about current events. I was always giving him my stupid ideas about what I thought should be done in the administration or different views on things. I think back on it and he always made me smile when I was with him … he was sunshine.
PROSECUTOR: Okay. And would you describe sort of the affectionate but non-sexual contact?
LEWINSKY: A lot of hugging, holding hands sometimes. He always used to push the hair out of my face.
As her relationship with the president moved to these new levels, Monica enthusiastically relayed stories back to California about her job in the White House. In doing so, she conveniently omitted the fact that she was having a sexual affair with the commander in chief. Her father and stepmother considered it incredible that Monica had gained such access to the president. At the same time, this was classic Monica. Recalled Bernie Lewinsky, “She told us how one night during the lockout or during the government shutdown, they were all working late and they all ordered in pizza and she went and asked the president whether he’d like a piece of pizza, and she was able to take it to the Oval Office for him. And I said ‘Wow, you know, that’s amazing.’”
Her stepmother, Barbara Lewinsky, who had married Bernie in 1991, interjected, “Those who know Monica know she endears herself to everybody around her, and so the scene she was describing—while it would be outrageous for somebody to think, ‘Your kid is having pizza with the president?’ Knowing Monica, you’d think, ‘Well, that’s certainly possible.’”
Nor did it seem out of the ordinary, when Bernie and Barbara flew east to attend son Michael’s high school graduation in June 1996, that they would be treated as VIPs in Washington. When the Lewinsky family gathered early for an arrival ceremony for Clinton who was greeting Ireland’s president, Mary Robinson, they were incredulous that Monica had pushed her way up to the front of the rope line and that President Clinton had actually stopped in his tracks and said, “I like your hat, Monica.” Recalled Barbara, “Monica insisted that we had to be there at seven in the morning or six in the morning,