Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [173]
CHAPTER
21
TRAPPED OUTSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE
By July 1997, her relationship with President Clinton on the rocks, Monica Lewinsky had become overwhelmed and depressed. The prospect of returning to the White House now seemed dim. Ever since the move to the Pentagon, Monica’s mother had observed that her daughter was, “very, very upset.” Marcia Lewis recalled, “The early sort of halcyon days, where she was a happy intern working in the White House … had totally changed. She was often in her room crying, and it was awful. It was terrible. Just dreadful.” Marcia would never address, head-on, whether she knew that President Clinton was the cause of her daughter’s distress. Nor would she state, categorically, whether she knew that Bill Clinton had broken off an affair with Monica. Yet she was prepared to admit this much: “I definitely knew that something was wrong.”
Meanwhile, in a July 3 “Dear Sir” letter that she wrote directly to President Clinton, Monica vented her growing frustration. She later described this breaking point to the grand jury:
The President wasn’t responding to me and wasn’t returning my calls and wasn’t responding to my notes. And I got very upset so I sat down that morning actually and scribbled out a long letter to him that talked about my frustrations and that he had promised to bring me back; if he wasn’t going to bring me back … then could he help me find a job? At that point I said “in New York at the United Nations,” and that I sort of dangled in front of him to remind him that if I wasn’t coming back to the White House I was going to need to explain to my parents exactly why that wasn’t happening.
Monica felt there were several reasons to commit her grievances to paper. As she explained to the rapt grand jurors, “Towards the end of the letter I softened up again and was back to my mushy self, but—one of the purposes, I think was to kind of remind him that I had left the White House like a good girl in April of ’96. A lot of other people might have made a really big stink and said that they weren’t going to lose their job and they didn’t want to do that and would have talked [publicly] about what kind of relationship they had with the President.” Monica, on the other hand, “had been patient and waited.” Yet her patience had worn thin. She was now “frustrated and angry.”
So Monica delivered her letter, addressed simply to “Mr. P,” to Betty Currie that same day, after meeting Currie at the Northwest Gate of the White House. Within hours Currie called Monica to tell her to arrive at 9:00 the next morning, on the Fourth of July, to meet privately with the president.
As Washington prepared for the rockets and fireworks of In dependence Day, both parties prepared for their own version of a pyrotechnics display. Each assumed his or her traditional spot: The president sat in his usual rocking chair; Monica sat in the black swivel chair behind his desk. Soon the meeting erupted into “a fight.” Clinton began by saying: “It is illegal to threaten the President of the United States.” He told Monica that he had destroyed the letter; she should not be putting these sorts of things in writing. He also “lectured” her that she was “ungrateful;" he was doing his very best to help her.
Monica in turn launched into a laundry list of her own grievances. She accused Clinton of using her and casting her aside, at which point she broke down crying loudly. The president hurried over and hugged her. He stroked her hair, whispering, “Please don’t cry.” By the end of the conversation, they were talking about being together again—someday—in the future. The young woman was reassured that there was still a tender spot that joined them.
Before they parted company, Monica raised another subject, wishing to protect Clinton. According to a “friend” (she did