Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [252]
“I was completely exhausted,” recalled Emmick, “just because it had been very intense and very trying in lots of ways. I was also a little bit disappointed. Disappointed because we had tried and tried and tried … and it still just didn’t work out.” Some of his fellow prosecutors, still in the room, would recall Emmick’s pacing back and forth and asking himself, “What else could we have done?” Nobody had an obvious answer.
At least he felt they had handled the situation in an admirable and professional manner, Emmick recalled with a forced laugh. “As we looked back on the day, one of the things that we said to ourselves was, At least we did everything right.’” He was confident that when the American public inevitably learned about the events that had transpired in Room 1012 of the Ritz-Carlton that day—a public airing was inevitable—people would conclude the OIC prosecutors had lived up to the highest professional standards. He expected the morning-after assessment would be this: “They let her leave; they gave her [phone] numbers of lawyers; they had Mom come down; they talked to Dad; they talked to everybody.”
Emmick concluded, a tinge of sadness in his voice, “We just thought we were going to look golden.”
In reality, the sting of Monica Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton would turn into the single event in OIC’s thoroughly controversial handling of the Lewinsky case from which Ken Starr and his team would never fully recover. As several FBI agents escorted Monica Lewinsky and Marcia Lewis to the parking garage in the dark January night, Emmick returned to OIC’s office to give Jackie Bennett a quick briefing before going home and collapsing into bed.
Jackie Bennett stayed up, pacing the floor of his office. Michael Isikoff had continued his badgering calls from Newsweek’s Washington offices, digging around for more information. At one point, Bennett blurted out, “Okay, you’ve got to knock this off. It’s not going to happen tonight. You just got to sit on this.” Isikoff reluctantly agreed, saying, “Okay, but keep me informed.” Both sides understood that they had placed their souls in hock.
Bennett knew that the president’s deposition was scheduled to take place the next morning. As long as they kept Monica and her mother from making any phone calls to tip off the principals, the bullet in the game of Russian roulette would spin into the proper chamber. Bennett sized it up: “Once he [President Clinton] got into that deposition, it was going to be very hard for them to get word to him.” The moment Clinton strode into that proceeding at Bob Bennett’s law firm to give his testimony under oath, the next morning at 10:30 A.M., OIC would be home free.
“That was kind of the drop-dead event,” said Bennett.
IN Los Angeles, Bernie Lewinsky downed another vodka for medicinal purposes. Bill Ginsburg, out of a sense of loyalty to his friend and because it seemed like an interesting professional adventure, volunteered to take the first red-eye to Washington. The bearded lawyer drove home, packed a minimal bag—expecting to return in a day or two—and caught the early-morning flight from LAX to Washington via Pittsburgh (a maneuver designed to throw off reporters) to “see what the hell [was] going on.”
In Washington, Monica Lewinsky was so hysterical that Marcia Lewis drove the SUV, navigating it back to the Watergate. Monica said that she needed to take a shower, feeling dirty after this confrontation with the Starr prosecutors. What she didn’t tell her mother, in the darkness of the apartment (she kept the lights off so that they wouldn’t be watched), was that she was still contemplating the logistics of suicide. As she attempted to shower away the horrible images of