Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [264]
Carpenter-McMillan had proclaimed, “Oh, thank you, Lord.”
That night, as a horde of reporters stood outside in the winter’s night, snapping pictures and filming video footage to their hearts’ content, the Jones team drank glass after glass of bubbly. Susan Carpenter-McMillan would laugh, “Unbeknownst to us, Clinton went back to the White House and canceled his dinner reservations. So you know what the headlines were the next day, ‘Jones camp popped champagne bottle, Clinton’s camp canceled dinner reservations.’ I mean, it just couldn’t have been any better.”
Dressed in her red wool coat to fend off the cold Washington weather, Judge Susan Webber Wright avoided any fuss and exited the law firm. She nodded politely to a few straggling reporters and walked briskly toward an awaiting car. The journalists knew that she would not comment—she had become an almost irrelevant figure in their story. What the journalists did not know was that the only two existing copies of the videotaped deposition of President William Jefferson Clinton—one set of three tapes for each side—were stuffed inside the judge’s black leather briefcase. She had arranged for herself and law clerk Barry Ward to meet a family friend for dinner, since they had only one night free for relaxation in the nation’s capital. A source close to Judge Wright later disclosed that she had another pressing concern besides getting the Clinton tapes home safely: The judge’s ten-year-old daughter, Robin, had asked for a “Spice Girl” Barbie doll, because it was nearly impossible to find those special dolls in the noncosmopolitan environs of Little Rock. The judge’s friend had made some calls and had eventually located a store in a tough Maryland neighborhood that still had a few left on the shelf after Christmas.
With the videotapes crammed into the judge’s briefcase, the group drove to an unsafe-looking neighborhood over the Maryland border, ventured out of the car long enough to purchase one Spice Girl Barbie doll in a box, and then drove quickly back into the district for dinner.
As Paula Jones and her team popped champagne corks in the window of the Old Ebbitt Grill, Judge Wright and her tiny entourage enjoyed a quiet dinner at a small restaurant, undetected by the media. Inside the judge’s black briefcase, stashed safely at her feet under the table, were the only two sets of Clinton videotapes in the world, along with one equally valuable Spice Girl Barbie doll.
CHAPTER
31
SCANDAL IN WASHINGTON
Bernie Lewinsky and his second wife, Barbara, were soaking up rays in Hawaii, beginning a long-planned vacation, when the story of Clinton’s alleged affair with Monica first leaked into the national media. Bernie and Barbara were working out in the exercise room of the Grand Wailea hotel in Maui, on this day in late January, when “all of a sudden we saw our daughter’s ID photo, which was horrible, flashed up, and we just felt like crawling under the blanket and didn’t want anybody to see us.”
Bernie placed a call to Bill Ginsburg’s wife back in California. She said, “Do you know your house is on TV? I see your van.” Bernie’s license plates on his car spelled out LWNSKY, a cute advertisement for his medical practice. Now the camera was zooming in on that vanity plate, so there was no mistaking whose daughter was involved in this sex scandal. Bernie Lewinsky would later recall of that horrifying day: “And all of a sudden, we just felt our life was being invaded.”
As Bernie and Barbara regrouped poolside, the couple with whom they were vacationing flip-flopped outside to find Bernie. The Internet was just coming into vogue; the husband-friend fancied himself a real “computer-nick.” He told Bernie that he had seen something called the Drudge Report, a gossipy Internet news site, implicating Monica in some crazy tryst with President Bill Clinton. Bill Ginsburg, meanwhile, called