Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [266]
Bill Ginsburg was, above all, a lawyer who marched to his own drum. In early years of practice, he had defended swimming pool manufacturers in horrible death and accident cases, racking up an astounding won-loss record. He relished jury trials and feared nobody in the courtroom. Nor was he intimidated by new challenges—which is why he was willing to take this case for Bernie Lewinsky’s daughter, without a background in the field of criminal law or, much less, presidential sex scandals.
When Ginsburg slid into the passenger seat of Monica’s SUV, he observed an attractive young woman who was older than when he last saw her, but still too young to be in this sort of mess. Ginsburg sized up his new client: “She was calm, but nervous. She was glad to see me. She was wearing slacks and an appropriate top.… It was conservative. It was dark-colored. And she was nervous, happy to see me and anxious to talk.”
Saturday afternoons were usually safe in the district—the odds of running into reporters were slim. So Ginsburg sought out a table at the Hay Adams Hotel, before the late-afternoon cocktail crowd arrived, ordering two drinks by the fireplace. Ginsburg’s thought was, “It was a little darker, and I thought maybe I could get a little more information out of her in a less public, more closed-place-type situation.” Monica was open and painfully candid. From this first meeting to the last, Ginsburg would recall that the facts that Bernie’s daughter laid out were remarkably consistent “all the way down the line.” Although lawyer and client would have their differences over time, Ginsburg would later concede, “One thing Monica has never done, I mean with all of her foibles, she has never told me an untruth. She’s manipulated me, and has done her thing, but she’s never told me an untruth.”
Seated beside the crackling fire in the basement of the Hay Adams, just about the time President Clinton’s deposition was winding up nearby at the Skadden Arps firm, Monica recounted the general story of her involvement with the president. Among other things, she told Ginsburg that she “did not have sexual relations with him [Clinton],” elaborating that her “understanding of sexual relations was intercourse.” This was consistent, the California attorney would later point out, with Monica’s surreptitiously taped conversations with Linda Tripp. In these conversations, she told Tripp that she never had “sex” with Clinton, explaining that she did not think of “oral sex” as “sex.” Although one could debate the meaning of these terms forever, Ginsburg would say—and the written definition presented to President Clinton at the Jones deposition was another matter altogether—Monica never departed from the facts as she saw them. “You know,” said Ginsburg years later, “everything that she said was always the truth.”
Late that afternoon, Ginsburg returned with Monica to her Watergate residence, so that he could make sure all was okay. He walked into a small, not particularly well-kept apartment, where Marcia Lewis was guarding the door. Monica had already begun packing her belongings for the move to New York to begin her new job at Revlon. Boxes were piled up. The apartment was cold and near empty. The doors were bolted and the shades were drawn, to shut out stray FBI agents who might be watching. Both mother and daughter were mentally strung out. As Ginsburg recalled, “Mom was a wreck, she [Monica] was a wreck, and Mom was asking me, ‘What to do, what to do?’” Although the substance of their conversations remained privileged, Ginsburg would acknowledge—as would his clients—that a principal topic of their discussion was immunity: how to get it, and under what terms.
The puzzle was complicated by the fact that Monica Lewinsky still seemed to be very much in love with Bill Clinton. This part of the story would often be ignored or trivialized, particularly after the titillating details of the sexual relationship printed in the Starr Report eclipsed it. Yet the facts were the facts. Ginsburg, who spent