Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [267]
So Ginsburg was aware that he was not simply dealing with a woman whom Starr’s office wanted to indict because of a false affidavit in the Jones case; he was also dealing with an emotionally fragile young woman who had recently been dumped by the president and was attempting to come to grips with it. “She was serious about the relationship,” Ginsburg confirmed.
That evening, Ginsburg joined Monica and her mother for dinner at the Oval Room, a chic, contemporary restaurant not far from the White House. Ginsburg permitted Monica to call her father on a pay phone. Moments into this conversation, Monica “just totally fell apart.” On the other end, Bernie “started to howl,” unable to believe that life had dealt him this set of cards in the Old Maid deck. Monica began sobbing into the phone, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s happening,” which caused Bernie to become even more emotional, demanding that Monica promise that she would not hurt herself in any way and declaring “that bastard [Clinton] is not worth it.” When Monica lost her composure a second time, Ginsburg yanked the phone away. He whispered gruffly to Bernie, “I can’t have her breaking down.” Ginsburg instructed the emotionally unglued father, “You just tell Monica that she needs to tell me everything that’s happened.” Otherwise, he wanted his client’s parents to butt out.
AS the Lewinsky saga unfolded, the American media’s fixation with all things Monica intensified. Reporters asked: How much did Monica’s parents themselves contribute to the dysfunction that caused their daughter to have an affair with the president and to get ensnared in this web of political intrigue? Not every young woman, after all, would find herself in this mess.
By the late 1980s, as Bernie and Marcia Lewinsky were nearing their twentieth anniversary, their marriage had virtually collapsed. Bernie had established a successful radiation oncology practice that netted him nearly a half million dollars a year in income; he had accomplished this by working two full-time jobs that kept him out of the house most days and nights. This allowed the family to move into a $1.6 million Mediterranean-style home with a red-tiled roof in Beverly Hills, in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of an exclusive town.
Bernie Lewinsky would later admit, “We had big aspirations, bigger than we needed to have.” Marcia’s own statement in the court papers relating to the couple’s rancorous divorce in 1998 declared: “I and my children have maintained an affluent lifestyle and have traveled first class extensively. We have always provided the children with expensive extracurricular lessons and tutoring to satisfy any desires that either they or we may have.”
There was no question that money was a central issue in the irreconcilable differences that arose in the couple’s marriage. Further adding to the discord, there were unrebutted allegations that Bernie had strayed from his marital vows by engaging in a relationship with a nurse at his practice, a fact that stung Marcia. There were also charges and countercharges by husband and wife that the other spouse did not have a firm grip on parenting responsibilities. Bernie Lewinsky, years later, admitted that “we had a total disagreement on how to bring Monica up from the day that she was born.” As Bernie described it, Marcia’s “value systems” were quite different from his own; she allowed Monica to do “whatever she wanted in order to have Monica be happy.” For instance, he said, as part of a high school project, Marcia had allowed Monica to “do some filming in a construction site in a not-so-good neighborhood of LA at two or three in the morning.” Bernie raised his usually calm voice as he remembered it. “I mean, what mother would allow a thirteen-, fourteen-year-old