Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [268]
Yet broken marriages and families with skeletons rattling in their closets and young men and women with complications were not unique to the Lewinskys of Beverly Hills. Marcia Lewis, who slept in the empty Watergate apartment to provide support for her daughter and to make sure Monica did not harm herself during this horrendous ordeal, felt particularly “defensive” because of “the public nature” of this scandal.
When it came to insinuations that she, as the mother, was responsible for Monica’s predicament, Marcia Lewis insisted that this was too simplistic an analysis: “Young women have made very poor choices, have fallen in love with the wrong men, sometimes married, sometimes a boss or a supervisor, for centuries. Forever, really. From the dawn of time. So, to treat this or to talk about this as such an anomaly and such an out-of-the-mainstream sort of thing to happen, I think it’s wrong. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a mistake. It just means that people seem to have ascribed so much beyond the normal to it, when in fact, sadly, I think it happens. It does happen.”
Although Marcia and her ex-husband may have been imperfect parents, she pointed out, it was unfair for the media to latch onto this family and treat it as a freak of nature. After all, “any young woman who makes a foolish choice, her parents, whoever they might be, you could say, made a mistake somewhere.” At the same time, said the mother, “In the same way that I can’t take full credit for all the wonderful things Monica has done—I can’t take credit for her sparkling, wonderful personality, for how bright she is, for how creative she is, she has many talents I don’t have—I don’t think I can take full responsibility, either, for mistakes that she’s made. So I wish more than anything that this had never happened. And to the extent that, well, that I am responsible for it, I so deeply, deeply regret that.”
When it came to the million-dollar question, whether Marcia Lewis had known about the extramarital affair between her daughter and President Clinton—and indeed, whether she had encouraged it—Marcia would reply guardedly that she had a general sense that something more than friendship had crept into the relationship between her daughter and the chief executive. Yet she insisted that she did not know the precise details, and further emphasized that she and her daughter did not have the sort of relationship in which they shared such private details. Although Linda Tripp and Bernie Lewinsky, among others, would lay bets that Marcia was completely “in the know” about Monica’s hanky-panky with Clinton, she dismissed their theories as the product of watching too many soap operas.
Marcia was willing to make a partial admission, despite her abiding fear—even years later—that Starr’s prosecutors might still come after her if she uttered some fact at odds with her testimony under oath. She had discerned that some sort of romantic link had developed between Monica and the president and that it had gone haywire. (Monica herself would later tell the grand jury that she had admitted to her mother she “fooled” around with the president—she had disclosed a few facts but not the whole picture.) For this reason, Marcia “had been begging [Monica] to get away from this situation for months and months and months.” Indeed, the mother would confess that she had “concerns about [Monica’s] safety,” and even mentioned (in worried conversations with her daughter) the tragic story of Mary Jo Kopechne and Chappaquiddick in 1969—when a young woman accompanying Senator Edward M. Kennedy was killed in a car crash late at night, plummeting over a remote bridge off Martha’s