Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [269]
With respect to the precise nature of the relationship with Clinton, however, and the details that eventually spilled out in bound copies of the Starr Report, Marcia Lewis still denied knowing the graphic details. “You know, most people don’t tell their mothers those things,” she said slowly. “That is something nobody seemed to get.” Although some media accounts tried to portray Monica and her mother as “roommates,” because they shared an apartment for a time, Marcia would take offense at this characterization. “It is very common nowadays for children to move back home right after they graduate from college. Very common. That doesn’t make her my ‘roommate,’” she said emphatically. “We had a loving mother-daughter relationship. We were not roommates.” Moreover, Marcia would underscore that Monica was not in the habit of discussing her sex life with her mother. “It’s very safe to say that. That’s correct.”
The first time Marcia heard anything about the possibility of Monica being subpoenaed as a witness in the Paula Jones case, she later divulged, was during one of Monica’s visits to New York on a job interview trip. Monica had leaned over in a taxi and whispered cryptic words to her mother indicating that she was “going to be subpoenaed,” and that “Linda Tripp posed some kind of a threat or some kind of danger.” It was only after the Ritz-Carlton sting, as mother and daughter spent time in the dark apartment together, that Monica began to share additional information. Marcia would acknowledge that her daughter did “explain to me that this had to do with the Paula Jones affidavit.” Monica also hinted that there was some connection to President Clinton’s upcoming testimony. Other than that, the mother said, she was largely in the dark.
In Marcia’s eyes, what seemed particularly unfair was that Monica was doing what any sane person would do if confronted with allegations of an extramarital affair: Whether it involved the president or the local milkman, the natural thing to do was to deny it. It may have been wrong for Monica to engage in this conduct, Marcia understood, but what in God’s name were her options? And why were the Jones lawyers asking these questions of her daughter in the first place, when her affair with Bill Clinton had nothing to do with the Paula Jones case? If Monica fessed up and said, “Yes, we had consensual oral sex,” not only would it create embarrassment and wreak havoc on her own family, but it would also hurt Clinton’s family (especially Hillary and Chelsea) and potentially wreck the Clintons’ marriage and lead to problems for all concerned. Monica may have told a white lie. But Marcia believed with every fiber in her body that her daughter was not involved in some grand conspiracy to thwart justice in the Paula Jones case. It was much less villainous than that: Monica had always planned that if confronted about her relationship with President Clinton, “she intended to deny it.”
“Paula Jones had voluntarily come forward,” Monica’s mother said, spelling out her position. “Paula Jones had chosen to make a public statement about this. That was her choice. Her free will.” On the other hand, “just because Paula Jones may have thought it was her right to make a public spectacle of this, I think Monica felt it was her right to keep it private. And not to tell anyone about it, and to deny it, which is exactly what she did.
“And I think innocently, not really understanding how serious that was at the time.”
THE OIC prosecutors had been “waiting on pins and needles,” wondering where this Bill Ginsburg character was. Jackie Bennett was becoming ticked off that Ginsburg didn’t seem to appreciate the urgency of OIC’s efforts. Starr’s lawyers had been monitoring President Clinton’s deposition via news reports. Bennett assumed that if Jones’s attorneys asked a few pointed questions about Monica, the president most likely would not answer truthfully. “I remember certainly thinking and expecting that he [Clinton] would lie,” Bennett recalled years later, “because he’s a liar after all.”
So the OIC