Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [275]
Bennett, for his part, had endured enough of these outbursts by the swimming-pool lawyer. It was time to pull rank. He shouted across the table, “This isn’t working. Let’s just stop.” Bruce Udolf stood up and handed Ginsburg a subpoena for Bernie Lewinsky, asking, “Will you accept service for the father?”
With this, according to those present, Ginsburg “went berserk.” He whipped Bernie’s subpoena across the conference table, knocking over a cup of coffee, causing it to shower the area like a small bomb. After hurling out a dozen more expletives, Ginsburg snarled at Jackie Bennett, “You’ve just made the worst enemy you’ve ever had. You want trouble, now you’re going to see trouble.” As Mike Emmick would later say of Ginsburg’s blowup, “It was a good act, if it was an act.”
Ginsburg marched into the reception room and collected Lewinsky. “Let’s go, Monica,” he shouted, “we’re out of here.” Monica had come to this meeting expecting the ordeal to be over. Now, the negotiations seemed to be suffering a meltdown.
Walking toward the elevator, Ginsburg informed her that Starr’s prosecutors had “threatened” to serve a subpoena on him for Bernie Lewinsky. They were obviously going after Dr. Lewinsky’s tax records in an effort to ruin him. At that news, Monica collapsed to the floor. The Starr prosecutors could hear their would-be witness sobbing all the way down the hallway, as Ginsburg pulled the young woman up and propped her against his shoulders. They could also hear the elevator doors slam shut as Bill Ginsburg, still cursing Ken Starr and the Office of Independent Counsel, removed his client from the building.
PART FOUR
THE GRAND CONFESSIONAL
CHAPTER
32
A PRESIDENCY IN PERIL
On Wednesday, January 21, 1998, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and ABC News dropped the bombshell, finally catching up with Matt Drudge and his salacious Drudge Report. The Post first posted the story on its Web site at 12:32 in the morning. Six minutes later, news anchor Jackie Judd reported it on ABC Radio. On the West Coast, the Los Angeles Times quickly followed suit. The dam had broken open.
The story was unlike any that the nation’s capital had seen in decades, not since President Richard M. Nixon had been caught with the smoking-gun tapes during the Watergate scandal, forcing him to resign in disgrace during the summer of 1974.
Early editions of the major newspapers were already printed and bundled by the time the Lewinsky story broke. This meant some readers opened their morning papers to see an innocuous headline about President Clinton’s summit with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It was not until after midnight that the printing presses were retooled in record time. Later versions of newspapers delivered to the doorsteps of millions of American homes contained the shocking headlines: CLINTON ACCUSED OF URGING AIDE TO LIE; STARR PROBES WHETHER PRESIDENT TOLD WOMAN TO DENY ALLEGED AFFAIR TO JONES LAWYERS.
One paragraph of the Washington Post story surprised even Michael Isikoff, who had been covering the Lewinsky-Tripp saga from day one. It read: “In some of the conversations—including one in recent days—Lewinsky described Clinton and Jordan directing her to testify falsely in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case against the president, according to sources.” Isikoff already had heard key tapes; he knew that this crucial piece of evidence involving Vernon Jordan—evidence that Linda Tripp had bragged about to him and OIC prosecutors—was nowhere corroborated on those tapes. Yet the Jordan story somehow had been pumped into the media and the rumor had shot around the world like a rocket.
John Podesta, inside the West Wing, recalled that the first full blast of the Lewinsky story felt like “a shotgun shot in the head.” The notion that the president may have engaged in a sexual dalliance of any kind with a young intern inside the White House nauseated him. “What’s the strategy, after you’re done vomiting?” he asked. Podesta assembled some