Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [277]
The Washington Post ran a story titled “Clinton Denies Affair, Says He Never Asked Former Aide to Lie,” while another headline blared “Former Intern Refers to Relationship with President.” The American public was treated to its first pictures of the blond, frizzy-haired Linda Tripp, along with a Defense Department file photo of a beaming Monica Lewinsky with black hair bouncing off her shoulders and pearls strung around her neck. News accounts were beginning to describe former civil rights lawyer Vernon Jordan as a “key figure in the Starr probe,” stating that Jordan had arranged for Lewinsky to get a job interview in New York with a big corporation and allegedly “was enlisted to persuade Lewinsky to deny having had an affair with the president.”
The Post declared: “President Imperiled As Never Before.”
Friends and family of President Bill Clinton reacted with a mixture of shock and disbelief. Supporters of Independent Counsel Ken Starr immediately rose to his defense. Already, dividing lines were beginning to split the country in two.
Joe Purvis, who had grown up with Clinton and who had barely gotten over the trauma of Vince Foster’s death, remembered thinking, “For the love of God, if the son of a bitch was so stupid to do something like that, he deserves what he gets.” As Purvis watched the photos flash on the television of this young former intern named Monica, he could only assume that this was “the latest in one of these slime attacks of Clinton.”
Betsey Wright, Clinton’s chief of staff during his years as governor and the person who had handled the “bimbo eruptions” during the presidential election of 1992, was living in seclusion on Beaver Lake in the northwest mountains of Arkansas. Although she had long since relinquished her role as guardian of Bill Clinton’s virtue, she still had plenty of friends in the White House. For some time, she had been worried about the stories she was hearing from secondhand sources: “I remember getting rumors about Bill alone in the Oval Office with a woman. And I would call people I knew on the staff and say ‘Just don’t ever let him in there by himself with anybody.’” Her principal fear, after decades of knowing Bill Clinton, was that this time, he might really cook his own goose and in the process deeply hurt Hillary and Chelsea. “Yes,” Wright said, choking back emotion. When she saw the Lewinsky allegations reported in the paper, she was overcome by an instant fear that they might be true.
Susan McDougal, still imprisoned for contempt, was convinced that the story was false. During her first stay in an Arkansas prison after she refused to answer the questions propounded by the Starr grand jury, a deputy sheriff had whispered to her: “Just tell those Starr people what they want. You think the Clintons care about you? They’re having dinner in the White House right now while you’re in this God-awful place. Think about it.”
Now Susan was in yet another God-awful jail cell; the president knew that one question the Starr prosecutors likely wanted to ask her related to whether she had engaged in an extramarital affair with him during the governor years, because it might explain why she wouldn’t talk. It seemed utterly implausible, McDougal told herself, that Bill Clinton would risk having a frolic with a young intern under these circumstances. Certainly the president knew that the longer Starr’s investigation kept grinding forward, the longer she would remain in prison for contempt, continuing to