Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [288]
After their second meeting, Merletti walked out of the OIC conference room and concluded, “It was a total waste of time. And I had the sense he just didn’t want me there. He didn’t want to hear anything I had to say.”
On February 4, the friction between Starr’s office and the Secret Service reached a new level. A retired uniformed USSS officer assigned to the White House, Lew Fox, granted an interview to a local paper in rural Western Pennsylvania, telling the paper that he “saw the President and Lewinsky alone together” for approximately forty minutes. Although the actual news story noted that Fox admittedly had no knowledge of what went on inside the Oval Office while Lewinsky was present, and that the retired officer said that he could not “imagine” an affair taking place, those details quickly got lost in the maw of the media. Within a week, the Washington Post was announcing: “Clinton, Lewinsky Met Alone, Guard Says.” The story reported: “Former uniformed Secret Service officer Lewis C. Fox said in an interview yesterday that Lewinsky, then a White House intern, spent at least 40 minutes alone with Clinton while Fox was posted outside the Oval Office door. She had arrived with papers for the President, he said, and Clinton instructed Fox to usher her into his office.”
Merletti hit the roof when Fox’s comments became national news. If anyone knew about the elaborate protective clockwork that made the White House tick, it was Merletti. To him it was utter nonsense, that Fox or any other uniformed officer could use his or her x-ray vision to determine what was going on inside the Oval Office. He also found the idea that a former Secret Service officer would blab to the press nothing short of a breach of the time-honored Secret Service code of silence and honor. Merletti would later say of the Fox episode: “It was inappropriate behavior.”
Fox also had suggested to the media that he had enjoyed an almost breezy relationship with Monica Lewinsky, who reportedly chatted with him periodically at his post outside the Oval Office door. Some of the security personnel even took to referring to Lewinsky as “your girl,” razzing Fox whenever they saw the young intern. Merletti had trouble digesting any of this. “What was that about? I mean we’re talking about security, so he was obviously preoccupied with other issues than security. It was very unprofessional. He’s not [supposed] to be involved in anyone’s social life.”
Merletti’s second objection was that if Fox or any other officer actually saw something that caused him to believe there was inappropriate behavior going on inside the Oval Office, he was duty-bound to report it to his superiors. “If he was so concerned about this,” Merletti said, “why didn’t he come to me or—he had his other supervisors that he could have gone to. Why keep it to yourself? Why sit on this information?” The proper procedure, if there was any serious question at all, was to tell the head of the PPD, who could then go to the president’s chief of staff and resolve the problem.
Moreover, the facts did not add up. A uniformed officer like Fox, the equivalent of a security guard within the White House, performed a wholly different role from that of the agents on the PPD who were assigned to protect the president. On a purely practical level, Merletti did not believe such an officer could have any clue as what was going on behind the closed doors of the president’s office. Speculation and gossip were a cheap commodity in these high-level