Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [304]
Cawkwell went on: “As head of state, it is damaging to portray someone as a fallible human being. We [in Great Britain] don’t attack our monarchs all the time. It wouldn’t have been good for people to have known every bit about Henry the Eighth. All of these personal things damage us terribly.”
As far as Cawkwell was concerned, Ken Starr had gone round the bend. Most observers across the Atlantic, he said, could not fathom why this battle between Clinton and Starr had become so bloody, and so bloody personal.
CHAPTER
36
A MOTHER’S COLLAPSE
If anything hardened Monica Lewinsky against Starr’s prosecutors, it was their pulling the plug on the immunity deal and simultaneously dragging her family into the ring of criminal jeopardy.
Monica was holed up at her home in Beverly Hills, conversing in whispers with her father and stepmother in the bathroom for fear the house was bugged, completely “stressed out” and mistrustful of the Starr prosecutors. One image on television continued to haunt the whole Lewinsky family: Susan McDougal had appeared on the news dressed in a bright prison jumpsuit, being led in chains from the jail on her way to a court appearance. Unexpectedly, the convicted Whitewater defendant had looked into the camera and said: “Monica, it’s not so bad in jail.” Monica’s mother would later whisper: “I’ll never forget that.… I was very taken aback by that.”
Then OIC pushed the envelope, calling Monica’s mother in front of the grand jury. For Marcia Lewis, that day in February was forever fixed in her memory. She was driven to the federal court house in Washington by her attorney, Billy Martin. “And I remember driving up there in an SUV and looking out the window and seeing, you know, masses and masses of people.…” Monica’s mother felt as if she were being forced to do the unthinkable: “You are there because they are hoping that you will say something unknowingly that will hurt your own child. That is why you are there.… My daughter was the target.”
She would fall silent, then end her statement in a challenging voice: “And it’s my position that if a prosecutor does not have enough evidence without the testimony of a parent, then he does not have enough evidence.… That’s how I feel.”
Much of the questioning in Grand Jury Room 4, conducted by Mike Emmick and Bruce Udolf on February 10, was aimed at pinning down a single fact: that Monica’s mother knew her daughter was engaged in a sexual affair with President Clinton. This would corroborate, for the first time, that Linda Tripp’s secret recordings did not capture a flight of fantasy. It was not the most direct evidence, but it would finally confirm that Clinton had lied in his Jones deposition.
“And there are half a dozen (prosecutors) lined up against you, all by yourself,” Monica’s mother would recall, “and you have no legal experience and no legal training. So it is very, very possible that unknowingly and unwittingly, you could say or do something that could be catastrophic and not even know it. It’s a terrifying, terrifying situation, and it’s barbaric.”
Emmick proceeded gingerly during the questioning. He established first that Monica’s mother had suspected, while her daughter was interning in the White House, that Monica might be developing a romantic interest in the president. She further acknowledged that this had caused her to be “very concerned and not happy.” When the prosecutor asked why, Monica’s mother looked at him quizzically. “Because I would like my daughter to find a nice young man and get married and I would like grandchildren,” she responded.
The grand jurors, seated