Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [352]
“Oh,” Emmick replied. With that, he hung up.
Said Ginsburg, “And I never heard from him again.”
As for the blue dress, Ginsburg felt secure in knowing that it was “stored in a safe place.” Beyond that, his lips remained sealed.
When Plato Cacheris and Jake Stein took over, Lewinsky initially acted coy, giving them conflicting stories about the mysterious, never-seen dress. One version was that “it was stained by Clinton.” The second was, “Maybe I spilled something on it, like clam chowder.” In light of these conflicting accounts, Cacheris and Stein had debated whether to have the fabric tested themselves for DNA matter. They decided that such a course was dangerous. The last thing they needed was to be charged with “tampering with evidence.” Over time, as their client came to trust them and to speak more candidly to them, they became convinced that she possessed the real item. So they told Lewinsky to “keep the dress,” wherever it was. She was not to wash it; she was not to give it away to Goodwill. As reluctant as their client might be to help OIC capture the president, the blue dress was her best chance of keeping herself out of one of those frightful-looking jails the FBI had shown her in Los Angeles.
KEN Starr arrived by plane the night before the meeting at “Grandma’s house,” wearing a baseball cap tipped over his eyes as a disguise. Starr needed to arrange the furniture and tidy up his mother-in-law’s pied-à-terre on the East Side of Manhattan. After all, this was the biggest meeting he would ever convene as independent counsel—even though he himself would not be attending.
Finally, everything seemed to be looking up for Starr. Of late, his prosecutors “were really of one cheerful accord,” he felt. Bruce Udolf had left the investigation, supposedly because of health concerns, but in truth he had been driven out by his own colleagues. The rest of the nonbelievers, that is, the moderates in the office, had now found religion. Everyone agreed that pinning down Monica Lewinsky was the proper fix to repair their stalled investigation.
After Starr spent a restful night in his parents-in-law’s cozy apartment, getting up at dawn to purchase plenty of orange juice and breakfast treats, he scooted out and walked several blocks to the Fitzpatrick Manhattan Hotel. Here, the independent counsel and a backup team of prosecutors were establishing a second base of operations. Starr was fully aware that Monica detested him—he did not want to “make her feel more uncomfortable.” Also, he told himself that as head of the OIC operation—much like the attorney general in charge of the Justice Department—the appropriate role of “yours truly” was to stay out of the fray.
Ken Starr was not the only person traveling in disguise for this gathering. Monica Lewinsky had flown in from California wearing a “platinum blond wig … long hair, bangs” along with “a baseball cap and sunglasses.” Cacheris and Stein had met with Lewinsky the night before at her mother’s apartment in Manhattan, noting that his client was unusually “apprehensive.” She had become thoroughly skeptical of the motives of the independent counsel. She was especially leery since her mother had been hauled before the grand jury and had suffered a public “breakdown.”
Marcia Lewis would remember that her daughter was “conflicted”: “I think in a perfect world, she could have stood her ground and never cooperated. And yet, what was the end going to be then? That she would risk going to jail while everybody else sat back and had a happy life ever after? It was just a very difficult period for her. She did all of this with a very heavy heart.”
Monica herself recalled that her principal emotion at this time was fear. She had waited eight months for the president to admit the truth and put a stop to this—that had not happened. Now, fearing prosecution for herself and her family, she needed immunity. But nobody,