Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [372]
During the extraordinary four-hour session that ensued, President Bill Clinton gave a detailed account of his affair with Monica Lewinsky—the only time, for the rest of his public career, that he would speak candidly about his relationship with the former intern. Clinton admitted that he met with Lewinsky approximately fourteen times in the White House—five before she was transferred to the Pentagon and then nine or ten times thereafter. He confessed to “phone sex” banter during isolated evenings in the family quarters of the White House. He acknowledged that in December 1997, Lewinsky had arrived at the White House gate, angry after learning that Eleanor Mondale had been visiting Clinton earlier in the day. When pressed to explain how Lewinsky had learned what was going on within the top-secret confines of the Oval Office, the president replied with a nostalgic smile: “Ms. Lewinsky has a way of getting information out of people when she’s either charming or determined.”
The president, several times, displayed unmistakable affection for Lewinsky. He confessed to the grand jury: “She’s basically a good girl. She’s a good young woman with a good heart and a good mind. I think she is burdened by some unfortunate conditions of her, her upbringing. But she’s basically a good person.” He added: “It breaks my heart that she was ever involved in this.”
Even as he confessed his sins, Clinton artfully turned the tables. He told the grand jurors, in a spontaneous burst of candor, “Did I want this to come out? No. Was I embarrassed about this? Yes. Did I ask her [Lewinsky] to lie about it? No.”
The president next turned his attention to the “strange” definition of “sexual relations” that the lawyers had handed him during the Jones deposition, insisting that he never intended to lie under oath, because he believed this tortured language referred (generally) to “sexual intercourse.” He sought his best to dance around a slew of questions by the prosecutors: “I understood the definition to be limited to—to physical contact with those areas of the bodies with the specific intent to arouse or gratify.”
President Bill Clinton was dominating the proceedings so thoroughly that the Starr prosecutors were getting exasperated. Wisenberg cursed to himself that the deputy in charge of this make-it-or-break-it proceeding, Bob Bittman, still hadn’t asked any of the hard-hitting “sex” questions that they had directed him to ask. Indeed, the overall report from those OIC lawyers inside the grand jury room, when they sneaked out periodically to use a phone in the hallway, was that they were getting pummeled. It was so bad that some prosecutors watching the faces of the grand jurors communicated that “the referral is in danger,” meaning that OIC might ruin its chance to send anything resembling a credible impeachment report to Congress.
With their chance to corner Clinton swirling down the drain, Wisenberg took over, throwing off the gloves. He asked the president bluntly: Would receiving oral sex constitute engaging in “sexual relations” under the definition he had been handed?
President Clinton replied that “if performed on the deponent,” his reading was that it was not covered. “As I understood it, it was not, no.”
Wisenberg pressed forward, making the president concede that if he had touched or kissed Ms. Lewinsky’s breasts with the “purpose to arouse or gratify,” that would fit the definition.
“That’s correct, sir.”
And “touching her genitalia” with the desire to gratify sexually would also fall within that definition.
“That’s correct,” said Clinton. Sensing danger from this line of questioning, the president shifted to his previous defense: “My recollection is that I did not have sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky and I’m staying on my former statement about that,” he repeated, clearing his throat.
No matter how close Clinton came to