Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [377]
A Washington Post photographer captured Bill, Hillary, and daughter Chelsea Clinton walking across the White House lawn with heads lowered, eighteen-year-old Chelsea positioned between her parents, clutching their hands as if trying to hold together a broken string of paper dolls. The president’s political people had spoken to Hillary’s staff, extremely gingerly, about ways to handle this situation. In the end, both groups had retreated. This was a “family matter,” they whispered, that was far too hot to handle. Clinton’s chocolate Labrador retriever, Buddy, which he guided forward on a leash, seemed to be the only one willing to show affection toward the president. As the First Family climbed aboard Marine One, the president attempted to assist his wife up the stairs; Hillary shook him off and mounted the steps alone.
Both Bill and Buddy, the media now joked, would be in the dog house as soon as they arrived at the Massachusetts coast.
Dick Kelley, the president’s stepfather from Hot Springs, had witnessed a considerable amount of sin during his eighty-three years on earth. He would later scratch his head and admit, “It was just a hard thing for me to believe, you know, that Bill Clinton would be involved in that [affair with Monica Lewinsky].” His worry was that Bill’s moral lapse would drive knives into the hearts of Hillary and Chelsea and do irreparable harm. “Hillary is a great woman,” said Kelley. “But I know that this hurt her very much. And Chelsea also.”
Another person who was not particularly pleased with the president’s performance was Monica Lewinsky, the former intern who potentially held the key to his survival. She would later say of Bill Clinton’s soft-shoe, by which he tried to dance away from danger by protesting that there were no “sexual relations,” because this was a one-way physical relationship: “I was very hurt. I was angry. I felt that the language he chose was so discounting of me as a person. And once again, made this seem like it was a ‘servicing’ relationship.”
Indeed, when Lewinsky arrived at the grand jury to continue her own testimony, days later, she was no longer in a forgiving mood. Starr’s office had purposely called her back, looking for “flaws” in Clinton’s account. When asked by one grand juror if she still felt love for the president, Lewinsky shot back, “I don’t know how I feel right now.” She was absolutely devastated by his new defense that “all I did was perform oral sex on him and that that’s all that this relationship was. And it was a lot more than that to me and I thought it was a lot more than that [to him].”
She told the grand jurors, who listened with misty eyes, that she had done everything humanly possible “not to hurt him.” Now this was the thanks Clinton gave her?
The former intern began to pour out her soul, telling the grand jurors that the president’s people had “trashed me … they have smeared me and they called me stupid, they said I couldn’t write, they said I was a stalker.” All she wanted Bill Clinton to say was “that I was a nice, decent person and that he was sorry this had happened.”
Her lip trembling, she added, “And I’m only 24 and so I felt that… this had been hard for me and this had been hard on my family and I just wanted him to … by saying something nice, he would have taken back every disgusting, horrible thing that anyone has said about me from that White House. And that was what I wanted.”
None of the women in Bill Clinton’s life, past or present, was happy with how he was expressing remorse for his wretched behavior.
AT Martha’s Vineyard, a fashionable island retreat off Cape Cod, President Clinton was staring into the dark face of the Grim Reaper of politics, a specter that foretold the death of politicians who had skated too close to the edge. At the Oyster Pond compound, a choice piece of property owned by wealthy Boston developer Dick Friedman, and with dazzling views of the Atlantic Ocean, Bill Clinton looked like a man without a place to hang his swimsuit. One observer summed up the vacation: “Hillary and Chelsea