The photograph is a simple black-and-white image of a man and a woman. But it also is a record of the dangerous proximity of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
The picture shows the president, hands in his pockets, smiling slightly and gazing firmly at Monica Lewinsky, animated as she reads from a document. It was snapped by a White House photographer on Nov. 17, 1995.
That same day, according to Lewinsky’s testimony before a federal grand jury, she and the president were alone together in the bathroom adjacent to the White House’s Oval Office having the second of their 10 sexual encounters.
The photograph is just one of the 3,183 pages of evidence intended to bolster the case for President Clinton’s impeachment. The records were gathered by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, who claims they show that Clinton has committed perjury, obstructed justice and abused the powers of his office in concealing his affair with Lewinsky.
The body of evidence released Monday is a thick, complex catalog of hope, desire and failure. The record is replete with compelling grand jury testimony, datebook entries, phone records, White House entry and exit logs, FBI interviews and lab reports, pictures of expensive neckties and cheap trinkets and reconstituted e-mail messages. And it reveals more than clinical descriptions of the president’s assignations.
Even more than in Starr’s formal 445-page report, the documents released Monday lay out not just how the president and Lewinsky carried off their affair but why. The disclosures go a long way toward showing the differences with which the man and the woman in this complex relationship approached each other and what each drew from it.
Lewinsky’s testimony is the most revealing. She was taken with Clinton’s stature, his charm, and soon came to believe–truly believe–that Clinton was in love with her. “I just knew he was in love with me,” she testified as late as Aug. 26.
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Their sexual affair began, Lewinsky testified, on Nov. 15, 1995, after Clinton and Lewinsky made eye contact during several previous ceremonies on the White House lawn. On that night, Clinton invited the intern back into his office and asked, she says, if he could kiss her. She assented.
Later that night, after 10 p.m., he summoned her again and this time “I unbuttoned my jacket,” she recalled, and their physical relationship commenced. She said he took a phone call that night while they were otherwise occupied.
That initial encounter would be repeated. Even Lewinsky admits in testimony disclosed Monday that the two developed a routine.
“We went into the back study and we were in the, the hallway area. And it had sort of become actually a ritual sort of at this point, that we always kind of started out our meetings, that he was leaning against the closed door of the bathroom and I would rub his back because he has a bad back. So I used to always rub his back, and sometimes he’d rub my back. . . .
“And you know, and then I’d usually move around and sort of just lovingly touch his chest.”
There was nothing routine, however, in Lewinsky’s emotions, or her belief that she was becoming deeply involved with Clinton. “It was the passion of the moment,” she testified. “That was, I mean, just sort of in the course of things that happened, you know. I always felt that we sort of just, we both really went to a, to a whole other place together sexually.”
The place they went, it appears, was also interwoven with official events, even tragedy. Sometimes Clinton would take phone calls while Lewinsky gave him oral sex. Other times White House aides would inadvertently call for the president, interrupting the two.
In one sexual encounter, Lewinsky said, Clinton was upset that the first American soldier had died in Bosnia-Herzegovina, “so I was trying to comfort him.”
On another occasion, Lewinsky testified that Clinton called her at home on April 7, 1996, days after Commerce Secretary Ron Brown had died in a plane crash in Croatia. The two discussed the tragedy for a time and then turned to Lewinsky’s transfer from the White House to the Pentagon.
White House aides were concerned about her proximity to Clinton. Clinton, Lewinsky says, promised to get her a job back at the White House after the 1996 presidential election, something that White House aides continued to block.
Lewinsky, nevertheless, did make it back for visits, taking pains to avoid suspicious staffers. They met twice in the Rose Garden, and they enlisted presidential secretary Betty Currie to get Lewinsky into the presidential office.
Clinton, Lewinsky testified, became concerned that his calls to her were showing up on her office caller ID as “POTUS” (or President of The United States). Clinton then began using a phone that would display only a number, and not POTUS, when he called her.
Lewinsky showered the president with more than 30 gifts, including expensive Hugo Boss, Ermenegildo Zegna and Calvin Klein neckties, luxurious Davidoff cigars, books, a steady stream of collectible frog figurines, a Sherlock Holmes game. She sang him “Happy Birthday.”
Her mood rose and fell on whether he called. She collected jokes from the Internet for him. When he hurt his knee at the Florida home of pro golfer Greg Norman, Lewinsky sent Clinton knee pads bearing the presidential seal. They engaged, Lewinsky said, in phone sex 10 to 15 times.
After sexual contact had ended, Lewinsky sent Clinton suggestive gifts, including a book about phone sex and an erotic postcard.
She called him a “sweet little boy” who was affectionate and self-centered, and who had “a Saturday night” personality that gave in to sexual desire and a “Sunday personality” that went to church and showed remorse. She became filled with envy when newspapers ran pictures of the president and Hillary Rodham Clinton sharing an embrace or holding hands.
“I was jealous and it just seemed sort of something, an aspect of their relationship that he had never really revealed to me, and it made me feel bad,” she recalled last month for Starr’s grand jury.
For Clinton’s part, Lewinsky appeared to be someone who simply serviced his sexual desire. According to Lewinsky, he called her when the first lady was out of town, memorized her phone number, encouraged her to visit, returned her favors with chocolates, a T-shirt, a compact disc and a now-famous copy of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” among other gifts, some previously given to Clinton. Lewinsky’s family had a picture taken with the him in the Oval Office; their beaming faces are included in Starr’s documents.
Over time, they talked more and more, at one point she suggested that he would have more time on his hands in three years when he was no longer president. Clinton, according to Lewinsky, told him, “I might be alone in three years.”
But at first, he would not allow her to complete sexual acts, explaining he did not want “to get addicted to me,” Lewinsky testified. On one occasion, however, their encounter resulted in the now famous stains on her blue dress.
Based on Clinton’s testimony, it is difficult to gauge his emotional investment in the relationship. Lewinsky complains that Clinton failed in the beginning to ask personal details, a lapse that she found annoying. “He didn’t seem to ask probing questions, when you’re trying to get to know someone.”
Clinton testified that after their sexual encounters ended in 1997, Lewinsky seemed to have trouble recognizing that the relationship had changed. “It may be that when I did the right thing and made it stick that, in a way, she felt a need to cling more closely or try to get closer to me,” he told the grand jury, “even though she knew nothing improper was happening or was going to happen.”
It all began to unravel last fall, with subpoenas to Lewinsky from lawyers for former Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones, who sued Clinton for sexual harassment.
The president and Lewinsky discussed her submitting an affidavit to avoid a deposition. Earlier, the two agreed, she said, never to discuss their relationship. “I told him I would always, I would always deny it, I would always protect him,” she told prosecutors.
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The affair between Clinton and Lewinsky ended with starkly different images than the warm pictures that marked its beginning: His speech on television on Aug. 17, admitting to an inappropriate relationship, her walking briskly into a federal courthouse in Washington to face Starr’s grand jury.
Clinton, his presidency imperiled, was obviously past whatever it was he felt for Lewinsky by the time he made his mea culpa. Not so Lewinsky. She watched, hoping the president would acknowledge their time together, her role in it, her loyalty. He never did.
“I wanted him to say that I was a nice, decent person and that he was sorry that this had happened because I–I tried to do as much as I could to protect him.”