A Vast Conspiracy (44 page)

The president did not behave like a trained witness; he gave long answers, and often volunteered more information than was called for by the questions. At one point, he said, unbidden, “I embraced her. I put my arms around her, I may even have kissed her on the forehead. There was nothing sexual about it.” But Clinton’s windiness sometimes worked to his advantage, as when he added, “Let me remind you—Kathleen Willey asked for this meeting with me. I didn’t ask for the meeting with her.”

At about eleven forty-five, Fisher turned to a new subject.

“Now,” he said, “do you know a woman named Monica Lewinsky?”

“I do,” Clinton said.

Fisher began with a series of questions about Lewinsky’s employment history—her internship, her service in the White House, then her move to the Pentagon. Throughout the deposition, Clinton suggested he knew Lewinsky because she was a friend of Betty Currie’s. Accordingly, Clinton professed a vague familiarity with her progress through the ranks, and the questions didn’t trouble either the president or his lawyers. (In truth, Clinton had played no role in Lewinsky’s various job changes within the government, much to her dismay.)

After a short break, though, Fisher started to put his knowledge to work. “Mr. President, before the break,” he said, “we were talking about Monica Lewinsky. At any time were you and Monica Lewinsky together alone in the Oval Office?”

“I don’t recall,” Clinton began. “I typically worked some on the weekends. Sometimes they’d bring me things on the weekends. She—it seems to me she brought things to me once or twice on the weekends. In that case, whatever time she would be in there, drop it off, exchange a few words and go, she was there.” (This, of course, was the cover story Clinton and Lewinsky had constructed to explain her visits to him on the weekends. It was why Lewinsky always carried a folder when she visited Clinton for their assignations.)

“So I understand,” Fisher continued gently, “your testimony is that it was possible, then, that you were alone with her, but you have no specific recollection of that ever happening?”

“Yes, that’s correct,” Clinton said. “It’s possible that she, in, while she was working there, brought something to me and that at the time she brought it to me, and she was the only person there. That’s possible.” In the year to come, this series of questions about whether they were “alone” proved to be the nightmare of Clinton’s defenders. The president’s answers were unequivocal lies.

“Did it ever happen that you and she went down the hallway from the Oval Office to the private kitchen?” Fisher continued.

Bennett took the opportunity to jump in—and unveil what he regarded as his secret weapon on the subject of Monica Lewinsky. “Your Honor, excuse me, Mr. President,” Bennett said, “I need some guidance from the Court at this point. I’m going to object to the innuendo. I’m afraid, as I say, that this will leak.… Counsel is fully aware that Ms. Lewinsky
had filed, has an affidavit which they are in possession of, saying that there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton.…”

Perhaps understandably, the affidavit—and several conversations between Bennett and Frank Carter—had lulled the Clinton team into a false sense of security about Lewinsky. With both Clinton and Lewinsky on record as insisting that there was no sexual relationship between them, Bennett felt he had the right to be indignant about the “innuendo” in Fisher’s questions. Bennett insisted, “I would like to know the proffer”—the basis for Fisher’s questions about Lewinsky. “In preparation of the witness for this deposition, the witness is fully aware of Ms. Lewinsky’s affidavit, so I have not told him a single thing he doesn’t know, but I think when [Fisher] asks questions like this where he’s sitting on an affidavit from the witness, he should at least have a good faith proffer.”

But Judge Wright let Fisher proceed without a proffer, and he asked Clinton again about whether he and Lewinsky had gone down the private hallway to the kitchen behind the Oval Office.

At this point, as if in an instant, Clinton’s demeanor changed. To answer this question, and all of the remaining queries about Lewinsky, the president assumed the posture in which he would spend much of the following year—one of abject self-pity, coupled with sustained dishonesty.

“Well, let me try to describe the facts first,” Clinton began, “because you keep talking about this private kitchen. The private kitchen is staffed by two naval aides. They have total, unrestricted access to my dining room, to that hallway, to coming into the Oval Office. The people who are in the outer office of the Oval Office can also enter at any time.

“I was, after I went through a presidential campaign in which the far right tried to convince the American people I had committed murder, run drugs, slept in my mother’s bed with four prostitutes, and done numerous other things, I had a high level of paranoia. There are no curtains on the Oval Office, there are no curtains on my private office, there are no curtains or blinds that can close the windows in my private dining room. The naval aides come and go at will. There is a peephole in the office that George Stephanopoulos and then Rahm Emanuel occupied that looks back down that corridor.

“I have done everything I could to avoid the kind of questions you are asking me here today, so to talk about this kitchen as if it is a private
kitchen, it’s a little cubbyhole, and these guys keep the door open. They come and go at will. Now that’s the factual background here.

“Now, to go back to your question,” Clinton said, at long last, “my recollection is that, at some point during the government shutdown, when Ms. Lewinsky was still an intern but working the chief of staff’s office because all the employees had to go home, that she was back there with a pizza that she brought to me and to others. I do not believe she was there alone, however. I don’t think she was. And my recollection is that on a couple of occasions after that she was there but my secretary, Betty Currie, was there with her. She and Betty are friends. That’s my, that’s my recollection. And I have no other recollection of that.”

This extraordinary monologue, full of both fact and fiction, could serve as a useful template of Clinton’s obsessions. He had conditioned himself to see the Jones suit, indeed the entire legal assault on his presidency, more as a metaphor than a reality. For him, the case served as a symbol of all of the outrageous accusations that he had fought off over the past six years. Their ends justified his means; his deceptions, the reasoning seemed to have gone, paled next to his enemies’ offenses. He had indeed removed the curtains and taken those other steps to free himself from suspicion. (That was why Clinton limited his trysts with Lewinsky to the study, bathroom, and hallway, where they could not be seen through the windows.)

But thanks to Tripp’s briefing, Fisher was not as easily dissuaded from pursuing the Lewinsky matter as he was about Willey. “At any time,” Fisher asked, “have you and Monica Lewinsky ever been alone together in any room in the White House?”

“I think I testified to that earlier,” Clinton said. “I think that there is a, it is—I have no specific recollection, but it seems to me that she was on duty on a couple of occasions working for the legislative affairs office and brought me some things to sign, something on the weekend. That’s—I have a general memory of that.” Another clear lie.

Then, a real surprise to his lawyers, if not to Clinton. Fisher asked about any letters that were sent by Lewinsky to Currie for Clinton. (On Thursday, two days earlier, Isikoff had called Currie to ask about these letters.) Clinton hedged, said it was possible. The questions grew more specific. Had Clinton met with Lewinsky at the White House between midnight and 6
A.M.
? (This was based on faulty information from Tripp and Goldberg, because Lewinsky never claimed any such late-night encounters.) “I certainly
don’t think so,” Clinton replied. Were any false records kept of his meetings with Lewinsky? Again, Clinton thought not.

“Have you ever talked to Monica Lewinsky about the possibility that she might be asked to testify in this lawsuit?” Fisher asked.

“I’m not sure, and let me tell you why I’m not sure. It seems to me the, the, the—I want to be as accurate as I can here. Seems to me the last time she was there to see Betty before Christmas we were joking about how you-all, with the help of the Rutherford Institute, were going to call every woman I’d ever talked to, and I said, you know—”

“We can’t hear you, Mr. President,” Bennett interjected. In his nervousness, Clinton had dropped his voice considerably.

“And I said that you-all might call every woman I ever talked to …” Clinton resumed.

This, too, was false. One month earlier, in the middle of the night of December 17, Clinton had called Lewinsky to tell her that Currie’s brother had died and that she was on the witness list. “It broke my heart when I saw your name on the list,” he had said.

Fisher moved now to ask about how much Clinton knew about Lewinsky’s contacts with Vernon Jordan and Bill Richardson. Clinton parried, suggesting he had some vague knowledge of the meetings.

“Have you ever given any gifts to Monica Lewinsky?” Fisher asked.

Clinton paused for an excruciating ten to fifteen seconds. His lawyers were dumbstruck.

“I don’t recall,” Clinton said, then paused again. “Do you know what they were?”

“A hat pin?”

The previous night, Tripp had struggled to remember the gifts she had heard about from Lewinsky. Clinton had given Monica
Leaves of Grass
, by Walt Whitman, but Fisher asked if he had given her “a book about Walt Whitman.”

Clinton waffled again. “I could have given her a gift, but I don’t remember a specific gift.”

What about anything from “the Black Dog store [actually a restaurant] in Martha’s Vineyard?”

Clinton did remember such a gift. Currie had told him that Monica wanted something from the Black Dog. “I bought a lot of things for a lot of people,” he said, “and I gave Betty a couple of the pieces, and she gave I
think something to Monica and something to some of the other girls who worked in the office.”

At this point, Bennett was getting nervous. Ettinger was also fidgeting a great deal. What was going on? Fisher obviously had a wealth of detail about contacts between Clinton and Lewinsky. The lawyers were hearing a great many of these things for the first time from their client, who was obviously laboring. There had to be a source who was feeding this stuff to the Jones lawyers.

Finally, Fisher came to the heart of his examination.

“Did you have an extramarital sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky?”

“No,” said the president.

“If she told someone that she had a sexual affair with you beginning in November of 1995, would that be a lie?”

“It’s certainly not the truth.”

“I think I used the term ‘sexual affair,’ ” Fisher went on. “And, so the record is completely clear, have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit 1, as modified by the Court?”

At the judge’s suggestion, Fisher handed the definition to Clinton so he could study it.

“I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky,” Clinton said. “I’ve never had an affair with her.”

A moment later, Clinton couldn’t help but ask his own question.

“Mr. Fisher,” he said, “is there something, let me just—you asked that with such conviction, is there something you want to ask me about this? I don’t, I don’t even know what you’re talking about, I don’t think.”

Fisher replied elliptically, and accurately, “Sir, I think this will come to light shortly, and you’ll understand.”

The session broke for lunch. Ettinger whispered to Bennett, “Bob, they’ve got Linda Tripp,” and bolted to a phone.

Fisher had been questioning the president for a little more than two hours—about half the planned length of the deposition—and he had spent about three quarters of his time on Monica Lewinsky. In all, Fisher did an inept job. Given the information available to him, he could have locked Clinton into a dozen false statements in about five minutes. Did
Lewinsky perform oral sex on you? Did she ever touch your genitals? Did you touch her breasts? Did you ever call her on the telephone? Clinton would have had to answer these simple questions categorically, and he certainly would have lied. Instead, Fisher stuck with his convoluted definition of sex and left Clinton an escape hatch that he later tried hard to use.

Still, the morning had left the Clinton team troubled, and Ettinger figured he had to do some investigating of his own. He knew that the Jones lawyers had subpoenaed Tripp, knew that she worked with Lewinsky, knew that she had been Isikoff’s source on the Willey story, and knew that she was angry at Bennett about his quotes in that piece. She had to be their source. So Ettinger frantically dialed the phone number of the man he understood to be Tripp’s lawyer—Kirby Behre. But it was Saturday, and there was no answer. Ettinger stewed on the issue for the remainder of the day.

The remainder of the deposition was anticlimactic. Fisher skipped around a variety of topics—Clinton’s record-keeping as governor, his dealings with the Arkansas troopers, the events at the Excelsior Hotel on May 8, 1991.