My life

What I had done with Monica Lewinsky was immoral and foolish. I was deeply ashamed of it and I didn’t want it to come out. In the deposition, I was trying to protect my family and myself from my selfish stupidity. I believed that the contorted definition of “sexual relations” enabled me to do so, though I was worried enough about it to invite the lawyer interrogating me to ask specific questions. I didn’t have to wait long to find out why he declined to do so.

On January 21, the Washington Post led with a story that I had had an affair with Monica Lewinsky, and that Kenneth Starr was investigating charges that I had encouraged her to lie about it under oath. The story first emerged publicly early on the eighteenth, on an Internet site. The deposition had been a setup; nearly four years after he first offered to help Paula Jones, Starr had finally gotten into her case. In the summer of 1996, Monica Lewinsky had begun talking to a co-worker, Linda Tripp, about her relationship with me. A year later, Tripp had started taping their telephone conversations. In October 1997, Tripp offered to play the tapes for a Newsweek reporter and did play them for Lucianne Goldberg, a conservative Republican publicist. Tripp was subpoenaed in the Jones case, though she was never on any witness list provided to my attorneys.

Late on Monday, January 12, 1998, Tripp phoned Starr’s office, described her secret taping of Lewinsky, and made arrangements to turn over those tapes. She was concerned about her own criminal liability, because the kind of taping she had done was a felony under Maryland law, but Starr’s people promised to protect her. The next day Starr had FBI agents wire Tripp so that she could secretly record a conversation with Lewinsky over lunch at the Pentagon City Ritz-Carlton. A couple of days later, Starr asked the Justice Department for permission to expand his authority to encompass the investigation of Lewinsky, apparently being less than truthful about the basis for his request. On the sixteenth, the day before my deposition, Tripp arranged to meet Lewinsky again at the hotel. This time Monica was greeted by FBI agents and attorneys who took her to a hotel room, questioned her for several hours, and discouraged her from calling a lawyer. One of Starr’s lawyers told her she should cooperate if she wanted to avoid going to jail and offered her an immunity deal that expired at midnight. Lewinsky was also pressured to wear a wire to secretly tape conversations with people involved in the alleged cover-up. Finally, Monica was able to call her mother, who contacted her father, from whom she had long been divorced. He got in touch with a lawyer, William Ginsburg, who advised her not to accept the immunity deal until he learned more about the case, and who blasted Starr for holding his client “for eight or nine hours without an attorney” and for pressuring her to wear a wire to entrap others. After the story broke, I called David Kendall and assured him that I had not suborned perjury or obstructed justice. It was clear to both of us that Starr was trying to create a firestorm to force me from office. He was off to a flying start, but I thought that if I could survive the public pounding for two weeks, the smoke would begin to clear, the press and the public would focus on Starr’s tactics, and a more balanced view of the matter would emerge. I knew I had made a terrible mistake, and I was determined not to compound it by allowing Starr to drive me from office. For now, the hysteria was overwhelming.

I went on doing my job, and I stonewalled, denying what had happened to everyone: Hillary, Chelsea, my staff and cabinet, my friends in Congress, members of the press, and the American people. What I regret the most, other than my conduct, is having misled all of them. Since 1991 I had been called a liar about everything under the sun, when in fact I had been honest in my public life and financial affairs, as all the investigations would show. Now I was misleading everyone about my personal failings. I was embarrassed and wanted to keep it from my wife and daughter. I didn’t want to help Ken Starr criminalize my personal life, and I didn’t want the American people to know I’d let them down. It was like living in a nightmare. I was back to my parallel lives with a vengeance. On the day the story broke, I did a previously scheduled interview with Jim Lehrer for the PBS