Clinton's Crisis: Truth or...Consequences

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It sometimes seemed as though ambitious West Wing staff members made a point of recruiting the prettiest interns--not only for their own aesthetic pleasure but in hopes that it would inspire the boss to come around more often. That tactic did not go unnoticed by the few senior women on the President's staff. A former White House aide tells TIME that on several occasions late in 1995 and early 1996, attractive young women were transferred to the nether reaches of government because Clinton kept dropping by unannounced to flirt with them. When Clinton "got too chatty with somebody," explained the former aide, "a couple of the older, more senior women on the staff would see that these women got moved."

And that is just what happened to Monica Lewinsky. She had arrived in Washington in the summer of 1995, the daughter of a Beverly Hills cancer doctor and a sometime Hollywood gossip writer. Lewinsky had just graduated as a psychology major from Lewis and Clark College in Oregon and had come to the White House to seek her fortune filing and photocopying and answering the phones. Maybe get invited to a party. Maybe even get to meet the President.

Interns would usually see the President's schedule a day ahead of time but were told to keep their distance. "We were briefed a number of times about what to do if the President is going to be in the building," says a fellow intern. "They'd say, 'Follow protocol. Get out of the way.'" A plum assignment was anything that required a blue pass for the West Wing, which allowed an intern to roam the West Wing more or less at will. Betty Currie, one of the President's private secretaries, was "an untouchable," off limits for networking, and any unsolicited conversation at all from interns.

But Monica was not just any intern. The portrait that was painted last week, by the tapes and the tabloids, was of a rather insinuating, flirtatious young woman with a habit of walking into bosses' offices with coffee they did not ask for. She told her friend Tripp that she met the President at a party that November, where she appeared in a fetching dress and caught the President's eye. Soon after, they began their relationship, she claimed, around the time she was hired as a regular White House staff member, working in the East Wing office of the legislative affairs shop, blue pass around her neck.

But by the following April, she was out of the White House, moved to a job at the Pentagon in spokesman Kenneth Bacon's Office of Public Affairs. As fate would have it, however, Bacon's office was the wrong landing pad for a young woman who loved to gossip. Sitting not far away was Linda Tripp, another former White House aide, who had joined the Bush Administration as a secretary and later ran afoul of the Clinton team. Though Tripp was earnest and efficient, with good instincts and a gift for prose, few White House staff members had good things to say about her last week. "She was awful," says one former official who worked with her in the White House counsel's office. "She was surly; she was sullen; she had a chip on her shoulder and a nasty look on her face." She routinely fought with the other assistants. "We thought she was a Bushie," says one official, "but the real problem is that no one liked her. She was difficult, contentious; the other secretaries just hated her."