Clinton's Crisis: Truth or...Consequences

(9 of 10)

It would take a while for her mother to reach Washington by train from New York City; Monica was frantic, and Starr's team had to calm her down. They bought her cookies. They watched Ethel Merman with her on TV. They took her shopping in the mall downstairs at Crate & Barrel. Lewinsky's father back in California had reached a longtime family friend, a medical malpractice lawyer named William Ginsburg, and Ginsburg reached Starr's team by phone around 10:30 that night. Ginsburg asked them to write down the terms of an immunity deal and fax it to him. We have no computer, they replied. Write it on hotel stationery, he suggested. They refused. Ginsburg offered to fly to Washington that night by charter if they would just put something in writing. No deal.

By the next evening, Ginsburg had arrived in Washington and gone to Starr's offices, where they told him the deal was off. And so the big squeeze tightened. Starr had been burned before, offering Clinton buddy Webb Hubbell a light sentence if he would sing about Whitewater, and getting little in return. This time around, Starr needs Lewinsky in order to make his case work, but knows that she alone is not enough. He needs some corroborating evidence of obstruction of justice to head off a he-said/she-said battle, in which the Leader of the Free World would have the advantage. Starr was prepared to immunize Monica before the story broke; she would have had a chance to produce new evidence by secretly taping or gathering statements from others to support her obstruction story. But by the middle of last week, when the cover had been blown, she may have had nothing left to give but old trinkets and a stained dress.

So it became all the more vital to portray her as a vulnerable victim of an ugly power struggle. Ginsburg may not be a criminal lawyer, but he knows how to do p.r. The bearded, besweatered, avuncular lawyer, looking every inch the indignant father figure, gave a string of carefully chosen television interviews. He directed his fire both at Starr and the President for "savaging" a "child." "My client...is at the vortex of a storm involving three of the most powerful people in the United States: President Clinton, Vernon Jordan and Kenneth Starr."

The "immunity dance" proceeded in fits and starts through the week--part flirtation, part bluff, part intimidation, which will need to end in an embrace for both sides to survive. It was clear by week's end that Lewinsky herself was now a target of a criminal investigation. Starr told the FBI he was going to need "additional resources" to do all the legwork. And he began issuing subpoenas that would send agents throughout the city with a vacuum cleaner.

By this time the historical echoes were so loud, it was time for a flashback: it came when FBI agents descended on the Watergate to search Lewinsky's apartment. They knew what they were looking for: her black and dark blue dresses; some T shirts Clinton allegedly gave her; a gold pin and trinkets from the Black Dog gift shop on Martha's Vineyard, where the First Family vacations; some hats; the volume of Whitman; a computer. Meanwhile, Starr subpoenaed the Pentagon and the White House for phone, computer and personnel records on both Tripp and Lewinsky. He served Lewinsky with a subpoena to appear before a grand jury this Tuesday.