This Is a Battle --Hillary Clinton

(3 of 7)

Without Lewinsky's testimony, Starr is left with little but circumstantial evidence, much of it messy, none of it conclusive so far. It suggests at best a pattern of attention and job-hunting assistance from Clinton and his friend Jordan that they could scarcely afford to provide all 250 White House interns. So in weeks to come, if Starr has any promising avenue left to pursue, it might be the tale of Lewinsky's job hunt: it unfolded right alongside her arrival onstage in the Paula Jones suit, and it reveals that Starr and Clinton may not be the only characters who are playing for keeps.

The story begins on Friday, Dec. 5, when Jones' lawyers quietly told Bob Bennett, Clinton's attorney, that they intended to call Lewinsky to give a deposition. Shortly thereafter, Lewinsky received a subpoena, and it was about this time that Vernon Jordan threw himself headfirst into her search for a new job.

In the days that followed, Jordan made a round of calls to various companies with which he has considerable influence. He phoned American Express and also Young & Rubicam, looking to find Lewinsky a spot in its Burson-Marsteller public relations unit. Lewinsky drafted a letter that arrived, as one company official put it, "on the heels of the Jordan call." The double team worked: Lewinsky got an interview with Burson-Marsteller on Dec. 18; on the 23rd, she interviewed at American Express. But despite Jordan's intervention, Lewinsky got no job offers. The day after Christmas, she left her job at the Pentagon--with no prospects.

On most Sunday nights the West Wing of the White House is quiet as a tomb; on the Sunday after Christmas, at the end of a long weekend, when every last soul in America was home cocooning with cocoa and football and kids, where was the President? He was meeting at the White House with a woman with a subpoena hanging over her head. According to the New York Times, Clinton advised Lewinsky to explain her many visits to the Oval Office area by saying she had come to visit his secretary, Betty Currie. Better yet, it was reported, she could get a job in New York, where it would be harder for Jones' lawyers to track her down. A source close to the White House denied the Times's account but acknowledged to TIME that Clinton and Lewinsky met that night with Currie present. The secretary's brother had just been killed in a car wreck, the source explains, and Lewinsky came to bring her a Christmas gift.

Two days later, Lewinsky was in New York City for a second interview at Burson-Marsteller. She took the standard writing test. "It was mediocre," a source told TIME. "It was sloppy when it came to details and showed little imagination." Her thank-you note was just as bad, full of bad grammar and misspellings. Burson-Marsteller never called her back.