Bill Clinton's $10 million autobiography, My Life, comes out this month. While the book will cover the accomplishments of the best president we've had since the last Bush disaster dragged us into recession and war, 99 percent of its readers will buy it for the three pages devoted to Monica Lewinsky. To save you plowing through acres of nostalgic wonkery (and $21), here they are:
"Come in Ms Lewinsky," I said. It was a bright morning in the fall of 1995. I had no idea that this would be a moment that would change my life, my presidency, my whole way of thinking about women and what they can contribute to public life.
She was a foursquare young person with what we used to call, in my native Arkansas, ‘big hair.' If there were a ‘type' of woman to whom I was attracted other than my beloved wife and life partner Hillary Rodham Clinton, which there isn't, I would be compelled to say she was not by any stretch of the imagination, however you might define that term, my type.
The first thing I noticed about her was an overstuffed briefcase, from which back copies of Foreign Policy were spilling. The second was the large cigar that she produced from nowhere and lit without asking me if I minded. ‘This is a no-nonsense, take-charge character,' I thought to myself -- with the added advantage, as I would soon discover, of having a terrific head on her shoulders.
‘Mr. President,' she began forcefully, puffing on her cigar. ‘I've been an intern here since June and I've been trying to get Leon [Panetta] to arrange a meeting with you for all that time. You need me, Mr President, you need me desperately!'
‘Well now, Ms. Lewinsky,' I said, taken aback by her directness. ‘It's not usual for an intern to get a one-on-one meeting with the President of the United States … .'
‘Let's cut the crap, sir,' she said. ‘Our country and you personally face a crisis of monumental proportions. Thanks to that self-aggrandizing blowhard [Newt] Gingrich and his gang of whining, penny-pinching 19th-century throwbacks, we're completely distracted by petty bourgeois fiscal concerns when we ought to be focused on the prime post-Cold War threat to our security and survival.'
With the 1994 Congress strangling at birth all that Hillary and I had hoped to do for America, this was music to my ears. But what was this threat? Surely the ‘Contract with America' -- or as we referred to it in the White House, the ‘Contract on America' -- was, in this time of relative peace and growing prosperity, the greatest threat we faced.
‘Mr. President,' she said, ‘can I call you Bill?' She continued without waiting for an answer. ‘Do you realize that you narrowly escaped assassination early last year?'
‘Whoo-ah!' I said, perhaps a little too loudly. “Take it easy, little lady! Slow down there.'
‘Bill,' she said, lowering her tone to a husky sotto voce. ‘I want you to call me Monica. Lewinsky is not my real name. It's probably best if you never know my real name. People who have known it are no longer, well, with us.'
Could she be for real? I thought. Oh boy, was she for real!
‘Bill,' she went on. ‘Last winter, during your swing through the Philippines, an Islamic fanatic named Osama bin Laden, leader of a terrorist group called al-Qaeda, tried to kill you. Earlier he tried to kill the pope in the same location; this spring he tried to kill [Hosni] Mubarak.'
‘My God!' I exclaimed. ‘Holy God!'
‘This man is uncompromising, well-funded, and ruthless,' she went on. ‘His operatives are ubiquitous in all urban areas of the developed nations, able to move at a moment's notice, often highly educated, willing to embrace martyrdom to achieve their principal aims, which include driving all Western presence from the Middle East and seizing control of our principal fossil-fuel source. And they can do it! Their cause is hugely popular in the Muslim world. Bill, your people do not take this threat seriously!'
I have to say my mouth was open. Her audacity, her grasp of the issues, the spellbinding rhetoric that bubbled from her lips. Her homeliness evaporated when she was animated. She was almost beautiful, intellectually aroused. I could see that an unattached man who appreciated her scintillating mind could have fallen for her in an instant. Indeed, with her openness, her almost insouciant lack of caution, I could even see how an unscrupulous man might take advantage of her. I was getting pretty excited myself -- by her brilliance, by the prospect of having such rare talent available 24-7 on my team.
This threat to our very existence, she explained, was pervasive and immediate. Our vast, bloated military, drunk on its own inflated post-Cold War self-promotion, was useless to combat it. She compared the military to a professional wrestler, all muscle and steroids and sideshow effects. The U.S. military, for all its power on paper, was obsolete in a crowded, globally connected world, the ‘last smokestack industry in America.' We needed a fast-moving, clandestine, highly trained and educated network of forces, organized in small, unidentifiable cadres, the very latest technology at their fingertips, as ruthless, mobile, and anonymous as the enemy.
I was utterly captivated by the extraordinary intelligence and passion with which she presented her case, which now grew to its climax. Finally, I could no longer contain myself:
‘Sweet Jesus on the cross, baby!” I exclaimed. ‘Why didn't I find you before? Leon told me how special you were but I never dreamed how special! Whoo-ee! You could teach Hillary a thing or two.'
I immediately apologized for that ‘baby,' of course. But that was not the problem. The problem was that I should have been more discreet, more restrained in my enthusiasm. In Washington, every wall has ears.
Of course, as the world now knows, some person or persons unknown overheard my words and completely misinterpreted them. Or misrepresented them to my enemies. Or perhaps, to be more specific, to my enemy in the Democratic Leadership Council. Who stood to rise to the presidency if … .
Well, I guess I should let bygones be bygones.
A despicable construction was put on our initial encounter, and on subsequent meetings at which Monica and I got down to the nitty-gritty, hashing out the details of super-secret, highly classified anti-terrorist strategies. (One of my last acts as president was to pass on these proposals to the Bush administration. Needless to say, they were shredded.)
And, of course, a still worse interpretation was put on the run-of-the-mill position I later placed Monica in at the Pentagon, whose undercover purpose was to start quietly recruiting the commanders of a force that could have prevented every major terrorist attack since then.
In the manufactured scandal that ensued, the great resource of Monica's talent was lost forever to the nation, because she could not defend herself without endangering others. For my part, with my legs cut off by the absurd three-ring circus of impeachment, my determination -- to wipe out al-Qaeda, bring bin Laden to justice, repair our global ties to our Muslim brothers and sisters, reform the U.S. military from top to bottom, and bring lasting peace to the Middle East -- was hopelessly compromised.
Do I hear you say, what about the semen-stained dress? Well, folks, it wasn't Monica's size. It wasn't even Monica's dress. And highly classified forensic tests have now established beyond the shadow of a doubt that that semen wasn't mine either.
So whose was the dress? Whose was the semen? You'll never believe this! The dress was purchased by credit card in May 1996 by the same man whose semen was - according to recently declassified forensic tests – all over it.
That man's name is...Kenneth Winston Starr.
Tony Hendra is an author and an actor. His latest book, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul, has just been published by Random House. Talk to Tony at tonyhendra.com.
