This probably isn’t what she had in mind. Last week the woman alleged to have had an affair with President Clinton remained holed up in her apartment at Washington’s Watergate complex, plotting legal strategy with her lawyer and shunning the hordes of reporters and camera crews outside. The president has denied the affair. Indeed, most interns rarely even see the president during their stay in the White House, let alone get to know him. But Monica wasn’t one to blend into the furniture. Former classmates and colleagues describe a young woman who went to great lengths to get noticed. She may have succeeded all too well.
Two years after her parents split, Monica transferred from Beverly Hills High to Bel-Air Prep, an expensive but not first-rate private school. She attended a Santa Monica junior college for two years before transferring to Lewis & Clark, a small liberal-arts college in Oregon. There, neighbors remember her as a perky and friendly young woman who threw potluck dinners and was available to baby-sit, earning $3 an hour.
Even before Monica graduated from college, she had already lined up her White House position–an old family friend, Walter Kaye, a major Clinton contributor, had called the White House to recommend her for the post. As an unpaid intern in the summer of 1995, the 21-year-old was assigned to a dreary ground-floor space in the Old Executive Office Building. Her job: opening and sorting mail. But Monica wasn’t the type to stay chained to a desk. She was granted a coveted blue “hard pass,” which allowed her to freely roam the corridors of the White House. And though she was under strict orders not to stray from her appointed rounds, Monica was a wanderer. In free moments she would hang around the Roosevelt Room, just steps from the Oval Office. More than once, senior officials had to shoo her out of the room. It was certainly hard not to notice her in the corridor. At least once she was sent home for wearing a low-cut dress. Down in the mail room she hinted vaguely about having “political connections,” and she would frequently corner senior White House officials to chat. “She wanted so badly to be important,” says one former co-worker. “She wanted to be the center of attention.”
After her internship was up, she landed a paid job as a low-level staffer, handling letters from Bill Clinton to members of Congress. On occasion her duties required her to deliver correspondence to Clinton’s personal secretary, who sat in an alcove adjacent to the Oval Office. Colleagues say Monica gave off the impression of being far more important than she actually was. She bragged about how she wangled her way into evening Clinton fund-raisers by waving her blue pass.
Monica’s flamboyance drew nervous glances from her superiors inside the White House. In April 1996, to her dismay, she was transferred to a post in the Pentagon’s press office. After the glamour of the White House, the Pentagon job was a bore. There weren’t many opportunities to make friends, so Lewinsky gravitated to another press aide, Linda Tripp. The two would take coffee breaks at the Pentagon Starbucks. Before long, Monica was detailing her alleged trysts with the president to Tripp–and to Tripp’s tape recorder.
When she tired of her Pentagon job late last year, Vernon Jordan found her a PR slot at Revlon, which is controlled by New York billionaire and Clinton contributor Ronald Perelman. Now Revlon says the position is on hold, and Lewinsky’s biggest PR problem is her own.
