‘I Never Expected to Fall in Love With the President’

“We would tell jokes. We would talk about our childhoods. Talk about current events. I was always giving him my stupid ideas about what I thought should be done in the administration or different views on things. . . .

“I never expected to fall in love with the president,” Monica S. Lewinsky said. “I was surprised that I did.”

That was the good part. The incandescent, high school first-love part that makes the heart glow and convinces two people, for a few moments at least, that their feelings and desires can overcome the world.

But there was another side to it as well: the groping, blouse-open, zipper-down, oral-sex-while-leaning-against-a-wall moments, followed by the “Do you remember my name?” moments. The married man’s time-stained “Maybe we can be together someday” lines. The belated efforts to convince each other it was more than sex. The posturing, deception, anger and betrayal.

Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s report to Congress presents a relentlessly explicit, almost clinically detailed description of the personal relationship between President Clinton and the former White House intern. And whatever the eventual verdict on Starr’s legal case, in purely human terms the picture that emerges is at once bizarre and achingly familiar.

Starr’s account, pieced together from grand jury testimony and investigative reports, leans heavily on the words of Lewinsky and almost a dozen other individuals to whom she allegedly gave contemporaneous accounts of the affair. Clinton’s own testimony appears to have been much less detailed and graphic.

Nonetheless, the accounts have few contradictions.

The relationship began as an all-too-typical office flirtation almost immediately after Lewinsky arrived at the White House as an unpaid intern in July 1995. It exploded into a series of hasty sexual encounters during the November 1995 shutdown of the federal government that followed Clinton’s confrontation with congressional Republicans over the federal budget. This was at a time when regular White House aides were barred from working and interns such as Lewinsky were given expanded duties and access to the Oval Office.

So feverish and brief were these initial experiences of oral and manual sex that it was only after the sixth episode, on Feb. 4, 1996, that Lewinsky raised the question of whether the two might be able to have a personal conversation--whereupon Clinton sat down and chatted with her for some 45 minutes.

In another sexual encounter not long after that, as Lewinsky was departing, she testified that the president kissed her arm and promised to call her. “Yeah, well, what’s my telephone number?” she demanded. “And so he recited both my home number and my office number off the top of his head,” Starr quoted her as saying.

In all, Lewinsky said she and Clinton had 10 sexual encounters, most in a windowless hallway connecting the Oval Office to his private study. Often the president leaned against a wall while she performed oral sex; he said it eased his sore back, Lewinsky testified. (John F. Kennedy, whom Clinton had taken as his role model, reportedly told his intimates the same thing.)

On several occasions, she said, Clinton took telephone calls, sometimes from members of Congress, while he and Lewinsky were engaging in oral sex.

Apparently in keeping with his own highly individual definition of what constituted sexual relations, Clinton consistently refused to permit intercourse. But during one episode, he did use one of his cigars as a sexual prop.

The two exchanged numerous gifts and messages. Lewinsky gave the president some 30 items, including neckties, an antique paperweight, old books of history, contemporary novels--some dealing with sex--a pair of sunglasses and a frog figurine. He gave her a hatpin, two brooches, a marble bear figurine, a blanket and a copy of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”

“I used to say to him, ‘I like it when you wear my ties because then I know I’m close to your heart,’ ” she told the grand jury.

Yet tensions gradually arose as White House aides began to notice and Clinton himself began to suspect--correctly--that Lewinsky, despite protestations of discretion, was spilling out details of their activities to an astonishing number of friends and relatives.

On May 24, 1997, Clinton told a weeping Lewinsky that the affair must end. Earlier in his marriage, she testified he told her, he had many affairs but had tried to become faithful. He was determined to resume that effort, she quoted him as saying, though he professed affection and admiration for her.

Whether by coincidence or not, the breakup occurred three days before the Supreme Court ruled that the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment suit could go forward.

November 1995: The First Time

The president’s first sexual encounter with Lewinsky occurred Nov. 15, 1995, the second day of the government shutdown. Clinton dropped by the office of then-White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta, where Lewinsky was working. At one point, when they happened to be alone for a few minutes, Lewinsky pushed the flirtation to a new level: She lifted the back of her jacket, exposing the top straps of her thong underpants.

Later, she encountered Clinton alone in presidential aide George Stephanopoulos’ office, and she and Clinton embraced and kissed after a hurried conversation acknowledging their mutual attraction. That night, Clinton invited her back to Stephanopoulos’ office.

The lights were out. She unbuttoned her jacket and, despite a telephone call, they engaged in oral sex.

Weeks later, when presidential aides became suspicious and moved to isolate Lewinsky, it was too late.

A Secret Service officer had told Evelyn Lieberman, deputy chief of staff for operations, that Lewinsky’s visits to the area near the Oval Office were becoming “a nuisance.” In Lieberman’s mind, that meant Lewinsky had become, in White House parlance, “a clutch . . . always someplace she shouldn’t be.”

In December 1995, Lieberman told Lewinsky that the part of the White House she was visiting was out of bounds for interns. Lieberman seemed surprised when Lewinsky replied that she was no longer an intern.

The young woman felt wronged. “People were wary of his weaknesses, maybe, and . . . they didn’t want to look at him and think that he could be responsible for anything, so it had to be all my fault,” she testified. She figured it was easier for others to believe “I was stalking him.”

April 1996: Lewinsky Told to Leave

By April 5, 1996, Timothy Keating, who ran the White House legislative affairs office, informed Lewinsky that she was “being given a different opportunity.” She could tell people the new job was a promotion.

Lewinsky burst into tears.

She asked if she could stay in the White House even without pay.

The answer was a firm, “No.” Keating told her she was “too sexy” to work in the East Wing--the first lady’s offices--and that her assignment to the Pentagon to write press releases was “a sexier job.”

Lewinsky feared, she testified, that distance would mean that “I was never going to see the president again. I mean, my relationship with him would be over.”

It wasn’t.

Two days later, on Easter Sunday, the president telephoned her at home, she testified. Solicitous of his grief a week after a plane crash had killed Clinton’s Commerce secretary, she asked him “if he was doing OK with Ron Brown’s death.”

Then she told Clinton that her next day at the White House would be her last.

“He seemed really upset,” she testified, “and sort of asked me to tell him what happened.”

She cried. She asked if she could visit him and he said that was fine.

Once she was inside the Oval Office, they followed what had by now had become routine. They repaired to the study.

“Why do they have to take me away from you?” he asked. “I trust you.”

And then, according to her testimony, he looked straight at Lewinsky and pledged: “I promise you if I win in November, I’ll bring you back like that.”

The president remembers the conversation differently. “What I told Ms. Lewinsky was that . . . I would do what I could to see, if she had a good record at the Pentagon, and she assured me she was doing a good job and working hard, that I would do my best to see that the fact that she had been sent away from the legislative affairs section did not keep her from getting a job in the White House, and that is, in fact, what I tried to do.”

“But,” he added, “I did not tell her I would order someone to hire her, and I never did, and I wouldn’t do that. It wouldn’t be right.”

After that conversation came the interruptions.

First, during a sexual interlude, a shout from the Oval Office heralded an important phone call. “Huh?” Clinton responded.

The president took the call in the study. The conversation was about politics. On the other end of the line, Lewinsky testified, was political consultant Dick Morris (who, records show, telephoned during the time Lewinsky was in the White House). At the same time, Lewinsky testified, the president indicated she should continue her activities, and she obliged.

Minutes later, Lewinsky heard White House aide Harold M. Ickes’ distinctive voice summon the president. Clinton rushed into the Oval Office and Lewinsky rushed in the opposite direction, out the dining room door.

On April 16, 1996, Monica Lewinsky started work as confidential assistant to the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs.

She would not see Bill Clinton alone for the rest of the year.

But the relationship--at the same time more than a friendship and less than one--continued.

The president called, sometimes leaving a message, four or five times in the first month of her new job and then two or three times a month for the rest of the year.

During at least seven calls, the subject was sex.

He phoned with agendas in mind when Hillary Rodham Clinton was in Denver, when she was in Prague and Budapest, when she was in Las Vegas and when she traveled to Bolivia.

During the fall reelection campaign, he sometimes called when he was on the trail without his wife.

But sometimes a month would pass without communication.

“I’m an insecure person,” Lewinsky testified, “ . . . and I was insecure about the relationship at times and thought that he would come to forget me easily and if I hadn’t heard from him . . . it was very difficult for me.”

She noticed that “usually when I’d see him, it would kind of prompt him to call me.”

On May 2, she saw him at a reception in a Washington hotel for a political group called the Saxophone Club.

August 1996: Clinton’s Birthday Party

On Aug. 18, she attended Clinton’s 50th birthday party at Radio City Music Hall in New York and saw the president at a cocktail party there for major donors. She testified that when he reached past her at the rope line to shake hands with another guest, she grabbed at him playfully.

The next month, she told Clinton on the phone that “she wanted to have intercourse with him,” Starr’s report says. He refused “because of the possible consequences.” They argued, and he asked if he should stop calling.

No, she answered.

On Oct. 23, she was photographed with him at a fund-raiser for Senate Democrats. “Hey, Handsome,” she told him, “I like your tie.” She had given it to him.

Clinton called her that night and, when Lewinsky mentioned she would be at the White House on Pentagon business the next day, he told her to stop by his office.

But she didn’t get a chance. Lieberman was around.

She wanted desperately to get back to the White House.

“I’m really unhappy, you know,” she told Clinton, as recounted in a recorded conversation with Linda Tripp, who worked with Lewinsky at the Pentagon. She said Clinton responded: “I don’t want to talk about your job tonight. I’ll call this week and then we’ll talk about it. I want to talk about other things.’

“Other things,” Lewinsky explained on the tape, “meant phone sex.”

She had kept a countdown on her calendar until election day.

It came and it went.

She wrote Clinton a letter that she never mailed: “I was so sure that the weekend after the election you would call me to come visit and you would kiss me passionately and tell me you couldn’t wait to have me back. You’d ask me where I wanted to work and say something akin to, ‘Consider it done,’ and it would be. Instead I didn’t hear from you for weeks.”

She also contacted other former White House colleagues to try to land another Executive Mansion job. She failed.

She told others--her college friend, Catherine Davis; her aunt, Debra Finerman; former White House colleague Ashley Raines; her psychologist, Irene Kassorla--about her frustrations.

Tripp’s notes include Lewinsky’s recollection that she unloaded on Clinton, too. His reply: “Every day can’t be sunshine.”

But the president was arranging a go-between: his secretary, Betty Currie.

It worked like this, Currie testified to the grand jury: Lewinsky would call and say she wanted to see Clinton. If he agreed, she would schedule a meeting, often on a weekend. Currie would authorize Lewinsky’s entry and take her to the West Wing. Sometimes, Currie came in to work for the sole purpose of letting Lewinsky in.

Lewinsky called Currie about six or eight packages she wanted to deliver to the president and addressed those to the secretary as well.

Currie generally opened the president’s mail. But not these parcels. “I felt,” Currie testified, that they were “probably personal.”

Suspecting impropriety herself, Currie took Lewinsky on a roundabout path to the study on weekdays to avoid staff members Nancy Hernreich and Stephen Goodin, who disapproved of the former intern.

One time, Currie testified, Lewinsky told her: “As long as no one saw us--and no one did--then nothing happened.”

“Don’t want to hear it,” Currie answered. “Don’t say any more.”

A Secret Service commander took a similar view. Officers noticed that Clinton often headed for the Oval Office within minutes of Lewinsky’s arrival at the White House and returned to his residence after she left. One suggested putting Lewinsky on a list of people to be denied entrance to the White House.

It was none of their business, the commander said. Besides, no one would find out.

Lewinsky told her mother and her friends about the special classified ad she placed in the Washington Post on Valentine’s Day. Addressed to “Handsome,” it quoted from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”: “For stony limits cannot hold love out/And what love can do that dares love attempt.”

She e-mailed Tripp that she would be in London that day but would check her telephone messages “in the hopes that the creep will call and say, ‘Thank you for my love note. I love you. Will you run away with me?’ What do ya think the likelihood of that happening is?”

There had been no sexual encounters for nearly 11 months.

February 1997: The Dress

On Feb. 24, Lewinsky stopped to see Currie. The secretary wrote a note to the president: “Monica Lewinsky stopped by. Do you want me to call her?”

Apparently, he did. Four days later, she arrived at the White House in a navy blue dress purchased at the Gap. Within a year, the dress would become notorious; DNA tests confirmed it contained the president’s semen.

Currie had invited her to attend the taping of the president’s weekly radio address. Clinton told her to see Currie after the obligatory post-address radio get-together because he had something to give her. “I was really nervous,” she would recall later.

She hadn’t been alone with him since she had worked at the White House.

Lewinsky was “pestering” Clinton to kiss her because “it had been a long time,” but he told her to wait. He offered belated Christmas presents: a hat pin and a special edition of “Leaves of Grass,” a volume he reportedly also gave to his wife during their courtship.

He told her he’d seen the Valentine’s Day ad in the Post.

By the bathroom in the hallway, they kissed. One thing began leading to another.

Then he pushed her away.

“He said he didn’t want to get addicted to me and he didn’t want me to get addicted to him,” she testified.

Then he said, “I don’t want to disappoint you.” And for the first time, he let her complete the act of oral sex.

In his grand jury testimony, the president acknowledged intimate contact that day.

“I was sick after it was over,” he said, “and I, I was pleased at that time because it had been nearly a year. . . . I promised myself it wasn’t going to happen again. The facts are complicated. . . . nonetheless, I’m responsible for it.”

In a note to “Mr. P,” Lewinsky thanked him for the gifts, “especially your gift of friendship.” The hat pin, she wrote, was “vibrant, unique” and the poetry was “so rich that one must read him like one tastes a fine wine or good cigar--take it in, roll it in your mouth and savor it!” She enclosed a necktie.

March 1997: Last Meeting

Lewinsky told of one last encounter, on March 29, 1997, a Saturday. The president had said on the phone that he had something important to tell her. Currie took her to the study and Clinton entered on crutches, a consequence of his fall in Florida at golfer Greg Norman’s home.

After a sudden kiss followed by more intimacies, Clinton told her he suspected that an unspecified foreign embassy was tapping his phone. If ever questioned, she testified that he suggested, she should say the two of them were just friends and that if anyone ever asked about phone sex, she should say it was a trick they were playing on their eavesdroppers.

Still, no White House job materialized. Lewinsky wondered if the president was leading her on.

By this time, party contributor Walter Kaye, who had helped Lewinsky get her internship, was hearing rumors from people at the Democratic National Committee: Lewinsky and the president were having an affair.

He told Finerman, Lewinsky’s aunt, that he’d heard her niece was “very aggressive.” Finerman lashed back that Clinton was “the true aggressor.” Kaye mentioned it to White House aide Marsha Scott. Scott told the president.

And the president asked Lewinsky if she had told her mother what was going on.

“Of course not,” she said. But she had.

About 11 a.m. on Saturday, May 24, 1997, Currie invited Lewinsky to visit the White House in about two hours.

Lewinsky showed up in a straw hat adorned with the hat pin that Clinton had given her.

But in the study, Clinton told her it had to end.

He had conducted hundreds of affairs earlier in his marriage, but he had “made a concerted effort to be faithful” since he reached the age of 40, according to Lewinsky’s account.

He wanted to stay friends.

She wept.

A deleted file fragment recovered from Lewinsky’s home computer shows that she wrote--though it’s unclear if she delivered--a reply:

” . . . cannot do anything but accept that. However, I also cannot ignore what we have shared together. I don’t care what you say, but if you were 100% fulfilled in your marriage I never would have seen that raw, intense sexuality that I saw a few times. . . . Instead, it would have been a routine encounter void of anything but a sexual release.”

Kassorla testified that she told her young patient that the president’s break-up statement sounded “rehearsed and insincere.”

Clinton refused even to take her telephone calls throughout June, she said, leaving her so frustrated that she wrote the president a letter starting stiffly, “Dear Sir.”

After accusing Clinton of breaking his promise to get her another job in the White House, Lewinsky obliquely threatened to disclose their relationship. If she could not return to work at the White House, she said, she would “need to explain to my parents exactly why that wasn’t happening.”

That got the president’s attention. He invited her to visit the White House the next day.

The Independence Day meeting began coldly, with Clinton admonishing her: “It’s illegal to threaten the president of the United States.”

It ended tenderly. Lewinsky testified that she left the White House “emotionally stunned” because “I just knew he was in love with me” although, unlike earlier encounters, there was no sex.

At first, Clinton seemed so distant that she began to cry. If it was a ploy, it worked: The president hugged her. As they embraced, she spotted a gardener outside the study window. So they moved to the windowless hallway by the bathroom, the scene of earlier sexual trysts.

There, Lewinsky testified, Clinton became “the most affectionate with her he’d ever been.” He stroked her arm, kissed her on the neck and praised her intellect and beauty.

She said Clinton seemed to suggest that after he left the White House, he might leave his wife and marry her.

By her account, Clinton said, “Well, I don’t know, I might be alone in three years. And then he said something about . . . us sort of being together. I think I kind of said, Oh, I think we’d be good team or something like that. And he . . . jokingly said, Well, what are we going to do when I’m 75 and have to pee 25 times a day? And . . . I told him we’d deal with that.”

But after talking about being together in the future, Lewinsky and Clinton returned abruptly to the more dangerous present. She said she told Clinton she had been informed that Newsweek magazine was working on a story about Kathleen Willey, the former White House volunteer who said Clinton had sexually harassed her. Although she did not tell the president how she had heard of the magazine’s plans, she told the grand jury she had heard of it from Linda Tripp.

If Lewinsky’s knowledge of coming news accounts of his sex life alarmed the president, he gave no indication. According to the Starr report, Clinton replied that Willey’s accusation was ludicrous “because he would never approach a small-breasted woman” such as her.

Ten days later, Clinton was clearly more concerned about Willey and her accusations. He summoned Lewinsky to the White House and asked her bluntly if she had mentioned Willey to Tripp, who might have tipped off Newsweek correspondent Michael Isikoff. Lewinsky admitted that she had done so.

She said Clinton urged her to persuade Tripp to talk to White House aide Bruce Lindsey, apparently so that he could determine how much she had revealed and urge her to say no more.

Lewinsky said Clinton also asked her if she had told Tripp anything about their relationship. She lied, telling him she had not.

July 1997: White House Visit

On July 24, the day after her 24th birthday, Lewinsky visited the White House to pick up a photograph from Currie. She said she and the president chatted for no more than 10 minutes. He gave her an antique pin for her birthday.

On Aug. 16, three days before Clinton’s birthday, Lewinsky said she brought him birthday gifts and a piece of cake with a candle in it. She suggested a birthday kiss, which Clinton accepted. But the president turned her down when she tried to resume the sexual relationship.

Later, in a note dated Nov. 11 and addressed to “Handsome,” Lewinsky lamented the visit. She said: “It was awful when I saw you for your birthday in August. You were so distant that I missed you as I was holding you in my arms.”

By the time she penned that note, Lewinsky had all but given up on renewing her relationship with the president. In an e-mail to a friend, she said: “It’s over. I don’t know what I will do now but I can’t wait any more and I can’t go through all of this crap anymore. In some ways I hope I never hear from him again because he’ll just lead me on because he doesn’t have the balls to tell me the truth.”

Still, she didn’t give up. On Sept. 12, Lewinsky arrived at the White House without an appointment and called Currie from the gate. When Currie finally arrived, Lewinsky was in tears. Currie told her that Clinton’s “hands are tied” and that a White House job was most unlikely.

Three weeks later, Lewinsky said she was told she would never work at the White House again. Tripp delivered the news, which she said she got from a friend at the National Security Council.

In another note she wrote to Clinton but didn’t send, she poured out her anger: “Any normal person would have walked away from this and said, ‘He doesn’t call me, he doesn’t want to see me--screw it. It doesn’t matter.’ I can’t let go of you.”

But the acrimony continued. On Oct. 10, Lewinsky said Clinton telephoned her sometime between 2 a.m. and 2:30 a.m. They talked for an hour and a half, most of the time spent arguing.

“He got so mad at me, he must have been purple,” she said.

She quoted Clinton as saying, “If I had known what kind of person you really were, I wouldn’t have gotten involved with you.”

A little more than 24 hours later Clinton invited Lewinsky to the White House. She said they discussed her efforts to find a job in the private sector. Clinton told her to prepare a list of New York companies that interested her. When she asked if presidential confidant Vernon E. Jordan Jr. could help her get a job, she said the president agreed to ask his friend to do just that.

November 1997: Mints

On Nov. 13, Lewinsky went to the White House hoping to see Clinton, who was playing golf. When he returned, she said, he met with her for only a minute or two. She showed him an e-mail describing the effect of chewing Altoid mints before performing oral sex. She told Clinton she was chewing the mints at the time, but he replied “that he did not have enough time for oral sex.”

They kissed, and the president rushed off to a state dinner with Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo.

Soon the relationship was back to stormy. On Dec. 6, when Lewinsky arrived at the White House with more gifts, she was kept waiting at the gate for 40 minutes and flew into a rage upon learning that Clinton was meeting with Eleanor Mondale, daughter of former Vice President Walter F. Mondale. An angry exchange followed on the telephone, ending with a surprise invitation for Lewinsky to return to the White House.

Lewinsky’s last met with Clinton on Dec. 28. According to her account, Currie told her the president wished to give her some gifts. Arriving at the Oval Office just after 8 a.m., Lewinsky, Currie and the president played for a time with Buddy, Clinton’s dog.

Then Clinton took her into his study and gave her several presents: a marble bear’s head, a Rockettes blanket, a stuffed animal from the Black Dog pub, a small box of chocolates, a pair of joke sunglasses and a pin with the New York skyline on it.

The encounter, she testified, ended with a “passionate” and “physically intimate” kiss. The president’s eyes were wide open, peering out the window for potential witnesses.

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How the Case Evolved

A chronology of events surrounding the relationship between President Clinton and former White House intern Monica S. Lewinski, according to the independent counsel’s report:

* July, 1995: Lewinsky starts her unpaid internship at the White House.

* Nov. 15, 1995: Clinton begins sexual relationship with Lewinsky.

* April 5, 1996: Lewinsky is abruptly transferred to the Pentagon.

* Nov. 5, 1996: Clinton re-elected to second term.

* March 29, 1997: Last intimate contact between Clinton and Lewinsky.

* July 3, 1997: Lewinsky tells Clinton she is disappointed that she has not been offered a new White House job; says she wants to move to New York.

* Oct. 7, 1997: Lewinsky sends Clinton a letter expressing dissatisfaction with her job search. Clinton calls two days later to tell Lewinsky that he will help her find a job in New York.

* Oct. 21, 1997: Lewinsky says Bill Richardson, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, called her and later offered her a job in his office, but she was unenthusiastic. She later declines the offer.

* Nov. 5, 1997: Lewinsky meets Clinton confidant Vernon Jordan in his law office. A month later, Jordan gives her the names of several business contacts.

* Dec. 5, 1997: Lewinsky appears on the witness list in the sexual harassment suit brought by Paula Jones.

* Jan. 7, 1998: Lewinsky signs affidavit for filing in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawasuit against the president.

* Jan. 8, 1998: On Jordan’s recommendation, Lewinsky receives a job offer from Revlon cosmetics in New York. She accepts the offer on Jan. 13.

* July 28, 1998: Lewinsky reaches agreement with Starr’s office on immunity to be received in exchange for her testimony.

* Jan. 17, 1998: Clinton is deposed in Jones case.

* Jan. 21, 1998: Story of Lewinsky relationship breaks in the press. Clinton denies allegations of a sexual relationship and of suborning perjury.

* Aug. 17, 1998: Clinton testifies before the grand jury. He later publicly acknowledges improper relationship with Lewinsky.

Source: Independent Counsel’s office.

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Where and When They Met

The report of Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr presents testimony from former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky that she had ten sexual encounters with President Clinton--eight while she worked at the White House and two later on--most often in or near a private study just off the Oval Office. Here is a chronology of those liaisons:

* Wednesday, Nov. 15, 1995: On the second day of a government shutdown, Clinton and Lewinsky make eye-contact in the West Wing office of White House chief of staff Leon Panetta. That night, Clinton beckons her.

* Friday, Nov. 17, 1995: During a late-night session in the midst of a government furlough, Lewinsky brings Clinton a slice of pizza.

* Sunday, Dec. 31, 1995: Clinton finds Lewinsky talking to a White House steward and they move to his private study.

* Sunday, Jan. 7, 1996: Lewinsky says Clinton telephoned her at home early that afternoon, and they went to a bathroom near Oval Office.

* Sunday, Jan. 21, 1996: Lewinsky says she sees the president in a hallway by an elevator, and he invites her into the Oval Office.

* Sunday, Feb. 4, 1996: The two meet in the hallway--at Clinton’s suggestion--and walk to his private study.

* Sunday, March 31, 1996: Clinton calls Lewinsky at her desk and suggests that she come to the Oval Office on the pretext of delivering papers to him.

* Sunday, April 7, 1996: Easter Sunday. Clinton motions to Lewinsky from the Oval Office.

* Friday, Feb. 28, 1997: Lewinsky attends the taping of the president’s weekly radio address in the Roosevelt Room. Later, they meet in Clinton’s study and exchange gifts.

* Saturday, March 29, 1997: Presidential secretary Betty Currie calls Lewinsky with word that the president has something important to tell her.

Source: Independent Counsel’s office