Suddenly Lewinsky Has Friends in the Capitol

She has, in some quarters, been reviled as a tramp, denounced as a liar and scorned as a delusional brat. But on the eve of her deposition in the Senate’s trial of the president, politicians on both sides of the aisle are talking about Monica S. Lewinsky as if she were a damsel in distress and they were her knights in shining armor.

As the Senate trial grinds toward its final stage, both Democrats and Republicans are courting the young woman with the flirtatious grin and the colorful past. And both sides are vying over who is the more ardent defender of Lewinsky’s dignity and credibility.

“What little dignity Monica Lewinsky has left, we hope we can protect,” said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) last week, arguing against making her testimony public.

Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.), one of three House impeachment managers who met with Lewinsky here a week ago, went further, praising her intelligence and poise. “I was certainly impressed,” he said.

On the Senate floor, House impeachment manager Ed Bryant (R-Tenn.) last week added a gallant flourish to the growing praise for Lewinsky. Calling the former White House intern “a very impressive young lady,” Bryant told senators: “I do commend Ms. Lewinsky for your consideration.”

Lewinsky, whose credibility is key to both sides’ cases, is hardly unaware of the stakes. Both sides--those pressing the case for and against impeachment--know that single-handedly Lewinsky could send them to defeat or rescue them.

And no one wants to make her mad.

“People who would like her to keep her story the way it is are trying to be nice to her, and those who are trying to get her to add to her story are trying to be nice to her. Everyone is trying to be nice to her,” said Joseph E. diGenova, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. “She’s come a long way since the president portrayed her as a stalker.”

A year ago, President Clinton referred to Lewinsky as “that woman” and told White House aide Sidney Blumenthal that she had “made a sexual demand” on him. Revelations about such private conversations hurt Lewinsky’s reputation: In August, 74% of Americans told pollsters that they had an unfavorable view of the former White House intern. And by October, 63% said they had a poor view of her.

But Clinton also urged aides not to speak unkindly of Lewinsky. “Don’t be too hard on her because there’s some slight chance that she may not be cooperating with Starr and we don’t want to alienate her by anything we put out,” Clinton told former political aide Dick Morris, according to Morris’ grand jury testimony on Aug. 18. Morris testified that Clinton’s warning came in a Jan. 22, 1998, telephone conversation when Morris boasted that he was going to blast Lewinsky “out of the water” in a news conference the following day. “This is the fevered fantasy of a teenage mind,” Morris told the president. “Her credibility will just be destroyed.”

In December, House Democrats were only slightly kinder than Morris as they sought to blunt charges of perjury against the president. Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Abbe Lowell, the Democrats’ chief counsel, recited a litany of whoppers that Lewinsky told to friends: She had lunched with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was helping find her an apartment in New York; the president had invited her to Martha’s Vineyard when Mrs. Clinton was out of the country; the Secret Service had taken the president to her apartment for a rendezvous.

“We know that none of those things happened,” said Lowell, who suggested that Lewinsky’s penchant for “embellishment” would make her a poor witness on whom to build a perjury case.

But with the Senate trial focusing heavily on charges that the president obstructed justice, Clinton’s attorneys have cast Lewinsky in a decidedly different light. In the Senate trial, Clinton’s legal champions have staked much of their defense on Lewinsky’s credibility. They have cited her claims repeatedly that Clinton never asked her to lie in her affidavit in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment case, that he did not urge her to get rid of gifts he had given her, that he never linked his help in her job search to her denial of their affair.

If the public feels whipsawed in its view of Lewinsky, said attorney Eric E. Sterling, it is because her image is almost entirely in the hands of lawyers. And lawyers, he added, are using her for different purposes at different times.

“Advocates are characterizing a witness to suit their purposes here. It’s commonplace,” said Sterling, a former House Judiciary Committee counsel and a Democrat. “The problem that Republicans have is that there are things she says that they want to insist are truthful: all of her statements regarding her relationship with the president which are unsavory, sexual, sordid.

“However, anything that she says about there being no conspiracy or plan to obstruct justice becomes problematic. The tightrope they’re walking is frequently faced by attorneys.”

And now, with Senate Democrats coming to the defense of Lewinsky’s dignity, Sterling said, the former intern is getting another boost from friends of convenience.

“Their defense of her dignity right now is a defense of the president’s dignity,” he said. “And their defense of her credibility right now is a defense of the president’s credibility on the obstruction of justice charge.”

But Republicans’ sudden appreciation for Lewinsky’s poise and intelligence is an equally convenient ploy, Sterling declared. House impeachment managers may be wooing Lewinsky privately, he said, but in public, too, they are trying to appeal to Lewinsky’s desire to regain control over her life and change the public’s negative image of her. And they are trying to provide her a way to do it.

To Republicans, said Sterling, “this is ultimately a way for her to salvage her reputation as a sexually obsessed, confused young woman.”