Evolving Lewinsky Steps From Shadows of Scandal Into Political Spotlight

Bit by bit, piece by piece, Monica S. Lewinsky has emerged from under layers of veils, the mysterious young woman at the center of a yearlong national spectacle. On Saturday, using videotape of her deposition, lawyers on both sides of the impeachment divide drew away yet another veil.

But what they revealed was perhaps no more telling than the disembodied voice, the naughty e-mails or the flirtatious smile in endless video loops seen before now. That flip of the hair in the Rose Garden, the rakish beret, the mob scenes of cameras crowding her entrance into the Mayflower Hotel--to those images has now been added: Monica, the perfect witness, in demure black.

With a book yet to promote and television interviews yet to tape, Lewinsky did not lift the veil on all her secrets. But what amounted to her first speaking role in President Clinton’s impeachment trial allowed a national audience to see both the girl she was and the woman she has become. If she was a vulnerable ingenue at the beginning of a presidential scandal that became her personal ordeal, she clearly is no longer.

Before the camera, the exuberant gestures of a White House intern were gone. Several times, she suppressed an evident urge to say more. She didn’t fidget in her chair. She didn’t play with her hair. When she answered with a curt “correct,” it was delivered crisply, sometimes with an edge of impatient condescension.

But beneath the coiffed hair and behind the single strand of pearls, there were remnants of the younger woman Lewinsky must have been before her name became the stuff of late-night talk show jokes and worldwide titillating headlines. On Saturday, viewers could still hear the girlish voice and see the perfectly lipsticked pout. And when the matter of her relationship with Clinton was raised, the tilt of Lewinsky’s head and her downcast eyes were abrupt reminders that the witness is not deep into her 20s.

Asked at one point how she reacted when Clinton confidant Vernon E. Jordan Jr. accused her of being in love with the president, Lewinsky drew a poignant recollection of her earlier self.

“I probably blushed or giggled or something,” she told Rep. Ed Bryant (R-Tenn.), the House impeachment manager who conducted the questioning.

At such moments, Lewinsky seemed to conjure up the person she was before she acquired a mountain of legal bills and endured months of enforced isolation. It was a time, at least, of legal innocence.

“Did you know what an affidavit was?” asked Bryant.

“Mmmmm,” responded Lewinsky, wrinkling her nose. “Sort of.”

In the days before Saturday’s final arguments, many have pointed to the mystique surrounding Lewinsky and her testimony. The New Yorker magazine pictured her as Mona Lisa on its latest cover. And Bryant, who questioned Lewinsky for hours last week, likened Lewinsky to a Hollywood queen of intrigue, Marlene Dietrich.

On Saturday, Republicans wavered between portraying Lewinsky as a vulnerable young victim and a mature, credible witness, and their use of videotape from her deposition reflected that dichotomy. Rep. James E. Rogan (R-Glendale) introduced her to senators as “a bright lady whose life has forever been marked by the most powerful man on the Earth.” Until she was subpoenaed to testify in a lawsuit against the president, added Rogan, Lewinsky “held untarnished hopes for tomorrow, like any other recent college graduate.”

But now, Rogan suggested, Lewinsky is none of those things. Now she has become “the one person whose testimony invariably leads to the conclusion that the president of the United States committed perjury and obstructed justice in a federal civil rights action.”

For her part, Lewinsky appeared to treat her Republican inquisitors with a poise borne of hard experience. In the face of Bryant’s fumbling questions, Lewinsky rarely nodded encouragingly. And on several occasions, she squared her chin and narrowed her well-lined eyes.

Asked at one point whether she was comfortable discussing a late-night phone call she received from Clinton, Lewinsky replied evenly, “Comfortable, I don’t know. But I’m ready to talk about it.” Bryant went on to ask her how she felt when she learned she could be called as a witness in Paula Corbin Jones’ sexual harassment case. “I was scared,” Lewinsky answered flatly.

But behind the polished presentation of a well-instructed witness, some professional viewers said a younger woman still lurks.

“When she gets older, she will understand [Clinton] was using her. I think she’s still very romantic about him,” said Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official who has been an advocate of impeachment. “Anyone watching it can see she’s telling the truth but still has attachments.”