from The Starr Report

KENNETH STARR

It is a curious moment in history when the steamiest literature you can get your hands on is a Congressional investigation, and the male protagonist is no Fabio, no stable hand on the Chatterley estate, but the President of the United States. For despite what Ken Starr might have us believe, his Report was written as, and is certainly meant to be read as, a love story. It has all the components of the pinkest romance novel: the oblique promise of l’amour propre is continually proffered in the resiliency of Monica’s naïve optimism. And bad Bill’s responses are marked by the diffidence and resignation of a man who sees the writing on the wall. We see him committing the classic error of forgetting that there was a mind behind the convenient lips, a heart within the heaving chest, of seeing Monica Lewinsky not as a person but as an appliance. Thus the abstraction of his responses, as if what was transpiring involved historical chessmen or universal allegories, not flesh and blood humans. When she suggested she might tell if he didn’t treat her better, he rejoined, “It is illegal to threaten the president of the United States.” Now this is a phrase I could never imagine saying to a lover (and not only because I might have inhaled); it confuses self and office, man and symbol. Lovers’ quarrels are not resolved by consulting the Constitution. Bill, stick in hand, was clearly trying to scrape off the unfortunateness he had stepped into. And Monica, meanwhile, persisted in her hopes, questioning if he really knew her, asking him if he wanted to, only to be silenced by his kisses. Kisses that said, in effect, “Dear girl, don’t you know that real emotions are not permitted on the stage of a Trauerspiel? Identity is unimportant here; a hand is moving you. I am that hand . . .”

I myself have come to fear such encounters, where an atavistic urge or momentary impulse leads me into temptation, or into tempting, a woman but a decimal of my years. And, like decimals, it is hard to remember that they are also wholes and harder still to remember that they might see you as larger than life or larger than you are. The easily won, never-asked-for heart is worn like a lodestone, a mantle of lead we try to wriggle out from under. I feel for Clinton because it’s hard not to wield power, to not feel and lust for the very act of wielding, and then to shrink beneath the burden of its consequences. Power scripts its own abuse. And thus I feel for Lewinsky too. For it is all too easy to come under its spell. To say, as she did again and again, “Even though he’s a big schmuck . . .”

And we, the American people, did we not in the end permit this to pass, murmuring to ourselves the very same sentiment?

January 7 Sexual Encounter

. . . “[H]e was chewing on a cigar. And then he had the cigar in his hand and he was kind of looking at the cigar in . . . sort of a naughty way. And so . . . I looked at the cigar and I looked at him and I said, we can do that, too, some time.”

March 31 Sexual Encounter

According to Ms. Lewinsky, the President telephoned her at her desk and suggested that she come to the Oval Office on the pretext of delivering papers to him. She went to the Oval Office and was admitted by a plainclothes Secret Service agent. In her folder was a gift for the President, a Hugo Boss necktie.

In the hallway by the study, the President and Ms. Lewinsky kissed. On this occasion, according to Ms. Lewinsky, “he focused on me pretty exclusively,” kissing her bare breasts and fondling her genitals. At one point, the President inserted a cigar into Ms. Lewinsky’s vagina, then put the cigar in his mouth and said: “It tastes good.” After they were finished, Ms. Lewinsky left the Oval Office and walked through the Rose Garden.

February 28 Sexual Encounter

According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President had a sexual encounter on Thursday, February 28—their first in nearly eleven months . . . [A]ccording to Ms. Lewinsky, the President “started to say something to me and I was pestering him to kiss me, because . . . it had been a long time since we had been alone.” The President told her to wait a moment, as he had presents for her. As belated Christmas gifts, he gave her a hat pin and a special edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass . . . [A]fter the President gave her the gifts, they had a sexual encounter: “[W]e went back over by the bathroom in the hallway, and we kissed. We were kissing and he unbuttoned my dress and fondled my breasts with my bra on, and then took them out of my bra and was kissing them and touching them with his hands and with his mouth.

“And then I think I was touching him in his genital area through his pants, and I think I unbuttoned his shirt and was kissing his chest. And then . . . I wanted to perform oral sex on him . . . and so I did. And then . . . I think he heard something, or he heard someone in the office. So, we moved into the bathroom.

“And I continued to perform oral sex and then he pushed me away, kind of as he always did before he came, and then I stood up and I said . . . I care about you so much . . . I don’t understand why you won’t let me . . . make you come; it’s important to me; I mean, it just doesn’t feel complete, it doesn’t seem right.”

Ms. Lewinsky testified that she and the President hugged, and “He said he didn’t want to get addicted to me, and he didn’t want me to get addicted to him.” They looked at each other for a moment. Then, saying that “I don’t want to disappoint you,” the President consented. For the first time, she performed oral sex through completion.