WHAT WAS MOST REMARKABLE about the Barbara Walters interview with Monica Lewinsky was its revelation of the moral derangement of Monica’s world. Consider, first, the embarrassing nature of the program itself. What exactly was this disconcertingly childlike woman doing baring her love life in our living rooms? One knows the answer, of course: She was promoting a lucrative book. In Monica’s world (as, perhaps, in mainstream America?), it is a given that one lunges after money and fame when opportunity arises, however humiliating the reason for the headlines. Monica says she has been violated, her conversations recorded and exposed, her most personal memories dragged from her before a grand jury. Such cruel usage reduced her to thoughts of suicide; she is compelled to take anti-depressants; aspires to healing. Yet on 20/20, she did voluntarily, in front of millions of people, the very thing she decried when a false friend and the prosecutors secured it by force. In Monica’s world, a decent retreat into privacy is the road to healing not taken.
Then there was the sheer, staggering coarseness of her story. The outline was already familiar. Even so, there was something shocking about watching Monica recount how she reassured Bill, the first time they were alone, that she’d already had an affair with a married man, so she “knew the rules”; hearing her affirm, apparently without irony, that she thought the world of Mrs. Clinton; learning that she quite liked the man at the Pentagon who impregnated her after her exile from the White House (her abortion was the one bit of news to emerge), though she felt for him nothing like her attraction to “the president.”
It was Monica’s comfort level with all this immorality, the matter-of-factness with which she spoke of her adulteries and placed them in the context of her low self-esteem, that was striking. She actually seemed proud of herself as she spoke of the early phase of her Oval Office liaison, before the lovers were reduced to phone sex. Now, chastened to whatever extent she is and “very sorry for what happened,” she chose to come forward and publicly glow at the memory of her “sexual soulmate.” Whatever lessons the last year has taught her, they don’t include shame. Indeed, she waxed indignant at the suggestion that others in the White House had good reasons for trying to separate her from the president: The affair, she said, was “none of their business!” In her universe, it seems that a strong attraction automatically confers an absolute license to act.
To act, and to blab. Monica told 11 friends and family members about her affair with Bill Clinton, regaling them with sexual particulars. Thus, she explained to Barbara Walters, it was not she but some of her friends who informed the grand jury of the infamous cigar. Again, the embarrassment was all ours. In Monica’s world, there is no reticence.
It must be said that Monica’s world is not mainly of her own devising. This clueless girl, a child of divorce, encountered an abundance of predatory men and too few adults who showed much zeal for the sanctity of marriage. (Vernon Jordan, she said, encouraged her to hope she might have an affair with Clinton after he left office.) Happily, though, her chaotic experience did not suppress her every wholesome instinct. Once the scandal came crashing down, she seems to have suffered for her family and even to have shed a few of her illusions about “Handsome.” She didn’t quite bite when Walters asked her whether the affair was “wrong,” but she did concede it should have been handled differently.
Then Walters asked Monica what lies ahead, and out from under all the emotional confusion of her life came this confession: What she really wants is to get married and have kids. The desire for motherhood seemed to clarify her thinking. “What will you tell your children?” asked Walters, and the interview ended with the answer: “Mommy made a big mistake.”
Even as one cringed, one detected here a seed of sanity. Is it conceivable that a young woman like Monica could work her way backwards from her wish to be a good mother toward reasonable conduct? Might she notice the advantages, for a mother, of a stable marriage, hence of fidelity and of a partner whose merits go beyond his physical appeal? Could she, before her life is altogether ruined, begin to reinvent the rudimentary verities so startlingly absent from her world?
Claudia Winkler is a managing editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
