By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 28, 1998; Page A01

It was shortly before 4:30 p.m. a week ago Saturday when President Clinton's black limousine pulled through the gates of the White House complex after one of the most grueling ordeals of his presidency – six hours of sworn testimony in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit covering some of the most intimate details of his personal life.

There to greet him was White House Chief of Staff Erskine B. Bowles, carrying a fresh draft of the president's upcoming State of the Union address and an update on the Asian economic crisis. Discreet as ever, the courteous Bowles was in and out of the Oval Office in a matter of minutes, never raising the delicate subject of the Jones deposition.

"How's he doing?" another official in the West Wing asked.

"He's fine," Bowles replied.

Save for the embarrassment of the Jones deposition, there was no reason the president shouldn't have felt good that night. He had had an extraordinary January. An aggressive plan to roll out new policy proposals in advance of his State of the Union speech had caught Republicans flatfooted. Clinton had announced that he would submit a balanced budget this year, three years ahead of schedule, and had proposed expansions of Medicare and child care. After criticism that the president had lost focus in 1997, his aides believed he was back in the groove.

Public opinion polls underscored the growing sense of optimism at the White House. Despite the Jones case, Clinton's approval ratings in surveys taken the weekend of his deposition remained at their peak. Equally important, twice as many people as in 1996 said the country was heading in the right direction. Clinton's State of the Union address gave him the opportunity to reinvigorate his presidency and once again reach for the history books. With the deposition out of the way, Clinton could concentrate fully on the speech, the stalled Middle East peace talks, the confrontation with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and other big issues.

But if there is a predictable pattern to Clinton's presidency, it is that adversity intrudes on success. And what has become more clear over timeis that Jones's lawsuit triggered forces more relentless, powerful and dangerous to the president than it appeared when she first came forward. As the president relaxed in the private residence with first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton after giving his deposition, the next storm was forming. "Do you know anything about this Newsweek story?" David E. Kendall, one of the president's personal lawyers who handles the multifaceted investigation of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr known as Whitewater, asked a senior White House official that afternoon. Within days, the entire world would know.

Armed with secretly recorded audiotapes, Starr on the previous day had asked for and received permission to expand his investigation into some of the most damaging charges ever made against Clinton. The tapes, made by a former White House employee named Linda R. Tripp, purported to show that Clinton had carried on an affair with a 24-year-old former White House intern named Monica Lewinsky and that he and confidant Vernon E. Jordan Jr., one of Washington's most powerful lawyers, had subsequently urged her to deny the affair in an affidavit submitted in the Jones lawsuit.

News of the allegations touched off the most bizarre week Washington has seen in decades as White House officials, the president's lawyers, Starr's investigators, Lewinsky's lawyer and platoons of reporters collided with one another in pursuit of what happened. Fears of a new constitutional crisis mixed with fascination over the sordid and sometimes comical details that spilled out by the hour.

The president, in careful language, denied any impropriety the day the allegations became public, then retreated until his lawyers could assemble more facts. Jordan too denied any wrongdoing, though he refused to answer reporters' questions. Starr, in a brief news conference on Thursday, insisted he would proceed as quickly as possible to find the truth. Lewinsky, whose scheduled deposition in the Jones case was postponed indefinitely late in the week, has not been heard from. Her lawyer spent Friday pleading publicly with Starr to make a deal. It was all a remarkable sight.

Throughout the week, the story careened forward at a breathtaking pace, but by week's end the allegations were still not proven, and many questions remained unanswered:

Did Lewinsky and the president actually have sex in the White House, as the tapes suggest, or is Lewinsky a calculating and insecure young woman who made up stories about a sexual relationship with the president and gossiped about them to a friend?

Are Clinton's denials complete and genuine or merely artfully worded legalisms with an escape hatch designed to slide him past the danger?

Did Starr overreach his authority in his long and expensive, but still inconclusive, pursuit of the president, or was he doing what any prosecutor would have done under the circumstances?

Was Tripp a willing participant in efforts by the president's opponents to bring him down, or merely a woman appalled at what she had seen and heard about the Clinton White House and concerned about protecting herself in an increasingly bitter and tangled legal struggle?

Can a politician who has survived numerous scrapes once again escape from a situation that some old friends fear could be fatal, or has his luck finally run out?

No one – from the most loyal Clinton supporter to the most vehement Clinton hater – doubts that the allegations represent the most serious crisis of Clinton's presidency, so perilous that their appearance prompted some politicians to talk about the possibility of resignation or impeachment – if the charges are proven.

There is no turning back. What has come tumbling out over the past week could forever change the way people see Clinton. The future of his presidency hinges on what may happen in the next week: on what Lewinsky says when she begins to talk; on what the president says when he finally responds in more detail; on the president's potential legal liability; and ultimately the judgment of Congress and the American people.

What follows is the story of how it all unfolded.

Unlikely Intersection

Jones is a former Arkansas state employee who first appeared at a conservative gathering in Washington in February 1994 with a startling story to relate. She told reporters that Clinton, while governor, had her brought to a hotel suite in Little Rock, where he asked her to perform a sex act. She said she refused and immediately left the room in embarrassment.

By that spring, her complaint had become a sexual harassment suit against Clinton, and the president's conservative opponents had seized upon the case and turned it into a crusade. To all but the most vehement Clinton haters, the suit still seemed only an embarrassing nuisance. They could not have been more wrong.

Efforts to settle the case broke down. Clinton attempted to block the potentially damaging suit until he had left the White House, claiming it would interfere with his duties as president, but a unanimous Supreme Court ruled in May 1997 that the case could move forward while he was in office. Jones's lawyers immediately began to intensify efforts to find and depose potential witnesses and made no secret of their intention to seek out other women with whom Clinton might have had sexual relationships in order to show a pattern of behavior. By December, both Tripp and Lewinsky had been snared in their web.

Tripp was a holdover from the Bush administration who developed a habit of finding ways to embarrass the Clinton White House. A former military spouse (she was divorced in 1992), she joined the White House staff in 1990 as a likable, low-level employee who gradually worked herself into more responsible jobs. When Clinton was inaugurated in 1993, she believed her White House days were numbered; instead she became executive assistant to then White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum.

Tripp was one of the last people to see Vincent W. Foster Jr., the deputy White House counsel, on the day he committed suicide in 1993. She wrote several embarrassing e-mail messages about the Foster case, including one that described White House lawyers as "the three stooges." Tripp wound up testifying before Congress and Starr's investigators about the Foster suicide and eventually found herself an outcast at the White House.

She took a job in the Pentagon in August 1994. Last summer she reappeared, this time as a source for a Newsweek story that alleged sexual misconduct by the president.

Tripp told Newsweek she had seen Kathleen Willey, a one-time volunteer at the White House, with her lipstick smeared and her clothing askew. Willey, she said in the article, told her that she had gone to see Clinton to ask him to give her a full-time job, and that the president took her into a small office adjacent to the Oval Office, where he kissed and fondled her. Clinton's attorney Robert S. Bennett dismissed Tripp as "not to be believed" – a comment that deeply offended Tripp and later convinced her that she needed to protect herself. (Willey has since confirmed the encounter with Clinton in testimony in the Jones lawsuit.)

Monica Lewinsky arrived at the White House a year after Tripp departed. A native of Beverly Hills and the daughter of a doctor father and a writer mother, Lewinsky was just 21 when she came to the White House as an intern after graduating from Lewis & Clark College in Oregon. "She was a bit star-struck," said a former White House official. "I think she was a young 21. But she was a very decent, hard-working, serious young woman."

She carried with her a reference from Walter Kaye, a retired New York insurance executive and Democratic contributor whose most valuable gift to Clinton may have been the discovery that the president's insurance companies were liable for the fees charged by Bennett to represent Clinton in the Jones harassment suit.

A few months after she began work at the White House, according to published accounts, Lewinsky attended a White House party wearing what was described as a revealing dress and apparently caught the president's eye. Soon after, she would later tell Tripp, she began a sexual relationship with the president that would last for more than a year.

Lewinsky caught the eyes of others at the White House, in particular that of Evelyn Lieberman, who was then deputy chief of staff and had worked previously for Hillary Clinton. Lieberman's antennae for trouble were especially acute, according to her colleagues. "Any hint, any whiff, any possible impropriety, or too many looks would raise Evelyn's suspicions," one colleague said. She sometimes admonished other women on the staff for wearing skirts that she deemed too short.

Lieberman didn't like it when she saw Lewinsky hanging around the West Wing. Others thought the young aide was infatuated with the president. By April 1996, Lewinsky had been shipped off by nervous White House officials for a job as confidential assistant to Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon

There she met and was befriended by Linda Tripp.

Friends Sharing Secrets

As Lewinsky allegedly told Tripp, the relationship included late afternoon or early evening encounters at the White House. The president, she claimed, sent her gifts, which subsequent reports say included a dress, a pin and a book of Walt Whitman's poems, "Leaves of Grass." She sent him a number of notes or messages from her office at the Pentagon, including what several accounts have described as a sexually provocative audiotape. She reportedly sent them to Clinton's secretary, Betty Currie, who also was listed as the official who often cleared Lewinsky for entry into the White House when she was no longer on the staff. The messenger service slips from Lewinsky's packages to the White House have been subpoenaed by Starr.

Lewinsky offers lurid descriptions of her relationship with Clinton, according to those familiar with the tapes. She suggests that she and the president have engaged only in oral sex, not intercourse, and relates how they engaged in telephone sex on a number of occasions late at night. She complains that Clinton is more interested in other women than in her.

Lewinsky and Tripp were drawn together as well by their mutual jeopardy in the Paula Jones case. Tripp was an obvious witness for Jones's lawyers, given her chatty description of Kathleen Willey and the president. How Jones's lawyers first got Lewinsky on their radar is not as clear. But in mid-December, both women received subpoenas to testify in the Jones case.

Well before then, Tripp had secretly begun to tape her telephone conversations with Lewinsky. Eventually there would be 17 tapes covering 20 hours of conversation that Tripp initially would give to Starr's investigators. Recent tapes captured Lewinsky's agonizing as her day of reckoning with Jones's lawyers neared.

Tripp told some people that she started taping conversations primarily to protect herself against retaliation by Clinton's lawyers and to preserve her federal job. On Saturday, The Post revealed that Tripp's literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg, an opponent of the president, had recommended making the tapes to prove to Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff, who had written the story about Kathleen Willey, that Clinton and Lewinsky were having an affair.

The first detailed account of their contents appeared in an article published by Newsweek on its Web site last week, and the magazine's editors and reporters have elaborated on the tapes in numerous television interviews since, including descriptions of one 90-minute tape they listened to a week ago.

On that tape, Lewinsky can be heard weeping and suggesting clearly that she and the president had had a sexual relationship. She tells Tripp that she plans to deny the affair to Jones's lawyers and despairs that the president has refused to settle the lawsuit. Clinton, she said, "is in denial. He'll never settle." She tells Tripp, "Look, I will deny it so he will not get screwed in the case, but I'm going to get screwed personally." Tripp tells her she plans to tell Jones's lawyers about the affair.

"You can tell from listening to the tape that Lewinsky is a scared, angst-ridden young woman," Newsweek assistant managing editor Evan Thomas said on CNN's "Larry King Live." "She makes it clear that she, at least in her own mind, is having an affair with the president." Tripp, he said, comes across as "a tough, formidable, somewhat manipulative woman."

"They sound like very upset women talking on the telephone to each other," said Ann McDaniel, Newsweek assistant managing editor on ABC's "PrimeTime Live."

On one of the tapes, Lewinsky reveals to Tripp that, on Currie's recommendation, she has sought the advice of attorney Vernon Jordan, Clinton's golfing buddy and close friend, because she feared she would be subpoenaed in the Jones case.

Jordan, as he later confirmed to reporters, met with Lewinsky, arranged for her to be represented by Washington attorney Frank Carter, and escorted her to Carter's office. "I want to say absolutely and unequivocally that Ms. Lewinsky told me in no uncertain terms that she did not have a sexual relationship with the president," Jordan said at a Thursday afternoon appearance before reporters. "At no time did I ever say, suggest or intimate to her that she should lie."

But Jordan said that in addition to finding legal assistance for Lewinsky, he had recommended her for employment at American Express and Revlon, two companies on whose boards he sits, and at the New York advertising firm of Young & Rubicam.

It was, he added, nothing out of the ordinary for a man who has helped many others in his life – "from paralegals to mail-room clerks, from corporate directors to CEOs," as he put it.

Currie, according to reports, also interceded on Lewinsky's behalf by helping to arrange for United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson to interview her for a job. Richardson and Lewinsky met at a Washington hotel in October for breakfast. He offered her a low-level job, which she declined, saying she preferred to work in the private sector.

It was a remarkable amount of high-level attention for a mere intern – especially one who hadn't worked in the White House for more than a year.

On the tapes, Lewinsky apparently refers to the president not by name but as "the big he" and "the creep." At one point Lewinsky muses aloud about confessing to Clinton that she had told others of the affair. "That's what I would do," Tripp replies. "But I don't know if you're comfortable with that." At another point, Lewinsky reportedly says she can't tell the president that she has told others they had a relationship. "If I do that, I'm just going to ... kill myself."

At still another point, she sighs, "I have lied my entire life."

Lewinsky's Affidavit

Five days later, on Monday, Jan. 12, Tripp met with her lawyers to prepare her statement for the Jones case. The previous Friday she had given copies of the tapes to her lawyers, who spent the weekend reviewing them. They were startled at what they heard. Their recommendation, according to one source, was to turn them over to Clinton's attorney Bennett, on the theory that the contents would force Clinton to settle the case.

Tripp was appalled at their suggestion, according to the source, and left her attorneys' office in anger. Instead of taking the tapes to Bennett, she called Starr's investigators. Before the end of the day, she was telling them everything she knew, and her story set in motion a series of extraordinary events over the next week.

The next day, by prior arrangement, Tripp met Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at Pentagon City for a drink around noon. Before arriving, FBI agents had outfitted Tripp with a tiny listening device – "a wire" in the parlance of the investigators – and as the two women talked, agents nearby monitored the conversation and snapped photos.

On Wednesday, Jan. 14, the two women drove home from the Pentagon together. During the ride, Lewinsky offers Tripp a three-page, typewritten document of "talking points" suggesting how she might handle her upcoming deposition with Jones's lawyers. The document suggests that Tripp alter her story about Kathleen Willey in ways that would protect Clinton. Tell the lawyers, Tripp is urged, that "you do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. You now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared her lipstick, untucked her blouse, etc."

It is not clear who drafted the talking points, which appear too sophisticated for a 24-year-old non-lawyer, but the document represents potentially damaging evidence of an attempt to tamper with a witness in a legal proceeding.

On Friday, Jan. 16, investigators again asked Tripp to lure Lewinsky to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel for another conversation. That same day, Starr had decided to ask the Justice Department to seek expanded authority for his Whitewater investigation, claiming that Jordan is a target. The Justice Department agreed and submitted the request to a three-judge panel, which also granted the approval. Starr's hope was to "flip" Lewinsky quickly and get her to help, before reporters already on the trail of the story started calling around town and exposing the operation.

As Tripp and Lewinsky sat down to talk at the hotel, agents interceded and escorted Lewinsky to a room upstairs. The agents confronted Lewinsky with the tapes and photos of her earlier meeting with Tripp. The young woman was shattered by the agents' assertion that she could be prosecuted for perjury, obstruction of justice and witness tampering – unless she cooperates with the independent counsel's investigation. They offered her immunity in exchange for her cooperation. "My life is ruined," she said.

Frightened and overwhelmed, she asked if she could call her mother, Marcia Lewis, in New York, who agreed to come to Washington – by train, not plane. A long wait ensued. Lewinsky and the agents killed time with a shopping expedition at the Crate & Barrel store in the Pentagon City mall. They watched Ethel Merman in the old movie, "There's No Business Like Show Business." They ate dinner together at a restaurant in the shopping mall. Finally, around 10 p.m., Lewinsky's mother arrived. "What's the big deal?" Lewis reportedly asked. "So she lied and tried to convince others to lie?"

Starr's team had warned Lewinsky that its offer expired at the end of the day, and the clock was ticking. Lewinsky's mother called her former husband, Bernard Lewinsky, in California, and he in turn sought advice from longtime family attorney William Ginsburg, a civil lawyer. Ginsburg refused to accept the immunity deal without knowing more details, saying he had not heard the tapes and had not fully debriefed his new client. He offered to fly to Washington the next day, but by the time he arrived the immunity offer had been taken off the table.

As the deadline for Starr's immunity offer to Lewinsky was passing, another deadline was looming at the editorial offices of Newsweek magazine. Newsweek reporter Isikoff had heard about the Lewinsky-Tripp tapes days earlier and had warned Starr's office the magazine was preparing a story for its upcoming edition. Starr's office, magazine editors said later, begged the magazine to hold off, claiming publication would jeopardize the investigation.

Rumors of a big story out of Newsweek swirled through Washington all day Saturday. Fearful of being scooped, Time magazine reporters pestered the White House "every 10 minutes" about the rumors, one official said, but as Kendall's call that afternoon indicated, those around Clinton remained mostly in the dark. At Newsweek, a debate raged throughout the day over whether to run the Isikoff story. At the last minute, top editors pulled the article from the magazine. Despite Isikoff's strong advocacy for the story, editors at the magazine feared they did not know enough about Lewinsky to publish such an explosive charge against the president.

"On the basis of what we knew Saturday, I am comfortable that we didn't go ahead with the story," Newsweek president Richard Smith said later. He added, "When the clock ran out, I wasn't prepared to air an allegation that a young White House intern had an affair with the president without more independent reporting on her."

The story of the Newsweek story soon found an outlet, however. By the next day, Internet gossipmeister Matt Drudge, who earlier had scooped Newsweek on its own story about Kathleen Willey, had posted an item on his Web site, and on ABC's "This Week with Sam and Cokie," William Kristol, editor and publisher of the conservative journal Weekly Standard, made reference to it before being dismissed by former White House official George Stephanopoulos. "We've all seen how discredited that's been," Stephanopoulos said of the Drudge Report site, whose tone would turn more serious later in the week once the allegations surfaced fully.

Other reporters who had long worked the Starr beat were in hot pursuit of the same material that Newsweek had held up. Late Tuesday night, Post reporters Sue Schmidt and Peter Baker got there first. The article was posted on the Post's Internet site shortly after midnight and appeared in the edition of the paper hitting the street at the same time. It was closely followed by reports on ABC News and in the Los Angeles Times. "Clinton Accused of Urging Aide to Lie," the four-column headline in The Post said on Wednesday morning. Washington had not seen a story as explosive since Watergate, and the feeding frenzy began.

The White House Response

During Clinton's first campaign, when he was forced to defend himself against charges that he had slept with Gennifer Flowers or tried to evade the draft, there was a standard procedure for dealing with the problem. Clinton, his wife and a handful of his top political advisers would gather, talk it out, fix a strategy and fight back ferociously.

But in this time of special prosecutors and multiple investigations, the old ways no longer apply. Today, Clinton's political advisers aren't allowed even to ask questions of Clinton about the facts of a particular charge, lest they be subpoenaed and hauled into court to testify – at their own expense. Clinton and his lawyers consult first; the political advisers then respond on the basis of what limited information they are given.

So it was that on Wednesday morning White House press secretary Michael McCurry called reporters into his office in the West Wing to deliver a statement prepared by Clinton's lawyers and approved by the president. Clinton, he told the throng of reporters packed in his office, "never had any improper relationship with this woman." He added, "He's made it clear from the beginning that he wants people to tell the truth in all matters." Under repeated questioning, McCurry refused to elaborate. A few hours later, he appeared before cameras for his daily briefing. Pummeled again with inquiries about seeming ambiguities in the statement, McCurry refused to budge. "I'm not going to parse the statement," he replied – a stance he would take another dozen times during the contentious 36-minute briefing.

It was a tense confrontation, broken only by McCurry's occasional flashes of humor. "Mike, what's your next move?" a reporter asked. "My next move is to get off this podium as quick as possible," McCurry replied. Pressed for further explanation of what the president's statement meant, McCurry noted that Clinton himself would be taking questions later in the day in three previously scheduled interviews. "We have an interview with PBS, an interview with NPR," McCurry noted, a "fortuitous bit of scheduling that's probably a lot better than the $25 pledge I sent it during pledge week."

Ninety minutes after McCurry finished his briefing, Clinton sat down with Jim Lehrer of PBS. "The news of this day is that Kenneth Starr, independent counsel, is investigating allegations that you suborned perjury by encouraging a 24-year-old woman, a former White House intern, to lie under oath in a civil deposition about her having had an affair with you," Lehrer began. "Mr. President, is that true?"

"That is not true," Clinton responded in sober tones. "That is not true. I did not ask anyone to tell anything other than the truth. There is no improper relationship. And I intend to cooperate with this inquiry."

"You had no sexual relationship with this young woman?" Lehrer asked.

"There is not a sexual relationship – that is accurate," the president said.

A moment later, Lehrer asked, "You had no conversations with this young woman, Monica Lewinsky, about her testimony, possible testimony ... ?"

"I did not urge anyone to say anything that was untrue," Clinton said. "I did not urge anyone to say anything that was untrue. That's my statement to you."

Lehrer turned to the alleged role of Vernon Jordan. Had Clinton asked Jordan, he began – and before he could finish the question, Clinton jumped in. "I absolutely did not do that," he said, suddenly animated. "I can tell you I did not do that. I did not do that. He is in no way involved in trying to get anybody to say anything that's not true at my request. I didn't do that."

In two other interviews that day, one with National Public Radio and another with the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, Clinton repeated his denials. But his carefully constructed sentences sounded oddly discordant. In his first two interviews, he spoke of the relationship only in the present tense, leaving room for a later explanation. By the third interview, he said flatly: "The relationship was not sexual."

The statements were reminiscent of the way Clinton had attempted to handle other charges during his 1992 presidential campaign. Asked whether he had ever smoked marijuana, he stuck to a non-denial denial – "I never broke the laws of my country" – until he was asked whether he broke the laws of another country. Then he admitted he had tried marijuana while a student in England, but "didn't inhale."

The clearest parallel, however, was Clinton's effort to contain the damage over his relationship with Gennifer Flowers, which erupted in January 1992 and nearly killed his presidential candidacy. On CBS's "60 Minutes," Clinton – sitting on a sofa with his wife – was asked about Flowers's allegation that she had carried on a 12-year affair with Clinton. "That allegation is false," he said. A few days earlier, when confronted by Flowers's tabloid story of the affair, he said, "The story is not accurate." Each statement contained the same kind of wiggle room Clinton had left himself in his interview with Lehrer about the Lewinsky relationship.

Ironically, the day after the latest scandal broke, the Post reported that, in his deposition in the Paula Jones case, Clinton had admitted having an affair with Flowers. Asked to explain the contradiction between Clinton's apparent denial in 1992 and his reported confirmation in 1998, McCurry issued a tortured defense. "The president knows that he told the truth in 1992 when he was asked about that relationship, and he knows that he testified truthfully on Saturday and he knows his answers are not at odds," McCurry said. It was a defense Clinton himself, rather than his lawyers or advisers, had prepared in anticipation of reporters' questions at a photo opportunity that morning. But no one asked him about Flowers.

The End of the Week

They were like huge, opposing armies who had warred with one another for years, now quietly gathering strength before one final and perhaps climactic clash.

Staff researchers Nathan Abse, Alice Crites and Ben White contributed to this report.