A sweet girl

So here's my summary of the news people are really interested in, as I perused the tabloids in the supermarket yesterday.

Of course, the really big story is that a very pretty woman in Britain had a baby, and he might grow up to be a king some day.

Jennifer Anniston may be pregnant again...or, maybe that was last week.

Michael Douglas and his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, may not be getting along well.

And then, there is Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky; you know, that woman he never had sex with?

Well, here is another view of Monica than the one presented by the National Enquirer, which only ever seems interested in publishing trash on people. Jake Tapper actually had a date with Monica just before she moved from Washington to New York. Jake wrote about it in 1998, after the scandal erupted.

She didn't strike me as a classic climber—just a woman looking for a decent, challenging job and a happy life to go with it.

She struck me as cheerful, open, a bit too much a resident of Planet Hap-Hap-Happy in my acerbic view. A little bizarre in her almost childlike sweetness.

So. A sweet girl. Nice.

Tapper predicted in 1998,

She will live her life within the borders of a tabloid cover.

Monica was/is like a lot of young women inside the Beltway, only more so: young, ambitious, and looking—looking for next, seeking a place to land, searching for that one friendly face in the crowd who will think she's worth talking to. A guy, a boss, a boyfriend, a mentor, a friend. For Monica, that person turned out to be Bill Clinton. Clinton apparently saw in her either a consummately gullible kid, or maybe, just maybe, he was taken by the same thing I was: an absence of jade, a willingness to look around the next corner, a sweetness that is rare in a city built on bitter and sour and salty.

And she kept looking even after she had become a footnote in the White House personnel files. When she started chatting with Linda Tripp at the Pentagon about clothes, or the office, or sex, or whatever, she'd thought she'd found a kindred spirit, or at least, for God's sake, a friend. She found an abyss instead, where she became trapped for not knowing where friendship ends and politics, of the most bitter and fanatical sort, begins. How was she supposed to know that when a friend invited her out to a hotel bar to pour out her heart over a couple of cocktails that the friend would show up wearing a wire under the chiffon? There's Monica, working through post-adolescent confusion about a close brush with a man who was both married and incredibly powerful, and suddenly she has G-men grabbing her under her arm, hauling her off to a room to tell her how it is going to be.

There is something supremely validating about proximity to power, and when that proximity morphs into intimacy—be it of an emotional or sexual sort—the seduction is a fait accompli. Isn't Monica just the ultimate expression of what D.C. is all about?

Those who really know her say that she worked, endlessly, cheerfully, that no job was too small or too daunting. D.C. is rife with her type, those of the perennially cheerful faces who are more than happy to do what ever it takes to make the alpha male (or female) look good.

And to be brutally honest, I got with her because I figured that behind her initial aggressiveness lurked an easy, perhaps winning, bit of no-frills hookup. Nothing of the kind happened, so either I am eminently resistible (which is certainly within the realm of possibility) or Monica is not the tart she is being made out to be.