Monica and Me
I can imagine you saying,
"What's Monica to him, or he to Monica?" But, in fact, we are quite close.
For one
thing, I am her neighbor. I live in the East building of the Watergate complex,
and she lives in the South building. It is said that she lives, with her
mother, next-door to Sen. Bob Dole. From the deck of my apartment I can look
across the plaza, less than a hundred yards, at the Dole apartment. So, I
suppose I can look at Monica's apartment.
Dole's presence is manifest. A picture of him getting a
haircut is on the wall of the Watergate barbershop. Sometimes, when in the
swimming pool, I have seen the senator on his terrace and exchanged a word with
him. Two years ago, before the presidential election campaign, I met him coming
out of the drugstore and used the occasion to advise him that cutting taxes was
not a winning issue. He did not take my advice, and now he is known chiefly as
Monica Lewinsky's neighbor.
I don't
think I have ever seen Monica. There are always several young girls, many of
them students at nearby George Washington University, buying food at the
Watergate Safeway. Monica, the overage Lolita, may have been one of them--but
of course, I would not have singled her out for attention before the publicity.
In fact, I don't think I could pick her out in a group of girls even
now--unless she were embracing President Clinton. Him I would recognize.
When I come out of my apartment I usually see a
group of photographers waiting near the entrance to Watergate South, hoping to
get a glimpse of her. There used to be 10 or 20. Now there are four or five.
Some days there are none. As I write this, on Palm Sunday, there are none.
Perhaps she has gone to California for Passover. Maybe, now that the Paula
Jones case has been thrown out, the paparazzi will leave her alone and
she will feel free to go to Safeway.
The photographers bring
folding chairs. They seem in no hurry. On rainy days they sit under umbrellas
and wrap their cameras in plastic. I saw one photographer whom I knew slightly
and asked if he had sighted her. He had been there for three days and had not.
In fact, I have never seen her on television coming out of the Watergate, but I
may just have missed it.
I wonder
if the work of these photographers is in the GDP. Of course, it wouldn't be.
They are an input. The output will be a shot on television of Monica, and the
value of that will be in the GDP. Someone evidently thinks this value
will exceed the cost of keeping the photographers on guard. And who will pay
that cost? Why, you and I, TV watchers, will pay, via the soft drinks and cars
and toothpaste we buy.
But residential proximity is not my only connection to
Monica. I am a member of the Cosmos Club, a rather conservative--some would say
stuffy--club in an old mansion on Massachusetts Avenue. The membership is also
pretty old, although not as old as the mansion. William Ginsburg, Monica's
lawyer, stays there when he is in Washington. He is not a member of the Cosmos
but does belong to a club in Los Angeles with which the Cosmos has reciprocal
arrangements. He has met with Monica at the Cosmos and once had an interview
with Barbara Walters there. Naturally this brought the press crowding around
the entrance. In fact, one pressed so close, his foot was run over by Monica's
limousine. There was no serious damage, however; reporters are a hardy lot.
There's probably a Pulitzer in it for him. One reporter tried to get into the
club by tapping a connection with a friend who is a member, but he was refused
admission on the reasonable grounds that he wasn't wearing a necktie.
There
hasn't been so much excitement around the club since a vote was taken, 10 years
ago, to allow women to become members. One member who had voted no on that
occasion was heard to say, "See, you admit women and the next thing you know
you have people like Monica Lewinsky and Barbara Walters hanging around." But
on the whole, the members took the excitement with good humor and were amused
by the irony of the difference in culture between the Cosmos Club and the Oval
Office.
Igave a lecture on the American economy in Tel
Aviv, Israel, last month. I did not mention Monica in my lecture, but the first
question I was asked was how President Clinton could do his job with all the
distractions caused by the Monica Lewinsky affair. I gave my stock answer: In
the first place, we don't know the truth; in the second place, the presidency
is not a person but a team. Presumably some members of the team, such as the
secretary of the treasury and the secretary of state, were not that distracted.
I had my own experience, during the Nixon administration, of carrying on
despite swirling scandal.
Later, I thought the subject
required more analysis. One had to separate the relationship, whatever it was,
between Monica, et al., and the president before it hit the headlines from what
happened afterward. I remember that some people complained President Eisenhower
was distracted from the business of his office because he was out playing golf
so much. But we were told, and I think most people accepted the explanation,
that golf relaxed Ike from the stresses of his job and enabled him to perform
better. A similar explanation was offered, but privately, to some in the press
who were aware of President Kennedy's sexual conduct. Perhaps Clinton's
relationships can be justified in the same way. That would assume, of course,
that the president did not feel any psychological stress from realizing he was
behaving in what many people regard as an immoral way. That apparently was no
problem for Kennedy. About Clinton we don't know.
After the alleged
relationship became public property, the situation was different. Certainly
there was much distraction at that point. What we have to ask, however, is
whether that was a bad thing. Would it be better for the president, and the
first lady too, for that matter, to be able to give their undivided attention
to getting America across that bridge into the next millennium than it is to
have them distracted by the Monica affair? I'm not sure.
