Monica Lewinsky Tells Author of Impeachment Book that Bill Clinton Lied to the Grand Jury

In a scholarly book soon to be published on the 1990s presidential impeachment saga, Monica Lewinsky is quoted as saying that former President William Jefferson Clinton committed perjury before the Whitewater grand jury while testifying about their physical relationship.

Clinton's convoluted testimony has, for a decade, been the frequent source of lampooning. His "it depends on what the meaning of 'is' is" has entered the lexicon as an example of male obfuscation. His parsing of a judge's language in his sexual harassment case led the then-president to assert with a straight face that when Monica Lewinsky performed oral sex on him in the White House, she was having sex and he wasn't.

Forget all that legal gamesmanship, Lewinsky now says: Clinton simply lied under oath. This revelation is among the many contained in a book titled "The Death of American Virtue," by Ken Gormley, a Duquesne University law professor. Gormley's well-researched, 769-page tome includes the fruit of interviews with both the former intern and the ex-president.

Lewinsky asserts that Clinton testified falsely before the grand jury about the nature of their association. "There was no leeway [there] on the veracity of his statements because they asked him detailed and specific questions to which he answered untruthfully," she wrote to Gormley earlier this year.

Politico, which first carried the news of the upcoming book's revelations, notes that both Clinton and his nemesis, Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr, have been intensely interested in how history will portray them. This has been an underlying theme in America's partisan politics in the last 10 years as well: Did Clinton stonewall the Whitewater investigation while preying on women -- and then lie about both matters under oath? Or was Ken Starr an overzealous and prudish prosecutor who needlessly precipitated a constitutional crisis over purely private behavior? These are the two story lines that professor Gormley addresses, and his answer appears to be that there is some truth in both of them.

"In the years since their bitter battle, both former President Bill Clinton and independent counsel Ken Starr have predicted they'd be vindicated in the history books," Politico wrote. "Now the first definitive history of the Clinton scandal is about to arrive -- and neither man can be completely happy about his portrayal in its pages."

For one thing, Gormley writes that the special prosecutor's very questioning of Miss Lewinsky, then only 24 years old, was tainted because the lawyers in Starr's office ignored her repeated request to have a lawyer present. But other revelations in the book include the following:

-- The author's assertion that as governor of Arkansas, Clinton was romantically involved with Susan McDougal, the one-time wife of James McDougal, whose original failed savings and loan prompted the Starr investigation. Susan McDougal spent 18 months in jail rather than answer questions from prosecutors -- and was pardoned by Clinton on his way out of office. Susan McDougal refused to talk to Gormley, but the author writes of his certainty that "some intimate involvement did occur," a contention he reiterated in interviews withPolitico.
-- Robert W. Ray, the lawyer who succeeded Starr as head of the Office of the Independent Counsel, was prepared to indict Clinton after he left office if the former president did not agree to admit that he made false assertions about Lewinsky while under oath.

Clinton accepted disbarment, which satisfied Ray. "President Clinton would never fully grasp how close he came to being indicted," states Gormley.

-- Attorneys working under Starr wrote a memo in which they sketched the outline of an indictment of both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Webb Hubbell, a Clinton crony and former law partner (with Mrs. Clinton) at Little Rock's Rose Law Firm. Hubbell ascended to the No. 3 position in the Justice Department during Bill Clinton's first term, but the prosecutors working in the independent counsel's office were focused on his work, along with the first lady's, at hiding the Clintons' involvement in Jim McDougal's failed thrift, Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan. Gormley writes that Hickman Ewing Jr., one of Starr's deputies, made a three-hour presentation on the pros and cons of such an indictment, but that afterward the vote against seeking it was unanimous.