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The second faction is the publishers and publicists, who want to sell the book. They seem more likely to stretch the limits of the immunity deal in exchange for the requisite publicity avalanche. And finally, there's the Lewinsky family, which wants payback--financial, yes, but perhaps moral as well. If Monica's Story seems too squishy for its first two-thirds, the book inspires genuine indignation when it delves into Starr's treatment of Monica and her mother. After the FBI and Starr's men corralled Monica in a hotel room--thanks to a Tripp sting operation--they made her feel she couldn't leave and shouldn't call a lawyer. Even after she spoke of suicide, the men were flashing handcuffs and saying, as one did, "Does it bother you that I have a gun on? Because I can put it in the other room." After the agents finally let her make a phone call to her mother, she says, one of them (the same fella who graciously offered to remove his gun) stood with his finger over the phone, ready to end the call if she said too much.
After this ordeal, which preceded a long media nightmare, the Lewinsky family wants to wake up with at least enough cash to pay off Monica's legal bills and those of her friends. Monica's alone are estimated at between $1.5 million and $2 million. She stands to make perhaps $3 million from the book and a British-TV interview that will be sold to stations around the globe.
Recently the publicist for Monica's Story called the book "the essential document for closure," borrowing a psychotherapy term and suggesting that we're all about to get off Monica and Bill's couch, finally. Even Clinton got into the closure game. He insists he didn't watch the interview. At a news conference on Friday, he noted that Lewinsky had "paid quite a high price for a long time, and I feel badly for that." He wished her "a good life." Lewinsky, it seems, still has some work to do: "I just miss him so much right now," she told Morton in one of their later interviews. Pity she still can't see Bill Clinton the way most of the country does: as a good President but an awful man. She will perhaps need more time alone, and less in front of cameras, before she comes to grips with that.
--With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York and Karen Tumulty/Washington