“You may say you’re sick of it, you don’t want to hear about it anymore, you don’t even care if the president is a total player.
But that’s not true. Deep down inside you have a sadistic urge to know more. You want to hear all the gory details about the cigar and the pizza, and even about the bizarre blue cocktail dress that Monica Lewinsky saved in the back of her closet.
At a certain point you do have to wonder, what more is there possibly to say? I mean everyone has already formed his or her opinion as to whether or not the president did anything wrong or “impeachable.” But here is an insider’s point of view. Yup, that’s right. We got William Ginsburg (Lewinsky’s former attorney) to let us all in on how people at the heart of the scandal behave. Finally, somebody will tell us what he really thinks.
When Bill Ginsburg walked into the already packed LA Youth staff room, he was huge. He had this air about him, like he took up the whole room. He shook hands with the crowd while sizing us up.
He was overexposed on television
I was wondering how this guy could defend the way he acted on TV. Ginsburg brought so much attention to himself. He was the only lawyer that was on TV and all over the place, while he was still working for Lewinsky. Ginsburg took a lot of heat from the media about his frequent TV appearances (like on one Sunday he was on five talk shows). Occasionally you can still catch him on the news when they run old footage of Lewinsky avoiding the press.
He admitted: “That criticism is probably correct. Early in this I became too intoxicated with the exposure. I was enjoying it too much…there were times when the story became more about me than the case.”
Ginsburg added: “I became concerned that I was dealing with the devil, and the devil had to be stopped. My personal feelings were that Ken Starr had to be stopped and I was going to be the instrument by which he was stopped.”
Which might explain why he was soon off the case. Lewinsky wanted to speak about Clinton without getting in trouble for breaking the law. Within a week of Ginsburg stepping down as her attorney, Lewinsky’s new lawyers struck her immunity deal with the Office of the Independent Counsel, a.k.a. Ken Starr. Ginsburg, who had originally been assigned to the case because of his friendship with Lewinsky’s father, said that he is now “estranged’ from her family.
He said some fascinating things
Even though he was being open with us, I couldn’t help but feel that he was trying to snow us. In fact he even admitted it: “I think the press has become more a function of commercial speech than of free speech,” Ginsburg said. “It has to be used from all sides. In the practical sense, the press uses me, I use the press and it goes on in a manipulative game. Isn’t this [LA Youth interview] also a manipulation? You may consider it such.”
But even though he was acting slightly condescending towards us, he ended up saying some fascinating things about the key players involved.
About Lewinsky, who Ginsburg has known since her childhood, Ginsburg said, “I personally think that her life is inevitably and inextricably changed. She’s got some real problems finding normalcy, a career, a husband. I don’t think she’s going to live a normal life. She’s the center of the storm. The only way that she can survive this is to make money off of it.”
Ginsburg called Linda Tripp “a sorry, sorry human being.” Not only did she betray her “friend,” Ginsburg argued, but she also allowed herself to become a tool in the war between the Republicans and the Democrats by recording her supposedly private phone calls with Lewinsky.
Ginsburg didn’t leave Clinton alone either. “I think he’s beyond help. He’s the only bull I know that carries his own china shop with him,” Ginsburg said, referring to a remark by Winston Churchill. “He does not yet believe he was wrong, that’s my problem with his personal integrity.”
His life was changed by the case
Even though Ginsburg seems really critical of everyone and he can come off sounding mean, it is important to keep in mind that this guy’s life was totally flipped around by this case. Suddenly he had to deal with getting bomb threats, anti-Semitic threats and having psychos visit his office. He even had to hire extra security. His life is still not back to normal.
But as far as the future of America’s politics is concerned, Ginsburg is oddly optimistic. He said, “We are going to have a new level of political thought…The American public is getting an insight into the political system like they never had before.”
I say oddly optimistic because the American public doesn’t seem to want this new insight that they are getting.”