While anonymous White House officials are portraying Monica Lewinsky as a flirtatious Valley girl with a crush on President Clinton, Pentagon colleagues describe her as a hard-working professional unintimidated by power.
A part of the White House strategy is to raise questions about the veracity of the woman who is heard telling a friend on a secretly recorded tape that she had sexual relations with the president. The issue of whether these encounters were real or fantasy, and whether Clinton or his close friend Vernon Jordan pressured Lewinsky to deny the affair in a sworn affidavit, lies at the center of the controversy.Lewinsky said in the taped conversations that she placed a personal ad in the Washington Post last Valentine's Day that was intended for the president, the Post reported Tuesday. Such an ad did appear on Feb. 14, the newspaper reported. The ad quoted lines from "Romeo and Juliet," was addressed to "Handsome" and was signed "M."
At the Pentagon, a step removed from the center of the political storm, the descriptions of Lewinsky are more circumspect, ranging from that of a fast talker and slow typist to a woman willing to put in long hours for low pay as secretary to Kenneth Bacon, the Pentagon spokesman.
"I'm heartsick," one close former Pentagon colleague said. "I think she's a good kid, obviously young but who came to Ken and did a good job for him personally and for the organization in general."
Even at the Pentagon, though, colleagues recall that whenever Clinton appeared on television, Lewinsky stopped what she was doing and watched.