The New Yorker, February 8, 1999 P. 23
Signed comment about Monica Lewinsky... Last week, Representative Ed Bryant, a son of Tennessee and one of the Republican managers, asked that all hundred senators avail themselves of the chance to “look into the eyes” of that woman, Miss Lewinsky. Bryant invoked the ritual need for “closure” and swore that the process of looking would take just “two to four hours.” The senators, in the majority, affirmed their right to spiritual curiosity... like the crowds at the Louvre who come each day to stare through a sheet of bulletproof glass and into the inscrutable eyes of “La Gioconda,” the lawmakers will finally have their chance to encounter her—Mona Lewinsky... The senators, of course, were not alone in wanting their privileged moment with Monica Lewinsky. A grateful nation has been promised by ABC, St. Martin’s Press, and the Lewinsky handlers that Monica will soon tell “her story.” Through an interview with Barbara Walters and a book written by the Princess of Wales’s biographer Andrew Morton, Monica Lewinsky will speak. She will be asked what she did and what she heard and what she felt, and she will tell and tell and tell. There can be little doubt that the Lewinsky-Walters interview will draw Super Bowl ratings and that the Lewinsky-Morton book, unless it displays the curious reticence of the Paula Barbieri memoir (a grave multimillion-dollar failure in the O. J. Simpson library), will assume a top position on the best-seller lists. In the meantime, a hundred senators and the entire impeachment-addled country keep gazing at her image—our Gioconda.... In Monica we have taken to seeing anything or anyone we care to: the innocent brought low, the sexual independent, the retrograde temptress. She is everywhere. She suits all interpretations. She is featured in everything from law journals to porn zines. She has given rise to a cable industry. But Monica is the woman of secrets who no longer has any. Her eyes are not windows but mirrors, and what we see in them is awful. Yet we go on staring.
