President Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky the Intern
and, somewhere real close, the surfer.
Saturday. January 24, 1998. 8:30-ish a.m., EST.
The phone rings. It being the Nineties, the phone is a landline. It
is answered, sleepily, sluggishly.
The voice at the other end of the line asks to speak with a
young guy not long out of college who in the not so recent past
cared mainly about scoring empty barrels in Central America and
targeting strikes at that certain left bending off a groin out
front of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse — but not a wit for the grand
conspiracies that are American presidential politics.
The guy who answered, only slightly less groggy now, responds.
“I’m him, who is this?”
“My name is Mike Isikoff,” says the
voice. “I’m a reporter for Newsweek. I’m working on a story
about the White House intern Monica Lewinsky that is going to press
later today, so calling under a tight deadline. Wanted to ask you a
few questions.”
The grogginess evaporates. The surfer guy sits up and swings his
legs out of bed.
Thirty minutes later the conversation wraps.
In January of 1998, Newsweek, as the name suggests, was a
weekly print magazine and one of the most widely-read news
publications in the United States. Often at the tip of the spear on
breaking national stories, Isikoff was one of the magazine’s star
investigative reporters, a relentless gumshoe with wire rim glasses
and floppy hair in the ink-stained mold of Woodward and
Bernstein.
But when it came to the Lewinsky
story, on that sleepy January morning Newsweek was
scrambling, having been scooped by a fedora-wearing rumor monger
(not yet cum internet media power broker) named Matt
Drudge.
Not that Newsweek didn’t have the story first. But as the
weekly was going to print the previous Saturday, its lead editors
chickened out and refused to run Isikoff’s story on the President
of the United States’ sexual relationship with a 22-year-old
intern.
In a matter of hours, news of the chickening out leaked to
Drudge. He didn’t hesitate — the Drudge Report, a site that
now boasts over 100 million page views per month, can trace its
true origins to that fateful moment on January 17, 1998 when Drudge
hit the go live button on his story alerting the universe that
Newsweek was sitting on the sordid true tale of POTUS’s
affair with the intern.
When Drudge went live, it was too late for Newsweek to do
anything, at least until the next weekend. As a weekly print
publication, it had to let an agonizing seven days go by as the
national news dailies chewed on the story it had sourced.
Back to the phone call. Isikoff had questions for the surfer
guy, questions that dug into the how and why of the Lewinsky
information, questions the answers to which would help flesh out
his Newsweek cover story, the magazine’s first opportunity
to go on record after it was scooped by Drudge on its own news.
The young surfer guy had some answers. After all, he was working
on media relations with Paula Jones’ legal team, the group that had
ferreted out the Lewinsky information to begin with during their
investigation of the sexual harassment claims being brought by
Jones against the President.
But there was a problem – being young, and much more adept at
duck diving tropical storm beach break mayhem than navigating the
turbid waters of US national media, he was extremely concerned
about saying the wrong thing, or even saying the right thing that
could later be published out of context.
The Paula Jones lawsuit further complicated the situation. While
not a lawyer himself, and not an employee of the lead law firm of
record for Jones, surfer guy nonetheless was in a unique position
and privy to information that someone might claim was privileged.
(All of which helped explain why Isikoff had tracked him down in
the first place.)
The uncertainty was vexing, like trying to decide whether to
paddle out at the local in sub-optimum conditions or drive up the
coast in the hopes that things would be bigger and cleaner at that
other spot.
Borrowing from his surf spot choice experience, the surfer took
the simple path. He couldn’t — or more precisely wouldn’t — provide
answers on the record. So he agreed to talk, at length, to answer
all the questions — but only if everything he said was off the
record.
Isikoff agreed. To this day, it isn’t clear why. He was under a
tight deadline so time was precious. Surely there were names of
other more important sources on his list. This was a huge story, in
terms of pure media coverage volume it would be the most monumental
of Isikoff’s career. But he stayed on the phone, asked his
questions, and listened to the answers, all off the record.
Among the topics of interest — exactly how had Jones’ lawyers
learned about the Lewinsky affair? The off-the-record answer surf
guy provided was that the team received an anonymous phone call
from a person who identified themselves as someone working inside
the White House who had overheard Lewinsky talking about it. The
identity of the caller, then and to this day, is still
unknown.
(A very brief aside: Isikoff in his later reporting has
contended that the anonymous call claims are dubious and that
Jones’ lawyers actually learned of Lewinsky via the not anonymous
Linda Tripp. This is not the case, or at least not the full story
of the case. In fact, the person who took the anonymous call (not
surfer guy, but someone well known to him with whom he worked
closely on a daily basis) put the phone on which he received it in
a specially-purchased plexiglass box and mounted it on a miniature
Corinthian column to keep for posterity as a Smithsonian-level
artifact.)
The call ended. The adrenaline subsided, and the anxiety kicked
in.
Did the surfer guy say too much? Would Isikoff keep his off the
record promise? Was the surfer about to become notorious, perhaps
even fired from his job?
The answers to these questions wouldn’t materialize until
Newsweek rolled out to newsstands in the next day or two. It
would be an agonizing wait.
But it wasn’t. Early the next morning, The Washington
Post ran a Lewinsky story on the front page of its Sunday
edition. It contained many of the same details the surfer had
shared with Isikoff. What was off the record had suddenly become
very much part of the record.
Unbeknownst to the surfer (and presumably to Isikoff too), a
Post reporter named Peter Baker (who today is the Chief
White House correspondent for The New York Times) had gotten
to a higher-ranking source than just the surfer guy, and that
source — being both significantly more experienced and less scared
than the surfer — had shared the details with Baker on the
record.
To this day, the surfer guy wonders if Isikoff thinks he was
played. For the record, he wasn’t. He just called the wrong source.
And to his credit he did keep up his end of the bargain, never
expressly revealing the contents of the conversation with the
surfer.
In the larger world, the news went nuclear. 60 Minutes came to
town, Ed Bradley resplendent in his sparkling golden hoop earring
and possibly the most suave person surfer guy had ever stood
beside. Steven Kotler, nine years before publishing
West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief,
spent a week wandering around asking questions while researching
and penning a profile that ran in GQ.*
Kotler and the surfer guy spent some time hanging out, Kotler
the much cooler hipster who had made it to GQ levels, surfer
guy the young wannabe who wished he could reach that pinnacle.
Instead, the surfer settled for a one-line quote in Kotler’s piece,
a pithy aside referencing shared free speech values with the ACLU
that, truth be told, has held up pretty well over the
years.
As with any long form piece, the ACLU quote was the tip of the
iceberg, the one nugget mined out of multiple conversations where
the surfer guy tried to convince Kotler that he wasn’t a right wing
maniac, that the Jones suit was about bigger human rights and not
just right vs left, while Kotler in turn foreshadowed his future
surf adjacent writings by positing existential queries like, “how
did you end up here if all you ever really wanted to do was
surf?” (A question without answer to this day).
The media frenzy peaked with the public reveal of the deposition
of the President from the Jones’ suit, where he denied any sexual
relationship with Lewinsky. It was the lie that led to impeachment,
the first such reprimand of a US president since Andrew Johnson
post-Civil War.
Surfer guy was there too, hauling the first publicly-released
copies of the deposition transcript into a secret press conference
in the basement of a D.C. hotel stuffed with a few dozen of the
most famous names and faces in American media, including Isikoff.
The conference was completely off the record, cameras and
microphones banned inside the room. After a couple of short remarks
by the lawyers explaining what could be found in the transcripts,
the reporters all dashed for tables at the back of the room, where
copies of the transcripts were passed out (one per news
organization) by surfer guy and a couple of his
colleagues.
As he waited his turn, Isikoff joked that surfer guy was handing
out transcripts to the women reporters before the men, so maybe the
whole Washington Post scoop didn’t sting that
bad.
Incidentally, Sam Donaldson (who was seated in the front row of
the secret conference) immediately stole ABC News’ only copy of the
transcript for his own purposes and refused to share it with the
rest of the ABC crew. So surfer guy sprinted through the streets of
D.C. with an ABC news producer and one spare copy of the transcript
to make copies at ABC headquarters in time to be read on air that
evening.
All those years of hard paddling and duck diving paid off –
surfer guy was still breathing easy as they raced into the ABC News
building and pulled up hot to the copier, the producer screaming at
some poor hapless intern running xeroxes of take-out menus to “get
the fuck out of the way.”
Like any memorable swell, the Lewinsky media frenzy peaked and
faded. The federal district judge handling the Jones’ lawsuit
granted summary judgment to the President, concluding (among other
things) that even if the one sexually-charged incident Jones
alleged actually did happen, it didn’t suffice to meet what the
judge believed was the required standard of severity (a conclusion
that is less persuasive in today’s legal environment).
The Lewinsky allegations then morphed into a national crisis far
beyond the Jones suit, fodder for independent counsels and GOP
legislatures. Isikoff wrote a best seller about the whole saga,
Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story, which the Associated
Press described, with a completely straight face, as “[a]
penetrating look at the most explosive presidential scandal since
Watergate.”
The book filtered events through Isikoff’s perspective (which is
likely more or less accurate), and even included a veiled reference
to the Saturday morning surfer guy call, referring to it obliquely
as one of the “many cover stories put out by all sides in the
Lewinsky affair” during the early months of 1998.
For his part, as the swell of media attention faded, surfer guy
paddled off into the sunset, moving on to other endeavors. He never
spoke with the likes of Isikoff or Kotler again. He never shared
the details of these experiences publicly, until today.
But he stuffed those “you should have been here yesterday”
stories deep into his wax pocket. Like the mythic winter of ’83,
they’re a memory against which all future swells will be
measured.
*Steven Kotler, GQ, Sept. 1998, “The President’s
Nemesis”
