The Last Time a U.S. President Got in Legal Trouble Over a Secret Tryst, I was There, Sort Of

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”