White House staff share somber details of how Hillary Clinton coped with the Monica Lewinsky affair

And while the nation wouldn’t find out about President Clinton’s scandal until January 1998, White House staff “witnessed the fallout from the affair and the toll it took on Hillary Clinton,” explains Kate Brower, author of “The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House.”

Article by ReviewAtlas.com

In November 1995, President Bill Clinton infamously began an affair with 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

For the next year and a half, America’s 42nd president would engage in a dozen sexual encounters with Lewinsky, most of which took place in the Oval Office.

And while the nation wouldn’t find out about President Clinton’s scandal until January 1998, White House staff “witnessed the fallout from the affair and the toll it took on Hillary Clinton,” explains Kate Brower, author of “The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House.”

“You just felt bad for the entire family and what they were going through,” White House maid Betty Finney told Brower. “You could feel the sadness.”

According to Brower, the president slept on a sofa on the second floor of the White House for three months during the height of the Lewinsky drama.

“Some on the staff have said that Hillary knew about Lewinsky long before it came out, and that what really upset her was not the affair itself but its discovery and the media feeding frenzy that followed,” Brower writes.

“It happened and she knew it happened and everybody was looking at her,” former White House storeroom manager Bill Hamilton said of the first lady.

White House pastry chef Roland Mesnier recalled that in the late afternoons, Hillary would call down and quietly ask for her favorite dessert, “Roland, can I have a mocha cake tonight?”

“I made many, many mocha cakes. You better believe it,” Mesnier told Brower.

Worthington White, a White House usher, described to Brower another encounter with the first lady during the dark days following the Lewinsky affair:

“One sunny weekend in August 1998, just before the president made his confession to the country, the first lady called Usher Worthington White with unusual request.

‘Worthington, I want to go to the pool but I don’t want to see anybody except you,’ she said.

‘Yes, ma’am, I understand,’ he replied sympathetically.”

White arranged for the Secret Service agents to abandon the protocol in which one agent would walk ahead of the first lady and another would walk behind her. Instead, they just trailed her.

White met Clinton, who was wearing reading glasses and carrying a few books, at the doors of a White House elevator and then escorted her to the pool — just as she had requested.

“They didn’t exchange a single word on the walk to the pool.

‘Ma’am, do you need any butler service?’ White asked her after she got settled in.

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