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4.2.12 WC: 191694 White House switchboard tried unsuccessfully to reach me. (The White House has an unparalleled capacity to reach people. Once when flying on a commercial flight, the pilot came out and whispered in my ear, “the President is on the radio-phone. I took the call in the cockpit.) I was on a beach, which had no cell phone service. When I got back to my house, there were seven frantic messages that the President needed to see me right away. He was staying a couple of miles away from our house, at the home of Dick Friedman in Edgartown. I jumped into my old Volvo and drove straight to Friedman’s house. The Secret Service man at the end of the road waved me through, telling me that the President was expecting me. But I was then stopped by another Secret Service man, telling me that the rules required that they search under the hood, so I would have to lift it up. I started looking for the mechanism to open the hood. After a few minutes, the Secret Service man smiled and said, “Professor you don’t know how to open up the hood on your own car, do you?” I responded sheepishly, “I’m not sure.” I then asked him if he had heard of the comedian Jackie Mason? He said yes. I said, “Jackie Mason tells a joke about how when a non-Jew hears knocking under the hood of his car, it makes his day. He gets in there and he fixes and fixes. But when a Jew hears knocking under the hood of his car, he immediately trades it in for a new one.” He laughed, and showed me where the lever was. I then drove down the road a short distance where the President was waiting for me in his jogging shorts. He had already heard that I didn’t know how to open up the hood of my own car and laughingly wondered whether he should be seeking advice from such a klutz. During the height of the Lewinsky affair, I found myself sitting right next to the President at a large dinner party. He asked me what I was working on and I told him I was finishing a book called the Genesis of Justice about the first book of the Bible. Clinton is incredibly knowledgeable about the Bible and we spent much of the dinner in intense conversation about the various Biblical stories in the Book of Genesis. The next day I received a call from Gail Sheehy [check this] of Vanity Fair saying that she had heard from somebody at another table at this party that the President spent the entire dinner grilling me about whether oral sex constituted adultery within the Biblical meaning of that term. I told her, truthfully, that the subject of adultery and oral sex had simply never come up during our discussion. We had talked about Abraham and Jacob and Joseph. I gave her the names of other people at our table—including Anthony Lewis of The New York Times—and suggested she check with them if she didn’t believe me. She said, “Damn, that was such a good story but I guess I can’t use it.” I said, “Of course you can’t use it, it didn’t happen.” When the article appeared in Vanity Fair, she included the story, knowing that it was false. I wrote a letter to the editor telling what happened and she replied that although I had denied the truth of the story, somebody at another table confirmed that it was true. Of course the person at the other table couldn’t possibly hear our conversation but he probably heard some words suggesting that we were talking about the Bible, and simply assumed that it must have been about adultery. So much for journalistic integrity. Shortly after the Clinton case was resolved, John Kennedy, Jr.—the late son of the former President—called and asked me if I would contribute an article to his magazine, George. He asked me if I would describe the ten greatest legal blunders of the 20" Century. Here is what I described as the number | and 2 greatest blunders: 219 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017366