Hello, whistlestop listeners. It's me, Leon Nafeck, the host of the Slate podcast, Slow Burn.

Since John Dickerson is out on vacation, instead of bringing you a new episode of whistlestop,

we are bringing you episode one of the new season of Slow Burn. It's all about the Clinton presidency.

And if you like this episode, please subscribe to Slow Burn to get new episodes as they come out over the next two months.

It's the best way to support the show.

John will be back in two weeks with a new whistlestop episode.

In the meantime, thank you and enjoy.

Monica Lewinsky didn't know it, but her lunch meeting with Linda Tripp was never going to happen.

Lewinsky was waiting for a trip at the food court inside a shopping mall in Pentagon

City, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. It was a typical suburban mall, brightly lit with a movie

theater, a Macy's, and white tiles in the floor. Luinsky had come from the gym. She was still in

her exercise clothes, and she was reading a magazine while she waited from the gym. She was still in her exercise clothes,

and she was reading a magazine while she waited for her friend. It was Friday, January 16, 1998.

Lewinsky was 24 years old. About two years earlier, she'd become involved in a precarious relationship

with the President of the United States. As Lewinsky later told her biographer, her relationship with Bill Clinton had come to overwhelm her life.

She found it hard to think about anything else.

Standing there at the Pentagon City Mall, Lewinsky looked up from her magazine, and she saw Linda

Tripp heading towards her on an escalator.

Suddenly she gestures.

I mean, Linda Tripp is coming down on the escalator and gestures towards some men behind her.

That's journalist Ronata Adler.

She wrote about Monica Lewinsky and what happened to her on this day in 1998 for Vanity Fair and the LA Times.

...