A Tale of Two Interns

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Two decades ago, two young women both became interns in the Clinton White House, but the personal trajectories of Huma Abedin and Monica Lewinsky could not have ended any further apart than they are today.

While one is now at the pinnacle of power in Washington, the other had her life ruined by her encounter with power.

Huma Abadin was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1976, the daughter of a Pakistani mother and Indian father, both academics. Abedin was two years old when her family moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She speaks fluent Arabic and Urdu.

She returned to the United States at age 18 to study at George Washington University and began working as an intern in the White House in 1996, assigned to then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.

She officially took over as Clinton’s aide and personal advisor during Clinton’s successful 2000 U.S. Senate campaign in New York and later worked as traveling chief of staff and “body woman” during Clinton’s unsuccessful campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

Writing in Vogue during the 2007 campaign, Rebecca Johnson called Abedin “Hillary's secret weapon.” According to a number of Clinton associates, Abedin is a trusted advisor to Clinton, particularly on the Middle East, and has become known for that expertise.

In 2009, Abedin was appointed deputy chief of staff to Clinton in the State Department, under an agreement which allowed her to work for private clients as a consultant while also serving as an adviser to the Secretary of State.

In addition to being on Hillary Clinton’s personal payroll, Abedin received money from the Clinton Foundation and Teneo, a consulting firm founded in part by Douglas J. Band, previously a senior aide to Bill Clinton.

After leaving her post at the State Department in 2013, Abedin served as director of the transition team that helped Clinton return to private life, and set up a private consulting firm, Zain Endeavors LLC.

Abedin is now vice chair of the Clinton presidential campaign. Her elevation has been a “transformative shift,” according to Politico. She screened and interviewed applicants for key campaign roles, and was the primary channel for communications to Clinton before the campaign officially began.

After Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States, she wrote an open letter to Clinton supporters calling herself “a proud Muslim” and criticized Trump’s plan.

Assuming Clinton wins the presidency, Abedin will no doubt play a prominent role in the White House. She might become an assistant to the president or deputy chief of staff.

Born in San Fransicso in 1973, Monica Lewinsky was raised in Los Angeles. Her father is a doctor and her mother an author.

She graduated from Lewis and Clark College, the same year she got an unpaid summer White House internship, in 1995. Her paternal grandfather was a German Jew who escaped the Nazis; her maternal grandfather was a Lithuanian Jew.

She moved to a paid position in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs that December and soon got involved in a sexual relationship with President Clinton. The ensuing scandal became the cause célèbre of the decade, and her life, too, was transformed – though not in a positive way.

Lewinsky experimented with a number of career paths after her humiliation -- Hillary Clinton called her “narcissistic loony toon.” She designed a handbag line, promoted the Jenny Craig weight-loss system and appeared as a television correspondent.

By 2005, Lewinsky found that she could not escape the spotlight in the United States, which made both her professional and personal life difficult. She moved to London to study social psychology at the London School of Economics, graduating with a Master of Science degree in 2006.

Since then she has tried to avoid publicity. Due to her notoriety Lewinsky has had trouble finding employment in the communications and marketing jobs for nonprofit organizations where she had been interviewed.

In a speech given in June 2015, Lewinsky described how “I was branded as a tart, slut, whore, bimbo, floozy and of course ‘that woman,’ I was seen by many but truly known by few … It was hard to remember ‘that woman’ had a soul and was once unbroken.

“In 1998 I lost my reputation and my dignity, I lost almost everything, and I almost lost my life.” She is today an “anti-bullying activist.”

From a common starting point, the lives of these two women have moved in very different directions.