MONICA'S HARVARD NEMESIS

Matt Spalding, a current Harvard Graduate School of Education student, is indirectly responsible, it seems, for our most recent constitutional crisis. He was described in Monica Lewinsky's book, "Monica's Story," as having dubbed Lewinsky "Big Mac" while at John Thomas Dye Elementary school in Bel Air, Calif. According to the text, the slight "was made all the more painful, because at the time she was harboring a schoolgirl crush on him." It became a "canker in her psyche." FM caught up with Spalding last week.

FM: Big Mac?

SPALDING: A friend I hadn't seen in 12 years e-mailed me a little while ago to tell me I was in the book. And I just sort of said, "are you joking?" I had no idea. This was three weeks after the publication--one of [our friend's] moms had read the book. And I was like, "Oh my God!" And he said, "No, not at all, go check out the book." So I looked. And then I was listening to my mom who was sort of chatting with a friend about, sort of, the journalistic integrity of the book because there were so many facts that were just totally off about her whole experience at John Thomas Dye. So as far as this episode with me and whether or not it happened...I mean, who knows. I'm just assuming that it did. It's an amusing thing. I mean, I wrote her a long letter, and I feel really bad about it.

FM: You wrote her a long letter of apology?

SPALDING: Yeah, I did. I mean, how often do you have your childhood meanness pointed out to you?

FM: At this point you should apologize to the nation.

SPALDING: I don't take responsibility for it. It was the first romantic disappointment of her life...the first in a long line. It's an amusing way to take things but it's kind of blowing things out of proportion obviously.

FM: Pun intended.

SPALDING: Listen, if it really happened the way she describes it, the only thing I feel responsible for is addressing it with her. As far as it being a national concern, it becomes a little trumped up at that point. In a way, the thing I feel most sorry about is not having remembered her in the first place.