LEWINSKY DESERVES SOME SYMPATHY.

Byline: Barbara Howar

IN the late 1960s, when I was not much older than Monica Lewinsky is now and had unrestricted White House access to Lyndon Johnson and his family, my heart leapt every time the Marine Band played ``Hail to the Chief.''

Like most presidents in this century, the chief's monumental ego required vast female adulation, offers of which Johnson probably succumbed to as readily as some of his predecessors reputedly did. Jack Kennedy, according to legend, occasionally dallied with White Houses staffers, worldly women who knew the difference between sexual servicing and true love. But even he had no reputation for pouncing on youngsters. Had LBJ stuck out his presidential neck in that direction, Lady Bird would have chopped it off.

She instead took great care to keep a young, unsalaried adviser to her daughters like myself out of harm's grasp. Had she been less vigilant and protective, I might have found it difficult to reject the advances of the most powerful man in the world.

As it was, my morals were never tested, nor was the rest of me tempted. Looks mattered, even in the aphrodisiacal corridors of power, and Lyndon Johnson, to twist a cliche, was no Jack Kennedy.

Some 30 very odd years since then, however, high-level lust and low-level promiscuity have publicly collided. But, although no two people seem more deserving of one another than Bill Clinton and Monica S. Lewinsky, the reams and reels of coverage on their coupling haven't provided much insight into the sphinx/minx who, for seven seamy months, has been up to her kneepads in personal abuse, branded as a dimwitted Beverly Hills bimbo destroying family, faith, finances and feminism, or as a pathological publicity/father-seeking political conspirator who wantonly seduces aging Democratic lotharios.

Yet spinned and stoned as she's been, we still don't know who this Freudian slip of a girl really is. Or even what the ``S'' stands for in her name.

We don't, for instance, read or hear much about how or why the lush young White House intern - then a ripe 21-year-old - became the willing victim of a reckless married man old enough to be her president. What we got instead was an earful of mouthings from her dopey first lawyer and cheesy former boyfriends, then an ill-conceived eyeful of Monica S. (for silly, sappy, stupid) cavorting with the American flag and deep cleavage on the pages of Vanity Fair. With a bustline measuring higher than her IQ, small wonder she's been done wrong by guys all her life.

In early 1992, when candidate Clinton went on ``60 Minutes'' and lied about his affair with Gennifer Flowers, Monica would have been about 18 years old, Chelsea Clinton's current age. What Monica would have seen on her screen back then was a handsome rogue saving his political hide with a ridiculously lame excuse his wife supported and the nation accepted. The message was clear: Bill was a seasoned philanderer and Hillary didn't care, nor did the majority of American voters who winked for the fun and games to begin. A clarion call to glory for a loose, impressionable teen-ager.

Of course, ignorance and immorality aren't excusable at any age, but whatever Monica's ultimate fate, I'm sorry for her. Not because she's an innocent, or because she alone kept her mouth shut throughout half a year of White House bluster and media blather that's made her the butt of a smutty global joke.

I'm sorry for Monica because in this whole sordid saga involving a huge cast of supposedly consenting adults, she's the only one who wasn't an adult.

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PHOTO MONICA S. LEWINSKY