For once, I felt sorry for Bill Clinton. It was January 1998, and the press reported that the President had had an intimate relationship with one Monica Lewinsky. In Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s office, where I worked, we had evidence that Clinton had sought to hide his dalliance through perjury and obstruction of justice. But that didn’t matter anymore. No president could survive the public revelation of sex (however defined) with a White House intern. Clinton was about to be driven from office over fellatio rather than felonies. I started thinking about a conciliatory statement Starr might release when the President resigned.
Our judgment, as Ken Gormley observes in The Death of American Virtue, was sometimes flawed.
After scads of journalists, Gormley is the first historian to chronicle the scandal that culminated in Bill Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representatives but acquittal by the Senate. (He recounts the Whitewater land scandal too, but that chicanery lacks the piquant simplicity of sex with an intern.)
The story begins in 1994, when Paula Jones files a lawsuit claiming that Bill Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, sexually harassed her. From 1995 to 1997, President Clinton has an intermittent affair with Lewinsky. Judge Susan Webber Wright lets the Jones team investigate Clinton’s sexual relations with subordinates, a ruling that makes the Lewinsky affair legally relevant. In Starr’s office, we get involved when an informant — the duplicitous Linda Tripp — reports that Clinton, his friend Vernon Jordan, and Lewinsky are conspiring to obstruct justice in the Jones case. The evidence never fully supports Tripp’s allegations, however, and she, having presented herself to us as a pure-hearted patriot, turns out to be collaborating with the Jones lawyers and angling for a book deal. But by then it’s too late. The Clinton forces have launched a ruthless and effective PR attack on Starr.
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