Bill Clinton
The greatest worldwide sex scandal to hit the headlines at the end of the 20th century was undoubtedly that of Bill Clinton, President of the United States. Monica Lewinsky, an intern who was working at the White House during 1995 and 1996, had a sexual relationship with the president during that time, and when this became known, it helped lead to Clinton’s impeachment trial. Thus, it was one of the most important scandals of all time, severely affecting the president’s reputation, as well as giving Lewinsky a notoriety that is likely to last for the rest of her life.
whiff of a scandal
Monica Lewinsky was a young, hopeful White House intern when she met the president. From California, she had graduated with a psychology degree and moved to Washington, D.C. to work at the White House. She began as an unpaid intern in July 1995, and by November had secured a permanent job there with good prospects. However, in the spring of 1996 Clinton’s chief of staff started to noticed that Lewinsky was spending rather too much time in the company of the president. He decided to have her transferred to the Pentagon to try and avoid a scandal, but the president wasn’t entirely happy about the arrangement and intervened. He arranged for her to get an important position with top-security clearance as a confidential assistant to the chief Pentagon spokesman, Kenneth Bacon. For this position she would earn $32,700 a year and had travel privileges. Clinton continued to buy Lewinsky lavish gifts and would talk on the phone to her late at night, often engaging in ‘sex talk’.
Members of Clinton’s staff became suspicious because no intern had ever advanced so quickly up the political ladder. Lewinsky was also given a special pass, which entitled her to enter the White House at night and at weekends, allegedly creeping in away from prying eyes.
However, at the Pentagon things were not going so well for Lewinsky. She couldn’t handle her day to day tasks and mismanaged her boss’s tight schedule, which resulted in her getting the sack. Clinton immediately stepped in once again and asked a favour of UN Ambassador Bill Richardson, if he would give her a job. Richardson agreed, but then the news of their illicit affair was leaked and the scandal was out.
The blue dress
The way the story leaked out was as follows. During 1997 the relationship between the president and Lewinsky continued, even though Lewinsky had left the White House. Lewinsky made friends with a woman, Linda Tripp, when they both worked in the Pentagon’s public affairs office. After Lewinsky foolishly revealed to Tripp that she was having a physical relationship with the president, Tripp secretly recorded the telephone conversations between Lewinsky and the president. Tripp also acted as an adviser to Lewinsky, telling her to keep the presents that Clinton had bought her during their affair. She told Lewinsky not to have a blue dress stained with Clinton’s semen dry cleaned, so that there would be evidence of what had happened between them, should this be needed for evidence later on.
In the meantime, Clinton was the subject of a court case involving a woman named Paula Jones, who was suing him for sexual harrasment. The case was dismissed, but Clinton paid Jones a large sum to settle the matter out of court. In the process of this, Lewinsky gave evidence denying that she had had a sexual relationship with the president, but Linda Tripp refused to lie under oath in this instance and gave the tapes she had made of the telephone conversations to an independent counsel, Kenneth Starr. Starr later issued a report alleging that Lewinsky and Clinton had had oral sex in the Oval Office and in other rooms at the West Wing of the White House. This rang true in many quarters, since Clinton had also been the subject of another long-running sex scandal involving Gennifer Flowers, a woman from Arkansas who claimed that she had had a 12-year affair with him while he was governor of that state, and had even had a child by him. (The child was apparently given up for adoption.)
The cigar tube
Clinton began by denying his affair with Lewinsky, swearing under oath that he had never had ‘a sexual affair’ ‘ sexual relations’, or a ‘sexual relationship’ with her. He categorically stated on American national television on 26 January 1998, ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky’. He later claimed that he did not include oral sex in his definition of ‘sexual relations’.
Next, he managed to find a way to argue around his claim, ‘There is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship’, claiming that this statement was true insofar as, when he made it, the relationship was actually over: as he famously remarked, ‘it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is’.
However, Starr confronted the president with the evidence that he had obtained a blue dress from Lewinsky that had his semen stain on it. Starr also told the president that Lewinsky had described how she and Clinton had conducted their sex play in the Oval Office, with Clinton pushing a cigar tube into her vagina. Faced with this evidence, Clinton backed down and admitted to having misled the court, admitting that he had had an ‘inappropriate intimate contact’ with Lewinsky. However, he said that he had not committed perjury, because he believed that oral sex was not real sex. He went on to claim that he was passive during these encounters, and that Lewinsky had performed oral sex on him rather than the other way round. When Lewinsky denied this, Clinton’s lawyer tried to persuade the court that he had remembered it all differently to her.
Serious and comical
The Lewinsky affair was finally proved and, at the same time, one of the most serious and comical sex scandals of the Clinton administration made the headlines. Clinton’s attempts to evade the truth in the Lewinsky case came at the end of several claims from other women about his sexual conduct over the years, and reinforced the public image of him as a sexually voracious man who was periodically unfaithful to his wife. However, in this case, he had tried, on the face of it, to pervert the course of justice by lying about what had happened between him and the young intern, and as such was suspected of perjury. Steps were taken to impeach him in 1998 by the US House of Representatives, but after a 21-day trial, the Senate did not achieve the two-thirds majority required to convict and remove the president from office under the laws of the Constitution.
Consequently, Clinton remained in office, but his reputation was severely damaged and many felt that he could no longer be trusted. Not only did he appear to have lied under oath, but he had begun a sexual relationship with a young woman (she was only 21 years old at the time) who was half his age, and many regarded this not just as inappropriate, but as immoral, or – at the very least – showing a disregard for his presidential responsibilities.