CHAPTER 31
The Internet and the Intern
The punctures, one after the other, finally pierced the veil. Between the private and the public. Between the real and the virtual. Between politics and sexual politics. And by the late 1990s it appeared as if all of the scandals and clandestine tapes and careening squad cars—along with the entire culture war itself—had been meant as a preamble to a single, preposterous morality play.
Today, of course, the details are familiar; the saga itself, brutal, futile, and contemptible.
A Newsweek reporter named Michael Isikoff, in reporting on Paula Jones’s sexual harassment case against Bill Clinton, would come to learn about an intimate consensual relationship between the president and a White House intern named Monica S. Lewinsky. (Internet wag Matt Drudge would actually be the one to publicly expose the intern’s name.) Isikoff would discover that Lewinsky—twenty-two years old when the relationship began—had been confiding in a coworker, Linda Tripp, about the romance. And Tripp in turn had begun secretly audiotaping Lewinsky, amassing over twenty hours’ worth of recordings of their private conversations, some of them related to the affair.1 On a parallel path, prosecutor Kenneth Starr, while investigating the president on several fronts, would become aware of Clinton and Lewinsky’s interactions—and of Tripp’s tapes—prompting him to widen the focus of his probe.
Then things got really rancid. Starr, partly pressured by the timing of upcoming depositions and the pending publication of Newsweek’s article about the relationship, decided to go for broke. He sent his minions after Lewinsky to get her to open up before the news story broke open.
On January 16, 1998, a small group of U.S. attorneys and FBI agents cornered Lewinsky in a Pentagon City mall. They brought her to a nearby hotel room, where she was met by prosecutors from Starr’s office. And then, according to her account, they threatened her with as many as twenty-seven years in prison for having signed a false affidavit about her relationship with the president. They discouraged her from calling a lawyer. They started interrogating her. They asked her to wear a recording device to secretly audiotape Clinton’s aides and, if need be, the president—which she refused to do. At wit’s end, Lewinsky requested to be allowed to telephone her mother for advice. Permission granted, she implored her to hurry down from New York and join her. When her mother arrived, both she and her daughter were subpoenaed.
After the shakedown came the takedown. Investigators would rifle through Lewinsky’s bookstore purchases. They would canvass her friends and colleagues about her habits and history. They would take possession of her personal property, from items as innocuous as printouts of her GRE scores, to gifts from the president, to a telltale blue dress bearing traces of the president’s DNA (which Tripp, according to Lewinsky, had encouraged her to hold on to for safekeeping). They went into Lewinsky’s computer and fished out drafts of unsent love letters that had been stored in her personal email account. (The drafts, which were equivalent to her private musings, were later published worldwide.) Above all, the independent prosecutor, in exchange for granting her immunity, would require Lewinsky—under threat of perjury for having signed the affidavit—to appear three times to give grand jury testimony and graphically describe personal encounters she had had with the president.
Lewinsky, as a consequence of her legal and media exposure, would be publicly shamed and derided by the White House and its surrogates, by media commentators, by fellow feminists who supported Clinton’s policies—and by former acquaintances who saw an opportunity to shine in the sulfurous limelight. For months she would remain traumatized by the initial ordeal with the authorities, shaken by the legal and press onslaught, and humiliated by the public dissemination of details about her personal life. Her family, alarmed, began to worry if she might choose to end her life.
The president, for his part, endured his own takedown. During his videotaped deposition in the Jones case, he would be pushed to discuss alleged sexual activities involving various women. He would deny, falsely, that his relationship with the former intern had been sexual in nature, and would insist to the American public, while standing at a podium and waggling his forefinger, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky.”2 For months, he would witness the anguish of his wife and daughter as well as the feelings of betrayal and distress expressed by members of his cabinet, his administration, and America at large. For spiritual counsel, he would turn to the Reverends Tony Campolo, Jesse Jackson, Gordon MacDonald, and J. Philip Wogaman. His presidency would stagger to the edge of a precipice. His legacy and reputation would be tarnished for a lifetime. “The yurts of Mongolia,” ex–Clinton aide Paul Begala would remark in 2016, “know that Bill Clinton was accused, and in fact was, unfaithful to his wife.”
In 1998, the country was convulsed and in many ways repulsed. From the moment the rumors of the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship surfaced, the immediate message that the president conveyed to the nation, in the view of Republican political strategist Mike Murphy, damaged both the president and the office. “There used to be an elevation [to the presidency],” he remarks today. “I think Clinton brought ‘the president’ down to just another… politician. When he stood in front of the [presidential] seal and said he didn’t have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, and kind of invoked the power of the presidency and that moral authority to cover a lie about his personal life, I thought that was kind of a crossing point [in the] culture at large. It was no surprise that the biggest applause line [of his successor] George W. Bush’s campaign was when he would say he would bring honor and respect back to the Oval Office.… I mean, Nixon gets a lot of blame—it kind of started with Watergate. [But] Clinton did his part to cement that image.”
For the next eight months, the carnival stayed open 24/7. Starr’s team compiled its case. Leaks circulated like a contagion. The media and the public would latch on to every salacious shred, as if the artifacts of the O. J. Simpson case (the knife, the Bruno Maglis, and the bloody glove) had been magically supplanted by new totems (the Tripp tapes, a beret, and a blue dress). Finally, in late summer, rafts of material compiled by the independent counsel’s office were packed into file boxes. Among the items: videos of Clinton’s and Lewinsky’s testimony, transcripts of personal conversations, logs of Oval Office comings and goings, numbingly clinical descriptions of sex acts, and page after page of sheer hearsay. The lot of it had been collated, scrutinized, and interpreted, and the results were crammed into a multivolume, 7,793-page data dump. The price tag for the entire Starr investigation: more than $70 million in taxpayer dollars.
And then the melodrama turned utterly Kafkaesque.
The Starr commission’s findings were handed over to Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Republican-run House of Representatives. And the lawmakers, in their zeal, decided to release them. Grand jury testimony, often kept sealed, was effectively unsealed. Nuggety portions of Tripp’s tapes were posted online for all to hear. The centerpiece of the committee’s work, the 445-page Starr Report, became a night-table curio, rocketing to the top of the bestseller lists. It would prove, in time, to be the ur-text of 1990s Washington.
JFK adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr., writing in his personal journal, would call the report “the most salacious public document in the history of the republic.” Journalist Renata Adler, in a scathing exegesis in Vanity Fair, would refer to Starr’s dissertation as “a voluminous work of demented pornography [that amounted to] an attempt, through its own limitless preoccupation with sexual material, to set aside, even obliterate, the relatively dull requirements of real evidence and constitutional procedure.” The Washington Post’s Peter Baker and Susan Schmidt would assert that the decision to publish the report’s findings “follow[ed] an emotional debate on the House floor about the propriety of releasing a document that none of its members, let alone Clinton or his lawyers”—not to mention Lewinsky or her lawyers—“had even read. Within minutes after it was posted on the Internet, millions of Americans jammed Web sites… [and] found themselves stunned by the breathtaking amount of detail included about Clinton’s sexual adventures with Lewinsky.”3
In short order, the House of Representatives, spearheaded by Gingrich, along with Bob Livingston, Dennis Hastert, and cohorts, compiled their case against the president. No matter that Gingrich was involved in his own affair at the time.4 Or that Livingston, Gingrich’s designated successor, would withdraw his name from nomination in 1999 amid rumors of his own extramarital activities. Or that his replacement, Dennis Hastert, would eventually be branded a “serial child molester” and sent to jail. The legislators and their colleagues pressed ahead in earnest, charging Clinton with engaging in impeachable offenses that included abusing his power, maintaining a relationship with a subordinate, and perjuring himself about it.
Ten days after the data’s release, a video of Clinton’s testimony would be made public by the House Judiciary Committee. It showed the president sitting in the White House and being grilled by anonymous prosecutors whose disembodied voices were piped in teleconference-style through video and audio hookups. (Q: “Did Kathleen Willey ever give you permission to take her hand and place it on your genitals?” A: “No, she didn’t.”) In a matter of days, two images would fuse in America’s mind: that of a president’s frosty denial at a lectern—and that of a president, in excruciating verbal gymnastics, trying to amend and parse that denial. (Quoth President Clinton, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”)
But just as his 60 Minutes appearance in 1992 had proved to be a potent character tonic, here was another filmed interrogation that, counterintuitively, engendered a degree of public sympathy. “It was the turning point for him to get out [of the thicket],” says Dee Dee Myers, his former press secretary. When the footage was released she was in Los Angeles and miked up to comment about it on NBC. “It was going to be [aired] after the Today show or [on MSNBC],” she recalls. “We did the seven-to-eight [o’clock] segment.… And I started watching this thing. And they actually broadcast the tapes. The whole thing… As I watched, I thought, first of all, these questions are absurd. They’re trying to get him to talk about how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin… They’re asking him completely inappropriate questions. And it ended up being the turning point—and there’s some pretty embarrassing stuff—but [viewers were wondering], Why are we seeing this? Why did they ask these questions? Why did they release the tape? Why are we going through this as a country?”
Clinton’s former communications director and close adviser George Stephanopoulos would have an even more visceral reaction that day. According to his memoir All Too Human, he watched while sitting in a room at ABC News. And the video’s harsh lighting, single-camera perspective, and the jarring crosstalk by unseen speakers gave the deposition “the quality of an amateur porn flick,” making Stephanopoulos “feel as if I were eavesdropping on a private encounter.” Once the dialogue moved on to sexual topics, he writes, “I felt a tug inside.… The whole scene was heartbreaking.… He was a man alone with his failings before the whole world, a man forced to confess sins that had devastated his family and undone the hopes of his life, a man ashamed.… Off camera, I quietly started to cry.”
Much of the nation, watching on television or online, was distraught as well—distraught for itself and its flawed leaders, its wanton voyeurism, its scorched-earth politics, and its children, who were now forced to witness such sorry spectacle. “At the end of the day, the Republicans were hurt more,” in the estimation of Mark Corallo, who had served as an aide to the GOP’s Livingston. “We became the party of the moral jihad. I’m as guilty as anyone. We all got wrapped up in it.”
The late Jonathan Schell, the writer and arms-control advocate, had a unique take. While discussing Clinton’s impeachment in an article for The Nation in 1998, Schell proposed that the O. J. Simpson drama in fact had been the beta test for the congressional proceedings. That decade, America had created what Schell called a “new media machine” that chose to elevate “the trifling (sex and lies about sex) to the earth-shaking (impeachment of a president and damage to the constitutional system)… [and] may have fatally tipped a newly endangered balance of power: the balance between fantasy and reality.”
Schell surmised that if “a history of this secondary reality is ever written, a pivotal chapter, I believe, will concern the trial of O. J. Simpson, in which the media, making use of materials offered by the real world, managed to construct a drama indistinguishable from a soap opera.” The Bronco ride, in Schell’s telling, was the centerpiece—the archetypal movie chase, broadcast live before a national audience. “At that moment,” he contended, “virtual reality and plain old-fashioned reality were inextricably fused in some new way.” He went on to suggest that the Simpson and Clinton trials were working off the same media script in which “highly diverting ascertainable facts mingling sex and crime were presented as, among other things, entertainment.”
And yet in Schell’s mind the two cases had vastly different ramifications. “The O.J. trial marked the apotheosis of infotainment—the use of factual material to amuse,” he wrote. By contrast, “the Monica and Bill story started that way too.… Only a minority, for instance, has ever thought that Clinton should—or would—actually be impeached. But then the story was given a fateful turn. The soap opera suddenly became serious and real. Against the public’s wishes and its expectations, Clinton actually was impeached.… The whole country found itself trapped inside a television program.”
The Boomers had cut their teeth on shared televised or mediated stories. Their sense of the wider world had often been shaped by its transmission in virtual space: from assassinations to moonshots; from a war in Southeast Asia to a war in the Persian Gulf.5 Boomers, settling down in the ’80s and ’90s and raising families, spent more and more time watching. Their desire, at the end of their workdays, was for escape, thrills, and the whole variety show. At first the audience tuned in because it was good dirty fun—no harm in that. But the harm came when the lure turned out to be the heat and the slime, not the substance of the high crimes and misdemeanors.
If JFK had been the first president to triumph because of TV, and Nixon the first to be done in by audiotapes, then Clinton was the first to be done in by audio- and videotapes. Trump, by extension, was the first president to triumph through reality TV. And he triumphed regardless of the fact that an audio track for a celebrity news program, Access Hollywood, had recorded some off-camera banter in which he’d boasted about how his star power enabled him to kiss women or grope for their genitals with little risk of reprisal. In an earlier America, such footage would have sunk any would-be president. But in the age of reality shows, WikiLeaks, and naked selfies, the body politic merely rolled a jaundiced eye.
Dr. Drew Pinsky, the physician, internist, author, and psychiatry professor, has made a career out of counseling Gen-Xers and millennials about sex—and by helping patients (celebrities, most notably) cope with addictive disorders. Over a coffee in L.A., then at his radio studio, he talks about how the culture became preoccupied in the ’90s with delving into the personal lives and behavior patterns of strangers and public personalities.
First, he says, individuals were leaving an ever-larger data “footprint”—audiotapes, videotapes, receipts, photos, surveillance footage, and so on—that allowed outsiders to document shameful actions. Second came “the normalization of humiliation,” a phenomenon he traces to the 1980s talk-and-trash TV programs such as The Jerry Springer Show. Third, he insists, both the cheap thrills of pop culture and the deep traumas that result from domestic disarray, neglect, and abuse (often the result of intense economic challenges) combined to make people predisposed to “the vice of envy, the most deadly sin, the most destructive of human emotions. Envy is not jealousy, which is a craving for another’s possession or trait or partner. Instead, envy requires action, which is knocking the person down to my size. They make me feel bad, they diminish me, so I have to bring them down. I have to make myself feel empowered over them. Envy is a highly narcissistic impulse. Envy is a product of trauma. And envy is what we are steeped in right now.”
Fourth and foremost, Pinsky says, is a narcissism that has been baked into the American mind-set. “If you go back to Christopher Lasch’s [1979] book The Culture of Narcissism, he predicted it [correctly], although even he didn’t predict the profundity of what would happen. Narcissism—which Freud debated even existed—is now rampant. You go down to the psych hospital and [countless] admission page[s have] what’s called a Cluster B diagnosis, which is a narcissistic disorder. Everybody. We’ve all got it. It’s in our system. It’s in our psyches.”6
Pinsky telescopes back in time to compare our era to an extreme paradigm: the Aztecs. “Where you see narcissism emerge as a personality style in a culture, you see a high incidence of childhood trauma and disrupted families, as we have in our society today. We’re not the Aztecs. [Their] codex of how to raise children would call for rules about how you hold them over fires, you bite them, you do horrible things to them, ostensibly to make them great warriors. We’re not quite [as bad as] that. When we focus our violence on someone else, we feel guilty, we feel ashamed. And to relieve us of that, we like redemption and resurrection, which lets us do the sacrifice, then cleanses us of our guilt for having done so. When we gather together and destroy somebody, we feel bad for that person and [for having] taken them down. And when they redeem themselves, it makes us feel good. So now we’ve completed our power cycle.”
Where, then, did this power cycle begin? “This started with O.J.,” he declares. “That’s really the moment.” Not only were we sanctioning celebricide, but we were watching it as a daily ritual. “That’s when reality programming began, and the news media gave up on trying to be journalistic. It is summed up well in the [2016 ESPN] 30 for 30 documentary O.J.: Made in America, in which journalists and producers are expressing that after a while they threw up their hands, [saying, in effect,] ‘If that’s what they want, that’s what they get.’ It became more about the consumerism than about the journalism.”
Three years after the Simpson trial, the zenith of the media-age sacrifice was Monica Lewinsky’s, made all the more riveting because it involved sexual relations and the American presidency and “the politics of personal destruction”—a phrase popularized by (drum roll) Hillary Clinton. Pinsky hazards an assessment of that curious process. “The takedown mentality, at the beginning, is really directed at Bill,” he says. “But it is sort of led by Hillary, in a way, toward Monica and away from her husband. Many times women will make the mistake of [seeking retribution against] the woman involved in the affair rather than the man choosing the affair. So I think a lot of that energy started this.” By the same measure, he adds, “We didn’t have a social media yet to act it out. So it was a press frenzy, first, around Bill. But once that sort of settled, the need for the ‘sacrifice’ began to focus on Monica. And the new domain of the Internet really began to flex its muscle. She became literally a punch line.
“In a weird way we were satisfied with Bill Clinton’s administrative skills and his record, and wanted him to stay [in office], but we still needed some blood. That’s Monica. It’s the first case of somebody being dehumanized through this mass, mob action. There was never any concern as to whether these attacks were hurtful to this individual. Monica was really Case One for the online mob. The narcissistic shift was larger now. And the city square where the mob gathered was the biggest in history: the Internet.”
Ultimately, nothing on the mass media continuum “creates more of a response than sex and violence,” Pinsky says, citing the Simpson trial, the sex tapes of the era, and the White House scandal. “There were no longer taboos against either. Shroud them with a little bit of euphemism [perhaps], but sex and violence had become part of what we saw every day—just another feature of the sexual revolution, the tabloid era, the violence in our culture [coming to] our many screens. We craved it.”
The deeper lesson of the ’90s, says Pinsky, is that two successive generations had become the unwitting victims of the ’60s sexual revolution. The American libido, aided by the pill and abetted by the free-love Age of Aquarius, never got put back in the lockbox. “Sex is deeply embedded in the human experience and ultimately it’s one of the deepest expressions of human intimacy. That’s why Freud talked about it so much. For twenty years, we pretended that wasn’t the case, and it came back to hit us. During the Swinging ’60s and ’70s it was never really contemplated that nonadults would begin engaging in recreational sex… using one another as objects of recreational satisfaction. [But as we have witnessed] throughout history, we are human beings. And, lo and behold, it turns out that sexuality has physical, emotional, and spiritual consequences, and we were completely unwilling to acknowledge it. So as people were getting harmed, first physically and then emotionally, it became obvious that the people who continued to use humans as objects, regardless of the effects they were having on them, were unable to control it. That’s a problem. That’s sex addiction.”
If there is a silver lining in all of this, Drew Pinsky notes, it is the return to the recognition of the importance of one’s closest acquaintances and family members—and the inherent value placed on sustainable intimacy. Today’s youth, according to several studies, are having less sex, not more, and less sex that is purely physical. “There’s been a refocus on children and families,” he proposes, “an increasing stability in relationships in the new millennium. My kids understand, strangely enough, that sexuality is part of a deep interpersonal experience with tons of implications.”
In the end, a politicized legal case, a constitutional crisis, and a muck-drunk media ran roughshod over an intern’s private life. For Paula Jones to effectively press her case against Bill Clinton… for Kenneth Starr to press his case against Bill Clinton… for the Republican Congress to press its impeachment case against Democrat Bill Clinton… (and for the press to cover it 24/7), Monica Lewinsky had to be placed on the altar.
For the last word, it seems appropriate to hear from her—the Internet age’s inaugural citizen-victim of sexual shaming.
“I was the first to have my identity and reputation savaged by the virality of the Web,” says Lewinsky in a series of conversations in New York and Los Angeles. “Today, unfortunately, people are routinely cyberbullied with impunity.7 But back in 1998, I happened to be the first one to walk into that barrage. And overnight I was branded a tramp, a floozy, an unstable stalker”—the latter characterization coming courtesy of Team Clinton. “I was outed by Drudge, used as a political pawn by the Republicans, and scapegoated by the White House. My reputation was shot so that the president could hold on to power. In the process, my identity was distorted and I was left voiceless [and unable to correct the record] because I was in the middle of a judicial process and had to remain silent. My human rights and civil rights were thrown out the window.”
Now forty-four, with a master’s in social psychology from the London School of Economics, Lewinsky is an antibullying advocate, a public speaker, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair (where I have served as her editor at the magazine). She says she has learned firsthand that public personalities as well as unknown individuals who are suddenly thrust into the public eye “have two identities,” as she puts it. “One is the true self—a human being with an inner spirit, a rich character, and a definable personality. They’re known to others by their behavior and character, their strengths and faults. The second self is a caricature made up by the media, PR people, gossip, enemies, or outsiders. It often has no resemblance to the real person. And when this false identity hijacks the person’s reputation, it’s almost impossible to shake it.”
Producer and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin once remarked that “everyone who works in Hollywood has two personalities: their real one and the one assigned to them by rumor.” In a similar way, Lewinsky had her “rumored self” chiseled in stone by others. “There is a social representation of Monica Lewinsky out there,” she attests, “who is supposedly rich, spoiled, a conniver. She’s bitchy and a bit of a ditz—none of the things that line up with my true identity or personality. I really was a social canvas and I had no part in painting [the picture], in being able to say, ‘This is actually who I am.’ That Other Monica existed—still exists—in a parallel universe, in a narrative I couldn’t take back.
“Sociologist Erving Goffman has explored the notion of ‘frontstage/backstage’: what we choose to share with the public and what we choose to keep private. Private doesn’t necessarily mean just within ourselves. Private means: within our circle of people, a boundary which we create. That boundary collapsed for me. My private self became a public commodity. I lost my sense of social identity and self-identity. My private conversations were there to be read. A copy of my brother’s SAT scores was taken as evidence. I became a test case for something that is still unresolved in a post–Edward Snowden world: How do we guard against a government intent on prying into our most private information? How do we guard against being taken out of context if we’re public people—or being ridiculed on social media [if we’re] private individuals?”
Lewinsky speaks at length about Jeffrey Rosen’s book, published in 2000, The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America. She draws my attention to pertinent passages. “During the impeachment drama,” writes Rosen, “privacy law failed to keep Kenneth Starr out of the bedroom of Monica Lewinsky, whose experience was a dramatic rebuke to the claim that women have no privacy to lose.… The Lewinsky affair has challenged us to refine the legal definition of sexual harassment so that the privacy and autonomy of individual women and men are preserved rather than invaded.”
Rosen, a George Washington University Law School professor who serves as the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, argues in his book that the creation of the independent counsel act,8 along with various rulings by the High Court from the 1970s through the ’90s (such as the right to subpoena private diaries and an overhaul of sexual harassment laws), have served to undercut personal-privacy protection. The Supreme Court, Rosen notes, has failed to adequately address “our ability to control the conditions under which we make different aspects of ourselves accessible to others.”
Indeed, for many, the pervasiveness of social media since the 1990s has made the very concept of privacy, in the words of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, an evolving “social norm.” Online, privacy has become a fluid concept. “If those creepy targeted ads on Google hadn’t tipped you off,” writes journalist Kate Murphy, “then surely Edward J. Snowden’s revelations, or… [actress] Jennifer Lawrence’s nude selfies, made your vulnerability to cybersnooping abundantly clear.” Murphy goes on to quote sociologist Christena Nippert-Eng, the author of Islands of Privacy: “When people want privacy there’s often this idea that, ‘Oh, they are hiding something dirty,’ but they are really just trying to hold onto themselves.”
“The action brought against me,” Lewinsky says, “was called United States versus Monica Lewinsky. My country was prosecuting me, essentially, for trying to keep private the fact that I had fallen in love with my married boss.” She argues that in order to make their respective cases against the president, Paula Jones, Kenneth Starr, and the Congress “first had to make their case against me by exposing my private life and subjecting me to this inquisition. It was litigation as harassment. There was a closed-door, detail-by-detail grand jury deposition, which was ultimately released and made public. It was an assault. I was violated. And I was traumatized by having been violated. Violation of privacy is really just an abstract concept until it happens to you.”
What does Lewinsky believe happened in the ’90s to make individuals’ private lives so susceptible to unwarranted intrusion and exposure? She sees five contributing causes. First came the increased “tabloidization of celebrity in tandem with the surface treatment of politics.”9 Next came the news-channel wars. “It wasn’t until ’96, with the birth of Fox News and MSNBC, in opposition to CNN,” Lewinsky says, “that you started to see the shift. That fierce and often partisan contest in a twenty-four-hour news cycle made news a business first, and [viewers] went from being interested in significant events—‘Is this newsworthy?’—to being consumers of information and entertainment that ‘sells’: ‘Does this bring the network value?’ Again, this created an inducement for more tabloidization and more defaming and shaming. It became this ‘gotcha culture.’”10
Third, of course, was the Internet. The World Wide Web, she says, “amplified the competition for new smears that could provide some prurience. Now you were getting rumors twenty-four hours a day—you didn’t have to wait for the next cycle.… In my instance the intensity surrounding the ‘sting’ in the hotel room had a lot to do with Drudge saying that Newsweek was holding back on a story [about my time in the White House]. I think it was the first time that a ‘nonlegitimate’ news source, as it was called then, was the catalyst for one of the biggest news stories.”
These all coincided, she believes, with a fourth factor: a change in “sexual mores in the ’80s and ’90s.11 We became more permissive as a society even if the culture’s puritanical [roots] still made us feel shame about our voyeurism and our behavior. We were grappling with issues of morality in a way that we hadn’t before. The Boomer generation and the Me generation and all the therapy—with people wanting a more self-focused life—were processing a very wide spectrum of behavior that some people considered moral and others considered immoral.12
“All of these things slowly chipped away at the division between private and public. So once we started to chip away at the privacy of a public person, that slowly trickled down into the privacy of a private person.
“What happened between Bill and myself,” she continues, “was not new for him. It was not new for other presidents.… Older men and younger women in inappropriate relationships have been around for a long time. Since the beginning of time, girls have been talking to their girlfriends about their relationships, and people have been denying sexual things [to keep them from being made public]. What had changed was the culture: the landscape of the media, the treatment of politicians as ‘power personalities,’ plus people’s mores, plus more tabloids and tabloid TV, which had no ethics, no standards.”
Monica Lewinsky, like Schell and Pinsky, also finds the O. J. Simpson case, coming three years before hers, to have been a force multiplier. “There was a seismic media shift in which people were being inundated by scandal. This was the beginning of the change of our attention span for certain stories which further eroded privacy as the press made that erosion more acceptable. O.J. literally happened in my backyard. My dad lives about two blocks from where Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman were murdered. At the time, 1994, I was in college—I was living in Oregon—so I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. I was at a Grateful Dead concert in Eugene the day of the Bronco chase. But examining it in hindsight, I see that it spawned the whole talking-heads culture, which became a very, very big part of what happened in ’98—the whole glamorizing of pundits along with the lawyers and the judges. Some of the same talking heads covering the Simpson trial morphed into those from 1998.13 But in my case, it was even more magnified: the direction of the country was on the line.
“The added ‘X factor,’” Lewinsky surmises, was the politics of the culture war in all of its shadings. “You had this religious thread. The religious right’s influence on the extreme right wing in that decade fomented the attitude that this is wrong. This fit in with the whole notion of private or interpersonal decisions and practices being judged: choice versus pro-life, sexual orientation, and a lot of other issues that allowed those on the religious right to judge others [as being immoral].
“The irony was the hypocrisy. The Republicans and the leaders of the religious right were hardly bastions of virtue. And the media put on a puritanical front, even though some of them were hardly averse to doing what they had to do to get to their positions in front of the camera. For preachers and congressmen and commentators to talk so disdainfully about ‘tawdry’ behavior was a bit disingenuous.”
Vanessa Grigoriadis, in New York magazine, would make the point that Monica Lewinsky had become “many… things, a global icon, a cautionary tale, the individual on whom America projected its feelings about sex and power and politics.” But Lewinsky had never remotely expected to become a role model in the arena of human sexuality. Even so, she now finds that strangers come up to her in social or public settings to thank her or to ask her if they can hug her. (I have witnessed such encounters.) “There are pockets of communities in our world,” she explains, “that have been persecuted for their sexuality, and I think that [among certain] people, there is a sense of understanding and empathy [because they] know what it’s like to be judged specifically on one’s sexual choices. They see some aspect of themselves in my own experiences. They express, to me, compassion, for which I am grateful.”14
What’s more, Lewinsky became a symbol of how gender politics apply in what many would consider a hostile work environment. “I lost my job at the White House because of this,” she says. “I was transferred to a job [at the Pentagon] where I was actually making more money, but that was not by my choice. There were real-world negative consequences for me. And so, in looking back at my predicament, new ethical and legal precedents in sexual harassment laws were tested out: where does a consensual sexual relationship overlap with others’ view that that relationship constituted workplace harassment and sexual coercion?”15
In the summer of 1998, the case for impeachment crescendoed. For a brief moment, though, one man in particular, and in particularly disarming fashion, tried to throw up a roadblock.
Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman had been one of Bill Clinton’s early, ardent supporters. The senator had taken the president at his word when he’d denied having had an affair. Yet over the months, the truth tumbled out, and Lieberman bridled. Clinton, in his view, had betrayed the public trust. Moreover, in the words of Lieberman’s chief speechwriter at the time, Daniel Gerstein, the senator believed the president “wasn’t owning up to the severity of his misconduct” nor acknowledging that his actions “eroded the office he held.”
The senator—as a Democrat, an observant Orthodox Jew respected for his principles, and a Washington divining rod on issues of ethics—felt he had the moral clout to reprimand the president but also to dissuade his fellow lawmakers from forging ahead with a trial so rare that it had but a single precedent: the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868. Lieberman decided to go to the Senate floor, just before legislators broke for the Labor Day weekend, to deliver what many would come to see as the most impactful speech of his career.
“It was really an extraordinary moment of political theater,” Gerstein reflects.16 No one in the Congress knew where the senator really stood on the matter. Few realized he was even scheduled to speak. “Most everything in Congress is very scripted and rather predictable—it’s kabuki. This was one of those rare moments where you don’t know what was going to happen.”
Gerstein remembers heading to the Hill with Lieberman, speech in hand, by underground subway. They conversed very little, Gerstein says, because “the significance of the moment was kind of heavy.” Upon their arrival, the setting they encountered was eerie. The Senate was in pro forma session and so the chamber turned out to be virtually unoccupied. Only two other members were present, both Republicans: one presiding (the Senate, like the House, was in the hands of the GOP) and one addressing the empty room.
Lieberman, Gerstein recalls, “[takes his seat, then] rises to ask for recognition and starts into his speech. And word starts filtering out [via] C-SPAN and the [Senate] cloakrooms. Republican members start streaming in because they recognize the significance of it.” The lawmakers took their places, one after another, as if in a scene from a movie. But no Democrats were among them. “I would say the majority of the Republican caucus [had gathered. Meanwhile, Democrats] Bob Kerrey and Dan Moynihan, watching [on TV monitors from their offices], understood what the optics looked like and what message that would send if it was a bunch of Republicans there. And they both, independently, dropped what they were doing and rushed to the Senate floor.”
Lieberman had recently stood at that same spot and excoriated entertainment moguls for “weaken[ing] our common values.” Now he was doing the same to Bill Clinton, whom he described as having even more sway “on our culture, on our character, and on our children”:
I must respectfully disagree with the president’s contention that his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and the way in which he misled us about it is nobody’s business but his family’s and that “even presidents have private lives,” as [the president] said. Whether he or we think it fair or not, the reality is, in 1998, that a president’s private life is public. Contemporary news media standards will have it no other way. And surely this president was given fair notice of that by the amount of time the news media has dedicated to investigating his personal life during the 1992 campaign and in the years since.
But there is more to this than modern media intrusiveness. The president is not just the elected leader of our country.… The president is a role model. And because of his prominence the moral authority that emanates from his office sets standards of behavior for the people he serves.… No matter how much the president or others may wish to compartmentalize the different spheres of his life, the inescapable truth is that the president’s private conduct can and often does have profound public consequences.… I fear that the president has undercut the efforts of millions of American parents who are naturally trying to instill in our children the value of honesty.… I am afraid that the misconduct the president has admitted may be reinforcing one of the worst messages being delivered by our popular culture, which is that values are fungible.
Lieberman’s remarks were lacerating. But implicit in his comments was an underlying message: despite Clinton’s misdeeds, impeachment was too grave a penalty. “Let us be guided,” he advised, “by the conscience of the Constitution, which calls on us to place the common good above any partisan or personal interest.” Lieberman’s overall intention had been to mute “the hysteria,” says Gerstein. “He felt strongly that there was a need to separate the moral implications from the legal implications. By condemning the president’s behavior on moral grounds, it became easier to then pivot and sort of say, ‘But these aren’t impeachable offenses and there are other ways to hold the president accountable, short of a constitutional crisis.’” (Lieberman would argue instead for a formal censure.)
Over time, the senator’s intercession was considered a boon to the president. While chastened, Clinton was reportedly “gratified” by Lieberman’s words of caution, delivered at such a crucial juncture. The next morning, in fact, Clinton was contrite, contending, “I agree with what he said.” And in his autobiography Clinton would insist, “I knew he was a devoutly religious man who was angry about what I had done, and he had carefully avoided saying that I should be impeached.”
The Impeachment Express, nonetheless, had already left Union Station. In October, the House of Representatives agreed to hold an inquiry. In December, its members cast votes along party lines and impeached William Jefferson Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice. In January and February 1999, the Senate, after public hearings, held a trial that would determine whether the legislative branch would remove the nation’s chief executive.
Like other televised, make-or-break spectacles that decade, the Senate proceedings and the historic roll-call vote, kept the nation in thrall. Arguing for the defense was retired senator Dale Bumpers, a longtime Arkansas friend and colleague of Clinton’s. He proved to be the president’s most valiant and effective advocate. Standing in front of a packed Senate chamber, Bumpers recalled that the founding fathers had spent months debating the method and meaning of impeachment, and that the procedure’s “greatest danger,” in the prescient words of Alexander Hamilton, “[was] that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of [the political] parties rather than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”
Bumpers, in his folksy, measured manner, went on to ask, “How did we come to here? We are here because of a five-year, relentless, unending investigation of the president. Fifty [m]illion dollars, hundreds of FBI agents fanning across the nation examining in detail the microscopic lives of people. Maybe the most intense investigation not only of a president but of anybody ever.… I doubt that there are few people, maybe nobody in this body, who could withstand such scrutiny.” In his most memorable passage, Bumpers reduced the impeachment case to three words: “H. L. Mencken said one time, ‘When you hear somebody say, “This is not about money,” it’s about money.’” Bumpers paused and then went on. “And when you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about sex,’ it’s about sex.”
He’d laid down a clear-eyed case for the defense, and appealed, many believed, to the legislators’ collective conscience. Finally, after the independent counsel’s five-year investigation, after Paula Jones’s four-year lawsuit, and after the second-ever impeachment in the history of the House of Representatives, the Senate voted to acquit the president on both charges. Clinton would remain in office and complete his second term.
In many ways the impeachment proceedings, coming after the itemized inanities of the Starr investigation, had exposed not the indecency of intimate acts between consenting adults but the indecent divisiveness of partisan Washington. One might argue that a majority of Americans—as evidenced by Bill Clinton’s rising favorability ratings during his last years in office—believed that things had gone awry and that a dark politics of revenge and character assassination were in perpetual play. (After he was impeached, Clinton’s approval numbers soared to 73 percent.)17 Indeed, the consensus among the citizenry appeared to be that private romantic or sexual matters, whether a president’s or their own, should be left private.18
Still and all, Bill Clinton had been impeached. And while much of America expressed resentment about the motivations that had led to his trial, the national fatigue with his ethical elasticity became a millstone for the Democratic Party, determining how the next decade played out.
Mark McKinnon was a longtime strategist for George W. Bush. He tells me that the reason the Texas governor defeated Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 election had little to do with Bush’s proposed policies or the state of the economy or the ballot confusion in Florida. “In any presidential election, the conventional wisdom is that it’s either going to be a ‘status quo’ or a ‘change’ election,” McKinnon offers. “The first question [in any poll] is, ‘Is this country, city, or state headed in the right direction or off on the wrong track?’ If the ‘right track’ number is over 50 percent, then we call it a status quo election [and] people are generally satisfied with the incumbent candidate or party.” In 1999 and 2000, he recalls, the Clinton-Gore numbers were all positive. The nation and the economy, most voters believed, were on the right track. “By all conventional metrics, it looked like a home run for Gore.… Strategically, it looked like an impossible hill [for Bush] to climb.
“But from the very beginning,” says McKinnon, “Bush had been talking about the importance of restoring integrity to the office of the presidency and talking about a cultural change—[insisting that] we needed to take more responsibility, accountability. This was all ‘coded speak’ for Clinton and all the Clinton problems.… So underneath that election and that time in our history, people felt that we’d kind of rolled off our moral axis and wanted to restore some order, and George Bush became the vessel for that. We looked at the [polling] numbers and there was no other way to explain it with the economy being so good. It turned out they voted on a constellation of attributes, the most important of which was strong leadership, and then character, and then values.
“The conventional metrics changed… to moral metrics. The line that got roars [on the campaign trail] was when he said, ‘When I put my hand on the Bible, I’ll restore the honor and integrity to the office of the presidency.’”
McKinnon, despite all of this, says that he does not believe Clinton should have been impeached. And Lewinsky, to this day, is of two minds about the verdict. “There were even plenty of Republicans,” she says, “who felt, ‘Okay, enough already—let’s just move on.’” But she remains firm in her contention that Clinton had much of it coming. “I can see both sides of everything,” she insists. “By no stretch of the imagination do I think that anything Ken Starr did was right, any step of the way. But I can see where somebody who is continuing to lie and evade the truth—even though he shouldn’t have had to be telling the truth about certain things—[needed to be] held accountable. What is the recourse when someone starts to thumb his nose in the face of the law that way? There’s no question that I did that too, but he was the president. For the head of the nation’s law enforcement to not be following the rules is a bit of a challenge.… I don’t know what the deciding factor for impeachment should be [but] we had a president, under oath, lying.”
At the heart of the matter—despite the many handmaidens of Clinton’s undoing, including Starr, Gingrich, and that vast right-wing conspiracy—the president’s precipitous fall was self-induced. As any student of Greek tragedy can attest, a hero’s demise, even when orchestrated by his enemies, is intrinsically the result of the protagonist’s own hubris.