Only a few U.S. presidents can boast of statements so memorable they define both their legacy and an era. Franklin Roosevelt said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” John F. Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Richard Nixon emphatically stated, “I am not a crook.” And Bill Clinton insisted, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman—Miss Lewinsky.”
* * *
According to her 2003 memoir, Living History, on the morning of Saturday, August 15, 1998, Hillary Clinton was awakened by her husband, President Bill Clinton, pacing agitatedly next to her bed. Bill, it seemed, had a little confession to make. Though he had denied for months to special prosecutors that he had had a sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, well, that wasn’t exactly the truth. Not that he had lied—because blow jobs aren’t really sex, everyone knows that—but still, Hillary recalled, he “told me for the first time that the situation was much more serious than he had previously acknowledged. He now realized he would have to testify that there had been an inappropriate intimacy. He told me that what happened between them had been brief and sporadic.” In all likelihood, the only reason Bill fessed up was that the FBI had DNA evidence of the affair. Otherwise, it’s safe to say Bill would have denied it until he was blue in the face.
“I could hardly breathe,” Hillary continued. “Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him, ‘What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?’ I was furious and getting more so by the second. He just stood there saying over and over again, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was trying to protect you and [their eighteen-year-old daughter] Chelsea.’” According to Hillary’s account, until that morning she’d believed that he was being unfairly attacked. In January, she had even told Matt Lauer of NBC that the whole story was ginned up by “a vast right-wing conspiracy.”
Now, upon hearing the truth, Hillary maintained, “I was dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged that I’d believed him at all.” Yes, she was shocked, shocked, to find that Bill had been at it with a girl because such behavior was so very unlike him.
The fact is that Hillary Rodham knew Bill was a philanderer well before she married him. They met at Yale Law School in 1971 and immediately became an item, though they were an odd couple from the get-go. Bill was handsome, personable, and funny, a back-slapping good ole Arkansas boy, always flying by the seat of his pants and coming out on top. Hillary, from Chicago, was chilly, calculating, painstakingly prepared, and frumpy. A creature of the mind, she gave no heed to her appearance. She had good features but wore no makeup to bring them out and had thick glasses and limp brown hair in no particular style. Long, unflattering granny dresses hid her figure. According to Jerry Oppenheimer’s 2000 book, State of a Union: Inside the Complex Marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton, when Bill’s childhood friend Paul Fray met Hillary, his reaction was, “My God, Bill Clinton, you son of a bitch—you could have any damn woman on the face of the earth, and you brought one that looks like the south end of a mule going north?”
Oppenheimer wrote that Bill leaped to Hillary’s defense. “He told me she was the smartest woman he’d ever met,” Paul said, “brilliant beyond compare.” When Bill’s mother, Virginia, first met Hillary, she, too, was unimpressed by the looks, and even more so by the aloofness that hinted of sneering superiority. “I want you to know that I’ve had it up to here with beauty queens,” Bill raged. “I have to have somebody I can talk to. Do you understand that?” And to a woman he’d dated, who asked him what on earth it was about Hillary that fascinated him so, he replied, “She challenges me, every moment of every day, intellectually. She makes me a better person. She gets me started, kicks my butt, and makes me do the things I’ve got to do.”
And, in fact, their differences held them together, like two puzzle pieces of vastly different shapes, interlocking perfectly. Both were highly intelligent and politically ambitious, but she had the cold calculation to maneuver him into political office, while he had the overwhelming charm. Because getting into office—getting into the White House—was the goal of their relationship. Both had dreamed of it since childhood. Both had chosen their postgraduate education, their internships and volunteer work for political campaigns based on that single goal. According to Gail Sheehy, author of the 1999 Hillary’s Choice, Hillary had already dumped one boyfriend for lack of ambition. David Rupert, whom Hillary dated when they both worked as summer interns in Congress, told Sheehy Hillary lost interest in him because he never “stated a burning desire to be president. I believe that was a need for her in a partner.”
And because the White House was Hillary’s goal, the regular rules of a relationship didn’t necessarily apply. According to Oppenheimer, they came to an agreement: Bill could carouse with women all he wanted as long as it didn’t rise to the level of interfering with their political future. That would be the only betrayal of significance.
After graduating Yale in 1973, Hillary went to Washington, D.C., where she joined the impeachment inquiry staff of the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigation. Bill went to Little Rock, where he taught law at the University of Arkansas. He ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974, lost narrowly, ran in 1976 for Arkansas attorney general and won.
Though Hillary would periodically swoop into Little Rock to visit Bill, he was dating other women, including one in particular, Marla Crider, a winsome, dark-haired, twenty-one-year-old political science major at the University of Arkansas who volunteered on his first campaign. Marla told Jerry Oppenheimer that one day Bill told her to stop by his house and pick up some things she would need for the campaign trail. He also asked her to retrieve some papers from his desk. On the desk she saw an open letter, clearly meant for her to read. According to her recollection, it went like this:
Dear Bill,
I still do not understand why you do the things you do to hurt me. You left me in tears and not knowing what our relationship was all about. I know all your little girls are around there, if that’s what it is, you will outgrow this. They will not be with you when you need them. They are not the ones who can help you achieve your goals. If this is about your feelings for Marla, this too shall pass. Let me remind you it always does. Remember what we talked about. Remember the goals we’ve set for ourselves. You keep trying to stray away from the plan we’ve put together. Take some time, think about it, and call me when you’re ready.
Hillary
Though Bill had clearly maneuvered Marla into reading Hillary’s letter, she didn’t understand it. She knew Hillary was possessive of Bill, giving Marla the evil eye during her brief visits. But other than the first couple of lines, this wasn’t a letter of love and jealousy, doubt and heartbreak. It was a letter about goals, about a plan. Love, fidelity, and trust were not the main focus of their relationship. There was something else, something Bill wanted Marla to understand.
Looking back years later, Marla said that Hillary “decided the most important thing was that political partnership, that goal they’d set, rather than taking care of their personal life, or being confident, or having a trustworthy relationship. I’m just amazed, as a woman, at her thought process. To be so smart and allow that to happen . . . to go for politics over personal life and love and happiness.”
Nightclub singer Gennifer Flowers alleged in her 1995 memoir Passion and Betrayal that she had had a twelve-year affair with Bill. She wrote, “Hillary never tried to put a stop to my relationship with Bill. In fact, he told me that after he hung up from talking with me one night, she walked into the room and asked, ‘How’s Gennifer?’ He looked at her carefully and replied, ‘Just fine.’ And that was the end of it . . . In retrospect, I can see that Bill and Hillary’s political career was undoubtedly more important to her than her husband’s faithfulness. But back then I couldn’t imagine why she would close her eyes to his fooling around.”
After Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, Hillary gave up the chance for a lucrative job at a D.C. law firm and joined Bill, where she taught at the University of Arkansas and then accepted a position at the Rose Law Firm. She made no effort to adapt to her new environment. She didn’t bleach her hair and tease it high, or slather on makeup, or wear more stylish clothing. She didn’t try to acquire a bit of southern charm or learn how to bake peach pie. Instead, she was brusque, impatient, giving the impression of disdaining those she spoke to, of not having the time to bother with them. After Bill and Hillary married in 1975, she even kept her maiden name, a shocking break from tradition for the time and place.
In 1978, Bill was elected governor of Arkansas—the youngest governor in the country at thirty-two—a position he held for twelve nonconsecutive years (1979–1981 and 1983–1992). Their only child, Chelsea, was born in 1980. Some, who just didn’t understand the dynamics of the Clinton marriage, called it an immaculate conception or the result of artificial insemination. Yet, over the years, there was never any doubt that the Clintons were devoted parents; even their most hostile political opponents agreed to that. Despite hectic schedules, they were there at the soccer games and ballet recitals. They drove their daughter to math programs, music lessons, and slumber parties.
When Bill lost the 1981 governor’s race, Hillary realized she needed to make some changes. She took his name—she was now Hillary Rodham Clinton—and did a full-body makeover. With shorter blond hair, tasteful makeup, contact lenses, and more becoming clothing, she was quite attractive and far more appealing to southern voters with strong ideas of how women should look.
As soon as Bill started running for public office, he was more of a babe magnet than ever before. On the campaign trail, women handed him their phone numbers on slips of paper. One campaign aide said every day some twenty-five women would show up at campaign headquarters looking for him. He would later tell Monica Lewinsky that he had slept with hundreds of women before he ran for president.
Bill loved the story of Lyndon Johnson having sex in the Oval Office, and the legendary tales of Kennedy’s endless harem of starlets and secretaries. His friend U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas admonished him, “Bill, if you’re going to idolize the womanizing side of Jack Kennedy, you’re gonna end up turning out that way yourself. You don’t need to be putting yourself in that kind of jeopardy. Don’t idolize someone who does things that are wrong.”
Rumors percolated, mostly in right-wing quarters years later, about Hillary having an affair of her own. At the Rose Law Firm, she developed a close friendship with another lawyer named Vince Foster. Handsome with thick graying hair, courteous and thoughtful, he was married with three children. Vince and Hillary ate lunch together most days, often having a drink after work. Those who suspected an affair couldn’t blame Hillary for seeking a little solace outside her own marriage, given Bill’s reputation. Others thought she couldn’t be having an affair with Foster because she was a lesbian; given her lifelong disinterest in makeup and clothing until political expediency required a trip to the hair salon, Hillary had to be gay.
By 1987, Bill was ready to toss his hat in the ring and run for president. But those plans crumbled after Gary Hart’s political meltdown in May of that year. As one of Bill’s state troopers said, “Governor, you’re gonna make Gary Hart look like a damned saint.”
“Yeah,” Bill replied. “I do, don’t I?”
In his memoir, Clinton wrote, “After the Hart affair, those of us who had not led perfect lives had no way of knowing what the press’s standards of disclosure were.” By the time he did run, four years after Monkey Business, he had a better idea than Hart how to navigate the media onslaught.
For one thing, Clinton learned that it was better to address the issue right off the bat. Republican consultant Eddie Mahe told the New York Times, “The press has collectively made a decision that when any information is presented to them and documented, they will publish it. So the new rule on these things is you’d better talk about it, and you’d better talk about it first.” When confronted with proof of his infidelity, Gary Hart had hemmed and hawed, obfuscated and denied, and chastised the media for even asking about his private life. By the late eighties, with the rise of cable TV talk shows like Oprah, voters wanted gut-wrenching honesty—or what passed for it—along with an apology.
On October 3, 1991, Bill Clinton announced his plans to run for president. His youth, vitality, eloquence, and charm all helped him become the early front-runner in a lackluster field of Democrats. He addressed his infidelity issue with members of the national political press at an off-the-record event in Washington. There had been problems in his marriage, he admitted, but that was in the past. He and Hillary had worked them out and were committed to each other. Bill must have hoped that was all that would be required. It was not.
In February 1992, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Bill’s long-term mistress, Gennifer Flowers, appeared in the tabloid Star, describing their relationship in an article with the headline, “My 12-Year Affair with Bill Clinton.” Denial wasn’t an option for Bill; Gennifer had recordings of their phone conversations indicating they’d had a relationship. History seemed to be repeating itself. This looked like Monkey Business, Part Two.
According to Flowers, their affair began in 1977 when he was the twenty-nine-year-old Arkansas attorney general and she a twenty-seven-year-old reporter for a local Little Rock TV station. “I can still remember the way he had of staring at me,” she wrote in her 1995 autobiography. “He did more than just mentally undress me, he was visually seducing me, and he made sure I knew it. He was turning me upside down and inside out just by looking at me, and when he looked away, I almost felt as though we had just made love. I was breathless and more than a little uneasy.”
When they ended up making jubilant love in her bed, it was the start of a twelve-year love affair. “As a lover, Bill was great,” she wrote. “Though not particularly well-endowed, his desire to please was astounding. He was determined to satisfy me, and boy, did he! I thought my head would explode with the pleasure . . . His stamina amazed me. We made love over and over that night, and he never seemed to run out of energy.” In 1977, she wrote, she realized she was pregnant with his child and he gave her money for an abortion.
He suggested she take an apartment not far from the governor’s mansion so he could jog over in the morning and spend half an hour in the sack. His driver, waiting outside, would drop him off a block from the governor’s mansion, where he would start jogging again and arrive red-faced and sweaty, with an excellent excuse for jumping into the shower immediately. Though their affair had ended in 1989 when she began dating a single man, Gennifer and Bill remained on friendly terms.
As soon as Bill announced his candidacy, reporters came to Little Rock, determined to dig up dirt on him, and soon heard about Flowers. They called her at work and at home and stalked her. She was ambushed by cameramen and lost her nightclub job. But something more sinister was at work than an overzealous press. Her mother got death threats, evidently from Clinton supporters, while Gennifer received a lot of heavy-breathing hang-up calls. Her apartment was ransacked, after which she made recordings of her conversations with Bill.
When Gennifer spoke to Bill about the break-ins and mysterious phone calls, he told her it was Republican harassment and to just deny, deny, deny. But now she wondered if Bill himself was behind it, or at least a group of his wealthy and powerful supporters determined to see him become president. Her neighbor in her apartment building, a lawyer named Gary Johnson, had set up a video camera in the hallway for security purposes with a clear view of Gennifer’s door. When rumors got around that Bill had had an affair with her, Johnson let it be known he had videotapes of the governor entering her apartment with his own key. One day, some men forced their way into his apartment, beat him severely, and left him for dead. When he regained consciousness, the videos were missing.
Flowers said that she sold her story to the Star as a means of self-defense. It would be out there once and for all; there would be no need to threaten her and her mother or to ransack her apartment.
But Gennifer didn’t count on the Clintons’ ruthless counterattacks. When the Flowers story broke, Hillary was campaigning for her husband in South Dakota. Gail Sheehy, covering Hillary for Vanity Fair, heard her on her phone talking to campaign aides. Hillary was furious, Sheehy said. “Not anger at Bill, but at Flowers, the press and Republicans.”
Sheehy heard Hillary ask, “Who’s tracking down all the research on Gennifer?”
The research involved a ruthless private investigator named Jack Palladino whose job it was, as he wrote in a memo, to disparage Gennifer’s “character and veracity until she is destroyed beyond all recognition . . . Every acquaintance, employer, and past lover should be located and interviewed.” Any unflattering information was given to Betsey Wright, Bill’s former chief of staff in Arkansas, who was made responsible for dealing with “bimbo eruptions,” as she called accusations of infidelity. Wright would release the information to the press. Gennifer Flowers, Wright said in an interview with Penthouse, was a liar, out for money, and guilty of “résumé hype, attempted blackmail, manufacturing a self-styled affair with Clinton to salvage a flopola singing career.”
It was a brutal response that would be replayed some two dozen times over the next eight years as women came forward with stories about sex with Bill Clinton. Wright’s job turned out to be a kind of bimbo whack-a-mole, standing vigilant with a mallet ready to hammer the women back into the holes they popped out of.
The Clinton campaign took their attack a step further by accusing President George H. W. Bush of having a twelve-year affair with his own Jennifer, his aide Jennifer Fitzgerald, who had joined his staff in 1974 when she was forty-two. The divorcée had served as Bush’s gatekeeper for his two terms as vice president under Ronald Reagan. People magazine reported that in 1984, Ambassador Louis Fields allowed the two to stay at his Geneva home during an official trip while Barbara Bush was off promoting a book on their dog. “It became clear [they] were romantically involved,” Fields said, adding that the relationship of the vice president and Fitzgerald made him “very uncomfortable.”
An acquaintance of both Bush and Fitzgerald told the London Times in 2004 that Jennifer Fitzgerald “wasn’t just another woman. She was a woman who came to exert enormous influence over George for many, many years . . . She became, in essence, his other wife . . . his office wife.” The acquaintance added that Barbara Bush put up with the relationship mainly because her husband never humiliated her. Yet, as Barbara wrote in her diary, “His eyes really glaze over when you mention her name. She is just what he wants, he says, and says the hell with it all.” Friends said Fitzgerald could be charming—but only to Bush. She was so rude to others that many valued staff members quit rather than work with her.
Rumors about Bush and Fitzgerald had bounced around Washington for years and even made a few fairly discreet headlines. The Washington Post had the best one: "Fitzgerald has served President-elect Bush in a variety of positions." Now Hillary brought the rumors front and center to media attention.
During Bush’s August 11, 1992, press conference with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, a CNN reporter asked the president about a front-page New York Post story on Fitzgerald titled “The Bush Affair.” “I’m not going to take any sleazy questions like that from CNN,” the president snapped. “I’m very disappointed that you would ask such a question of me, and I will not respond to it. I think it’s—I am outraged. But, nevertheless, in this kind of screwy climate that we’re in, why, I expect it. But I don’t like it, and I’m not going to respond other than to say it’s a lie.” When NBC’s Stone Phillips asked him about the affair, Bush retorted, “You’re perpetuating the sleaze by even asking the question, to say nothing of asking in the Oval Office.” Bush clearly thought he was living in a pre–Monkey Business world.
The story ended up withering away. Short and stern-faced, her blond hair lacquered into a French twist, the prickly Fitzgerald didn’t seem to be the kind of femme fatale capable of turning a president’s head. Buttoned-up, plump, and now sixty, she was an uninteresting target of media attention compared to the sexy bleached-blond lounge singer Gennifer Flowers and her audiotapes.
The twin Clinton strategy of accusing their political opponents of engaging in adultery and disparaging Bill’s women would not be enough. If the Clintons learned how not to address the infidelity issue from Gary Hart, perhaps they also learned some pointers from Alexander Hamilton, who made a gut-wrenching public confession of his affair with Maria Reynolds in his hundred-page pamphlet. Two hundred years later, Bill Clinton would choose television as his confessional. Bill and Hillary appeared on 60 Minutes right after the 1992 Super Bowl, the most watched program in the world.
Bill’s confession lacked something that Hamilton’s had: the full truth. He denied having an affair with Gennifer Flowers. But, looking chastened and remorseful, he said, “I have acknowledged wrongdoing. I have acknowledged causing pain in my marriage. I think most Americans who are watching this tonight will know what we’re saying. They’ll get it, and they’ll feel we’ve been more than candid. And I think what the press has to decide is: Are we going to engage in a game of ‘gotcha’?” Hillary asked whether people who had experienced marital difficulties should be prevented from running for public office. The two of them looked like a typical married couple who had had problems over the years. An ABC News poll found that 80 percent of those surveyed thought Bill Clinton should stay in the race.
Ironically, the Gennifer Flowers scandal helped Bill Clinton win the Democratic nomination. Primary voters saw that he had the skill, grace, and media savvy to parry attacks by the Republican machine. While it is usually difficult to unseat an incumbent president, Clinton’s candidacy was aided and abetted by the U.S. economy, which had fallen into a recession. On November 3, 1992, Clinton received 370 delegates, Bush 168.
If the Clintons believed the scandals were behind them, they were dead wrong. In May 1993, it was Travelgate. Soon after taking office, Clinton had fired seven employees of the White House Travel Office, which he was fully entitled to do as any of his staff could be dismissed at his pleasure. But his political opponents claimed he had sacked efficient career employees to hire his friends and supporters.
In July, Vince Foster, Hillary’s good friend from the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, shot himself in a Virginia park. A sensitive, gentlemanly soul, Foster had come to Washington to work as deputy White House counsel. But almost immediately he disliked his new life. For one thing, Hillary no longer had time for him. “It’s just not the same,” he told Webb Hubbell, White House liaison to the Department of Justice, another Clinton associate from Little Rock. “She’s so busy that we don’t ever have any time to talk.”
Attacked by the media for botched Justice Department nominations and his handling of Travelgate, Foster soon slipped into a deep depression. In a note, found torn to pieces in the bottom of his briefcase after his death, he wrote, “The WSJ [Wall Street Journal] editors lie without consequence . . . I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here, ruining people is considered sport.” Although the FBI, the park police, the independent counsel, and two congressional investigations found his death to be suicide, according to conspiracy theories, Hillary had had him murdered.
Another scandal, called the Whitewater controversy, resulted in an investigation into purported illegal activities of the Clintons and another couple, the McDougals, with regards to a failed Arkansas real estate deal. The McDougals were convicted of financial crimes, but the Clintons were never charged.
In December, it was Troopergate, news articles reporting allegations by four Arkansas state troopers that Clinton had forced them to help with his romantic assignations. They claimed Clinton sent them to scout out attractive women, obtain their phone numbers, arrange hotel rooms, drive him there and back, deliver gifts to the women afterward, and lie to Hillary about where he was. One trooper estimated that Clinton had been intimate with hundreds of women. “There would hardly be an opportunity he would let slip to have sex,” he said. Bill denied the allegations. It turned out that Troopergate was orchestrated and, in some cases, financially supported by Clinton’s political enemies, yet there was never proof that the men were lying. In 1996, the scandal du jour was Filegate—improper access to hundreds of security clearance documents without the individuals’ permission, which Clinton explained away as a “bureaucratic snafu.”
But there were political successes along with the scandals. On November 30, 1993, Clinton signed into law the Brady Bill, which mandated federal background checks on people who purchase firearms in the United States. He also expanded the earned income tax credit, a subsidy for low-income workers. In 1994, he implemented a directive known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which allowed gay men and women to serve in the armed services as long as they didn’t discuss their sexual orientation, which was considered a huge stride forward at the time. In 1997 he proposed—and signed—legislation to create the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which helped pay for medical care for children from low-income families.
Despite Bill Clinton’s political achievements, the largest scandal by far, the one that would define his presidency, was Monica Lewinsky. That morning in August 1998, according to Hillary, Bill finally told her the truth after months of vehement denials. He had lied to her, lied to the American people and, most dangerous of all, lied to the independent counsel, Ken Starr.
The affair had started when Monica, a recent twenty-two-year-old college graduate, began working as a White House intern in the summer of 1995. Aimless, smarting from the ending of an affair with her married former high school drama teacher, she thought this position, arranged by an influential family friend, would look good on her résumé. But when she first caught sight of the charismatic Bill Clinton in person, she shifted her obsession to him, arriving for White House ceremonies hours early to have a place up front to catch his eye. At one such event, she was successful. The president not only noticed the voluptuous brunette with a toothy grin and lustrous shoulder-length hair, he gave her “the full Bill Clinton,” as she said, and her description is quite similar to that of Gennifer Flowers. “It was this look, it’s the way he flirts with women . . . We shared an intense but brief sexual exchange. He undressed me with his eyes.”
According to Lewinsky’s testimony in the Starr Report, on the evening of November 15, 1995, Monica walked past the inner office of the West Wing and saw the president alone. She lifted the back of her jacket to flash the straps of her thong panties and a sizable amount of firm, round buttock. A few minutes later, Clinton summoned her into his study, and they kissed. Two days later, Lewinsky gave him oral sex as he spoke on the phone with two congressmen. But he never allowed her to bring him to climax and finished himself off over a wastepaper basket. Perhaps he was afraid that DNA might be used as evidence—and rightly so, as events would prove. Or perhaps he had convinced himself that sex wasn’t sex without orgasm, and the orgasm he achieved all by himself, so that was actually masturbation, not sex. On one occasion, however, Clinton left two small spots on Monica’s navy blue Gap dress. Over the course of a year and a half, during which Lewinsky went from intern to full-time employee, the two engaged in physical encounters nine times—during one he inserted a cigar in her vagina and then put it in his mouth—and in phone sex fifteen times.
The relationship wasn’t just sex. “We enjoyed talking with each other and being with each other,” Lewinsky said. “We were very affectionate. We would tell jokes. We would talk about our childhoods, talk about current events . . . I think back on it and he always made me smile when I was with him. He was sunshine.” A good friend of Bill’s told author Jerry Oppenheimer, “I know how he is with women. But she was different. He was literally hooked on her and pursued her with the same level of adolescent obsession that she pursued him. He desperately needed to be loved—I’m not talking just about sex, but a caring kind of love, and Monica probably more than any other woman—except his mother—filled that need. Certainly Hillary never did. From things he has said since, I truly believe that Bill would have run off with that girl if he had the chance, if things had been different.” Caught up in the euphoria of secret, forbidden assignations, Bill even suggested he might divorce Hillary after he left the White House. Overjoyed, Monica boasted to a friend that one day she might become the second Mrs. Clinton.
In April 1996, concerned Secret Service agents informed Deputy Chief of Staff Evelyn Lieberman that Monica was spending too much time with the president. Lieberman immediately transferred her to a job at the Pentagon. Monica was devastated at being so distant from her lover, though she did make a few White House visits.
Soon, Clinton’s passion for Monica ebbed, rather like helium leaking out of a balloon until all you have left is a limp, sagging memory of better times. He wanted to end the relationship but he feared she would blab if he did. As long as they had a relationship, he believed she would keep quiet about it. Bill promised to find Monica a great job and asked Washington power broker Vernon Jordan to help. By January 1998, Jordan had an exciting job lined up for Monica at Revlon in New York.
Unfortunately for Clinton, Monica couldn’t keep her mouth shut even though he was still stringing her along. At the Pentagon, she befriended Linda Tripp, who had worked at the White House for George H. W. Bush and then briefly for Clinton, whom she despised. She was, in fact, planning to write a tell-all book about Bill’s sexual dalliances and even had a literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg. When Monica began confiding in Linda about her affair with the president, including details of their sexual encounters, Linda notified her agent, who suggested she tape-record the calls. It was Linda who instructed Monica to put that navy blue dress in the freezer to preserve the DNA.
Linda heard that lawyers for a woman named Paula Jones, who were suing Bill Clinton for sexual harassment, were looking for other women who had worked as his subordinates and been subjected to romantic overtures. Paula’s run-in with Clinton occurred on May 8, 1991, at an event in Little Rock’s Excelsior Hotel, when Governor Clinton asked a state trooper to invite the twenty-five-year-old, $6.35-an-hour state document examiner to come up to his room. According to Jones, when she arrived, Clinton “began pulling me over like he has done this a million times and grabs me and pulls me over to him to the windowsill and tries to kiss me and just didn’t ask me or nothing.” Then the governor pulled his pants down, sat down and asked, “Would you kiss it for me?” Paula uttered the immortal words, “I’m not that kind of girl!” and fled.
In 1994, with Clinton now president, Jones filed a lawsuit against Clinton for sexual harassment, as she had been a state employee when he, her ultimate boss as governor, pressed for sex. She wanted $700,000. To prove she was no liar, she said she could identify an unusual bend in his penis. In an affidavit that is considered one of the strangest legal documents ever, she stated that Bill’s penis was “five to five and one-half inches, or less, in length . . . a circumference of the approximate size of a quarter, or perhaps very slightly larger” and “was bent or crooked from Mr. Clinton’s right to left.”
The main question was whether a civil suit could go ahead against a sitting president. For two hundred years, such suits had been dismissed, as judges presumed national security depended on a president completely focused on protecting the nation. But by the time Jones filed her suit, the Cold War and America’s archenemy, the Soviet Union, were no more. Perhaps the president could handle some distraction without the country going up in smoke. In January 1997, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Jones’s suit could proceed. The New York Post trumpeted the headline “Grin and Bare It” for an article that suggested the best method of proving Jones had seen the president’s penis would be for the president to drop his pants in court. Those in the courtroom could study it to see how bent it actually was.
Tripp told Jones’s lawyers that her friend—and we use that term loosely—Monica Lewinsky had confided that she had been having an affair with the president for some eighteen months while she was a federal employee. The lawyers subpoenaed Monica, and on January 7, 1998, she signed an affidavit under penalty of perjury that she had never engaged in sexual relations with the president. Foiled and bursting with venom at the thought of losing her book deal, Tripp turned over the tapes of her phone conversations with Monica to Independent Special Counsel Ken Starr, who had been looking into the Whitewater controversy but had the prerogative to investigate any suspicious matters that came his way. Now Starr turned a gimlet eye on Monica Lewinsky. On January 16, Starr wired Tripp for a meeting with Monica and prosecutors listened to their conversation. Minutes later, they swooped in, took her into custody, and told her she could either cooperate or go to jail for twenty-five years for perjury, obstruction of justice, and several other charges.
The following day, January 17, 1998, Bill Clinton was deposed under oath in the Paula Jones case. He didn’t remember Jones, he said. He certainly never showed her his penis in a hotel room. He did know Monica but had never had a sexual relationship with her, couldn’t even remember being alone with her.
Meanwhile, rumors of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair had reached the press. The same day as Clinton’s deposition, the internet news site the Drudge Report first published the story about the affair and, over the next few days, stories about blow jobs in the White House, presidential perjury, and a cushy job in the private sector as a bribe for silence.
What to do? Clinton did what most men do in such a situation: deny, deny, deny. On January 26, he marched into the Roosevelt Room of the White House, looked straight into a TV camera, and said the words that would define his presidency. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman—Miss Lewinsky.”
On April 1, 1998, a federal judge dismissed Paula Jones’s sexual harassment suit, finding that Clinton’s conduct did not constitute sexual assault. Jones’s lawyers appealed the dismissal. Given the newer, bigger, and more dangerous mess of Monica Lewinsky, however, Clinton didn’t wait for the appeal decision and settled with Jones for $850,000—$150,000 more than she had asked for in her lawsuit—with no acknowledgment of wrongdoing. Costly as it was, he had whacked that mole.
But other moles had popped up during the Paula Jones case. On March 18, 1998, Dallas lawyer Dolly Kyle Browning, who had attended high school with Clinton, testified that they had had an affair starting in the mid-1970s which lasted until January 1992. According to Browning, her own brother, who worked for the Clinton campaign, said, “We think you should deny the story,” and, “If you cooperate with the media, we will destroy you.”
Fifty-one-year-old White House volunteer aide Kathleen Willey had also been subpoenaed by Paula Jones’s lawyers. On March 15, 1998, she went public with her story, telling 60 Minutes that Clinton had sexually assaulted her on November 29, 1993, in the Oval Office. She had met with him to discuss some personal and professional issues, she said, when he grabbed her crotch and rubbed up against her. In a deposition, Clinton denied Willey’s story but did finally admit he’d had sex with Gennifer Flowers. But only once. In 1977. It seems that Bill Clinton couldn’t help but lie even when he was telling the truth.
Bill’s most important testimony occurred on August 17 when he appeared before a grand jury on a closed-circuit television feed from the White House and conceded that he’d had “inappropriate intimate physical contact” with Monica Lewinsky. But he stubbornly insisted it had not actually been sex as defined by the judge in the Paula Jones deposition, so he had not really perjured himself. The judge had defined sex—and many of us may wonder why he had felt the need to do so—as “contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.” Clinton argued that if a woman was performing oral sex on him, he was actually not in contact with her genitalia, anus, groin, breast, or buttocks, but with her lips.
That night, Clinton curtly told the nation, “I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people including even my own wife. I deeply regret that.” The American public was unimpressed. They wanted breast-beating drama, streaming tears, agonized sobs, guilt, and remorse, not this tight-lipped pseudo-apology. They wanted a poignant performance. They would get it on September 11, when Clinton tried again at a prayer breakfast. “I have sinned,” he lamented. The voice cracked. The eyes overflowed with tears. The audience found it far more satisfying.
The same day, Starr released a 452-page report full of disgusting details: the cigar-cum-tampon, the ejaculating into the trashcan, the blow job while he was talking to members of Congress on the phone. The press was horrified. More than sixty-five major newspapers demanded he resign. Worse for Clinton, Starr’s findings reported that he had discovered “substantial and credible information that President William Jefferson Clinton committed acts that may constitute grounds for impeachment.”
On December 19, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton on two charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. On February 12, 1999, the Senate, however, acquitted him of perjury with a vote of 55 to 45, and of obstruction of justice by 50 to 50.
Oddly, impeachment only served to beef up Clinton’s approval ratings. His highest Gallup score ever—73 percent—occurred the week of the impeachment. A Washington Post poll found that even though a majority of Americans believed Clinton had lied under oath, the lies didn’t bother them as they had only been about sex, and almost everybody lied about sex. If he had lied, say, about stealing taxpayer dollars and putting them in an offshore bank account, it is likely they would have felt quite differently.
The majority of Americans also believed that Clinton was a victim of a political conspiracy. A man playing around with a girlfriend was far less objectionable than a political group plotting to take an opponent down by any means, no matter how ridiculous. Starr’s investigation smacked of sexual McCarthyism; his investigation was a kind of House Committee on Unpious Activities, where old white men shrieked with outrage as they examined semen stains under a magnifying glass, but also experienced a prurient thrill.
Time magazine named Bill Clinton and independent counsel Kenneth Starr its 1998 Persons of the Year. Columnist Michael Kinsley wrote, “The most significant political story of the year is that most citizens don’t seem to think it’s significant that the President had oral sex with a 22-year-old intern. Yes, yes, and he lied about it. Under oath. Blah blah blah. They still don’t care. Rarely has such an unexpected popular consensus been so clear. And rarely has such a clear consensus been so unexpected.”
Clinton’s sex life was unimportant compared to the sky-high stock market, record job creation, low inflation, higher household incomes, a federal budget surplus, reduced crime, and the lowest welfare rolls in thirty years. Gary Langer of ABC News summed up how most Americans felt about Bill Clinton: “You can’t trust him, he’s got weak morals and ethics—and he’s done a heck of a good job.”
During the impeachment, the Los Angeles Times, which had supported Clinton in the past, declared, “The picture of Clinton that now emerges is that of a middle-aged man with a pathetic inability to control his sexual fantasies.” No one could deny that, but it didn’t necessarily mean he was a bad president. In fact, Clinton’s sexual behavior came to be seen as part and parcel of his political brilliance. The energy, the drive, the impish charm, and the insatiable love of life seemed irrevocably interwoven with his skill for foreign relations and handling of the U.S. economy. A dried-out old stick of a president surely would not have been so successful at governing. Personal morality, Americans of the 1990s figured out, had little to do with leadership capability. It was as if the American public were becoming French.
Many Americans were also disturbed by the hypocrisy angle of the impeachment. How many of those lantern-jawed hanging judges in Congress and the independent counsel’s office had had a little sex on the side themselves? Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, was determined to find out. In October 1998, as the House initiated impeachment proceedings, he placed an $85,000 full-page ad in the Washington Post offering a $1 million reward to anyone who could provide “documentary evidence of illicit sexual relations” involving any senators, congressmen, or other high-ranking government officials. “I feel the people who are going to be sitting in judgment who have not been truthful about similar activities in their own lives should recuse themselves,” Flynt said. “What we are talking about is hypocrisy in its highest form.”
“That’s some very easy money,” said one veteran House staffer interviewed by the Washington Post, and he was right. More than two thousand calls came into the hotline. Evidence arrived showing that Congressman Henry Hyde, the House leader on impeachment, had been unfaithful to his wife with a hairdresser back in the 1960s. Flynt released transcripts from the 1985 divorce case of Congressman Bob Barr—one of the House managers who presented the Clinton case to the Senate—in which he refused to answer questions about cheating on his second wife with the woman who would become his third. Congressman Bob Livingston, the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, had had numerous affairs, including one with an employee. When Livingston accused Flynt of being a “bottom feeder,” the publisher replied, “Well, that’s right. But look what I found when I got down there.” As a result of Flynt’s inquiry, Livingston resigned from Congress in March 1999. Bill Clinton quipped, “The interesting thing was, Larry Flynt turned out to be a better guy than Ken Starr.”
Even after Flynt’s stunt, proof of more hypocrisy came rolling in. In 2007, Senator Larry Craig, who had spoken harshly against Clinton’s crimes, was accused of soliciting sex from a male undercover cop in an airport men’s room. In 2015, Dennis Hastert, who had replaced Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House, pled guilty to charges of illegally structuring cash withdrawals to make blackmail payments to young men he had molested decades earlier while working as a high school wrestling coach.
Two months after Clinton was acquitted, just as things were finally settling down, the most serious accusation of all arose. On February 24, 1999, Juanita Broaddrick told NBC’s Dateline that Clinton had raped her in 1978 when she was a thirty-five-year-old volunteer on his gubernatorial campaign. She had arranged to meet him in a hotel coffee shop, but Clinton suggested they meet for coffee in her hotel room to avoid the throng of journalists in the hotel lobby. There, she said, he raped her so violently he left her bloody. Her friend Norma Rogers, who shared the hotel room with Broaddrick, said she found her in bed with torn panty hose and a bleeding, swollen lip. Rogers stated that Broaddrick described the rape to her, as did three other friends of Broaddrick’s. Yet in 1997, when Juanita was deposed in the Paula Jones case, she denied having any sexual contact with Clinton. A year later, when Ken Starr questioned her, she told the truth, she said, as she was terrified of the harsher criminal penalties for lying to the independent counsel. Yet she ended up as only a footnote in Starr’s final report.
By the time her story came out, Americans were exhausted by the Lewinsky scandal, the Starr Report, and the impeachment. Broaddrick’s allegation was far worse than the others, as she claimed rape, but still. Broaddrick had no proof to bring a lawsuit against Clinton and had muddied the waters by denying the assault in her original deposition. Scandal fatigue caused most Americans to insert their fingers in their ears, close their eyes, and stick out their tongues. Broaddrick ended up self-publishing her book, You’d Better Put Some Ice on That: How I Survived Being Raped by Bill Clinton, in 2019.
The most recent accuser of Bill Clinton behaving badly was Leslie Millwee, who in 2016 came forward to accuse him of sexually assaulting her three times in a small editing room in 1980 when she was working as a reporter at an Arkansas television station. According to Millwee, Governor Clinton came up to her on each occasion, groped her breasts and, on the second and third assaults, rubbed himself against her until he climaxed.
In 2017, public opinion veered in another direction with the #MeToo movement. Unwanted groping, rubbing, and touching was now defined as sexual assault. It was time to reexamine Clinton’s bad behavior, even his consensual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
Lewinsky had been twenty-two when the affair began, an adult, but barely. Most of us with a few more years on us, looking at twenty-two-year-olds, see them as big children with functioning reproductive organs. And who among us hasn’t done something illegal, immoral, or just plain idiotic at twenty-two? Luckily for us, our poor judgment was not at the center of a presidential impeachment inquiry, resulting in the global sliming of our names for all time to come. Blushing furiously as we remember foolhardy choices, we can raise a toast to the good fortune of our own obscurity.
In contrast to Lewinsky’s youth, Clinton had been forty-nine, her superior in the workplace, and the most important man in the country, arguably in the world. After he left office, he remained an A-list celebrity, earning fortunes in speaking fees, campaigning for Democratic candidates, going to all the best parties. Little if any slime stuck to him, but then again, Teflon skin is usually a male attribute. Lewinsky, reduced to a punchline and a semen-stained dress, struggled to find work and a relationship. Fleeing the U.S., she obtained her Master of Science degree in Social Psychology at the London School of Economics in 2006 but had difficulty getting a job due to her notoriety.
In 2014, she reemerged from a long hibernation to discuss the scandal in an essay in Vanity Fair and began to speak out against cyberbullying. “When news of my affair with Bill Clinton broke,” she wrote, “I was arguably the most humiliated person in the world. Thanks to the Drudge Report, I was also possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet.” In 2105 she joined the anti-bullying organization Bystander Revolution as an ambassador and strategic adviser.
In a March 2018 Vanity Fair essay, Lewinsky shifted her position from four years earlier when she had accepted full responsibility for her actions. Now, in the light of #MeToo, she saw her relationship with the president as replete with “inappropriate abuse of authority, station, and privilege . . . Now, at 44, I’m beginning (just beginning) to consider the implications of the power differentials that were so vast between a president and a White House intern. I’m beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot.”
A few months later, when Bill Clinton was asked in an interview if he owed Lewinsky an apology, he said he did not. Hillary Clinton said Bill had not abused his power as Lewinsky had been an adult.
“What feels more important to me than whether I am owed or deserving of a personal apology is my belief that Bill Clinton should want to apologize,” Lewinsky said. “I’m less disappointed by him and more disappointed for him. He would be a better man for it . . . and we, in turn, a better society.”
In the 2020 Hulu documentary series Hillary, Bill finally apologized to Monica, sort of. “I feel terrible about the fact that Monica Lewinsky’s life was defined by it, unfairly, I think,” he said. “Over the years I watched her try to get a normal life back. But you gotta decide how to define normal.” His final remark seemed to indicate she should just accept the spectacular public derailment of her life, suck it up, and move on.
Oddly, Clinton blamed his decision to pursue the affair on the stress of office. “Here’s something that will take your mind off it for a while,” he explained. “Things I did to manage my anxiety for years.” It seems he did indeed emulate his hero, JFK, who used unseemly sex to prevent stress headaches.
Most Democrats stood by the Clintons despite Bill’s numerous sex scandals and Hillary’s rather chilling reaction to them. But when the Clintons’ supporters excoriated another candidate trailing a long list of similar allegations, including rape, Republicans called them out on hypocrisy. That candidate’s name was Donald Trump.