by Jill Lepore
Watergate had inaugurated an era of politics by other means, where political opponents attempted, instead of defeating one another’s arguments, or winning elections, to oust each other from office by way of ethics investigations. Between 1970 and 1994, the number of federal indictments of public officials rose from virtually zero to more than thirteen hundred. These often meaningless battles, waged in televised hearings, on television talk shows, and in the courts, brought down a great many politicians. They also eroded the public’s faith in the institutions to which those politicians belonged, mainly Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court.166
In July 1995, Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-one-year-old graduate of Oregon’s Lewis & Clark College, started an internship at the White House. In November, the president began an affair with her that lasted sixteen months and appears mainly to have involved her performing oral sex on him in or near the Oval Office. Allegedly, she later said her title ought to have been “Special Assistant to the President for Blow Jobs.”167
Other presidents had affairs. Most of those men, including FDR and JFK, had affairs in an era when the press tacitly agreed not to expose them. Clinton engaged in an affair with Lewinsky at a time when exposing politicians’ affairs was the favored weapon of political battle. Not only that, but the nation was in the midst of a campaign against sexual harassment in the workplace. Clinton’s foolishness, irresponsibility, and recklessness in this affair was difficult to fathom. He was the first Democratic president to assume office after the rise of right-wing radio. Millions of Americans heard him criticized, daily, for hours. Right-wing attacks on Clinton and his wife were relentless, whether the charges had merit or, more often, no merit at all. Limbaugh accused Hillary Clinton of covering up a murder, a rumor he read in a fax sent to his office. “That’s what it said in the fax,” Limbaugh said, defending slander.168 Whatever else other presidents had done, or not done, it was absurd, in such circumstances, for Clinton to believe he would get away with, first, the affair, and, second, the cover-up.
Clinton had been subjected to investigation from the moment he took office. Unrelated investigations into a land deal the Clintons had made in Arkansas, involving Whitewater, a development on the White River, and into a civil suit filed by Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, had been orchestrated by the Conservative Political Action Committee. Jones alleged that Bill Clinton had sexually harassed her in a hotel room in 1991. Beginning in 1994, these charges were investigated by Bush’s former solicitor general Kenneth Starr, appointed as an independent counsel. Jones, who alleged that Clinton had asked her to kiss his penis, purported to describe its “distinguishing characteristics” in a sworn affidavit. Jones represented conservatives borking back, after the Clarence Thomas hearings. The month her story broke, in March 1994, the nation’s three major television news networks aired 126 stories about Whitewater; from January through March, they had aired 42 stories about the proposed health care plan.169
Critics despaired about a politics of RIP, “Revelation, Investigation, Prosecution,” that led from Watergate to Whitewater. Starr proved an indefatigable investigator. He spent years and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars following every lead, right down to a blue dress stained with presidential semen. In 1996, a former White House aide named Linda Tripp met Lewinsky at the Pentagon, where they both worked. Tripp began recording her conversations with Lewinsky about Clinton in 1997; she then gave these recordings to Jones’s lawyers. (Tripp also told Lewinsky to never wash that blue dress.) By this time, Clinton had helped Lewinsky get a job in New York. On learning about the tapes, Starr began an investigation into a possible obstruction of justice.170
The Lewinsky story broke not in a newspaper of record, like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but on the Internet, when Matt Drudge at the Drudge Report revealed the allegations at 11:27 p.m. on Saturday night, January 17, 1998. Clinton asked his in-house pollster, Dick Morris, to conduct an instant poll to decide what to do. Morris told the president that Americans would not forgive him an affair. The Washington Post printed the story on January 21. That afternoon, Clinton agreed to an interview with PBS’s Jim Lehrer. Later that night, in a meeting in the White House solarium, deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes told the president that the interview had been a disaster. “You look like a fuckin’ dog that’s been running all night and someone just kicked the shit out of you. I’ve never seen such a performance in my life. Nobody believed you.” Five days later, in the presence of his wife, Clinton delivered an address from the Roosevelt Room and said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” The next morning, on the Today show, Hillary Clinton attributed the allegations to a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”171
To cover the Lewinsky story, Ailes launched a new 6:00 p.m. newscast, Special Report, hosted by Brit Hume, and moved commentator Bill O’Reilly’s The O’Reilly Factor from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. By the time the story had played out, Fox News had beaten MSNBC in the ratings war and was on its way to beating CNN. Partisan coverage produced partisan opinion: by the time the House voted on impeachment, 58 percent of Independents and 84 percent of Democrats would oppose it, while some two out of three Republicans would support it. But Fox News had no monopoly on in-depth coverage of the Lewinsky affair. Broadcast and televisions news, magazines and newspapers, all covered each new detail of the president’s encounters with his intern, which included inserting a cigar into her vagina and then, as most Americans believed, lying about it on national television and before a grand jury. “The country is awash in the muck of the White House nastiness,” columnist A. M. Rosenthal wrote in the Times, and “dirty with the cynicism that flows from it.” In September 1998, Starr submitted to the House his 445-page report, along with 2,600 pages of documentary evidence. The details, both of the affair and of Clinton’s efforts to cover it up, were at once ridiculous, embarrassing, and terrible. Columnist Andrew Sullivan wrote: “Clinton is a cancer on the culture, a cancer of cynicism, narcissism, and deceit.”172 But the cause of the cancer lay elsewhere.
The United States had endured eras of heightened partisanship before, in the 1790s, say, or the 1850s. But beginning in the 1990s, the nation started a long fall into an epistemological abyss. The conservative media establishment, founded on the idea that the existing media establishment was biased, had built into its foundation a rejection of the idea that truth could come from weighing different points of view, which, after all, is the whole point of partisan disputation. Instead, the conservative media establishment engineered a fail-safe against dissent. As one historian explained, “When an outlet like the New York Times criticized a liberal policy, conservative media activists presented it not as evidence of the paper’s even-handedness but as evidence of the policy’s failure. Even the liberal New York Times had to admit. . . . Thus evidence that seemed to undermine the charge of liberal bias could be reinterpreted to support it.”173
The nation had lost its way in the politics of mutually assured epistemological destruction. There was no truth, only innuendo, rumor, and bias. There was no reasonable explanation; there was only conspiracy. The White House hired private detectives to find dirt about Starr and other investigators. Voters found the investigation as reprehensible as Clinton, or more so. By a margin of two to one, women thought the press coverage had gone too far. Still, they blamed Republicans for making a spectacle of the presidency. Republicans, who’d hoped to gain seats in the 1998 midterms, lost them. After the election, House Speaker Gingrich, who was already on his second wife, learned that his own affair with a congressional aide twenty-three years his junior was about to be exposed, and resigned, blaming “cannibals who had ‘blackmailed’ him into quitting.”174
The Lewinsky scandal indelibly left something else in its aftermath. It diminished liberalism. Liberals defended Clinton almost at all cost, depicting him as a victim. Steinem and other prominent feminists who had crusaded against Clarence Thomas as a perpetrator of sexual harassment waved aside Clinton’s dalliance
s, often with young women, including women in his employ, at some sizable cost to the cause of feminism. Thomas had at one point suggested he was being subjected to “a high-tech lynching.” Writing about the Lewinsky investigation in The New Yorker, Toni Morrison said that, “white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President”—he was so cool, so hip, so long-suffering—and compared the investigation to a lynching. “Serious as adultery is, it is not a national catastrophe,” Morrison said.175 Adultery is not a national catastrophe, but Bill Clinton was no more subjected to a lynching than was Clarence Thomas.
On February 12, 1999, the Senate narrowly defeated two charges of impeachment: on perjury and obstruction of justice. Four days later, Paul Weyrich circulated a letter in which he announced the failure of the Christian Right. The Christian Coalition fell into debt, and, investigated by both the FEC and the IRS, its membership numbers had plummeted by 1997. But that wasn’t the kind of failure Weyrich was talking about. Even if the Christian Coalition had fallen apart, conservatives had won elections and appointed judges. But they hadn’t been able to stop what Weyrich called the “collapse of the culture” into an “ever-widening sewer.” “I no longer believe that there is a moral majority,” Weyrich wrote. “I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values.” If they did, he said, “Bill Clinton would have been driven out of office months ago.”176
A curtain closed on the culture wars. “People on the political right set out to unseat a president, and they almost succeeded,” Anthony Lewis wrote in the New York Review of Books. “In his folly, Clinton played into their hands. But that does not alter the fact that this country came close to a coup d’état.”177 The most that many Americans began to expect Congress to accomplish in any given session was, possibly, to avoid a shutdown and, at best, to agree on a budget. The government had been reduced to a shambles. Attempting to stage a coup d’état became an ordinary part of every American presidency. Opponents of each of the next three presidents, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald J. Trump, would call them “unconstitutional.” Members of the House of Representatives would call for impeachment proceedings. Collectors of political paraphernalia interested in documenting this turn could have compiled, by attending political rallies during any year after 1994, calls for an end to each American presidential administration. IMPEACH CLINTON! The signs came in every color. IMPEACH BUSH! They came in block letters and cursive. IMPEACH OBAMA! They were staked in front yards. IMPEACH TRUMP! They were duct-taped to mailboxes.
In the summer of 1999, in a nation consumed by the politics of scandal, celebrity, pettiness, and vengeance, rumors began to spread that Donald Trump, fifty-three, intended to run for president. Born in 1947, Trump was the son of a real-estate man from Queens. In 1964, he graduated from military school, where he’d been known as a “ladies’ man.” He considered going to the University of Southern California, to study film, but ended up studying first at Fordham University, then business at Wharton, graduating in 1968.178 He spent most of his time reading the listings of foreclosures on federally financed housing projects, he later said. He joined his father’s business and set out to conquer Manhattan. In 1973, the Department of Justice charged Trump and his father with violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act. “We never have discriminated,” Trump told the New York Times, “and we never would.”179 During the years when the parties swapped women for men, and Hillary Rodham left the Republican Party to become a Democrat, Donald Trump did the reverse. In the 1970s, Trump began making donations to the Democratic Party. “The simple fact is that contributing money to politicians is very standard and accepted for a New York City developer,” he explained in The Art of the Deal, his best-selling business book, published in 1987, the year he first toyed with running for president. At the time, Trump was a larger-than-life media presence, a huckster chronically in and out of bankruptcy court but a reliable ratings booster on the talk show circuit, where he was usually referred to as a “hustler.” An avid participant in the world of professional wrestling, Trump’s forays into politics were generally greeted as stunts. In 1984, he’d offered to serve as an arms negotiator with the Soviet Union. “It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” he told the Washington Post. “I think I know most of it anyway.”180 In 1987, Trump had flown to New Hampshire, where he was greeted by “Trump for President” signs. “I’m not here because I’m running for President,” he said. “I’m here because I’m tired of our country being kicked around.” He promised to eliminate the budget deficit by making countries like Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait pay their debts: “There is a way you can ask them and they will give it, if you have the right person asking.”181
In the 1990s, the American economy thrived, at least by some measures. Dot-com stock was booming. By the end of Clinton’s second term, unemployment had fallen to 4.1 percent and the United States was producing nearly a quarter of the world’s output, a share never seen before, not even by the British Empire at its peak, in 1913, when it produced 8 percent of the world’s output. And still, for Americans without a college education and especially for those without a high school diploma, real wages were stagnant or falling. And yet a worship of the very rich was everywhere, from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which aired from 1984 to 1995, to the rising fame of gold-plated New York real estate tycoon Donald Trump.182
During the Lewinsky scandal, Trump, known as “a twice-divorced, doll-chasing socialite,” gleefully offered his opinions, as a famous cad, about the affair. The Lewinsky scandal had elevated Trump from pop culture celebrity businessman to political commentator. “Paula Jones is a loser,” he said on NBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews. “But the fact is that she may be responsible for bringing down a president indirectly.” Clinton’s statement was “a disaster,” Trump said, and he should have taken the Fifth Amendment. He’d have had more respect for Bill Clinton, Trump said, if he’d had sex with a supermodel instead of with Lewinsky.183
Keen to remain in the spotlight, Trump published a new book, The America We Deserve, that had all the trappings of a campaign manifesto. In a chapter called “Should I Run,” Trump pointed to a survey that documented his name recognition: “It was no surprise to me that 97 percent of the American people knew who I was.” His supporters launched a website, www.thedonald2000.org. The National Enquirer conducted a poll of one hundred people, who very much liked Trump. Readers of the Enquirer, Trump said, were “the real people.” He said, “I think the kind of people who support me are the workers, the construction workers, the taxicab driver. Rich people don’t like me.” The National Enquirer survey allowed Trump to report, “The polls have been unbelievable.”184
Trump knew exactly what he was up to. He said that he’d choose Oprah Winfrey as his running mate and if the establishment laughed, that was their error. The establishment did laugh. “Mr. Trump is trying to determine whether there is a place in American political life for a rogue,” the New York Times reported. But Trump knew that Americans were disillusioned. “I am considering a run only because I am convinced that the major parties have lost their way,” he explained. “The Republicans, especially those in Congress, are captives of their right wing. The Democrats are captive of their left wing. I don’t hear anyone speaking for the working men and women in the center. There is very little contact between the concerns and interests of ordinary people and the agendas of politicians.”185
Trump boasted of his legendary deal making, but his real attraction to voters, he told the columnist Maureen Dowd, was his personality, and his sex appeal. “I think the only difference between me and the other candidates,” he said, “is that I’m more honest and my women are more beautiful.” His candidacy didn’t go much beyond talking points, but he did offer policy proposals: to close the budget deficit, he suggested raising $5.7 trillion with a onetime 14.25 percent tax on the net worth of people and trusts worth $10 million or more. As for the rest of his economic plan, he said, “That w
ould be determined and worked out.” In remarks outlining his possible foreign policy, he insulted France (“a terrible partner”), Germany (“they failed militarily”), Japan (“ripping us big league”), and Saudi Arabia (“I mean, the money they make”) and suggested that, if elected president, he would double as U.S. trade representative, “and I guarantee you,” he said on Fox News, “the rip-off of the United States would end.”186
Serious political commentators did not even elevate his candidacy to that of a crank; they considered him a buffoon. “The only thing standing between Donald Trump and the presidency,” wrote syndicated columnist Mark Shields, “is the good judgment of the American people.” By January 2000, www.thedonald2000.org was for sale. “Are these people stiffs, or what?” Trump said later that month, watching a GOP primary debate. “They’re losers,” he said. “Who the hell wants to have a person like this for president?”187