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In ruling that a sitting president had no immunity from civil lawsuits, the Supreme Court said it believed the Jones case would scarcely be a distraction for Clinton. Writing for the court, Justice John Paul Stevens said it was “highly unlikely” the Jones case would “occupy any substantial amount” of the president’s time.97 So the case went ahead, and Jones’s lawyers were permitted to subpoena and question under oath women with whom Clinton was suspected of having had extramarital affairs. Among them was Monica Lewinsky.
Her name was made known to Jones’s lawyers by Linda Tripp, whom Lewinsky had befriended at the Pentagon. Tripp had been a secretary at the White House during the administration of President George H. W. Bush and stayed on for a while after Clinton’s inauguration before taking a job at the Pentagon. Tripp loathed Clinton and had contemplated writing a tell-all book about chicanery at the White House. In conversations with Tripp, Lewinsky described her assignations with the president in some detail. Tripp eventually alerted Jones’s lawyers to the Clinton-Lewinsky liaison. At a deposition in Washington on January 17, 1998, they asked the president about his dalliance with the former intern. The federal judge hearing the Jones case, Susan Webber Wright, presided in person at the six-hour session.98 Clinton may have been taken aback by the detailed questions about his liaison with Lewinsky,99 but he denied under oath having had a “sexual relationship” or a “sexual affair” with her. He also denied having been alone with Lewinsky.100
Tripp, meanwhile, also spoke with lawyers for Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel appointed in 1994 to investigate suspicions of misconduct by Clinton and his wife in the failed Whitewater real estate investment in Arkansas. The Clintons’ business partners, James and Susan McDougal, were indicted in 1995 and convicted the following year of fraud and conspiracy charges in the far-reaching, many-tentacled Whitewater scandal. But the Clintons were never formally accused of wrongdoing. Not long after hearing from Tripp and receiving audiotapes that she secretly made of conversations with Lewinsky, Starr sought and was granted authority to expand his mandate to include suspected unlawful conduct stemming from Clinton’s assignations with Lewinsky.101
Word soon leaked that Starr was investigating Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice in an affair with a young former intern—news that electrified Washington as nothing had since the most dramatic revelations of the Watergate scandal in 1973 and 1974. Network television news anchors cut short assignments to Havana, where they had been covering the visit of Pope John Paul II, and returned to the United States.102 ABC and CBS preempted primetime programming to broadcast reports about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair.103 Matt Drudge of the online Drudge Report, which first reported word of Clinton’s dalliance with an intern, went on NBC’s Today show and said, “I go where the stink is.”104 The media frenzy, Clinton recalled, “was overwhelming.”105
The president had had a reputation for womanizing, and suspicions of his extramarital liaisons had circulated in the West Wing of the White House.106 But reports of Clinton’s having had an affair with a former intern struck some White House officials as so improbable that it must be bogus. McCurry, the White House press secretary, recalled that, on the day the story broke, “I was told that this is about Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, and I said, ‘You mean Monica—you mean the large intern?’ And someone said yeah, and I remember just breaking out laughing. It was like, ‘This is so wildly improbable that maybe finally we’re going to be able to put the rumor-mongering to bed once and for all.’”107
Soon enough, though, “impeachment”108 and “resignation” were in the air. Some commentators speculated that Clinton surely would quit if it were shown that he lied about his dalliance with Lewinsky. Sam Donaldson, a veteran White House reporter for ABC News, was among the pundits who said so. “If he’s not telling the truth, I think his presidency is numbered in days,” Donaldson declared on a Sunday talk show on January 25, 1998. “This isn’t going to drag out. We’re not going to be here three months from now talking about this. Mr. Clinton, if he’s not telling the truth and the evidence shows that, will resign, perhaps this week.”109 On the same program, syndicated columnist George Will said Clinton’s presidency “today is as dead—deader really—than Woodrow Wilson’s was after he had a stroke” that incapacitated him in 1919.110
Clinton was not telling the truth, but he was not about to quit. He denied an affair with Lewinsky, most memorably in a defiant, finger-wagging declaration at the White House in late January 1998. “I want you to listen to me,” the president said on that occasion. His face was reddened. It was clear he was seething. “I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time—never,” he said. “These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people.”111 Later, he told senior White House advisers and officials essentially the same thing: the allegations were untrue, he never had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky. According to Sidney Blumenthal, an assistant to the president, Clinton said Lewinsky “came on to me and made a sexual demand on me.”112 Blumenthal also said that the president likened himself to a character in Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon—“somebody who is surrounded by an oppressive force that is creating a lie about me and I can’t get the truth out.”113
Clinton and his supporters were buoyed by opinion polls that indicated that most Americans had little appetite for impeaching the president or forcing his resignation114—at least not for the misconduct Starr was investigating. The polling data remained fairly consistent as Starr’s investigation dragged on; months passed before his office reached an immunity agreement with Lewinsky in exchange for her testimony.115 In the interim, Clinton’s defenders mounted a fierce attack on the prosecutor and his investigation, characterizing him as a sex-obsessed Puritan and describing his inquiry as invasive and a needlessly partisan vendetta. Discrediting Starr was central to Clinton’s strategy for surviving the scandal.116 So was keeping the support of Democrats in Congress. While many of them were dismayed by the president’s behavior, few of them wavered in their support for him.
Clinton was invited several times to testify to the grand jury that Starr had empanelled; he repeatedly declined. Finally, in July 1998, a subpoena was issued for the president’s testimony. He agreed to appear before the grand jury provided the subpoena was withdrawn. It was, and on August 17, 1998, Clinton was questioned via closed-circuit television from the White House. Two weeks before then, he had given Starr’s investigators a DNA sample, which matched small semen stains on the blue dress Lewinsky had worn at their last sexual encounter, on March 29, 1997. Under oath, Clinton acknowledged having had an “inappropriate intimate” relationship with Lewinsky but insisted he had not committed perjury at his deposition in the Jones case seven months before. He said his statements then had been legally accurate.117
Hours after his grand jury testimony, Clinton went on national television and acknowledged in an angry, four-and-a-half-minute address that he had indeed had an “inappropriate relationship” with Lewinsky and that he had misled Americans about it.118 The president’s confession was belated, incomplete, and clearly unwilling—and it did nothing to deter the prosecutors. Three weeks later, Starr submitted an elaborately detailed, 445-page report, or referral, to Congress that identified eleven possible counts for impeaching the president. All of them arose from his dalliance with Lewinsky; none was related to Whitewater or its related scandals.119 The prospective grounds for impeachment included five counts of lying under oath, four counts of obstructing justice, one count of witness-tampering, and one count of abusing constitutional authority.120 The most serious allegations were that Clinton lied at his deposition in the Jones case, had lied before the grand jury, and had endeavored to conceal evidence of his dalliance with Lewinsky.
On December 19, 1998, the House of Representatives approved two counts of impeachment—that the president committed perjury in his grand jury testimony and obs
tructed justice by encouraging others to lie to conceal his affair with Lewinsky. The furtive and tawdry affair begun in 1995 had spun, unimaginably, into a national spectacle. Clinton thus became the first elected U.S. president ever to be impeached.121 It was, John F. Harris wrote in the Washington Post, “an emblem he will wear through history. It was the one action that everyone who knows Clinton agreed will sting him.”122
The Senate, as obliged by the Constitution, took up the impeachment charges at a trial that began January 7, 1999. By then, it was widely recognized that Clinton would never be convicted because the Senate lacked sixty-seven votes—the obligatory two-thirds majority—to remove the president on the impeachment charges. On February 13, 1999, the Senate voted to reject both counts against Clinton. Neither charge won even a majority vote.123
The extraordinary ordeal—which had its origins during the ill-conceived partial shutdown of the federal government and which took momentum from Clinton’s willingness to engage the brazen overtures of an aggressive yet insecure young woman—left a stark and bitter legacy that can be detected even now, in the cleavages of an often-hostile political environment. Clinton’s impeachment, R. W. Apple wrote in the New York Times the day after the House voted, “seemed to crystallize the long-term decline in political civility” in America.124 That it did. The votes to impeach the president were largely along party lines: Republicans were mostly in favor, Democrats were mostly opposed. Those votes signaled a stark partisan divide that would deepen and intensify during the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. Surveys have found that the Republican and Democratic parties have both become more ideologically unified and more homogeneous. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats became rarities—oxymorons, almost—a trend that has become most vivid in the House of Representatives125 and in statehouses around the country.126 Middle-ground positions are more often eschewed, and swing states in presidential elections have become fewer.127 Republicans have come to be dominated by the party’s conservative wing, while growing numbers of Democrats self-identify as liberals.128
Sharp and predictable partisan disagreement on a variety of matters came to characterize the country’s riven political culture. Well into the twenty-first century, Republicans and Democrats were at odds, and often bitterly so, over the size and reach of the federal government, over national health care and other federal entitlements, over environmental policy, and over national security.129 It would be a mistaken exaggeration, of course, to attribute political polarization exclusively to the storms provoked by the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.130 But the impeachment battles of 1998–99 contributed mightily. The centrist “third way” approach Clinton periodically espoused was badly damaged by the impeachment battle and did not long survive his presidency.131 Clinton left office in January 2001, but the wounds opened by the scandal and his impeachment were not soon to close. They were aggravated by the disputed outcome of the presidential election in 2000, in which the Supreme Court declared Republican George W. Bush the winner over Vice President Gore. They were aggravated further by the long-running and inconclusive U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Clinton succeeded in beating back the impeachment charges, but his mendacity did not go unpunished. Two months after his acquittal by the Senate, the president was found in contempt of court by Susan Webber Wright, the federal judge who presided at his deposition in January 1998. In a scalding opinion, she wrote the “record demonstrates by clear and convincing evidence” that Clinton at the deposition gave “false, misleading and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process.” Simply stated, the judge wrote, “the President’s deposition testimony regarding whether he had ever been alone with Ms. Lewinsky was intentionally false, and his statements regarding whether he had ever engaged in sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky likewise were intentionally false.”132 Moreover, she wrote, “It appears the President is asserting that Ms. Lewinsky could be having sex with him while, at the same time, he was not having sex with her.”133
The penalty the judge imposed was unprecedented: no court had held a sitting president in contempt. Wright also ordered the president to pay a $90,000 fine to cover legal fees and other expenses that Jones’s lawyers had incurred as a result of the falsehoods he told under oath. In April 1998, Webber had dismissed the Jones lawsuit, saying the evidentiary record failed to reach the threshold of sexual harassment under federal law. Jones’s lawyers appealed and, in November 1998, as the House was preparing to consider articles of impeachment, Clinton agreed to pay $850,000 to settle the Jones case out of court.
On the last full day of his presidency in 2001, Clinton acknowledged having given false testimony at his deposition and surrendered for five years his license to practice law in Arkansas, his home state.134 He also agreed to pay a $25,000 fine to the Arkansas Bar Association.135 Acknowledging false testimony and surrendering the law license were key elements of a deal struck with Robert W. Ray, who had succeeded Starr as independent counsel.136 The agreement also removed the prospect of criminal prosecution after his presidency: Clinton out of office would not face indictment for misconduct arising from the sex-and-lies scandal. In his statement acknowledging false testimony—which was read aloud in the White House briefing room by his press secretary, Jake Siewert137—Clinton said: “I tried to walk a fine line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely, but I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish this goal and that certain of my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false.”138
Although impeachment tainted his presidency and impaired his second term, Clinton survived the humiliating ordeal. The reasons he did so are several. Among them was that Clinton benefitted from the consistent good fortune of confronting foes who were inept or who lacked his political wiliness and instincts. In winning the presidency in 1992, Clinton had ousted an out-of-touch incumbent, George H. W. Bush. To win reelection in 1996, he handily defeated a hapless, seventy-three-year-old Republican opponent, Bob Dole. During the government shutdowns of 1995, Clinton outmaneuvered Gingrich, a formidable but blunder-prone adversary, to reclaim political momentum in Washington. Kenneth Starr fit the pattern: he was another of Clinton’s clumsy foes. Starr was earnest and gentlemanly but thoroughly unprepared for the fierce political combat unleashed by his investigation of the sex-and-lies scandal.
Starr’s report to Congress identifying grounds for impeaching the president was arresting and disturbing in its graphic detail. Readers of the report, even at the remove of many years, are astonished by its intrusive content and graphic detail that, in places, seem gratuitous and intended principally to embarrass. Starr insisted that Clinton’s falsehoods under oath made it necessary to present explicit detail. “If the President, in his grand jury appearance [in August 1998], had admitted the sexual activity recounted by Ms. Lewinsky and conceded that he had lied under oath in his civil deposition,” Starr’s report said, “these particular descriptions would be superfluous.”139
Even so, the prosecutors’ decision to freight the report with graphic detail was a serious misjudgment—and another reason why Clinton survived the scandal. As Richard A. Posner, a federal judge and frequent writer on legal matters, has pointed out, Starr “could have unmasked [Clinton’s] lies simply by listing each of the ten sexual encounters by date, time, and place” and briefly describing what took place. “That would have been enough to show that the President had lied in denying that he had engaged in sexual relations with Lewinsky,” Posner wrote. “There was no need to add that he stuck a cigar in her vagina and then put it in his mouth and said it tasted good.”140 Incorporating such details encouraged suspicions that Starr was bent on destroying the president.141
The explicit content backfired on Starr, undercutting the report’s gravity and almost trivializing the allegations about the president’s misconduct. The report was posted online two days after the House of Representatives received it, giving rise to what the Washington Post called “history’s first simultaneous reading of
smut.”142 Americans absorbed the report’s salacious content, and cringed. But for the most part they did not turn against the president. Polling data consistently showed a majority of Americans felt Clinton’s transgressions were not grounds for resignation or impeachment.143 And a majority of Americans thought it inappropriate for Starr’s report to have included so much explicit detail.144
If the case to unseat the president failed in part because of the misguided zeal of his opponents, it failed more significantly because Clinton’s misconduct fell well short of a standard for impeachment effectively set by Nixon in the Watergate scandal.145 Nixon was compelled to quit the presidency in August 1974 in the face of certain impeachment and conviction for authorizing a cover-up of the signal crime of Watergate—the burglary in June 1972 at the Washington headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. That Nixon committed crimes in Watergate was unequivocal: audiotape recordings he surreptitiously made of his conversations at the White House confirmed his misdeeds.146 Clinton’s falsehoods, evasions, and dishonest efforts to conceal his dalliance with Lewinsky scarcely rivaled the crimes of Watergate, a political scandal unique in the depths of wrongdoing it plumbed.147 Clinton may have been a raffish, self-centered rogue who tortured the truth and recruited aides to do the same on his behalf. But he was no vindictive, score-settling crook oozing paranoia, as Nixon was.148