For once, I felt sorry for Bill Clinton. It was January 1998, and the press reported that the President had had an intimate relationship with one Monica Lewinsky. In Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s office, where I worked, we had evidence that Clinton had sought to hide his dalliance through perjury and obstruction of justice. But that didn’t matter anymore. No president could survive the public revelation of sex (however defined) with a White House intern. Clinton was about to be driven from office over fellatio rather than felonies. I started thinking about a conciliatory statement Starr might release when the President resigned.
Our judgment, as Ken Gormley observes in The Death of American Virtue, was sometimes flawed.
After scads of journalists, Gormley is the first historian to chronicle the scandal that culminated in Bill Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representatives but acquittal by the Senate. (He recounts the Whitewater land scandal too, but that chicanery lacks the piquant simplicity of sex with an intern.)
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