Also critical in Clinton’s surviving the sex-and-lies scandal was America’s robust economy of the late 1990s. The long run-up of the stock market, begun in 1995, had Americans feeling prosperous. It was said they cared far more about the Dow Jones than Paula Jones.149 Robust, low-inflation economic growth that had dropped unemployment rates to less than 5 percent in 1999 contributed to a willingness to excuse Clinton’s misconduct.
Also important in understanding why Clinton survived and served out his term was the immediate precedent for career-ending sex scandals in Washington—a case far uglier, more sordid, and more clearly embroidered with evidence-tampering and influence-peddling. That case centered around Bob Packwood, a Republican senator from Oregon who, in September 1995, announced his resignation to bring an end to a three-year inquiry into reports of his sexual misconduct.
Packwood was a twenty-seven-year incumbent who had gained a well-deserved reputation as an expert on tax policy. He also had a reputation as something of a lecherous figure who periodically took sexual advantage of women dependent on him for their jobs.150 That reputation was confirmed in early September 1995 with the release of a report—179 pages long and supported by ten volumes of evidence—in which the Senate Ethics Committee documented Packwood’s misconduct. The offenses were such that the committee unanimously called for his expulsion.
The report etched a devastating portrait of Packwood, accusing him of attempting “to obstruct and impede” the committee’s inquiry “by withholding, altering and destroying relevant evidence” including portions of his audiotaped diary in which he discussed his sexual overtures and conquests. The senator also pressured lobbyists to pay consulting fees or retainers to his estranged wife as a way to reduce his financial obligations to her, the ethics committee found. The report identified eighteen separate encounters that took place from 1969 to 1990 in which Packwood had made “unwanted and unwelcome sexual advances” on women. It represented, the committee said, “a pattern of abuse of his position of power and authority.”151 Packwood’s targets, the ethics committee said, “were effectively powerless to protest in the face of his position as a United States Senator.”152 His behavior was more grotesque, offensive, and unbidden than Clinton’s in his relationship with Lewinsky.
Packwood was no Lothario. The senator’s advances were graceless and “consisted chiefly of dropping sudden, surprise French kisses on women, usually after forcefully seizing them by their arms or wrists,” as the New York Times described them. “The women, most of them members of Packwood’s staff, lobbyists and campaign volunteers, [denied] sending any signals of romantic interest. . . . He didn’t flirt suavely or invite women for candle-lit dinners. No, he swooped down out of the blue, usually embracing a woman under the fluorescent lights of an inner office. According to many accounts, his groping was wooden and his open-mouthed kisses oddly passionless.”153
The committee’s bipartisan demand for his expulsion left Packwood with few options. He insisted he would not resign but abruptly changed his mind and, on September 7, 1995, delivered a farewell speech from the floor of the Senate. His valedictory was mawkish, disjointed, and at times excruciating. Tears came to Packwood’s eyes as he recalled successes, failures, and frustrations of his years in the Senate. He spoke of “the dishonor that has befallen me in the last three years.”154 By way of departure, he declared: “I leave this institution not with malice, but with love.”155 He was the first U.S. senator to quit involuntarily in thirteen years. Had he not resigned, Packwood likely would have been the first U.S. senator expelled since Southerners were kicked out during the Civil War.
When Packwood finished speaking, several of his close friends in the Senate—Mark O. Hatfield, John McCain, Alan K. Simpson, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan among them—took the floor, one by one, to lament Packwood’s resignation and to say how they would miss his presence. There was, the Washington Post reported, “little talk . . . about the allegations that brought him down, no puffed-chest pronouncements of good riddance.”156
Also rising to pay tribute to Packwood that afternoon was Senator Dianne Feinstein of California. She had been an early voice calling for his resignation.157 Feinstein prefaced her remarks by saying she did not know Packwood well. Nonetheless, she said, “it is the sign of a wise man, and even a giant man, who stands and does what has to be done, and goes on to fight another day.”158 Surprised and moved by the charity of her remarks, Packwood crossed the floor, took Feinstein’s hand, and wept.159
Unlike Clinton, Packwood managed no Houdini-like escape from serious trouble, but the disgraced former senator was soon to recover a measure of status in Washington. Like many erstwhile members of Congress, Packwood turned to lobbying after leaving the Senate. In early 1998, Washingtonian magazine declared him one of the capital’s fifty top lobbyists. “Despite his well-publicized troubles,” the magazine said, “Packwood remains a formidable intellect and an insightful analyst of the legislative landscape. Few know the tax code like Packwood.”160
Conclusion
The Long Reach of 1995
Nineteen ninety-five closed the way it began—on a Sunday, with the farewell appearance of a popular newspaper comic.
The delightfully bizarre Far Side, a single-panel cartoon drawn by the low-profile artist Gary Larson, entered retirement on January 1, 1995, ending a fifteen-year parade of oddities and lighthearted grotesqueries that included talking bears, cows driving cars, and dinosaurs facing extinction from smoking cigarettes. It was half-seriously suggested that Larson decided to give up The Far Side because it had become more and more “difficult to out-weird the rest of the newspaper.”1 In an interview before ending the strip, Larson said his “humor is sometimes on the dark side, or whatever you want to call it. But I don’t think that’s altogether unhealthy.”2 Not at all: The Far Side was inspired in its quirky weirdness. Its final installment was a takeoff on the closing scene of The Wizard of Oz and depicted Larson waking up in bed at home, after an extended visit to a strange place populated by cavemen, monsters, and nerdy little kids.
The year closed with publication of the last original Calvin and Hobbes, drawn by Bill Watterson, who also was famously publicity-shy. “My interests have shifted,” Watterson told his syndicate in giving up the strip after a ten-year run, “and I believe I’ve done what I can do within the constraints of daily deadlines and small panels.”3 The retirement of Calvin and Hobbes marked the passing of a “national cultural treasure,” one critic said4 about the consistently imaginative strip that featured the antics of a mischievous six-year-old named Calvin and his stuffed-tiger straight man, Hobbes. In the exclusive company of Calvin, Hobbes became a lithe, wise-cracking tiger, six feet tall.5 In the valedictory strip on December 31, 1995, the boy and his tiger set off into a brilliant landscape of newly fallen snow. “It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy,” Calvin exclaimed, launching a toboggan down a snowy hill. “Let’s go exploring.”
There was something eccentric and droll about a year bracketed by the leave-taking of immensely popular comics. Their departures were coincidental, just happening to fall on the first and last days of 1995. Even so, they respectively anticipated and confirmed 1995 as a year of notable watersheds. It was, as we have seen, a decisive year, the time when the Internet entered the mainstream of American life; when terrorism reached deep into the American heartland with devastating effect; when the “Trial of the Century” enthralled and repelled the country and brought forensic DNA to the popular consciousness; when diplomatic success at Dayton gave rise to a period of American muscularity in foreign affairs; and when the president and an unpaid White House intern began a furtive and intermittent dalliance that would shake the American government and lead to the extraordinary spectacle of impeachment.
Given that it was a year of milestones, it is not surprising that 1995 extends a long reach: it is a year that matters still. The major events and leading actors of 1995 return to the public eye from time to time to command attention and commen
tary. Even the reclusive Bill Watterson was the subject of a documentary a couple of years ago, a paean to his still-admired and much-missed Calvin and Hobbes.6 Nineteen ninety-five lives on in many ways: as context, as a curiosity, and as a point of reference. And sometimes as a combination of all three.
There was much reminiscing about 1995 when, for example, Republicans in Congress forced a partial shutdown of the federal government in October 2013. They sought to strip away or delay federal funding for the Affordable Care Act national health plan (often known as Obamacare), but failed utterly. The shutdown lasted sixteen days and in some ways seemed like a strange replay of the government closures of 1995. Dan Zak noted as much in the Washington Post in a snarky look back at 1995 that included nods to Tommy Boy, a little-remembered film that starred Chris Farley and David Spade:
During the last government shutdown, some of us were 12 years old and wearing out our VHS tape of “Tommy Boy,” that comic masterpiece about responsibility, duty and friendship. The disapproving public might think the 113th United States Congress is full of both Tommy Callahans (entitled oafs) and Richard Haydens (sniveling bean counters), but this is no time to discuss how “Tommy Boy” is an allegory for our legislature. Instead, after a week of thinking shutdown thoughts, the heart of the matter is how culture changes faster than politics, and how the time between this shutdown and the last shutdown is somehow both an eon (when measured in how we live) and a blip (when measured in how we govern).7
The government shutdown of 2013 also brought published reminders that President Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky began their furtive liaison during the closure of November 1995. “It was during that enforced idleness,” the Independent newspaper in London pointed out, “that the President began his fateful dalliance with Monica Lewinsky.”8
The former intern is now in her early forties and still compels fascination, which not infrequently brings her back into the news. An example of this phenomenon came in early 2014, when it was reported that at the height of her husband’s sex scandal Hillary Clinton privately referred to Lewinsky as a “narcissistic loony toon.” She so confided to Diane Blair, a close friend who recorded the “loony toon” comment in a memorandum on September 9, 1998. Blair died in 2000, and her papers were donated to the University of Arkansas where she had taught political science. The memorandum of 1998 and other contents of the archive were publicized in early 2014 by a conservative website, the Washington Free Beacon.9 In the memorandum, Blair addressed the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and recounted her conversation with Hillary Clinton, to whom she referred as HRC. She indirectly quoted Hillary Clinton as saying the president’s dalliance with Lewinsky “was a lapse” but that “to his credit, he tried to break it off, tried to pull away, tried to manage someone who was clearly a ‘narcissistic loony toon’; but it was beyond control. And, HRC insists, no matter what people say, it was gross inappropriate behavior but it was consensual (was not a power relationship) and was not sex in the real meaning of the word.”10
As if in response, Lewinsky broke a prolonged silence in 2014, in an essay of more than 4,000 words published by Vanity Fair. Lewinsky wrote that she “deeply regret[s] what happened between me and President Clinton. . . . At the time—at least from my point of view—it was an authentic connection, with emotional intimacy, frequent visits, plans made, phone calls and gifts exchanged. In my early 20s, I was too young to understand the real-life consequences, and too young to see that I would be sacrificed for political expediency. . . . I would give anything to rewind the tape.”11
Lewinsky said she bristled in reading of Hillary Clinton’s harsh characterization of her as a “narcissistic loony toon.” It was, Lewinsky wrote, “the latest twist on Me as Archetype.” Yes, she added, “I get it. Hillary Clinton wanted it on record that she was lashing out at her husband’s mistress. She may have faulted her husband for being inappropriate, but I find her impulse to blame the Woman . . . troubling. And all too familiar: with every marital indiscretion that finds its way into the public sphere—many of which involve male politicians—it always seems like the woman conveniently takes the fall.”12
Lewinsky’s essay underscored anew the odd, even scandalous pull that she exerts on the American consciousness13—a fascination of which she is quite aware. “Every day someone mentions me in a tweet or a blog post, and not altogether kindly,” she wrote. “Every day, it seems, my name shows up in an op-ed column or a press clip or two—mentioned in passing in articles on subjects as disparate as millennials, [the television series] Scandal, and French president François Hollande’s love life.”14 That such fascination endures is testimony to a deep and lingering suspicion that there remains more to know about why Bill Clinton took the risks he did, trysting with an intern who, when it began in 1995, was barely twenty-two years old.
O. J. Simpson is another figure prominent in 1995 who tugs from time to time at the collective conscious. He can still make news, even from behind bars at the Lovelock Correctional Center in northern Nevada, where he is serving a sentence of up to thirty-three years for kidnapping and armed robbery. In early 2013, Simpson was reported to have thrown a Super Bowl party in his cell, where he had installed a television. “If you have the money, you can buy a TV at the inmate store and put it in your cell,” Norman Pardo, a friend of Simpson was quoted as saying, adding, “He’s like the Godfather of the prison now.”15
Simpson was back in court, in Las Vegas, for several days in 2013, seeking retrial on the criminal charges that sent him to jail. At times during the hearings, Simpson seemed confused, tentative, and weary. He looked very much unlike a Godfather. He was by then sixty-five years old and was much heavier than in 1995 when he cut such a sharp figure at the “Trial of the Century.”16 The proceedings in Las Vegas inevitably brought comparisons to the trial in 1995, some of which were edged with disdain. “This was no ‘trial of the century,’” the Los Angeles Times reported from Las Vegas.17 “The bland courtroom narrative held none of the theatrics and high drama of Simpson’s mid-1990s murder trial for the deaths of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Missing this time were the public frenzy, the ‘Free O.J.’ signs and legal dream team” who won Simpson’s acquittal in 1995. “On this day,” the Times said, “there would be no rock star treatment for Simpson, who spent the lunch hour eating a simple jail bag lunch of a sandwich, piece of fruit and drink.” Simpson’s plea for a new trial was a long shot; he claimed he had been represented by incompetent counsel in 2008, when he was tried on the kidnapping and armed robbery charges. Almost predictably, Simpson’s request was turned down.18
But the “Trial of the Century” in 1995 remains a standard against which other sensational murder cases are measured and invariably found wanting. No murder trial in the United States since 1995 has matched the Simpson saga for mania, duration, infamy, and unrelenting media attention. The six-week trial of Casey Anthony in 2011 perhaps came closest. Anthony was a single mother accused of killing her two-year-old daughter, Caylee, and hiding her remains; Anthony did not report her daughter missing for thirty-one days. But no forensic evidence tied her to the girl’s death, and jurors acquitted her of murder after deliberating eleven hours. The not-guilty verdict provoked outrage, disbelief, and crude comparisons to Simpson’s acquittal. “O. J. Simpson is alive and free and living in the body of a 25-year-old sociopath named Casey Anthony,” the New York Post declared.19
The Anthony trial’s outcome returned Marcia Clark briefly to the limelight. Clark, who was the lead prosecutor at Simpson’s trial in 1995, declared that Anthony’s acquittal was “far more shocking” than the not-guilty verdicts in the Simpson case. “Why? Because Casey Anthony was no celebrity,” Clark wrote. “She never wowed the nation with her athletic prowess, shilled in countless car commercials, or entertained in film comedies. There were no racial issues” of the kind that shaped the Simpson case. “And while there was significant media coverage before the [Anthony] trial,” Clark stated, “it didn
’t come close to the storm that permeated the Simpson case. . . . Because of those factors, many predicted from the very start in the Simpson case—in fact, long before we even began to pick a jury—that it would be impossible to secure a conviction. There was no such foreshadowing” in the trial of Casey Anthony.20
The verdict prompted Alan M. Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, a high-profile lawyer who was on Simpson’s legal “Dream Team,” to point out, as if lecturing, that “a criminal trial is not a search for truth. Scientists search for truth. Philosophers search for morality. A criminal trial searches for only one result: proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” he wrote in a commentary for the Wall Street Journal. The evidence presented at the Anthony trial—as in the Simpson case in 1995—had left reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors. “In real life,” Dershowitz wrote, “. . . many murders remain unsolved, and even some that are ‘solved’ to the satisfaction of the police and prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to result in a conviction,”21 a decisive feature of both trials.
Simpson was a professional football star. But he is hardly thought of as much of a hero these days: he lost such status long ago, a casualty of his trial in 1995. He has instead become the occasional subject of ridicule and derisive humor. His lingering notoriety and his plea for a new trial inspired a Top Ten list in 2013 on the CBS Late Show with David Letterman. “Top Ten O. J. Simpson Excuses,” the list was called. Among its entries were these jibes: “Remember, I’m innocent until proven not guilty and then found liable in civil court,” and “Give me a break, I’m a widower.”22
Easily one of the most perfidious actors of 1995 was Timothy McVeigh, the mass murderer of Oklahoma City. He was executed by lethal injection in 2001 at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. McVeigh was unrepentant to the end, clinging to the delusion that bombing the federal building in Oklahoma City was a deed necessary to punish a wayward government.23 Ten years later, McVeigh’s attack was a source of perverse and indirect inspiration to Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian anti-Islamic extremist who killed seventy-seven people in a methodical, lone-wolf bombing-and-shooting rampage. As in Oklahoma City, the attacks in downtown Oslo and soon afterward at an island summer camp were at first wrongly believed to have been the acts of Islamic terrorists.24 At his trial in 2012, Breivik said that in planning the attacks he had conducted research on the powerful truck bomb McVeigh had set off in Oklahoma City.25 Breivik was sentenced to twenty-one years in prison; Norway imposes no death penalty.
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