by Nick Bryant
With the then New York governor Mario Cuomo having declared himself a non-runner, Clinton had started the year well out in front in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Already, he had won the money primary by attracting the wealthiest donors. He had also achieved something of a landslide victory in the media primary, by winning over opinion-forming writers, such as Joe Klein of New York magazine, who wrote the first draft of the invented narrative of the campaign. But then came the moral primary, after the first bimbo eruptions started to explode on the front pages of the supermarket tabloids. They arrived not with pyrotechnics but peroxide, for the allegations of infidelity centred on Gennifer Flowers, the bottle-blonde cocktail waitress who claimed to have had a 12-year romance with Clinton. At her kiss-and-tell-all press conference, Flowers played a recording of a phone conversation with the governor in which he purportedly urged her to deny their affair. But her appearance that day lives in the memory for her embarrassed reticence in response to what is possibly the most tacky question ever uttered during a presidential campaign: ‘Did Mr Clinton use a condom?’
With even papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post lapsing into British-tabloid-style sensationalism, the governor took an immediate hit in the polls. Then he managed to temporarily right himself by appearing in his famed Sixty Minutes interview on Super Bowl Sunday, when, with Hillary sitting dutifully by his side, he implicitly acknowledged his infidelity. The draft-dodging story, however, threatened to be terminal, since, with seven out of the past eight US presidents having served in the Second World War, Americans still expected their commanders-in-chief to have worn dog tags. Even more worrying for the scandal-prone Clinton was that the aura of inevitability around his candidacy had evaporated. His response was the melancholic cry ‘I’m electable’, though a dwindling number of reporters believed him.
On the plus side, the scandal led to the publication of an anguished 1400-word letter which the then 23-year-old Clinton had written from Oxford to a colonel in Arkansas explaining his opposition to the Vietnam War. It had plumbed ‘a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America’, he said, and fuelled a belief that no government ‘rooted in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill in a war they may oppose’.
For his admirers, the letter demonstrated not only a powerful intellect but also his skill at elucidating the most complicated of issues. On the negative side of the ledger, however, it provided damning clues about the extent to which his character was so completely riven with politics even in his youth. ‘I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason,’ Clinton offered as the sole explanation for finally putting his name forward, ‘to maintain my political viability within the system.’
In those final manic weeks of the New Hampshire primary, I had actually signed up as a volunteer for the Clinton campaign, though I suspect it was less out of admiration for the governor and more because his bus left for Nashua, New Hampshire, on Saturday mornings an hour after those laid on by his main rivals, Paul Tsongas and Bob Kerrey. For my then girlfriend, who also made the trip north from Boston, it was the start of a celebrated career in the Clinton campaign, which took her all the way to a desk in the policy-shop just down the corridor from the famed War Room in Little Rock, Arkansas, where James Carville, the ‘ragin’ cajun’, barked out orders and refused to change his lucky underwear. Alas, my involvement started and ended on the same day, after withdrawing my services in a fit of self-righteous pique.
At that stage, the draft-dodging allegations had not yet come to the fore, but they were of little concern. After all, the national obsession with Vietnam, like the fixation with student pot smoking, was discouraging some of America’s most talented baby boomers from seeking high office – especially when combined with the puritanical streak of American journalists and their refusal to impose any statute of limitation on scandal. Nor was I concerned with Clinton’s mutually consensual infidelities (back then, the allegations of non-mutually-consensual infidelities with Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey had not yet surfaced). Again, I was a student of Jack Kennedy, whose presidency had come to be called ‘The Thousand Days’ but was almost as noteworthy for its Thousand Nights – or, for that matter, its Thousand Afternoons, given the hours wiled away after lunch frolicking in the White House pool, often with his secretaries ‘Fiddle’ and ‘Faddle’. Neither was it his New Democrat politics, which, with its blend of public compassion and personal responsibility, was considered a little too conservative by many Cambridge liberals, who lamented Mario Cuomo’s withdrawal.
Rather, my problem with Clinton stemmed from his handling of the case of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man whose party in 1981 had been denied entry at a dance hall at Tommy’s Old-Fashioned Home-Style Restaurant in Conway, Arkansas. Rector had responded by killing one man and then, three days later, murdering a police officer. Guilty of a double homicide, he could hardly be described as a sympathetic figure. But he was also mentally retarded, chronically so, having destroyed his frontal lobe when he raised the gun to his temple and shot himself through the forehead. Now half-lobotomised and a colossal 298 lb, Rector waited on death row in Cummins Prison, Arkansas, howling, barking like a dog and, according to his guards, laughing uncontrollably.
Adding to his misfortune, his execution coincided with the lead-up to the New Hampshire vote, at the very moment when Gennifer Flowers was hogging the headlines. For Clinton, this presented an opening. Having insisted during a candidates’ debate in New Hampshire that Democrats should ‘no longer feel guilty about protecting the innocent’, he left the campaign trail to oversee the execution. So, on 24 January 1992, after eating a last supper of fried chicken, steak and gravy, Rector was put to death by lethal injection. Famously, he had asked for his dessert, a plate of pecan pie, to be set aside for later. In the retelling of this story, however, another salient fact is commonly overlooked. Two hours before his execution, as he watched television news reports on how his final pleas for clemency had been rejected by the Arkansas governor, he announced to his attorney, ‘Gonna vote Clinton.’
For the governor, the politics of the execution were uncomplicated. As for the ethics, they did not appear to trouble him. During the 1988 presidential election, he had watched George Herbert Walker Bush bludgeon Michael Dukakis over the release on weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison of Willie Horton, a black convicted murderer, who then raped a woman. Early in his career, during the 1980 gubernatorial election, he himself had faced the same accusations of being too liberal, when the voters of Arkansas sacked him as governor – the crucible moment in his political career. Still traumatised by that defeat, Clinton needed to protect himself against the Republican charge that he was the ‘Dukakis of the South’. The execution of Ricky Ray Rector provided the perfect rebuttal.
When the voters of New Hampshire went to the polls in their first-in-the-nation primary on 18 February 1992, Clinton placed second, which was just enough to validate his ringing boast of being ‘The Comeback Kid’. Now, the kingmakers in the Democratic Party marvelled not at his invincibility but at his survivability. With the primary season heading south, Clinton triumphed in nearly all the Super Tuesday contests, which enabled him to lock up the Democratic presidential nomination.
With Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)’ blaring in the background, he then took aim at George Bush Snr, the hero of the first Gulf War, who was a second-term shoe-in when I arrived in America at the back end of 1991. Over the coming year, however, Bush became the target of a pincer movement involving Clinton and his own guardian angel, Ross Perot, the fiery Texan independent who arguably contributed more to the president’s eventual defeat. Clinton gleaned just 43 per cent of the popular vote, one of the lowest shares for a winning candidate, but Perot’s presence in a rare triangular presidential contest meant that it was enough.
As a reward for her efforts in Little Rock, my girlfriend snagged us tick
ets to the inaugural festivities, that great Arkansan carnival of big hair, Ferrari-red lipstick and ballooning evening gowns, and we jetted off to Washington to witness the commencement of the Clinton era. From his bullet-proof pulpit on the western terrace of the Capitol, Clinton tried once more to evoke Kennedy, with talk of a New Covenant modelled on the New Frontier, but he had no rhetorical answer for Kennedy’s ‘Ask what’ riff.
Instead, the most memorable moment of the day came when he let rip on his saxophone with B. B. King, which my girlfriend and I watched from the mosh pit of Clintonistas down below. On the night of Kennedy’s inauguration, after Jackie had gone to bed, JFK went on to a party thrown by the Washington columnist Joe Alsop at his Georgetown home, where he committed his first adulterous act as president with the actress Angie Dickinson. (Shamefacedly, one of my research highs as a doctoral student was to dine at the Alsop residence and be shown the very bedroom where all this unfolded.) For Clinton, that kind of presidential peccadillo was still some way off.
Now, five years on, it looked as if the Clinton era was about to come to an abrupt end. At 1.11 am on 18 January 1998, the Drudge Report raised the curtain on the first presidential scandal of the online age by revealing that Newsweek was sitting on a scoop exposing the president’s affair with a young White House intern barely older than his daughter, Chelsea.
Nothing gets Washington more excited than a rumoured resignation, and the Beltway commentariat was agog. Alarmed by the president’s cradle-snatching, George Will, the effete conservative columnist, spoke of a ‘yuck factor’, while the ABC commentator Cokie Roberts complained that he had crossed a behavioural threshold. ‘With an intern?’ she harrumphed.
On 21 January, after the story had been confirmed in the mainstream press, Tim Russert, the ever-jovial host of NBC’s Meet the Press, was unusually unsmiling: ‘The next forty-eight to seventy-two hours are going to be critical.’
The legendary White House correspondent Sam Donaldson had made up his mind already: ‘I think his presidency is numbered in days.’
Amidst the flow of other bodily secretions, the White House press corps smelt blood.
The news was jaw-dropping, though I watched it all unfold through gritted teeth, in the most literal sense of all. Just before Christmas, my dentist had noticed an ominous formation of billowing grey clouds on an X-ray of my lower-right mandible, and the removal of the tumour meant that my mouth had to be wired together for more than six weeks. Newsweek was reporting at the time that the scandal had ‘made it virtually impossible to talk to your kids about the American presidency or let them watch the news’. My problem was that I could not speak, with any fluency, to anyone.
Still, during my weeks of muzzled convalescence, the Lewinsky scandal was one of the few things that I could actually digest. By the time that I had regained the use of my mouth, I had become such an aficionado that when the Washington bureau sought to beef up its numbers I was recruited to help. Initially, I went thinking I would be there a matter of months, until Clinton was either out of trouble or out of office. Five years later, I was still covering the White House beat.
Even now, in this era of unshockability, the details of the affair have the capacity for surprise. Not so much because of the sex but because of the intimacy. No doubt Ms Lewinsky was a little brazen on the night of their first sexual encounter in November 1995 when, after enjoying some flirtatious eye contact with the president, she showed him the straps of her G-string underwear. No doubt the president was a little reckless when, later that night, he groped her in his private study, above and below her waistband, and then watched her perform oral sex while he was on the phone to a Congressman.
But for all the lurid details relayed in the 453-page Starr Report – the world’s most extensively researched and expensively produced work of pornography – it is their close rapport that continually comes through. Consider their pet names. Clinton called her ‘Sweetie’ and ‘Baby’, which admittedly sounded vaguely pornographic, but also the word ‘Dear’, which implied something altogether more tender. Lewinsky called him ‘Handsome’. Conversations extended long into the night, where they talked about their childhoods, which again spoke of emotional intimacy. Investigators counted some 50 phone conversations, not all of them for the purposes of late-night masturbation, while Clinton also left four answer-machine messages at her home, which spoke, on his part, of incautious abandon. There was even a softness about the hurried sex, with Monica Lewinsky describing how the president would lean against the door, with the cushion just above his tailbone, to relieve his aching back.
The Starr Report, under the headings ‘Emotional Attachment’, ‘Conversations and Phone Messages’, ‘Initial Sexual Encounters’ and ‘Continued Sexual Encounters’, chronicled all the particulars. But it is the sub-section on ‘Gifts’ that truly lives up to its billing, for it provides the texture of their relationship. Of 30 or so presents, Monica Lewinsky gave him ‘six neckties, an antique paperweight showing the White House, a silver tabletop holder for cigars or cigarettes, a pair of sunglasses, a casual shirt, a mug emblazoned “Santa Monica”, a frog figurine, a letter-opener depicting a frog, several novels, a humorous book of quotations and several antique books.’
The president responded with a marble bear figurine, a hatpin, two brooches (one of them gold), a throw blanket, a souvenir from Radio City Music Hall in New York, where he had celebrated his 50th birthday, a signed copy of his State of the Union address, and, most famously, a special edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, with its celebration of frowned-upon sensuality. Other than his gift of a box of chocolates, perhaps, these were not the accoutrements of a boss who looked upon his buxom young secretary solely for the purposes of physical relief. Certainly, they convinced Monica that there was something very solid about their relationship. Why, she even told a friend that the president implied they might one day be married after his term in office was over. Were Ken Starr to have granted himself a measure of poetic licence in the preparation of his report, he might even have gathered all these things together under a subsection entitled ‘Expressions of Love’.
Later, Clinton tried to put one of his presents to good use. In a note accompanying her gift of a $100 silk Zegna tie emblazoned with gold and navy-blue patterns, Monica had written, ‘When I see you wearing this tie, I’ll know that I am close to your heart.’ The president wore it at a Rose Garden gun-control rally on the very morning that Monica Lewinsky appeared before the grand jury with some potentially fatal ammunition of her own. Trading on their one-time closeness, he was trying to appeal for her discretion, if not her silence. Alas, she was too busy that day to turn on the television.
When the president himself appeared before that same grand jury, to quibble, among other things, about the meaning of the word ‘is’, his greatest lie was to claim that a warm friendship with the young intern had matured into a sexual relationship. The truth was a complete mirror image. It started with a flash of knicker elastic and ended with Whitman’s song of the body electric.
By early January 1998, Monica Lewinsky had revealed all this to federal investigators – previously, she had confided in 11 people, effectively guaranteeing that it would not remain secret for long in gossip-obsessed Washington – but Clinton remained in complete outer denial. To nervous aides, he explained that the intern had a post-adolescent crush and had even tried to blackmail him into having sex. To the public, he also professed his innocence. ‘Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night,’ he said with the First Lady at his side five days after the scandal broke – or, more pertinently, 16 days after he had last spoken to his former lover. ‘But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. 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. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.’
Mainly for reasons of taste and decency, the scandal threw up some tricky editorial dilemmas for the BBC suits in London involving what we could say and when we could say it. Mindful of the sensibilities of our viewers and listeners, they eventually decided that the phrase ‘performed a sex act’ would have to suffice for our early-morning audiences, while ‘oral sex’ was permissible after the nine o’clock watershed. As for the famed blue dress, the unwashed garment that was the sole reason that Clinton ever confessed to the affair, our choice of wording was positively euphemistic: it had been soiled by ‘the president’s DNA’.
All of these issues were compounded by the immediacy of round-the-clock news. When the Starr Report was published in all its titillating minutiae, correspondents naturally wanted to relay its contents as quickly as possible. But briefly consider how you would respond to being confronted by the following sentences, with a live microphone capturing your every word and an audience of tens of thousands hanging on them at home:
…[S]he performed oral sex on the president on nine occasions. On all nine of those occasions, the president fondled and kissed her bare breasts. He touched her genitals, both through her underwear and directly, bringing her to orgasm on two occasions. On one occasion, the president inserted a cigar into her vagina. On another occasion, she and the president had brief genital-to-genital contact.
