Adventures in Correspondentland (9 page)

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.'

Observing Clinton on the campaign trail in 1992, the writer Joan Didion noticed ‘the reservoir of self-pity, the narrowing of the eyes, as in a wildlife documentary, when things did not go his way'. Now, this description even more perfectly captured Clinton, as he suddenly became Washington's latest president of prey.

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:

Nothing in your BBC training quite prepares you for that – although at least no macadamia nuts sprinkled Kenneth Starr's account, the alleged presidential insertion of which became one of the great urban myths of the entire scandal.

Of course, the public appeared a lot less shocked about the scandal than Washington, which is the main reason why Clinton survived. That and the fact that Kenneth Starr and his Republican allies continually overplayed their hand. When a videotape of Clinton's appearance before the grand jury was released in September 1998, rumours abounded beforehand that it showed the president erupting into a childlike tantrum – a display of petulance sure to harden public opinion against him and heighten calls for him to resign. (By now, 78 newspapers, including
USA Today
,
The Philadelphia Inquirer
and
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, had called for him to go.)

For the most part, however, this four-hour screening was numbingly boring, and it lives in the memory for Clinton's dissembling rather than his irritability. ‘It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is,' he said at one point during his testimony. On the question of whether they had shared ‘sexual relations', he explained that sex for him meant the giving of oral sex rather than the receiving – an almost Yuletide-like expression of sexual charity. What we did not yet know was that Hillary Clinton had been informed of the affair just three days before the president's video-testimony. Rather than tell her himself, Clinton had reportedly dispatched his lawyer, David Kendall, to do so.

Had this been more widely known at the time – this particularly juicy nugget came out in the reporter Peter Baker's book
The Breach
– Clinton, and the Democrats through association, might have fared much worse in the congressional mid-terms. As it was, Newt Gingrich's Republicans, the president's accusers, suffered a net loss of five seats. Politically embarrassed, and later personally embarrassed when revelations surfaced about his own marital infidelity, Newt Gingrich resigned his post.

We therefore witnessed a curious inversion of how scandals are supposed to play out in Washington: the Democratic president had admitted to an affair, but it was a Republican house speaker who lost his job. Throughout the whole scandal, however, there was always the feeling that the sound of shattering glass might come from the houses of those throwing the stones. Congressman Henry Hyde, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the main prosecutor of impeachment, suffered the ignominy of seeing an affair from 40 years ago splashed across the front pages. Even on the day of Clinton's impeachment in the House of Representatives, another Republican speaker, Gingrich's successor, Bob Livingston, was lanced on his own erection, and was forced to resign when
Hustler
magazine caught wind of his own adulterous frolics.

What followed in the New Year was still more bizarre: the sight of Clinton being tried by the US Senate, a body whose membership included some of Washington's most celebrated philanderers. Peering down from the press gallery, it was rather like seeing teenagers watching a movie in the lounge room with their parents and facing the squirming horror of knowing that a sex scene was about to unfold before them on screen. Never before had senators become so closely acquainted with the
mouldings and paintings on the walls and ceilings above and around them.