The REDEMPTION of MONICA LEWINSKY
‘I was made a scapegoat to protect the president’
Twenty-five years ago, Bill Clinton was re-elected as President of the United States, defeating Bob Dole in a landslide. He had survived the missteps and controversies of his first term and the loss of Congress to the Republicans in 1994.
The economy was strong. America was at peace. Clinton, a man of prodigious energy, intellect and ambition, seemed well placed to become one of the more consequential US presidents. Except that he was also a man of prodigious appetites – for sex as well as food.
Like other journalists based in Washington DC at that time, I was well aware of Clinton’s past womanising. His 1992 presidential campaign had been rocked when Gennifer Flowers, a cabaret singer, claimed to have had a long affair with him when he was governor of Arkansas. In 1993, Arkansas state troopers said they had procured women for him during his governorship. He had himself admitted “causing pain in my marriage”. His wife Hillary once described him as “a hard dog to keep on the porch”.
What none of us suspected was that the 49-year-old president had been conducting a reckless affair inside the White House with a 22-year-old intern just out of college and not much older than his daughter Chelsea.
When the Monica Lewinsky scandal finally erupted 14 months after Clinton’s re-election, his presidency was very nearly destroyed and the course of US politics was changed forever.
The scandal dominated Clinton’s second term. It contributed to Vice President Al Gore’s wafer-thin defeat by George W. Bush in the presidential election of 2000, and thus to Bush’s disastrous military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. It fuelled the bitter partisan warfare that has since crippled America, and almost certainly played a role in Hillary Clinton’s narrow defeat by Donald Trump in 2016.
By choosing to brazen out the scandal instead of resigning, Clinton also set an example that has since been followed by numerous other politicians – among them Trump, former New York governor Andrew
