The Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair: Notes on a scandal

IT WAS the summer of scandal, when the headlines brought us a salacious farrago of presidential semen stains, interestingly deployed cigars in the Oval Office and treacherously taped phone calls; the summer when the disclosures of a 22-year-old White House intern almost brought down the presidency of the most powerful nation on Earth.

Ten years ago this week, President William Jefferson Clinton agreed to testify voluntarily before the Senate. The following day, 30 July, Monica Lewinsky handed over to the prosecutors her now infamous blue dress bearing semen stains she alleged were physical evidence of her sexual relationship with the president. Tests indicated that the semen's genetic markers matched Clinton's DNA and on 17 August, 1998, having become the first US president in office to testify before a grand jury investigating his conduct, he admitted having had an "inappropriate relationship".

In a televised address to the American people, he declared: "Indeed I did have a relationship with Ms Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong."

In hindsight, perhaps the most astonishing thing about the whole sorry affair was the fact that Clinton weathered it. While the scandal weakened his second term in the White House, he remained surprisingly popular among all but the Christian right, while his impeachment was regarded by many as a witch-hunt. In the decade since his humiliation, with the proliferation of internet gossip websites, celebrity magazines and reality TV, one may be forgiven for wondering whether bad behaviour in the public eye may even advance a political career, rather than jeopardise it.

Clinton's admissions were the climax of a four-year investigation by independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr, initially into the Whitewater land transactions made by Clinton and his wife Hillary when he was governor of Arkansas, but which spilled spectacularly over into the president's personal life.

The results of Starr's investigation were made public in a 445-page report on 11 September and the year would end with Clinton becoming only the second president in American history to face an impeachment trial in the Senate. He refused to resign, however, and the following February senators voted to acquit him of the two impeachment charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

That summer of 98, the trial prompted daily headlines and a surfeit of off-colour jokes as Lewinsky recounted her alleged nine sexual encounters with the president in the Oval Office – some of them while the first lady was elsewhere in the White House. Publicly, Hillary Clinton stood by her man, initially claiming the allegations were part of "a vast, right-wing conspiracy". Privately, however, once Bill had admitted the affair to her, she was outraged, recalling in her 2003 memoir, Living History, her reaction: "I could hardly breathe… gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him, 'What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?'"

Earlier this year, when running head-to-head with Barack Obama in the presidential nomination contest, she reiterated on television the pain and embarrassment the affair had caused her, although adding that she never doubted her husband's love for her.

The couple's daughter, Chelsea, hasn't been immune from the lingering fall-out of "Monicagate". Campaigning for her mother on the college campus circuit in March, she visibly bristled when a questioner at Butler University, Indianapolis, asked whether Hillary's credibility had been damaged by the Lewinsky affair: "Wow," she responded. "You're the first person that's asked me that in maybe 70 colleges… and I do not think that's any of your business."

Monica Lewinsky had arrived at the White House in June 1995, as an unpaid intern in the office of the chief of staff, Leon Panetta. Her sexual encounters with Clinton started a few months later, and the following spring she was moved to a job in the Pentagon – according to the then deputy chief of staff, Evelyn Lieberman, because of "inappropriate and immature behaviour" and a lack of attention to her work. It was at the Pentagon that Lewinsky met a seasoned government worker, Linda Tripp, to whom she confided details of her liaisons with the president. But Tripp taped their telephone conversations, later claiming she feared she might be pressurised to lie about the president's extramarital affairs. When Lewinsky was called to give evidence in the case of Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee suing Clinton for sexual harassment during his tenure as governor, thousands of pages of these transcribed tapes spooled into a chronicle of deceit and betrayal which threatened to unravel the presidency.

Since then, Lewinsky has co-written, with author Andrew Morton, her version of the affair, expressing her dismay at Clinton's account. "He talked about it as though I had laid it all out there for the taking," she wrote. "I was the buffet and he just couldn't resist the dessert. That's not how it was. This was a mutual relationship, mutual on all levels."

After a brief period hosting a reality TV show and capitalising on her hobby of knitting to market "Real Monica" handbags, she slipped out of public life and in 2006 graduated from the London School of Economics with a masters in social psychology. She was reported to be job-hunting in London. Earlier this year, during Hillary Clinton's campaign to lead the Democrats, her former publicist stated that Monica was "getting on with her life" and wished to remain as anonymous as possible: "If she comes out now and says anything, if Hillary loses they will blame her..."

Monica's betrayer, Linda Tripp, now runs a Christmas shop in Virginia. Kenneth Starr is now dean of Pepperdine University School of Law in California.

Ten years on, the Clinton-Lewinsky case remains a byword for politically volatile scandal, but in these gossip-led times have we become more inured to the peccadilloes of public figures?

PR guru Max Clifford believes attitudes have changed, but only to an extent. "Are we more tolerant? Yes. Are we less easily shocked? Yes. But can a sex scandal still be damaging to a major politician? Very much so.

"It depends on how the person was perceived. It would have done John Major (who in 2002 admitted to a past affair with Edwina Currie] a lot of harm, because he was lecturing us on family values. It would have been the same if Tony Blair had been seen to have had an affair – close-knit family man and all that. But it wouldn't have done John Prescott any harm, (partly] because he wasn't an international representative of his country."

Dr Philip Drake of Stirling University's department of film, media and journalism, currently co-editing an edition of the journal Cultural Politics on the cult of celebrity, reckons there is greater public acceptance of certain types of scandal, such as extra-marital affairs.

"There is also an awareness of how scandal is managed for PR purposes," says Drake, "and a certain distrust of this and how it keeps celebrities in the news, as with Kate Moss, Amy Winehouse and so on. As the line between celebrities and politicians becomes less marked, so the private lives of politicians are deemed to be newsworthy.

"The difference today is that the media are able to report such matters as being 'in the public interest'."

What Drake finds interesting about the Clinton case is the besmirched president's continuing popularity. "The so-called shock of the US 'moral majority' was orchestrated through the Christian Right and (Clinton's] opponents, such as Kenneth Starr, but never reflected the views of any majority. Clinton remained incredibly popular… his biggest error was lying about the affair and (pretending] oral sex did not count. This caused most damage – not the affair itself."

Drake isn't saying that scandal can actually promote a political career, but he concedes it can make dull politicians more interesting. "Most people are quite sensible and believe politicians are fallible like everyone else, except when they deny allegations or are hypocritical."

Such attitudes, he adds, can be culturally specific: "French politicians have long taken lovers and this is not deemed newsworthy. Sarkozy has certainly become a greater celebrity with Carla Bruni than with his previous wife."