How impeachment became the main character in US Politics
It was early February 1998, and the British press pack was in the Oval Office with President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair. The Northern Ireland negotiations had reached a hyper delicate stage, and what turned out to be the Good Friday Agreement was just weeks away.
Clinton played a key role leaning on the nationalists, republicans, unionists and loyalists, but nobody in the West Wing that day was interested in the peace process. We were in Washington in the immediate aftermath of the president’s infamous statement live on camera in the nearby Roosevelt room: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”.
His angry words still hung in the air, and they had gripped the world’s attention. We knew that we had to ask him about the scandal, even though it was, strictly speaking, none of our business. “Who’s going to do it?” Michael Brunson of ITN whispered to me, “You” I replied heroically, “You’re senior”. And so he did, coming up with some weasely form of words about the responsibility of leaders.
Clinton, of course, knew exactly what we were up to and engaged in a direct conversation with us for the next few minutes. However, the next day, he left Tony Blair to field all such questions at their formal news conference and was overheard muttering “I owe you one,” as they left the podium.
These memories were rekindled as I watched the opening two episodes of Impeachment: American Crime Story, the new FX ten-part drama series now showing on BBC2. Centred around the relationship between the President and Monica Lewinsky when she was a White House intern in 1995 and 1996, it is yet to get to the juicy bits – the spattered blue dress, the cigar and that denial – but it surely will.
The series is a loving recreation of “the Nation’s Capital” at that time – from the big hair to the Pentagon City shopping mall to lonely working girl TV dinners, dieting and male entitlement. It tries too hard with verisimilitude in the casting.
Great efforts were expended on prosthetic make-up, especially false noses; the actor’s Clive Owen and Annaleigh Ashford certainly don’t look like themselves, unfortunately, they don’t look much like Bill Clinton and Paula Jones either. Most bafflingly, Beanie Feldstein gives a sympathetic performance but entirely lacks Monica Lewinsky’s allure.
The previous two series, The Assassination of Gianni Versace and The People v O.J. Simpson, were American Crime Stories, even if OJ was found not guilty of murdering Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. Clinton was charged “with high crimes and misdemeanours” but there was no crime. The Senate did not convict him. In concentrating on the titillation and the personal relationships the series misses a bigger story.
Before 1998 only one President, Andrew Jackson had been impeached in 1868, but in the past 23 years, the US Congress has reached for the weapon three times, against Bill Clinton and against Donald Trump twice. Either the United States has been extraordinarily unlucky in its recent choice of presidents or something has gone badly wrong with the way Americans do politics or perhaps both.
It is worth noting though, that on all four occasions, there were not two-thirds of Senators prepared to vote guilty in the trial after simple majorities in the lower House of Representatives voted to impeach.
It is hard not to feel sorry for Lewinsky who has described herself as “the most humiliated woman in the world”. She never wanted her private relationship with Clinton, when she was 22 and he 44, to be made public but it has defined her life ever since. Now aged 48 she has never been able to put her notoriety behind her in spite of sincere efforts.
She has not married or had children as she had hoped. Instead, she has had to return to the story. She moved to England and studied Psychology at the London School of Economics. Getting nowhere in her life, she then wrote a widely praised Vanity Fair article entitled “Shame and Survival” in 2014.
Now in the wake of the #MeToo exposés her experiences are being looked at in a different light. She was involved in the production of Impeachment and is the executive producer of an HBO documentary 15 Minutes of Shame.
The writer Jeff Toobin, whose books were the basis for both the OJ and Monica series was less fortunate. He was dropped by The New Yorker and CNN after being seen masturbating during an editorial meeting on Zoom and has had nothing to do with the development of the new series.
Sophie Gilbert, a contributor to The Atlantic magazine, has watched Impeachment all the way to episode 7 and makes the same complaint as me. She writes: “It’s a scattered, frivolous confrontation with history that neglects the more crucial parts of the Clinton impeachment: the extra-legal manipulation of power, the seeding of a thousand conspiracy theories that still bloom today, the extraordinary influence of a handful of unelected people who know how to work the media to their own advantage.”
The conservative activists and lawyers out to get Clinton, whether he’d done anything wrong or not, are sketched in. The characters of Linda Tripp, the older woman who betrayed Monica’s confidences, the polemicist Anne Coulter and the book agent Lucianne Goldberg play the part of the three witches, and Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek journalist, doesn’t come off much better.
But their motivations or seemingly limitless resources are never examined in the script. They are cardboard villains, not the real-life ruthless forces who continue to operate today.
As we see briefly in the series, the Clinton impeachment began with an inquiry into Whitewater, an Arizona property deal in which no wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton was ever found. Then fuelled by the suicide of Vince Foster, a White House lawyer, the indictment by the Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr expanded to take in Clinton’s sex life. Impeachment makes for great television but should it ever have happened?
Was Mrs Clinton on to something when she accused Starr of being “politically motivated” and part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy”? There was concerted action in the opposite direction in the case of Trump’s two impeachments. There was certainly a case to answer in the first impeachment when the President was accused of threatening to withdraw US aid from Ukraine unless President Zelensky came up with dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Given its partisan flavour during an election campaign, the Democrat-dominated House may still have been unwise to vote for it. No such reservation can be made about the second impeachment on charges of “incitement to insurrection” by a President who still refuses to accept that he lost the 2020 election and who urged supporters to march on the Capitol on 6 January, the day it was ransacked.
On both occasions, Republican Senators voted solidly against impeaching Trump.
Impeachment, which is the severest and most disruptive sanction of a US President, risks becoming a routine tool in America’s partisan politics.
Some Republicans are already talking about impeaching Joe Biden. Even if they don’t succeed the process would blur the stain on Donald Trump who seems set to be their 2024 Presidential nominee.
Senator Linsey Graham has stated publicly that Biden should be impeached for “Dereliction of Duty” because of conditions on the US Mexican border. Half a dozen members of the House Freedom Caucus have already drawn up articles of impeachment against Biden and other Administration members over the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
If, as many predict, the Republicans were to win back control of the House of Representatives in next year’s mid-term elections, there is a real chance that an impeachment of Biden will be launched, on any charges that can be scrambled together.
It wouldn’t matter if the Senate backed it or not, Biden, the Democratic president and likely 2024 candidate, would be politically crippled nonetheless.
Forget the cheap thrills and the 1990s nostalgia, partisan abuse of the impeachment process is what really matters about the story of “that woman, Miss Lewinsky”.