<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Published in the October 2013 80th Anniversary issue What I remember most is that it was just coming on dawn. I was in Arizona, on assignment for this magazine to write about John McCain, who was just gearing up for his first presidential run in 2000. I was staying in Phoenix and I was meeting him that morning in Tucson. There was an orange mantle on the mountains behind me to the east. The light was just coming up, and I was driving through the softening night, listening to some all-news radio station and wondering what in the hell had gone on while I slept. It was a Monday morning, January 19, 1998. The radio signal kept rising and falling, losing strength and gaining it again. I caught the news only in snatches. The president of the United States was accused of having been involved in a sexual affair with a young woman named Monica Lewinsky. We knew about it this morning because Newsweek had been preparing to run a story about it, but the magazine had held off; later we learned from the story&amp;#039;s author, Michael Isikoff, and from a number of other sources, that there had been a considerable amount of what former Watergate conspirator Donald Segretti would call &amp;quot;ratfucking&amp;quot; involved in boosting the story into the mainstream. But this morning, not even that made sense. The story of the affair was being credited not to Newsweek but to something called the Drudge Report, which had ferreted out the details of the story while ostensibly writing about the brawl that had broken out at the magazine over publishing it. Newsweek, it appeared, had been scooped on its own scoop, and by something of which I had never heard in my life. For the previous five years, I&amp;#039;d followed more closely than most people, I think, the proliferation of ginned-up scandals that had launched themselves almost from the moment Bill Clinton took his hand off the Bible. I had spent an entire summer watching congressional hearings into the Whitewater land deal and come away more confused about what actually had happened than I&amp;#039;d been before. I didn&amp;#039;t think Hillary Clinton (or anyone else) had had poor Vince Foster murdered, but apparently enough people did that Congress and two special prosecutors had, unbelievably, looked into the case. I never quite figured out what the whole thing with the White House Travel Office was supposed to be about. What I did know is that these purported scandals came hard after one another, and with increasing speed. The news cycle was becoming both faster and endless. There was a sense of time gone reckless, of judgment left gasping. It was becoming impossible to keep up. And now, on this chilly dawn in the desert, here came news of the least probable scandal of them all. I spent the day with McCain, driving from one personal appearance to another. It had been almost three decades since I&amp;#039;d spent any time with a politician, and the first important difference I noticed was cell phones. There were four of them, and the interior of the car rang like a carillon all morning. The media was openly speculating that the presidency of Bill Clinton now could be measured in days, if not hours. The government seemed to be coming apart at warp speed. I was still trying to figure out what in God&amp;#039;s name the Drudge Report was. At one point, McCain looked at me and asked, &amp;quot;What do you think I should say?&amp;quot; This was quite a moment. An influential senator whom I&amp;#039;d known for approximately thirty-five minutes had asked me for advice on what his public stance should be as regards the issue of the president&amp;#039;s doing the hired help. &amp;quot;I think,&amp;quot; McCain said, answering his own question, &amp;quot;that I should say that we have to wait until all the facts are in.&amp;quot; I think that&amp;#039;s a hell of an answer, I told him. The mountains of Arizona are tamed by the urban sprawl that carpets the valleys beneath them. As McCain and I drove around Tucson, ringed by docile peaks, what neither one of us knew was that, far away, deep in another scarred range of broken mountains, in a place called Khost in eastern Afghanistan, the jumped-up son of a Saudi millionaire was preparing himself for a press conference. He would be announcing his latest international venture. It would be called the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders. His name was Osama bin Laden; 1998 was going to be a very big year for him. And for fellatio, too.  Isaac Newton is still smarter than most of us. In 1687, he proposed his Second Law of Motion, in which he explained that acceleration is possible only if the object to be accelerated is acted upon by what he called a &amp;quot;net&amp;quot; or an &amp;quot;unbalanced force.&amp;quot; That is what happened to the country, and its government, in 1998. It was the beginning of an accelerated age that has not yet exhausted itself. The events of the year were buffeted by unbalanced forces. The news business was just beginning to speed up owing to the effects of the Internet. Events seemed to blur, one into the other, the way the landscape will from the windows of a speeding train. The sped-up news cycle became an unbalanced force driving the government and the people in it. In the midst of an accelerated reality, there is a danger that the acceleration itself will effectively become the reality for some of the people in it, and when the actual reality reasserts itself, it will do so harshly and with a considerable impact, like a wall to a speeding train. It was a year of unbalanced forces, both here and abroad. The acceleration took place along two principal tracks: The very strange and compelling pursuit of Bill Clinton that culminated in only the second impeachment of a president in the country&amp;#039;s history, and Clinton&amp;#039;s attempt while that pursuit was going on to actually be president \u2014 most notably, in the recognition by him and by his administration that Osama bin Laden was a profound threat to the national security of the United States. The absurd was the unbalanced force that accelerated all the events, even the deadly serious ones. For the rest of the country, holding on for dear life and watching as if out the window of that speeding train, events passed so quickly that they blurred, one into another. And now, fifteen years after the fact, when the past has slowed down in comparison to an accelerated present that already seems to be the future, we can look back and realize that a year of unbalanced forces can appear at the time to be comic but, in retrospect, look like nothing more than an epic of insupportable tragedy born of lost opportunities that passed too quickly. At about 10:30 on the morning of August 7, 1998, in Nairobi in Kenya, a truck bomb detonated and blew off the entire back side of the American embassy in that country. A building next door collapsed, killing, among other people, several classes of secretarial students. About nine minutes later, in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, another truck bomb went off outside the U. S. embassy in that country. As Steve Coll points out in Ghost Wars, his excellent history of the largely covert war between the United States and Osama bin Laden&amp;#039;s Al Qaeda network, the impact of this bomb was partially muffled by a water truck that had been parked between the truck containing the bomb and the embassy building. (The water truck got blown three stories high.) There were 224 people killed, and well over 4,000 injured, by the two blasts, the overwhelming majority of them in the Kenyan attack. In this country, most people heard the words &amp;quot;Al Qaeda&amp;quot; for the first time. Suddenly, Osama bin Laden, whose renown to this point had been limited to the whispery corridors of various intelligence establishments, was the most famous terrorist in the world. But throughout the year, as the seemingly preposterous story of the president and the intern dominated coverage in this country, the CIA had been working on a complicated plan to capture bin Laden at a base called Tarnak Farms in Afghanistan. When CIA director George Tenet presented the plan to the White House at the end of May, it was shelved due to the possibility of heavy civilian casualties in the raid and because, ultimately, the raid was a direct attack on the Tarnak compound, over open ground, and it looked for all the world like it might turn out to be Pickett&amp;#039;s Charge transplanted onto an Afghan plain. In August, when the bombs went off in Kenya and Tanzania, the recriminations within the intelligence community were swift and harsh. So, too, was the president&amp;#039;s response. On August 20, he ordered cruise missiles launched at an Afghan training camp in Khost, where it was thought bin Laden might be, and at an industrial facility in the Sudan, which was said to be a chemical-weapons facility but turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory. The latter was a criminal blunder. The former was not. It was, in fact, the last great opportunity to stop Osama bin Laden before he changed September 11 forever. Lawrence Wright, in The Looming Tower, his history of Al Qaeda, describes what happened that night: &amp;quot;Bin Laden had made the decision to go to Khost only the night before,&amp;quot; he writes. &amp;quot;But as he and his companions were driving through Vardak province, they happened to pause at a crossroads. &amp;#039;Where do you think, my friends, we should go,&amp;#039; bin Laden asked. &amp;#039;Khost or Kabul?&amp;#039; His bodyguard and others voted for Kabul, where they could visit friends. &amp;#039;Then, with God&amp;#039;s help, let us go to Kabul,&amp;#039; bin Laden decreed \u2014 a decision that may have saved his life.&amp;quot; But the acceleration blurred everything, and the acceleration became the reality itself, with its own history and its own physical laws, until people began treating the acceleration as the reality. A contemporary New York Times analysis demonstrates this phenomenon conclusively: &amp;quot;A president who evaded the draft as a young man and has avoided the use of force through most of his presidency has now launched his second series of attacks in recent months. The first came last August when Mr. Clinton ordered the bombing of targets in Afghanistan and the Sudan in retaliation for the bombing of American embassies in East Africa. The attacks in Afghanistan and the Sudan came just three days after Mr. Clinton had gone on national television to acknowledge that he had had an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky. &amp;#039;Wag the Dog&amp;#039; theories were rampant. A disturbing, surreal haze covers nearly every development now. Every act and every utterance has multiple potential meanings. The right wing of the Republican party clearly is out to destroy Mr. Clinton.&amp;quot; The rock-solid historical evidence is that by a fluke, Osama bin Laden survived the cruise-missile attack sent to kill him. Over time, that would become the only one of the &amp;quot;multiple meanings&amp;quot; that really mattered. However, for nobody was the acceleration the reality more than for the Republicans who remained in pursuit of the president. This was because in that same month, in August of 1998, Kenneth Starr finally ran Bill Clinton to ground. On August 17, three days before the missiles flew, the president admitted to a grand jury \u2014 and, later that evening, on television, to the country at large \u2014 that he indeed had had a sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky. Almost immediately, the calls for his resignation began and the notion of impeaching him over the events surrounding the investigation of his affair took on vivid life. There was a conspicuous lack of support for him in the Congress, even among Democrats. (The odd thing, and something that later would come to be reckoned as the president&amp;#039;s salvation, was that his appearance on television, while roundly condemned by the political media, was accepted as a heartfelt apology by the general public.) The White House called around looking for somebody \u2014 anybody \u2014 who would defend the president on television. Finally, they reached Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who was vacationing at the time in Provincetown. &amp;quot;Once it became clear that, yes, the president had gotten a blowjob, my view was that he was going to be impeached,&amp;quot; Frank recalls. &amp;quot;The early votes in the House, the raw data, showed him with about 60 votes, and 350 against. So the day the grand-jury testimony came out, I was down in Provincetown, and the White House had been called by all the networks, and they said they didn&amp;#039;t want to respond. The networks said, Well, we need someone to present your side, so the White House called me. The next thing I knew, I was getting calls from all the networks and CNN. So I put on a jacket and a white shirt and a tie over a pair of shorts, and they sent the trucks to me. I was the only member of Congress that the White House asked who was willing to do it, although I have to say that defending oral sex in Provincetown is not the hardest thing in the world.&amp;quot; Frank looked on in something like awe as the Republicans drove their inquiries into the president&amp;#039;s affair beyond what he saw as the country&amp;#039;s capacity either to keep up or to very much care about the whole business after a while. (In this, there was a foreshadowing of their destructive impulse to engage in a culture of ginned-up &amp;quot;scandals&amp;quot; against Barack Obama rather than govern.) They blew right through the possibility of censuring Clinton, which might have garnered four hundred votes in the House, and which had been an option in almost every other impeachment proceeding against a federal official in history. (It was also the primary objective of one of the new online activist gatherings, which were just then coming into being, called &amp;quot;Censure and Move On,&amp;quot; which later would shorten its name to MoveOn.org.) It started, Barney Frank believes, in the summer of 1998. &amp;quot;It actually was the first sign of the right wing&amp;#039;s driving the train and taking them into disaster,&amp;quot; Frank explains. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think Henry Hyde wanted to do it. He was riding the tiger and he couldn&amp;#039;t get off. I don&amp;#039;t think a lot of them wanted to do it. They had their people out in the country so stoked that they couldn&amp;#039;t stop. It was one of the first examples of the right wing grabbing control and abandoning political reality.&amp;quot; The acceleration increased, and nothing was truly under control, in Washington or in the hills of western Asia. And in the streets of cities throughout the Islamic world, as Lawrence Wright reports, new signs were seen. NO WAR FOR MONICA, they read. Finally, Republican congressmen and Islamic radicals \u2014 unbalanced forces both \u2014 had something in common. But in all the sweaty pursuit of Clinton by Starr and the Republicans in 1998, and for all the talk of wagging dogs and of the maddening ill discipline of an enormously talented political figure, there was not then nor has there been since any serious contemplation of the danger these hideous political games put the world in. It is a fact that in 1998, the American government possessed the best sustained intelligence on Osama bin Laden&amp;#039;s movements, activities, and associations that it ever would (until the operation that resulted in his burial at sea). It is a fact that for the White House \u2014 which two years before had created the bin Laden Unit at the CIA \u2014 the Al Qaeda leader was at least a minor obsession. It is also a fact that several of the seminal events in both the bin Laden and Lewinsky stories coincided, and each time during that calendar year that Clinton moved to use the might of the United States military to kill bin Laden, the action was denounced in both houses of Congress as an illegitimate use of American power, meant to cover for the president&amp;#039;s misconduct. No one ever asked the compelling question: In its zeal, might Congress just be crippling a president, and preventing him from defending the United States of America? After all, had we put a stop to Osama bin Laden in 1998, it is safe to say that history might well have spun off in a much different direction, and we&amp;#039;d be living in a much different world. But in 1998, we had all begun to go too fast to care about any of that.     On September 11, 1998, one of the last September 11th&amp;#039;s that would be completely normal, I was sitting in a small bar in the airport in Shreveport, Louisiana, drinking the second of several indolent afternoon beers and waiting for my plane back home. The TV set above the bar was tuned to CNN, and Candy Crowley was reading, as best she could and propriety allowed, the report compiled by Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr concerning the only case he had left against Bill Clinton \u2014 namely, the sexual affair between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. The report was precise. The report was graphic. The report was the single most bizarre government document ever produced. &amp;quot;According to Ms. Lewinsky, she performed oral sex on the president on nine occasions\u2026. 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.&amp;quot; A crowd gathered quickly, jamming the little concourse saloon far beyond what must have been its legal capacity. The closed-captioning was on, and quite a few words scrolled by that have not often scrolled by on a news program, before or since. People stared, silent and, yes, it must be said, openmouthed. I thought back to that morning in the desert almost nine months earlier. I knew now what the Drudge Report was. I had a fairly good idea of what was going on in this, the least likely scandal of them all. It was easier to understand than Whitewater, God knows, and more obviously a problem than the unfathomable uproar over the travel office. I didn&amp;#039;t know what was going on in Afghanistan, nor did many of the other people in the bar. The last most of us had heard about the place, the Russians were still raising hell there. A cigar? &amp;quot;Jesus,&amp;quot; somebody behind me said. &amp;quot;How the hell did the country get to this place?&amp;quot; The pursuit of Bill Clinton, who was himself pursuing Osama bin Laden, fell into a burlesque after the midterm elections of 1998. Newt Gingrich, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, had said that he would give a speech on the moral turpitude of Bill Clinton every day until the elections were held. At the last minute, Gingrich spent millions of Republican-party money on an ad campaign specifically attacking Clinton over the scandal. However, in a considerable break with political tradition, which dictated that the party out of the White House always does well in midterm elections, especially in the second term, the Republicans got kicked around the block by a party led by the man they were preparing to impeach. They actually lost five seats in the House of Representatives, leaving them with a thin eleven-vote majority when the next Congress would convene in January. Even Henry Hyde, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee that would vote on the articles of impeachment, thought that the election results were directly tied to what the country had come to believe was a Republican obsession with Bill Clinton&amp;#039;s penis and where it had been. Surely, many people in Washington thought, there was no way that the Republicans would proceed with impeachment proceedings in a lame-duck Congress. Many people in Washington were wrong. The acceleration was still increasing. The unbalanced forces driving it were still irresistible, and they were still growing. The deputy of the disgraced Gingrich, now-felon Tom DeLay of Texas, hoisted impeachment onto his back. The reprobate from Sugar Land had long wanted to impeach Clinton for something, and with Republican ownership of Congress, how could they not? &amp;quot;The most amazing thing I had to report back to my caucus was what happened on the day after the elections in 1998,&amp;quot; says Julian Epstein, who then was the minority chief counsel for the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, which included Barney Frank. &amp;quot;I went to see the general counsel and I asked him if the elections had given us a way out. But they were going full speed ahead. The elections hadn&amp;#039;t changed their plans one bit. I was very surprised.&amp;quot; Throughout the fall of 1998, the Democrats used the reckless momentum of the Republicans to very good advantage, even as the actual impeachment proceedings ground on toward fruition. In November, Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr came before the committee, and Barney Frank elicited from Starr that all the other purported scandals that had dogged the Clinton administration from its beginning \u2014 which, after all, were the things that Starr had been intended to investigate \u2014 were the purest moonshine. Frank then suggested that it might have been nice had Starr admitted all that before the elections, but he succeeded in demonstrating that the Lewinsky scandal, of which the public had demonstrated its exhaustion, was all that Starr and the Republicans had left. Nevertheless, on December 19, the House of Representatives approved two of the four articles of impeachment that had been proposed by the Judiciary Committee and Bill Clinton joined Andrew Johnson to become one of only two presidents ever to be impeached by the House. Even that news was overcome by events; that same day, as Clinton was being impeached over the events surrounding his affair with Monica Lewinsky, Speaker of the House\u2013designate Bob Livingston of Louisiana, who was to have replaced Gingrich, who&amp;#039;d been defenestrated after the election debacle, got up in the chamber and announced that he&amp;#039;d also had an extramarital affair and would be resigning immediately. The comic opera was nearly complete. Three days earlier, at the height of the debate over his impeachment, Clinton had launched cruise-missile strikes into Iraq. &amp;quot;Never underestimate,&amp;quot; said Republican Gerald Solomon of New York, &amp;quot;a desperate president.&amp;quot; At least for me, the acceleration began in the hours before dawn as I drove through the Arizona desert to meet John McCain. Things moved so fast, and the unbalanced forces grew so strong, that you never noticed the turning points when they came. They are obvious only now in retrospect, and you have to look quickly or you&amp;#039;ll miss them. A lot of things we take for granted in our politics now had their rough beginnings in 1998. Ratfucking \u2014 or, more politely, opposition research \u2014 went far beyond Donald Segretti&amp;#039;s pranks. The campaign against Bill Clinton that began with the Richard Mellon Scaife\u2013financed investigation into his personal life, continued with a cavalcade of phony scandals, and ended with impeachment was as far beyond writing phony letters on Muskie-campaign stationery as the Internet is from lawn signs. The media now means almost anything you want it to mean; there are now literally millions of Drudge Reports, some mainstream and some decidedly not, and all of them helping to speed the dissemination of information beyond the power of reason or discernment. That has led to the argument culture that has come to dominate political debate. &amp;quot;Polarization&amp;quot; in the sense that most of the people decrying it define it began when Bill Clinton was elected and became a permanent fixture in our politics during 1998. &amp;quot;Part if it was that we had people on the Judiciary Committee who loved the limelight,&amp;quot; explains Julian Epstein, himself a fixture now on cable-news programs. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s when Moveon was born. The Internet was coming of age. It was the first real grassroots organizing by Internet. &amp;quot;As I said, some of the Republicans really liked the fact that they were in the limelight and they were getting a lot of grassroots reinforcement. Cable TV and the Internet were starting. You had listservs. The fact was that cable news was getting immediate ratings, so they also had an outlet to get on TV. That polarized things. It was partisanship on steroids at that time. And impeachment was the stage where all these factors came to a head.&amp;quot; It was the hard stuff, the obscure stuff, that was lost as the accelerated age dawned. Men plotting in distant caves were not good television. They did not move the ratings needle, or get your new Web site hits, or titillate the audience with tales of illicit foozling in sacred hallways. It is impossible now to wonder, if Monica Lewinsky never had come to the White House, or if the unbalanced forces driving her story had not found as much traction as they did, whether the original World Trade Center might not still be standing. What if bin Laden had overruled his aides and gone on to Khost, instead of Kabul, there to meet a cruise missile with his name on it? What if they had stormed Tarnak Farms and hauled him into a New York federal courtroom, the way they did several of his accomplices in the embassy bombings, at roughly the same time Kenneth Starr was telling the House of Representatives about orgasms? You used to be able to notice when history pivoted. You could feel the fearsome momentum of it. So much changed in 1998 without us ever turning our heads to notice. It is now fifteen years later, and Monica Lewinsky has turned forty. The violence goes on in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and in other places, all of it spawned in response to the actions of the man who ensured that September 11, 1998, with CNN telling us about strategically placed cigars, actually would be one of the last September 11th&amp;#039;s that we would remember as being normal, the man we could neither kill nor capture back in 1998. He eventually was killed on the orders of another Democratic president who also found himself beset at home by phantom scandals \u2014 first by doubts about the place of his birth and then by accusations that he is simultaneously a socialist, a communist, and a fascist, and then by Benghazi and the IRS. Isaac Newton is still smarter than all of us. It was in 1998 that the acceleration began. It has only increased, the unbalanced forces working on the government, and the country, and the events of the day, only growing in both numbers and in strength. The present even more seems already to be the future, and the past, when we can see it at all, recedes into the distance faster than it ever has, faster than thought, faster certainly than regret. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/interviews/a24789/1998-bill-clinton-1013/>