Original subtitles

Buoyed by his convincing reelection,

Bill Clinton sailed confidently into his second term.

The economy was booming, lifting millions of people

into better jobs, better homes and better lives.

We have much to be thankful for.

With four years of growth,

we have won back the basic strength of our economy.

With crime and welfare rolls declining,

we are winning back our optimism,

the enduring faith that we can master any difficulty.

Around the world,

American prestige and power had never been higher.

Even Clinton's longing to "repair the breach"

with Republicans seemed possible.

It was two different worlds.

1997, beginning of Bill Clinton's second term,

was totally different from the first term.

It was American politics the way it should be.

A Republican Congress working with the Democratic president,

trying to find areas they would agree on,

the hatred toward Bill Clinton was gone.

The hatred toward Hillary Clinton was gone.

Things had finally quieted down.

But in Bill Clinton's life,

things never stay quiet for long.

By early 1997, at great risk to himself and his presidency,

Bill Clinton had been carrying on

his affair with Monica Lewinsky for over a year.

I've asked myself a number of times

why he put himself and his presidency in jeopardy

in such a careless way.

The presidency is probably the loneliest office in America.

Regardless of your friends,

regardless of how good your marriage is,

regardless of anything, you are alone there at the top.

And maybe Bill Clinton,

who so much needed and wanted to be loved,

couldn't say no to someone who was going to give him affection

and wanted affection back.

The previous spring, Lewinsky's superiors in the White House

had begun to notice her attraction to the president.

Quietly, she was transferred to a job across town

at the Pentagon.

There, Lewinsky befriended a career civil servant

named Linda Tripp.

Like Lewinsky, Tripp had come to the Pentagon

after years working at the White House,

first in the Bush administration

and then, less happily, in Clinton's.

Linda Tripp didn't like the Clinton people.

She didn't like their politics,

she didn't like their personalities,

she didn't like their social lives,

and she simmered with resentments.

And she finds this young woman a couple cubicles away,

Monica Lewinsky, who decides to cry on her shoulder.

It was very much a big sister-little sister,

mother-daughter relationship.

Monica would tell her everything.

Linda genuinely cared about Monica,

but there was one overriding emotion,

and that was what Bill Clinton was doing.

And... I'm telling you, this was an angry woman.

Shortly before meeting Lewinsky,

Tripp had approached conservative literary agent

Lucianne Goldberg about writing a tell-all book

on the Clinton White House,

but the project had gone nowhere.

In the fall of 1997,

she contacted Goldberg with a new project:

the true story of an ongoing affair

between a White House intern

and the president of the United States.

She called me and she said,

"He's having an affair with a girl who's 23 years old."

And I said, "Yeah, yeah."

You know, the kind of agenting that I did,

I heard a lot of wild stuff and people have to prove things.

So she said,

"No, I'm not kidding you, he's having an affair with...

and I know the girl and I talk to her every day."

And I said, "Well, can you prove this?

"Do you have pictures, is she willing to step forward,

is she willing to go on the Today show and say...?"

And she said, "Well, no, I'm sure she wouldn't.

This is a big secret."

I said, "Well, you got to...

"you got to do something to prove to me

"so I can prove to a publisher that this...

this wild story is true."

And I said, "You say you talk to her every day,

how about taping your phone conversations?"

And she agreed that that would be a cool idea

and she went to RadioShack and bought a tape recorder

and plugged it into her phone.

Linda, I don't know why I have these feelings for him.

I never expected to feel this way about him.

And the first time I ever looked into his eyes close up

and was with him alone, I saw somebody totally different

than I had expected to see.

And that's the person I fell in love with.

Linda wanted the world

to know about this,

and I think the motivation was no...

you know, no deeper, no more shallow than that.

That was it.

She wanted the world to know about this relationship.

She came to believe that fate did call her

to expose these defects in this president to the country.

On the other hand,

she becomes entwined in a scandal

that she helped to create.

He was supposed to call me again,

I wasn't home and I was afraid to call.

What happened?

I don't know.

I saw him for 60 seconds.

So how was it?

I mean, we hug, and I gave him the paperweight.

So, what did you wear?

I knew if the story broke huge

that people would start calling Linda, and Linda would say,

"Call my agent."

And they would call her agent,

and her agent would make a book deal,

and then would make some money, and she would get a little money

and I would get ten percent of it,

and that's the way the world works.

Goldberg suggested Tripp reach out

to Newsweek's Michael Isikoff.

Before long, the two were having regular conversations.

She would kind of tease me

and she told me early on that there was a woman,

who had been an intern,

and that she was having an ongoing affair

with Bill Clinton.

I was taken aback, as anybody would be.

So, I wanted to get Linda Tripp to tell me as much as she could.

And so I kept talking to her.

Linda Tripp was not just talking to Isikoff.

She had also begun sharing her story

with the independent counsel investigating the Clintons.

By 1997, after more than two years,

Kenneth Starr's investigation into Whitewater had stalled.

Short on evidence or reliable witnesses,

he had too little to bring charges

against the president or first lady.

We know that they were running out of gas,

and running out of rope, and had just about completely failed,

until Monica came along.

In early January 1998,

Starr's office received a phone call from Tripp.

She revealed the existence

of her tape recordings of Monica Lewinsky.

At first, Starr saw little value in the tapes.

A presidential affair, no matter how sordid, was not illegal.

But there was something in Tripp's story

that caught Starr's attention:

the president had asked his friend Vernon Jordan

to help find Lewinsky a job in the private sector.

Could this be an attempt, Starr wondered,

to buy Lewinsky's silence?

I'm just... I'm starting to get a little nervous about Vernon.

Why?

I just want everything to be easy.

I want him to call me and say,

"You know, how does this amount of money,

doing this here sound?"

And I say, "That sounds great."

He says, "Okay, consider it a done deal."

Clinton had good reason to worry about whether Lewinsky

would keep their affair secret.

She had just been subpoenaed to testify

in a sexual harassment lawsuit against the president

brought by a former Arkansas state worker named Paula Jones.

Tipped off to the affair, Jones' lawyers believed

the president's relationship with Lewinsky

would demonstrate a pattern of behavior.

I thought it showed

President Clinton's proclivity to make sexual advances

to extremely young, low-level employees,

and President Clinton

had obtained jobs for Monica Lewinsky

as part of his effort to control her.

Highly relevant to Paula Jones' case.

Ken Starr was watching the Jones lawsuit

with great interest.

If Clinton was trying to influence Lewinsky's testimony,

he would be committing a major crime.

Suddenly, Starr glimpsed a bridge from Whitewater

to a potentially more fruitful area of investigation.

The bridge is that the president and those close to him

may be encouraging Monica to lie in the Paula Jones case

and therefore suborning perjury.

That's the little connection they make.

It's tenuous at this point, but they go for it.

With Starr's determined efforts,

three seemingly unrelated threads

from Clinton's past and present...

Whitewater, Paula Jones, and Monica Lewinsky...

Had suddenly come together

in one potentially devastating investigation.

And a single reporter threatened to upend the whole thing.

I knew we had

a blockbuster of a story.

And, of course, I had to call Starr's team.

And fair to say that when I did, they freaked out.

They realized that were I to publish a story,

it would blow their investigation wide open.

Starr hoped to convince Lewinsky

to secretly tape record the president

before Isikoff's story tipped him off.

On January 16, he sent Linda Tripp to meet with Lewinsky

at a food court at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

Before the friends sat down, FBI agents swooped in.

The FBI grabs Monica in front of the Cinnabon

and takes her upstairs in the Ritz-Carlton,

and tries to get her to flip.

But Monica basically just drives them crazy with her histrionics,

with her refusal to talk.

They felt like one of these scenes in a movie

where a bunch of grown men

are trying to change the diapers of a baby

and don't know how to do it.

Monica's crying, she's kind of wailing out loud.

What they weren't counting on,

what they hadn't figured out is,

"So what to do we do when Monica is not going to tell us

whether she had an affair with Bill Clinton?"

Unable to secure Lewinsky's cooperation

against the president, Starr still had a card to play.

The next day, January 17, 1998,

Clinton was scheduled to give his deposition under oath

in the Paula Jones lawsuit.

If he lied about his affair with Lewinsky,

Starr would be able to bring a charge of perjury.

He was about to testify,

and they knew he was going to lie about Monica

and that was, if you want to call it, the trap.

"And when a man is asked about this,

"a married man is asked about this, he's going to lie.

"And once he lies, we got him.

We got him!"

You may show the witness definition number one.

Barred from questioning the president himself,

Starr had to rely on Paula Jones' lawyers.

Lead attorney Jim Fisher began the deposition

by introducing a definition of sexual relations

taken from a federal statute.

In an effort to avoid ambiguity,

I thought I would use a definition

that was well-grounded in federal law.

So I thought that there could be no doubt

that these were unambiguous definitions

for which the law had a well-recognized meaning.

Fisher's efforts to avoid ambiguity

had the opposite effect,

leaving Clinton a loophole through which to escape.

So the record is completely clear,

have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky

as that term is defined in deposition Exhibit 1?

I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.

I never had an affair with her.

If they had simply asked him,

"Did Monica Lewinsky ever perform oral sex on you?"

the gig would have been up.

Instead, they gave him this ridiculously complicated,

hard-to-understand definition of sex, which allowed him to parse.

If I could have done it over again,

I would have just asked the salacious questions.

I would have let him have it.

I was trying to be respectful, and I paid a price for it.

Having said that,

he clearly didn't answer the questions honestly.

If she told someone

that she had a sexual affair with you

beginning in November of 1995, would that be a lie?

It's certainly not the truth.

It would not be the truth.

The turning point was when I started to ask him about gifts

that he had given to her and she had given to him.

And I described some of them quite specifically.

There was a book of poetry by Walt Whitman, for example.

I thought his mood changed visibly at that point.

His face became bright red, there was tension in his face.

He knew at this point

there was a mole.

There was a rat in the woodpile.

Someone has given all of this damning information

to these people.

He was in trouble.

Clinton's secret affair with Monica Lewinsky

was now hurtling toward public exposure.

The very day that the president was deposed

in the Jones lawsuit,

Michael Isikoff filed his story on the Lewinsky affair.

But at the last minute,

his editors at Newsweek backtracked

and decided to kill the story.

Obviously, we had

an enormous scoop here that was going to shake Washington.

Some of my colleagues and some of the editors agreed,

but at the end of the day, the brass at Newsweek

just were not willing to pull the trigger.

Michael told me.

He said, "They aren't gonna run with it.

"They're afraid of it, they don't like it.

Nasty stuff, they don't want to do it."

And I said, "Well, what am I gonna do?

I'm sitting on this thing."

In her frustration,

Goldberg turned to an internet gossip columnist

named Matt Drudge.

A couple of people said,

"Call Matt Drudge."

Or, I said, "Well, tell him to call me."

So at 11:00 that night, he called me and that was it.

It went kaboom!

The president, the intern, the accusations, and the denials.

The allegations that the president had an illicit affair

with a 21-year-old intern

and then attempted to cover it up

blasted through the White House today.

This scandal could unravel the administration.

Over the next 72 hours,

the story made its way around the world.

Caught unawares,

Clinton's cabinet members rushed to his defense.

I believe that the allegations are completely untrue.

I'll second that...

Aides who had worked for him

for five to six years at this point

are just on the floor.

They can't figure out

what they're supposed to think about this,

much less what they're supposed to do about this.

I was convinced that Bill Clinton had been set up.

He's got all these enemies who are out to get him.

He wouldn't be so stupid

as to jeopardize his entire presidency.

For what?

No, that was not the Bill Clinton I knew.

Clinton did confide in the one person

he knew would not judge him.

When the Lewinsky scandal broke,

the president paged me and I returned the call.

And he said,

"Ever since I got here to the White House,

"I've had to shut my body down... Sexually, I mean...

"but I screwed up with this girl.

"I didn't do what they said I did,

but I may have done so much that I can't prove my innocence."

And I said to him,

"The problem that presidents have is not the sin,

"it's the cover up, and you should explore

just telling the American people the truth."

He said, "Really, do you think I could do that?"

And I said, "Let me test it, let me run a poll."

So I took a poll and I tested popular attitudes on that

and I called him back and I said,

"They will forgive the adultery,

but they won't easily forgive that you lied."

Mr. President, welcome.

Thank you, Jim.

Clinton disregarded Morris' advice.

In interviews days after the story broke,

he continued to hide his relationship

with Lewinsky.

The news of this day is that Kenneth Starr,

the independent counsel, is investigating allegations

that you suborned perjury by encouraging a 24-year-old woman,

a former White House intern,

to lie under oath in a civil deposition

about her having had an affair with you.

Mr. President, is that true?

That is not true.

I did not ask anyone to tell anything other than the truth.

There is no improper relationship.

And I intend to cooperate with this inquiry.

But that is not true.

He says, quite indignantly,

"There is no relationship with Monica Lewinsky."

And people begin to focus on the words.

"He said 'is, ' didn't he?

He didn't say 'was. ""

What is he trying to say here? Is he parsing here?

MIKE McCURRY: I didn't notice

the peculiar tense issue until later.

But I did think to myself, I said,

"Boy, there's got to be a stronger denial of this."

And I think some group of us said,

"Look, you're denying this, you've gotta be strong.

"You've gotta get out there and say, you know,

how outrageous this is."

And, of course, I think that was dreadful advice in retrospect.

I want you to listen to me, I'm going to say this again.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. 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.

I was watching with a friend in my office and I said,

"That is it, this man is dead meat.

"That is it, because I know that he's lying,

"and if I know that he's lying,

then the rest of the world is gonna know he's lying."

Having set off on a course of deception,

there was no turning back.

Clinton continued to press his lie, even to Hillary.

He tells her it's not true.

He tells her that Monica Lewinsky

was a troubled young woman,

that he had just tried to be nice to her,

to mentor her in some ways.

And that's a story that Hillary Clinton hangs onto

like a life raft.

The day after Clinton's denial,

Hillary appeared on national television.

I just think that a lot of this is deliberately designed

to sensationalize charges against my husband

because everything else they've tried has failed.

She focused her energy and her anger and her ire

at the external enemies...

At Ken Starr, at the press, at the Republicans in Congress.

They were the ones who were doing this, not her husband.

The great story here, for anybody willing to find it

and write about it and explain it,

is this vast right-wing conspiracy

that has been conspiring against my husband

since the day he announced for president.

She says, "This is all about the vast right-wing conspiracy,"

and in that moment, sort of sets the tone

for the defense of the president against these charges.

To the Clintons,

the Lewinsky scandal was just the latest front

in a war waged by their political enemies

to destroy them.

The Lewinsky scandal

was not really the Lewinsky scandal.

It was really an attempt by the Republican Party

to have a coup d'état

based on having discovered the president's personal behavior.

This time, however, even some allies of the Clintons

found their protestations hollow.

You can never blame your enemies

for doing what your enemies will predictably do.

You can only blame yourself

for what you have given to your enemies.

If you've given them absolutely nothing,

guess what they're gonna be able to do?

Nothing.

As the scandal raged around him,

Clinton did his best to focus, he said,

"On the job the American people hired me to do."

He's coming to work every day, he says,

and he's going to do the job that's in front of him.

Privately, behind the scenes,

it's a completely different story.

Of course he's obsessed by this.

Of course he's consumed by this.

Of course he is distracted.

He has a meeting with the head of the World Bank, for instance,

who goes back to his office, calls Clinton's chief of staff,

and says, "It's like he wasn't even there."

"I feel like a character in the novel Darkness at Noon,"

Clinton told an aide.

"I am surrounded by an oppressive force

that is creating a lie about me and I can't get the truth out."

In fact, the truth was closing in.

All he can do is buy time.

All he can do is hope Starr doesn't have the goods,

doesn't have the evidence,

that there's no physical evidence that could prove it.

Before long, Starr had his physical evidence.

In July, Monica Lewinsky reached a deal to give her testimony

in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

As part of the deal,

she turned over a blue dress stained with Clinton's semen.

The next day, seeing no way out,

Clinton himself agreed to answer questions

before Starr's grand jury.

Before the president faced Starr, however,

he had to face Hillary.

That morning, Clinton awoke the first lady from a deep sleep.

Pacing the room, he finally confessed he had lied.

It was probably the most shattering moment in her life.

He'd lied to her and he'd used her,

he let her go out and essentially make alibis for him.

And it not only jeopardized

everything they'd worked for all their lives,

but totally humiliated her and Chelsea,

and she couldn't trust him anymore.

Later that day,

Clinton's deposition was scheduled to take place

in the Map Room of the White House.

The president's lawyers

had won an important concession from Ken Starr:

the interrogation could not last longer than four hours.

Good afternoon, Mr. President.

Good afternoon.

Could you please state your full name for the record, sir.

William Jefferson Clinton.

Bill Clinton's strategy was to run out the clock.

And so, he would start talking about

little stories from Arkansas.

He would, you know, take an aside

and give a lecture about justice and the American dream.

And all along, the clock is ticking out.

Let me begin with the correct answer:

I don't know for sure.

Well, it would depend upon the facts.

I think on the whole, people in the uniformed civil service...

If we circle number one... this is my circle here.

I remember doing it

so I could focus only on those two lines...

It depends upon what the meaning of the word "is" is.

The Starr prosecutors walked out

of that grand jury testimony, totally demoralized.

They knew they had been clobbered by President Clinton.

And even though it was just obvious what he was doing,

it was a masterful performance on Clinton's part.

If Clinton could finagle his way out of Starr's legal trap,

he could not, he knew,

escape the judgment of the American people.

And we've got about 45.

That night, President Bill Clinton addressed the nation

in one of the most unusual and anticipated broadcasts

in American history.

Stand by.

Five seconds...

Good evening.

This afternoon, in this room, from this chair,

I testified before the Office of Independent Counsel

and the grand jury.

I answered their questions truthfully,

including questions about my private life,

questions no American citizen would ever want to answer.

Still, I must take complete responsibility

for all my actions, both public and private.

And that is why I am speaking to you tonight.

Indeed I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky

that was not appropriate.

In fact, it was wrong.

For many of those closest to Clinton,

this was the first time they'd heard him admit the affair,

and they were deeply hurt.

Yes, I felt betrayed.

He lied to me, yeah.

He lied to a lot of people about that,

not least of whom was himself.

The morning after his grand jury testimony

and his speech to the nation,

he and Hillary and Chelsea

head off to Martha's Vineyard for their annual vacation.

It may be the worst-timed family vacation

in the history of the world,

but there they are,

heading out to the helicopter on the South Lawn.

And the staff is sitting in the White House thinking,

"What are we going to do about the walk to the helicopter?"

They decide they can't do anything.

They can't orchestrate it, they can't spin it;

they are powerless to affect it.

And in the end it falls to Chelsea Clinton, a teenager,

to take both of their hands, on her own initiative,

take her father's hand in one, her mother's hand in another

and walk across the lawn,

literally the bridge between her parents

at this moment of crisis between them.

As the Clintons spent a tense vacation on Martha's Vineyard,

Washington was abuzz with talk of resignation

or even impeachment.

At this moment, he was in maximum peril.

Clinton's advisors were acutely aware

that President Nixon was driven out of office

not by the opposing party, but by his own party,

when the Republicans came to him and said,

"Enough, you have to leave."

That's when President Nixon resigned.

And so there was real concern

that Democrats were going to begin bolting,

and they were not returning President Clinton's calls.

They were not happy with this.

There was a real concern that this could be

the beginning of the end.

It had been a quarter of a century

since Richard Nixon had resigned the presidency

rather than endure an impeachment.

Now, many were urging Clinton to do the same.

But Clinton had no such intentions.

There were the inevitable comparisons

between Nixon and Clinton.

I always thought there was a fundamental difference.

Both Nixon and Clinton were convinced

that it was their political enemies

that were responsible for all their troubles.

The difference is that Nixon always suspected

that his political enemies were better than him.

Clinton hated his political enemies

and was convinced they were beneath him.

And that was the reason, at the end of the day,

Clinton was never going to do what Richard Nixon did,

which was to give into them and resign.

Yes, go ahead.

Mr. President,

all these questions about your personal life

have to be painful to you and your family.

At what point do you consider that it's just not worth it

and you consider resigning from office?

Never.

You know, I was elected to do a job.

I think the American people know two or three things about me now

that they didn't know the first time...

this kind of effort was made against me.

I think they know that I care very much about them,

that I care about ordinary people

whose voices aren't often heard here.

And I think they know I have worked very, very hard for them.

Hard work had always been Clinton's salvation

in moments of vulnerability.

Now, as he sought to show the American people

he could still function,

he bore down on a suddenly violent foreign policy crisis.

Early on the morning of August 7, 1998,

two truck bombs exploded simultaneously

outside U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

The death toll reached 200, with another 5,000 injured.

Within hours, the FBI had pegged responsibility

to a little-known terrorist organization called Al Qaeda.

Clinton soon ordered his national security team

to hunt down and destroy Al Qaeda

and its elusive leader, Osama Bin Laden.

CIA had information... it thought it was reliable information...

That Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership

were going to come together at a certain camp,

in Afghanistan, at a certain date, at a certain time.

We went to the president and said,

"We want to be able to land cruise missiles at that camp

while they're there."

The order would have huge political risks.

Clinton knew that it would be widely seen as an attempt

to distract the public from his own personal problems.

Somebody said something about,

"Well, you know, we have to take into account

the political realities in the United States at the moment."

Which was sort of code words for,

"You've got this Monica Lewinsky scandal going on."

And he snapped.

He just very quickly and sharply said,

"You don't think about that.

"You think about national security.

"You give me the national security advice

"you would give me if this were not going on.

You let me worry about that."

On August 20, Clinton ordered

a series of missile strikes against Al Qaeda,

targeting training camps in Afghanistan

and a plant in Sudan

that the administration claimed was involved

in making chemical weapons.

The missiles narrowly missed their main target.

We didn't kill Bin Laden.

We didn't have that to show for the attack.

And people, frankly,

a lot of people in the Congress and in the media

said this was just an attempt to "wag the dog."

The timing of all of this is more than coincidental,

and I think it may very well run the risk...

the president may run the risk

of having an even more cynical view of his behavior.

He knew that.

He knew that was going to happen.

He knew it would make it worse for him to do this.

But he launched the attack because he thought it was

the right national security thing to do.

That's what we told him.

And he said, "I'll do it anyway,

even though it makes it worse for me."

Things were deteriorating quickly for the president.

On September 9, Kenneth Starr finally delivered to Congress

the long-awaited results of his investigation.

In 450 pages of sometimes salacious detail,

Starr laid out his case against Clinton for perjury,

obstruction of justice,

and abuse of office in the Lewinsky affair,

while dropping almost all reference

to his original investigation of Whitewater.

Lawyers are thorough.

Good lawyers are thorough.

There could be absolutely no gap whatsoever between the facts

and then a reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the facts.

The case had to be proven.

The House Sergeant at Arms

officially unsealed the document at mid-afternoon.

It had been advertised as steamy,

and you could almost see the steam rising

as the boxes came open.

According to the sources,

the report focuses almost entirely

on the president's relationship with Lewinsky.

However this turns out,

it is a turning point in Mr. Clinton's presidency.

It is not an exaggeration to say

that he has less control of his destiny

than at any time since he was elected.

The Starr report was a turning point,

but not in the way the independent counsel

or his Republican supporters had expected.

Polls showed that after four years and $40 million,

most Americans believed the investigations against Clinton

were more persecution than prosecution.

The Republicans had so undercut their own credibility

in the way they were going after him

that people, although they deplored what he had done

and thought it was stupid

and it demeaned the office of the presidency

and tarnished the presidency,

tarnished him and had been a devastating blow

to Hillary and Chelsea and all those things

that went through people's minds,

they looked at the Republicans and they had enough already.

After the release of Starr's report,

Clinton appeared in the Rose Garden

to offer his first full-throated apology to the American people.

I am profoundly sorry for all I have done wrong

in words and deeds.

I never should have misled the country, the Congress,

my friends or my family.

Quite simply, I gave in to my shame.

I have been condemned by my accusers with harsh words,

and while it's hard

to hear yourself called deceitful and manipulative,

I remember Ben Franklin's admonition

that our critics are our friends,

for they do show us our faults.

If Clinton was willing at last to take responsibility,

the American people were willing to forgive him.

He disappoints them every time on some level,

but he always gets up and tries to make it better.

You know, what else can you ask from a sinner, right?

And that's how he would define himself, "I'm a sinner.

"And I try to be better every time,

and I learn from my mistakes and I go forward."

And I think the American public is pretty forgiving of a guy

who sees himself as a sinner.

Weary of the attacks on Clinton,

Americans punished Republican candidates

in the congressional elections in November.

Upsetting precedent,

Democrats actually gained seats in Congress.

I think the message the American people sent was loud and clear:

we want progress over partisanship

and unity over division.

Blamed for the defeat, Newt Gingrich resigned his post

as speaker of the House of Representatives.

To the frustration of his Republican opponents,

Clinton seemed to have won over the American people again.

There are two or three things

that I have witnessed in my political career

that I never could figure out.

The fact that a lot of people

didn't think that that was a serious problem

that he, you know, perjured himself in his testimony,

and that he'd had a relationship

with that woman Monica Lewinsky...

That did shock me,

and I've never quite figured out how in the world could that be

that he'd come out the back end of it

pretty much where he was at the beginning.

It's just one of those things I've never quite figured out.

Determined to punish the president,

House Republicans, led by Texas congressman Tom Delay,

played their last card: impeachment.

A resolution impeaching William Jefferson Clinton,

president of the United States,

for high crimes and misdemeanors.

The Republicans were gripped

by just unreasoning hatred of Bill Clinton.

They just despised the man

and could not stand that he was going to get away with this.

"Article One: In his conduct

"while president of the United States,

"William Jefferson Clinton,

"in violation of his constitutional oath

"faithfully to execute the office

"of president of the United States,

"has willfully corrupted and manipulated the judicial process

of the United States..."

On Saturday, December 19,

the House of Representatives voted along party lines

to impeach the president on two of four counts

involving obstruction of justice and perjury.

On this vote, the yeas are 228, the nays are 206.

Article one is adopted.

Bill Clinton had become

only the second president in American history,

and the first in more than a century,

to be impeached by the House.

The American people,

I call them to my side here at the podium to verify to you

that the president committed falsehoods under oath.

Republican leaders moved the proceedings to the Senate,

where a two-thirds majority was required

to convict the president and remove him from office.

The Senate will convene as a court of impeachment.

We are here today

because President William Jefferson Clinton

decided to put himself above the law.

This is not about sex.

This is about obstruction of justice.

This is about a pattern, this is about a scheme,

this is about a lot of lies.

For three long weeks, with little hope of success,

13 Republican Congressmen

pressed the case against Clinton.

This is not about sexual misconduct

any more than Watergate was about a third-rate burglary.

Finally, Arkansas Democratic Senator Dale Bumpers rose

to express the sentiments felt by many in the chamber

and the country as a whole.

We are here today because the president suffered

a terrible moral lapse.

A marital infidelity,

not a breach of the public trust,

not a crime against society.

It is a sex scandal.

H.L. Mencken said one time,

"When you hear somebody say, 'This is not about money, '

it's about money."

And when you hear somebody say, "This is not about sex,"

it's about sex.

The Senate adjudges that the respondent,

William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States,

is not guilty as charged in the first article of impeachment.

What had begun with a sexual indiscretion

more than three years earlier

and mushroomed into a full-scale constitutional crisis

was finally over.

This time, however, there was no triumph,

no crowing about "The Comeback Kid."

Bill Clinton knew that this time,

both he and the country had paid a heavy price.

Bill Clinton, in his second inaugural address,

said it was his ambition during the second term

to be, quoting scripture, "a repairer of the breach."

That ambition was not realized in his second term

and it effectively died in 1998, the year of scandal.

The fact that the president was impeached

will always be part of his story, part of his legacy.

It consumed a tremendous amount of energy.

It undercut his standing.

And, I think, limited his ability

to accomplish anything outside of surviving

for almost two years.

And, you know, that's tragic.

Clinton created many of his own problems,

but his enemies exaggerated, enhanced, mythologized, lied,

were utterly hypocritical in their attacks on him.

You know, to the extent that I believe that every human being

is responsible for their own lives,

he holds the responsibility for it.

To the extent that context shapes a life,

his enemies have a lot to answer for.

Clinton had survived, but the impeachment ordeal

seemed to have sapped much of his drive and ambition.

President Clinton has more than 700 days left in office

after he is acquitted by the Senate,

and he promises to use every single one of them

to its fullest.

But the constraints were enormous at that point.

The big aspirations were gone.

The chances of re-inventing Social Security

or re-inventing Medicare just proved too elusive.

He had a Congress

which had just, literally, put him on trial,

and was not willing to do a lot of business with him.

In 2000, Clinton came tantalizingly close

to the great historical achievement

for which he had yearned,

but a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians

broke down in the 11th hour.

The same year, after decades of budget deficits,

the federal budget had a surplus of nearly $240 billion,

an accomplishment for which Clinton was given much credit.

It was only as her husband was preparing to leave the stage

that Hillary finally stepped front and center,

ready at last to take her star turn.

The day the Senate votes to acquit President Clinton

on impeachment charges,

Hillary Clinton is meeting in the White House residence

with Harold Ickes to plot a campaign

for the very same United States Senate.

Literally the end of his crisis is the birth of her new phase.

She said, "I want to be independent.

I want to be judged on my own merits."

And she finally released herself from, you know,

the shadow of Bill Clinton over her

and began making her own decisions.

He then came to her support,

and there was nobody more of a champion

for her Senate race than Bill Clinton.

He was behind her all the way.

So even if I didn't know her

better than anybody in this room,

I'd be for her.

That November, as Vice-President Al Gore

lost the closest presidential election in American history,

Hillary Clinton easily won the Senate seat in New York.

I am profoundly grateful to all of you

for giving me the chance to serve you.

In his final round of goodbye speeches,

Bill Clinton even bid farewell to the Washington press corps.

You know, I read in the history books how other presidents say

the White House is like a penitentiary

and that every motive they have is suspect.

Even George Washington complained he was treated

like a common thief.

And they all say they can't get away...

can't wait to get away.

I don't know what the heck they're talking about.

I've had a wonderful time.

It's been an honor to serve and fun to laugh.

I only wish that we'd even laughed more

these last eight years,

because power's not the most important thing in life

and only counts for what you use it.

Listen, this guy loved being president.

He even loved being president when it was tough.

And a lot of times I would say, "How does he smile?

"How does he keep laughing?

How does he keep going through this?"

But it was because he got the energy back from the people.

Whatever you think of the man, he wanted to do the right thing

for the people of his county, his state, his country,

and that never changed about him.

Clinton departed the White House for the last time

on Saturday, January 20, 2001.

In the end, he left much as he had come:

a man loved by his friends and loathed by his enemies;

a politician who had achieved a great deal,

yet left behind a curious sense of unfulfilled promise.

I believe he's an argument without end,

that there will be people discussing and debating

the significance of Bill Clinton for a long time.

Bill Clinton will be remembered

as one of our best presidents in the 20th century,

who accomplished an enormous amount,

and he will be remembered

because of his personal recklessness.

And that is tragic,

because so much more could have happened.

Did Bill Clinton help the country,

and was the country better for having him as president?

I think, unquestionably, yes.

But, are there elements of tragedy here as well?

Huge elements of tragedy

in terms of failures and opportunities lost,

and risks made that didn't have to be made?

Undoubtedly.

I know a lot of people think that Clinton's presidency

was a wasted opportunity.

But he came to office in 1992

and left a stronger country in 2000.

I don't know if you can say of a president who served us well

and improved our material good

that it was a wasted opportunity.

And it was sure a lot of fun to watch.