Clinton-Lewinsky scandal克林顿-莱温斯基性丑闻

Clinton-Lewinsky scandal
The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal dominated news headlines in the United States, with reverberations heard around the world, throughout the second term of President J. Clinton. The scandal centered on a consensual, sexual affair involving the president and a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. Facts about the affair were made public in the course of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s far-reaching inquiry into what began as accusations of financial improprieties in the Whitewater land deal. Starr’s probe culminated in a vote on December 19, 1999, by the U.S. House of Representatives to approve two articles of impeachment against the president on charges that included perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with Clinto n’s efforts to suppress information about his relationship with Lewinsky. The events surrounding the revelation of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair elicited widespread concern about dwindling privacy protections for public figures and private citizens in the contemporary United States. Frequently likened to a form of “new McCarthyism,” the Starr probe in particular came to emblematize the pathologies of a society that no longer respects the right to privacy. The media was also widely condemned for what many considered to be excessive coverage of the details pertaining to a private affair.
The origins of the scandal lie in two other legal imbroglios that dogged Clinton throughout his presidency:the investigation of the Whitewater land deal and the Paula Jones sex ual harassment lawsuit. In 1994, during Clinton’s first term in office, Attorney General Janet Reno appointed Robert Fiske, Jr., as independent counsel to investigate the financial dealings of the Whitewater property company. The president and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, were accused of colluding with their friends and business partners, James and Susan McDougal, to reap profits, tax breaks, and financial favors from the deal. The Clintons denied any wrongdoing, emphasizing throughout the investigation that they had in fact lost money on the Whitewater venture.
In August 1994,Fiske was replaced as special prosecutor by Kenneth Starr, a
well-known conservative who had served as the solicitor general for the Justice Department under President George H. W. Bush. At about this time, a former Arkansas state employee named Paula Jones filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton, charging that in 1991 he had ordered a pair of Arkansas state troopers to escort her to a hotel room where then-governor Clinton had made unwelcome sexual advances. Jones claimed that she filed her suit in an effort to salvage her reputation after conservative journalist David Brock had published an article naming Jones as a participant in one of Clinton’s many extramarital affa irs. Meanwhile, in July 1995, 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky joined the White House staff as an unpaid intern, and in November 1995 she took a paid position at the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. Two days later, a sexual relationship between the President and. Lewinsky began during the government furlough. According to later testimony, the affair continued intermittently for the next 18 months.
In May 1996 the first Whitewater trial ended, and both of the McDougals were convicted of fraud. A month later, a Senate hearing on Whitewater ended inconclusively. Shortly thereafter, Starr announced that he would step down, but four days later he suddenly changed his mind and decided to continue his investigations. It soon became clear that Starr had shifted the focus of his investigation from a concern with financial affairs to an interest in intimate ones. Following on the heels of a story published in Newsweek magazine detailing the president’s alleged sexual advances toward White House staffer Kathleen Willey, Lewinsky was subpoenaed in December 1997 by lawyers for Paula Jones; in a sworn affidavit, Lewinsky denied having an affair with the president. Soon thereafter, Lewinsky confidante Linda Tripp turned over to Starr over 20 hours of taped telephone conversations with the unwitting Lewinsky that contained admissions of Lewinsky’s sexual relations with the president. In January 1998, Matt Drudge published Lewinsky’s name on his website, as well as a report that Newsweek had obtained the Tripp-Lewinsky tapes but had pulled a story about them under pressure from Starr, who feared it would jeopardize his investigation. On January 21, 1998, following a Washington Post report on his relationship with Lewinsky, Clinton told a television interviewer that “there i s no
improper relationship.” One week later, before an invited media audience at the White House, Clinton insisted, “I want you to listen to me. I did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky.”
Several months later,Lewinsky’s lawyers struck an immuni ty deal with Starr, in which she agreed to provide “full and truthful testimony” in exchange for full immunity from prosecution. For the next 15 days, Lewinsky was questioned by the grand jury. Shortly thereafter, the president was asked to provide a blood sample for DNA testing to determine if it was a match with semen stains found on a blue dress Monica Lewinsky had kept in her closet following a sexual encounter with the president. Two weeks later, President Clinton admitted to the grand jury that he had had “inappropriate intimate contact” with Ms. Lewinsky, although he continued to hold that his earlier statements had been accurate, explaining at one point that his answer to the question about the nature of his relationship with Lewinsky “depends on wha t the meaning of ‘is’ is.”
In September 1998, Starr submitted his report to Congress, and despite its graphic sexual content, the report was immediately posted on the congressional website, with particularly salacious portions reprinted in newspapers and on websites around the world. One month later, the House of Representatives voted to hold an impeachment inquiry. In November Clinton settled the Jones lawsuit for $850,000 without acknowledging guilt. In December, the House Judiciary Committee approved four articles of impeachment. The full House approved two of the articles, and Clinton became only the second sitting president in the history of the United States to be impeached. The Senate trial began in January 1999, and a month later the President was acquitted.
The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal spawned widespread reconsideration of the meaning and extent of privacy rights in the contemporary United States.Throughout the ordeal, many suggested that the real scandal lay not in the fact that the president had h ad an extramarital affair, but rather in the invasion of the president’s privacy by the independent counsel’s office and the media. While scandals are nothing new in U.S. politics—nor is the tendency for presidents from Jefferson to Kennedy to stray
from the terms of the marital oath—the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal set a new standard in terms of the public’s sense of its right to know personal details about public figures. In the wake of the scandal, no clear consensus emerged about who to blame for the breakdown of respect for the principle of privacy. Special Prosecutor Starr was frequently chastised in the media for his tactics, which included the subpoena of records of sale from a local Washington, D.C., the reliance on methods of intimidation in interrogating Lewinsky. Such seeming abuses of prosecutorial discretion led to calls for a repeal of the statute authorizing special prosecutors, as well as demands to curtail prosecutorial discretion in an investigation of sexual harassment charges.
The media was charged with violating privacy as the scandal unfolded.The president’s affair with Lewinsky dominated headlines in the mainstream media for an extended period, leading to complaints that journalists had abdicated their responsibility to guard the public interest. The scandal also raised concerns about the growing influence of alternative and nontraditional media, including web-based news sites such as the Drudge Report and AM-frequency talk radio stations, which appeared to hold themselves to lower standards of verification and professional comportment when gathering and reporting the news than had been expected of more traditional news outlets.
Throughout the scandal, the feminist movement was frequently identified as a cause of the breakdown of privacy norms in the United States, with second-wave feminism’s embrace of the motto “the personal is political” held culpable for the corrosion of the boundary between public and private. At the same time, many self-described feminists rose to Clinton’s defense, urg ing chastened members of the movement to rethink the meaning and limits of the imperative to politicize the personal, and to dedicate themselves to re-conceptualizing privacy rather than abandoning the ideal altogether.。