3

Bill and Newt

Not since the transfer of power from Dwight D. Eisenhower to JFK had Washington witnessed such a profound generational shift, as a 68-year-old grandfather made way for a successor more than 20 years his junior. Bill Clinton’s inaugural celebrations, rather than alluding subtly to this changeover, sledgehammered the point home. Shortly after arriving in the capital, Clinton made a pilgrimage to Jack Kennedy’s graveside in Arlington National Cemetery, a visit not included ahead of time on his official schedule and witnessed by only a select group of reporters – the sort of stealth arrangements sure to attract more media attention.

This séance-like visit suggested a shared lineage: that the Clintons were somehow an offshoot of the Camelot clan. Blurry black-and-white footage of the ‘torch has been passed to a new generation’ passage from the Kennedy inaugural bellowed from big screens erected either side of the Lincoln Memorial, which again implied an ancestral affinity. ‘Clinton stared in wonderment and mouthed the words,’ wrote the journalist John Harris, the finest chronicler of the Clinton years.¹

Just as Kennedy had got Frank Sinatra to sing at his pre-inaugural gala, so Clinton turned to the pop-culture idol of the day, Michael Jackson, who moonwalked at the Lincoln Memorial. Maya Angelou, who recited ‘On the Pulse of Morning’, became only the second poet to perform at an inaugural ceremony, emulating Robert Frost, who in 1961 delivered from memory ‘The Gift Outright’.

Clinton’s New Covenant speech, replete with Kennedy-esque imitations, was a reworking of JFK’s New Frontier: ‘This ceremony is held in the depth of winter. But, by the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring. Now we must do the work the season demands.’ Its nimblest line relied on the kind of rhetorical inversion favoured by Kennedy’s phrasemaker, Ted Sorensen. ‘There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.’ Lest anyone be in any doubt this was an epochal event, a carillon of gongs rang out from coast to coast to herald this new Clintonian age.

Because my then girlfriend had worked at campaign headquarters in Little Rock just down the corridor from the famed ‘War Room’, I was a guest that night at the Arkansas inaugural ball, and watched through a bobbing mass of blow-dried hair as Bill Clinton once again raised his saxophone to his lips to riff with B. B. King. This not only recalled his star turn on The Arsenio Hall Show but also signalled that after the somnolence of the Bush interlude a president who understood the show-business requirements of the job was back in the Oval Office – even if the Clinton years would end up feeling more like tawdry daytime television.

For a president who had reached the White House with the smallest share of the vote since Woodrow Wilson in 1912, the celebrations – which also included a stop at Monticello, the Virginian residence of America’s third president, on the tenuous pretext that his mother had given him the middle name Jefferson – were ludicrously over the top. A narcissistic delusion.

The inaugural festivities also glossed over another parallel with Kennedy: the unconvincing nature of their respective victories. In 1960, when Kennedy edged out Nixon by just 112,827 votes, or 0.17 per cent of the electorate, the popular vote was a virtual dead heat. Clinton’s victory was more comfortable – he received five million more votes than Bush – but his 43 per cent of the vote was hardly resounding.

As with Kennedy in 1961, Clinton’s mandate immediately came into question. Now, though, the GOP went further by raising doubts about his very legitimacy, something Nixon had shied away from doing in 1960, despite allegations that Chicago’s then mayor, Richard J. Daley, had spirited up enough phantom votes to put Illinois in the Democrat column (Kennedy, it is often forgotten, would have won without the Prairie State). The day after the 1992 election, the Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole pledged to be ‘a watchdog for the 57 per cent’ of the electorate who had not supported Clinton. Republicans labelled him ‘a minority president’. Instead of a political honeymoon, he received a partisan hazing. So began the modern-day habit of losing political parties refusing to admit they had lost.

Another JFK storyline the Clintons would have preferred not to repeat was the lamentable start to his presidency. The mists of Camelot have obscured the early mis-steps that exposed the 43-year-old’s callowness: from the calamity of the Bay of Pigs, when a CIA-backed invasion force was easily repelled by Fidel Castro’s ragtag army, to his first disastrous summit with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, which encouraged the Soviet premier to believe he could construct the Berlin Wall months later without any serious push-back from Washington.

Clinton’s early slip-ups were less momentous, partly because with the Cold War consigned to history the world was a less perilous place. Nevertheless, he ran into immediate trouble over his choice of attorney general, gays in the military and his attempts to pass a budget. Each controversy exhibited the ugliness of post-Cold War Washington. Each fight brought to mind the old adage about academia, where the politics are said to be so vicious because the stakes are so small. From start to finish, a pettiness pervaded the Clinton years.

Newt Gingrich, who was then still the House whip, immediately signalled an escalation of political hostilities in the confirmation battle over Clinton’s pick as attorney general, Zoë Baird, who looked set to become the first woman to head up the Justice Department. Originally, when The New York Times reported that she and her husband had employed illegal immigrants as household help, senior Republicans such as Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, described it as ‘no big deal’.²

Gingrich, however, that master of contrived controversy, eyed her as quarry. How could the Senate confirm an attorney general who had knowingly broken the law? he asked, showing his skill for sketching out battle-lines. Was this not a case of the Washington elite protecting its own? The Gingrich effect was instantaneous. Republican senators hitherto prepared to green-light Baird’s nomination now vowed to block it, forcing her to withdraw her name from consideration. It was an example of trickle-down polarisation: of how Gingrich took a controversy that few really cared about and turned it into a moment of political truth.

In a second culture wars flare-up, which opened him up to the criticism that he had hoodwinked the electorate by pretending to be a centrist, Clinton clashed with the Pentagon over his promise to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military. ‘There never was a sign on the wall in Little Rock that said, “It’s the gays in the military, stupid,”’ complained an unnamed Democratic consultant, bemoaning the kind of cultural liberalism and identity politics that was so off-putting to Reagan Democrats.³ The ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy which emerged was a classic Clintonian fudge.

If the criticism in those fledging weeks was of a leftward lurch, Clinton’s apprehension during the first budget battle of his presidency was of moving too far to the right.

‘You mean to tell me that the success of my program and re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders,’ he famously fumed, after his economic team produced a budget designed to reassure Wall Street and appease the Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan.⁴ ‘I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans,’ he also complained. ‘We’re Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans.’

The budget battle was a watershed moment: a Democratic president took his cues on economic policy from Wall Street rather than the union movement, an approach repeated by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s first Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, a Goldman Sachs alumnus, joked that if the president had been a Republican, ‘they’d be building a monument to him on the National Mall’.⁵

Despite Clinton’s fiscal probity, Republicans nonetheless bemoaned the inclusion of tax hikes. For the first time they deployed a filibuster to obstruct an incoming president’s economic programme. Not a single GOP lawmaker in either chamber supported the White House budget plan.⁶ Nor could Clinton corral his own party. In the House, where the Democrats had what should have been an ironclad majority of 257 seats to 177, the budget plan passed by a solitary vote.

This Republican wall of opposition suggested that the delegiti­misation of modern-day presidents had a corollary: the legitimisation of the politics of no. Even though the GOP held just 43 seats in the Senate, the minority party attempted to exert as much control as the majority party. Filibusters, sparingly used in the past, now became routine, a ‘weapon of mass obstruction’, in the words of Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, two highly respected Washington commentators who, justifiably, blamed the Republicans more than the Democrats for this partisan polarisation.

Blocking major legislation, rather than working to amend it, became the new modus operandi. ‘You need 60 votes to get anything done around here,’ crowed Bob Dole, of the supermajority needed to override a filibuster. The GOP blocked measures, such as new restrictions on lobbying, that previously it had supported, and even withdrew backing for the global trade pact, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade – an abnormal posture for the party of business and free trade.

Gridlocking Capitol Hill was the best way to sabotage the Clinton presidency. ‘Stop it, slow it, kill it, or just talk it to death,’ was how Clinton described the blocking strategy,⁷ not that the Republicans cared. ‘It’s not obstructionism,’ claimed Gingrich. ‘It’s interpreting the will of the American people.’⁸ Mitch McConnell, an up-and-coming senator from Kentucky, who over the years turned obstructionism into a political art form, claimed the blocking tactics gave ‘gridlock a good name’.⁹ Since then, political scientists have used the term asymmetrical polarisation, because the Republicans were the prime instigators of the present-day destructiveness. Likewise, we talk of top-down polarisation, of how political divisiveness has been orchestrated rather than organic. Hyper-partisans, such as Gingrich, deliberately sought to divide the American electorate in the hope of winning over the bigger half.

Clinton’s frustrations spilled out into the open at a political fundraiser in Boston in 1994. The Republicans were ‘dedicated just to being against everything we are for, and dedicated to the politics of personal destruction’, he griped, self-pityingly. Then, getting more visibly angry as he spoke, he complained the GOP had become ‘an opposition party that just stands up and says, “No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!”’¹⁰

This incontrovertibly was true. Yet the Clinton team added to the toxicity by importing its ‘War Room’ campaign philosophy from Little Rock, and by treating every day as a battle to win the news cycle. Opponents were looked upon as adversaries.

‘What are you doing inviting these people in my home?’ complained Hillary Clinton when the presidential aide Rahm Emanuel organised a White House event involving moderate conservatives, such as James Baker, to drum up bipartisan support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). ‘These people are our enemies. They are trying to destroy us.’

Even friends deemed disloyal or uncooperative were cast as foes. ‘We’ll roll right over him if we have to,’ an unnamed White House aide told Time magazine when the Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the chair of the influential Senate Finance Committee, complained about not being consulted by the new president.¹¹

A string of scandals and pseudo-scandals intensified this bunker mentality in the West Wing. ‘Travelgate’ centred on the firing of seven employees in the White House Travel Office and their replacement by friends of the president and First Lady. ‘Troopergate’ involved claims from several Arkansas State Troopers, published by the right-wing magazine The American Spectator, that they had arranged sexual liaisons involving dozens of women. The most potentially damaging centred on a real-estate investment on the banks of the White River in the Ozark Mountains by the Clintons in the late 1970s.

‘Whitewater’ crossed a Rubicon, since it was not just suspected sins in office that were now under investigation but alleged transgressions from the pre-presidential past. It led to the appointment in 1994 of a special counsel, Robert B. Fiske, who was later replaced by Ken Starr, a bespectacled former federal judge, who began by investigating the land deal and ended heading up a sexual inquisition.

The suicide in July 1993 of Vince Foster, one of the Clintons’ closest aides and a former partner of Hillary Clinton in the law firm they worked for in Little Rock, showed how even a personal tragedy could blow up into a political firestorm. ‘Here ruining people is considered sport,’ wrote Foster in a resignation letter, found in his briefcase torn into 27 pieces, that read like a suicide note. The discovery of the letter brought calls for a dialling back of the heated rhetoric. If anything, however, it became more incendiary.

‘Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton,’ Rush Limbaugh told his 20 million listeners. Later on he fumed, ‘the only difference between Watergate and Whitewater is that Whitewater has a dead body’.¹²

The Arkansas Project, a shady outfit funded by the ultra-conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife to dig up dirt on the Clintons, claimed the president had organised a hit. The Republican Congressman Dan Burton fired a bullet into a watermelon to prove, through crude ballistics, that Foster’s wounds could not have been self-inflicted.¹³ Five separate official investigations found that the former Little Rock attorney had shot himself in the head, but even Gingrich announced he could not accept the verdict of suicide.¹⁴

The conduct of the Clintons in the aftermath of their friend’s death fuelled the right-wing conspiracy theories. The White House, after finding those torn scraps of paper in Foster’s briefcase, took more than 24 hours to report them to the police. Having first agreed to let the Justice Department search Foster’s office, the Clintons reneged. While investigators were kept at bay, several files relating to the First Couple’s private business were removed. The Clintons’ desire for privacy was understandable, given the sensitive nature of these personal documents, but it heightened the sense that they had something to hide and did not feel bound by the law – criticisms that would hound them years later.

In hungrily reporting each plot twist, the press began to rival the Republican Party in its contempt for the Clintons. This was part of a broader industry shift. Post-Watergate, newsrooms came to be populated by reporters who arrived in Washington dreaming of becoming the next Woodward or Bernstein; hoping for clandestine meetings in underground car parks with their own ‘Deep Throat’s; yearning to be played by a Hoffman or Redford in the sequel, All the President’s Women.

In many respects, the lack of deference from this new generation of muckrakers marked an improvement on the chumminess of the ’50s and ’60s, when the relationship between politicians and the Fourth Estate could be horribly incestuous (so close was the friendship between Jack Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, the hero of Watergate, that they watched a porn flick together in downtown Washington while awaiting the results of the 1960 West Virginia primary).

Often, though, the determination to topple presidents elevated what should have been C-grade imbroglios into full-blown scandals. As reporters looked for smoking guns, even the faintest whiff of cordite turned newsrooms into states of near apoplexy. Debased through overuse, the ‘-gate’ suffix became a dreary journalistic cliché. Just as Richard Hofstadter had spoken during the mid-’60s of the paranoid style in American politics spawned by conspiracy theorising, so it was possible now to identify a paranoid style in American journalism. The predicate for so much reporting during the Clinton years was the suspicion that the President and First Lady had committed felonious or potentially impeachable acts: the presumption of guilt. Some White House correspondents almost saw themselves also as crime beat reporters, an after-effect of the Nixon years that added again to the criminalisation of presidential politics.

The tone of the press coverage was different too. With phrase-twirling reporters such as Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman of The New York Times assigned to the White House, the writing became sassier, snarkier and more comedic. Press pile-ons became more common, such as when Bill Clinton reportedly held up air traffic at LAX airport so the celebrity hairdresser Cristophe could board Air Force One to give him a $200 trim – a story given front-page prominence by The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times. The Post dubbed it ‘the most famous haircut since Samson’s’. Tom Friedman called it ‘the most expensive haircut in history’. Time, inevitably, dubbed it ‘Haircutgate’. The story, however, was fake news. Rather than two of LAX’s runways being shut down, and dozens of flights delayed, the Federal Aviation Administration later revealed just one plane took off two minutes late.¹⁵

True to the adage that a lie can travel half-way around the world while the truth is getting its boots on, the story was parroted by late-night comedians and right-wing shock jocks, and instantly became part of Clinton lore. Here we were witnessing the convergence of news and comedy, a cycle of cynicism that daily made the president the butt of the joke.

This ‘comedy-first culture’, as the author Ken Jennings later called it, made late-night talk shows even more central to the political conversation.¹⁶ So much so that by 2016 a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the presidential campaign from late-night TV comedy than from national newspapers.¹⁷

Alas for the Clintons, there was no shortage of comic material. The First Lady was supposed to have thrown a lamp at her husband – or was it an urn, a briefing book or even the Bible? (Each of these objects appeared in various print stories about the alleged incident.) When the president appeared with a scratch on his face – a shaving wound, said the White House press office – rumours abounded that Hillary had physically attacked him after returning from an out-of-town trip to discover Barbra Streisand had stayed overnight in the Executive Mansion. In a post-Cold War America that could enjoy the luxury of being unserious, we were witnessing the trivialisation of national life.

The informality of the Clinton White House further undercut his standing; likewise his awkwardness with some of the ceremonial rituals of the office. His rookie attempts at military salutes, even after coaching from Ronald Reagan, who originated the practice, were so feeble they prompted what was dubbed ‘the great salute flap’.¹⁸ Pre-dawn jogs along the National Mall, his flabby pink legs jiggling in the unforgiving glare of the television lights, did little to enhance his presidential aura. Even his baby-boomer dress code raised eyebrows. Observing him in ‘threadbare jeans, a check wool shirt, unzipped windbreaker, bulging Reeboks’, Alistair Cooke wryly commented, ‘Along with the passing of George Bush, we shall see, I fear, the passing of the blue blazer.’¹⁹

His casualness bred even more contempt, and never more so than when he breezily fielded a question from a 17-year-old female high-school student during an MTV-sponsored forum in the spring of 1994. ‘Boxers or briefs?’ he was asked. ‘Usually briefs,’ the 42nd president of the United States unabashedly replied.

This undressing peeled away the mystique of the office, and showed how the traits that gave him a populist touch on the campaign trail could seem indecorous for a president. It was both a strength and weakness, which went some way to explaining why he was so polarising. As James Carville, his ‘Ragin’ Cajun’ political consultant, pointed out, ‘He is not remote in the way presidents have been, so you are more free to love him or hate him the way you would anyone.’²⁰ In trying to humanise the presidency, he ended up undermining the prestige of the office.

The disorderliness of the Clinton White House added to the sense of dishevelment. There was an essay crisis feel to the West Wing, typified by the incoming president staying up until 4.30 a.m. on the morning of his inaugural to make witching-hour alterations to his address. All-night policy discussions, strewn with half-eaten slices of pizza, often ended indecisively, which brought to mind Robert Frost’s definition of a liberal as someone so open-minded they wouldn’t take their own side in an argument. A session on Bosnia lasted for eight hours without reaching a conclusion. Multiple meetings were held to decide upon trivialities, such as whether the former vice-president Walter Mondale should be appointed as the US ambassador to Poland. Lost in these endless vacillations was a sense of the big picture.

Just as he struggled to make headway pushing his domestic agenda, so Clinton’s early foreign policy made a travesty of America’s claim to global pre-eminence. Lacking a clear sense of how to project US power in the post-Cold War world, there was no Clinton doctrine. In the absence of an animating vision, the young president merely told advisors foreign policy should be an extension of domestic policy. This ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ principle meant promoting trade deals, such as NAFTA, which came into effect on 1 January 1994, and advancing globalisation, the process of international economic interconnectedness that moved into top gear after the defeat of communism.

Ever since World War II, successive presidents had dealt with the first-tier problem of containing the Soviet Union, and for the most part were instinctively interventionist and hawkish. Clinton’s foreign-policy team struggled with second- and third-tier trouble spots, and were squeamish about projecting US power. In Haiti, an angry mob prevented a US warship from docking in Port-au-Prince, which led to a humiliating turnaround. In Bosnia, the Clinton administration continued the Bush administration’s policy of non-intervention, despite the ethnic cleansing conducted by the Bosnian Serbs and Croatians. To his eternal dishonour, Clinton did nothing to curb the genocidal fury of the Hutus against the Tutsi minority in 1994, where up to a million Rwandans were slaughtered at the rate of six men, women and children every minute.

The Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993, when Somali tribesmen shot down two US Black Hawk helicopters, killing 19 and wounding 73, was formative. So traumatised was Clinton by the television footage of American casualties being dragged through Mogadishu’s streets that he withdrew US forces and became reluctant to insert the military anywhere else. The Gulf War had supposedly vanquished the Vietnam syndrome, but for years afterwards the Mogadishu syndrome had an immobilising effect on Clinton. Less than four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America no longer looked so dominant, while its young president looked ineffectual. As Jacques Chirac, the new French president, mocked, ‘The position of the leader of the free world is vacant.’²¹

It became clear in the early months of the Clinton presidency that America was vulnerable on the home front too. In February 1993, terrorists detonated a truck bomb in the car park under the North Tower of the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand. Masterminded by Ramzi Yousef, a jihadist trained at an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the September 11 attacks, the intention was to topple the North Tower and send it crashing into its twin to the south. Then they planned to blow up the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, along with other New York landmarks. An international Islamist terror network had declared war on the United States, but Clinton was slow to grasp the magnitude of the threat.

Politically, the low point of Clinton’s first two years in office came in the battle over healthcare, that post-war liberal lodestar. True to his promise of getting ‘two for the price of one’, Bill Clinton announced three days into his presidency that the First Lady would head up a health task force to ‘hammer out a consensus’ on this intractable issue.

Rather than seek compromise, however, she disregarded the advice of Democratic lawmakers, who recommended a gradualist approach instead of a single mammoth reform. Hillarycare ran to 1,342 pages and 240,000 words. Even health-policy experts struggled to make sense of it. Its convoluted design rested on universal coverage, and was unworkable without it, which made Hillary Clinton resistant to compromise.²² Republicans were implacably opposed, partly out of ideological zealousness but also because they feared it might be a political boon for the Democrats, in much the same way as social security had been for FDR.

Throughout the Hillarycare debate, the psychodrama of the Clinton marriage was almost as significant a factor as the power dynamics of Washington. Clinton’s threat during his 1994 State of the Union address to veto any healthcare bill that did not provide 100 per cent coverage came just months after the Troopergate scandal, and White House aides, such as David Gergen, suspected his maximal position was part of a marital quid pro quo. ‘Watching him at the time,’ said Gergen, ‘was very much like watching a golden retriever that has pooped on the rug and just curls up and keeps his head down.’²³

After Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested 95 per cent coverage was the most that could be achieved – ‘something like this passes with 75 votes or not at all’, he wisely warned – Bill Clinton signalled during a speech in Boston that he was open to compromise. His wife, though, instantly shot him down. ‘What the fuck are you doing up there?’ she shouted at the president over the phone. The following day Clinton walked back his remarks. With the White House again not willing to compromise, Hillarycare stood no hope of passage. Five weeks before the 1994 congressional midterms, it was pronounced dead. Ignominiously, it did not even reach a vote in either chamber.

The Hillarycare debacle made a hate figure out of Hillary Clinton. During hearings on Capitol Hill, she clashed with Dick Armey, then the third-ranking Republican in the House. ‘I have been told about your charm and wit,’ Armey said icily, ‘and let me say the reports on your charm are overstated, and the reports on your wit are understated.’²⁴

The personal animus towards her was evident, too, when she appeared at an event in Seattle. Demonstrators held aloft placards reading ‘Impeach Hillary’ and ‘Heil Hillary’, forerunners of the ‘Lock Her Up!’ banners of the 2016 campaign. So worried was her Secret Service detail that agents persuaded her to wear a bulletproof vest.²⁵ Hillarycare reinforced the storyline from the 1992 campaign that she was too powerful, too manipulative, too secretive and, to many men and women, too much of a threat to the male status quo.

Time derided her as ‘ever the best girl in class’. People magazine labelled her ‘the perpetual A student’. The underlying message of these sexist tropes was that it was entirely acceptable to abhor this she-devil of a First Lady. All this suggested America was not ready for a strong feminist First Lady, let alone a strong feminist president.

Healthcare was not only a demoralising defeat for the Clintons but also a ringing ex post facto victory for Ronald Reagan. In post-Reagan America it was harder to enact big government reform, and even to make the case that government could be a force for good. In 1964, 62 per cent of Americans had trusted Washington to do the right thing most of the time. By 1994, that figure was 19 per cent.²⁶

Surveying the setbacks of his first two years, it became intel­lectually fashionable to describe Bill Clinton as America’s first post-modern president, and to reflect on how the end of the Cold War, the quickening globalisation of the world economy and the fragmentation of the US media made it harder for any occupant of the White House to shape events at home and abroad. All this was true, but Clinton’s faltering start to his presidency magnified his problems, whether it was the miscalculations over Hillarycare, the indiscipline of his White House or his feebleness abroad. In that first year there was also the botched response to the Waco siege, when 76 members of the Branch Davidian cult died – including more than 20 children – after the FBI brought to an end the 51-day stand-off. A Time cover in June 1993 neatly captured the powerlessness of a leader widely touted as the most gifted politician of his generation: ‘The incredible shrinking president’.²⁷

Since the word ‘tsunami’ was not then in common usage, the scribes of the Beltway, those framers of the conventional wisdom, settled on the term ‘earthquake’ to describe the Republican Revolution in the 1994 congressional midterm elections. The volcanic terminology was apt. By picking up 54 seats the Republicans ended 40 uninterrupted years of Democratic dominance in the House of Representatives and also won the Senate.

It was the first time since 1954 that both chambers had changed hands simultaneously, and the first time since the start of Eisenhower’s presidency that the GOP had monopolised power on Capitol Hill. The Republicans even picked up the governorship of New York, where George Pataki defeated the liberal hero Mario Cuomo.

Trampling all over Tip O’Neill’s dictum that all politics is local, Newt Gingrich successfully nationalised the congressional elections. His ‘Contract with America’, a legislative agenda proposing the shrinkage of government, term limits for lawmakers and welfare reform, served both as an indictment of the Clinton presidency and a declaration of war on Washington. The Republicans’ sweeping victory proved there was no political downside for the obstructionism of the past two years, an ugly lesson the GOP drew on time and again thereafter.

Inevitably, given the seismic scale of the landslide, the political ground shifted. By identifying more strongly with Republican candidates, conservative voters became politically less promiscuous. In the 1990 midterms, almost a quarter of voters who described themselves as Republicans voted for Democratic House candidates. In 1994, it was less than 10 per cent. (By 2010, as the American political historian E. J. Dionne has noted, 3 per cent of liberal Democrats and 2 per cent of conservative Republicans voted for candidates from opposing parties.²⁸ )

Regional divides were delineated more sharply, with the states of the Old Confederacy embracing the party of Lincoln like never before. After 1992, Republican House members from below the Mason–Dixon line outnumbered Democratic House members for the first time since Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War. Evangelical Christians voted more strongly for the GOP – almost 80 per cent of white, born-again Protestants – as did lower-income whites, showing how the politics of beliefs and values increasingly trumped the politics of the wallet. The Republican Revolution therefore became another important milestone in the ideological sorting of America.

Newt Gingrich’s elevation to the Speakership crowned a genera­tional shift in the Republican Party (born two years before the end of the war, the Georgian was technically not a baby-boomer, but was regarded as one nonetheless). On the eve of the midterms, he had replaced Bob Michel, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge who had served 14 years as minority leader. Though Michel considered himself a staunch conservative, he frequently played golf with Tip O’Neill, took part in card schools with Democrats and moved legislation in a bipartisan way.

‘My style of leadership, my sense of values, my whole thinking process is giving way to a new generation, and I accept that,’ said Michel, as he handed over the torch to Gingrich prior to the election, in the knowledge that the GOP caucus would yank it away from him afterwards.²⁹ Gingrich described politics as ‘war without blood’.³⁰ Michel, the recipient of two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart after being wounded by machine-gun fire, had experienced the real thing first-hand. Whereas Michel had prioritised the defeat of Soviet communism, Gingrich was dedicated to the defeat of American liberalism. Washington became the new Berlin.

Instantly, Gingrich changed the character of the Republican caucus. At his victory party in November, a local Atlanta talk-show host, Sean Hannity, told the crowd that Tylenol had been delivered to the White House because Bill Clinton was about to ‘feel the pain’.³¹ When the new Congress convened in January, Rush Limbaugh addressed the freshman class. This was the ‘Limbaugh Congress’, proclaimed the Republican Congressman Vin Weber, the new House Speaker’s wingman. The ‘Dittoheads’, as Limbaugh’s unquestioning listeners were known, had sent so many of their ideological fellow travellers to Washington.³²

The man of the moment, though, was ‘King Newt’, who believed he was the saviour not just of the Grand Old Party but of American civilisation itself. As he rounded out his first 100 days as Speaker, he even decided to deliver a quasi-presidential address, which CBS and CNN granted him 30 minutes of airtime to deliver.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the real president struggled to justify his existence. There was even conjecture about him being dumped from the Democratic ticket in 1996. ‘Can Bill Clinton – should Bill Clinton – be the party’s presidential nominee in 1996?’ asked The New York Times’s legendary political commentator, Johnny Apple.³³

At a primetime news conference on 15 April, carried by just one US network, a reporter even asked Clinton how to ensure his voice would still be heard. ‘The president is still relevant,’ he implored. ‘The Constitution gives me relevance.’ Now a BBC trainee, with hopes one day of covering the White House, I happened to be in Washington that night, and watched agog. It was the first time I had been back in the US capital since Clinton’s inaugural celebrations, and it was extraordinary to see how quickly his power had drained away.

Had it not been for what happened the next morning, his presidency might never have recovered from this pitiful show of insignificance. That day was the first time I had ever set foot in the BBC Washington’s bureau, my journalistic home for so much of my career. It was alive with activity, with hurried conversations and staccato telephone calls. From my seat in reception, I thought, thrillingly, I was observing the normal tumble of a busy Beltway news day. The press conference the night before had been startling, after all. Then the receptionist said something that confused me. Reports were coming through of a bomb attack in Oklahoma, a sleepy state where nothing much happened. What we were truly witnessing was one of the most tragic and transformative 48 hours in modern-day US politics.

Clinton’s revival began in the rubble of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, where a truck bomb was detonated, killing 168 people, including 19 children in day-care, and injuring more than 600 others. As soon as it emerged that the bomber was Timothy McVeigh, an anti-government extremist seeking revenge for the FBI’s storming of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Gingrich’s own revolutionary rhetoric came to be cast in a more sinister light. A president who had pleaded for relevance now became the country’s most reassuring and reasonable voice.

‘People should examine the consequences of what they say, and the kind of emotions they’re trying to inflame,’ said Clinton during an appearance on 60 Minutes, in which he avoided naming Newt Gingrich but left no one in any doubt about whom he was talking. Americans should resist ‘the purveyors of hatred and division’ and the ‘promoters of paranoia’. Clinton mounted a further attack during a commencement address at Michigan State University, again without mentioning the House Speaker directly. ‘There is nothing patriotic about hating your country,’ he told graduates, ‘or pretending that you can love your country but despise your government.’

Clinton’s consoler-in-chief pitch to the moderate middle received a further boost from the National Rifle Association, when it emerged that Wayne LaPierre, its leading propagandist, had issued a statement ahead of the attack labelling officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms ‘jackbooted government thugs’ who wore ‘Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms’. When the NRA refused to withdraw those remarks, George H. W. Bush, a gun owner and avid hunter, resigned his membership in protest.³⁴

As Clinton reflected afterwards, ‘The American people sort of began to move back to the vital centre after Oklahoma City.’ It ‘broke the spell in the country as people began searching for common ground again’.³⁵ Up until Oklahoma, Clinton looked like he would be a one-term president. Afterwards, he looked like a shoo-in for a second term.

Even before the bombing, Clinton had turned in secret to his old friend Dick Morris, a Republican political consultant who helped salvage his career in the early ’80s after voters in Arkansas had made him, aged 34, the country’s youngest former governor. Morris, as has oft been told, advised the president that triangulation was the key to winning a second term. This involved positioning himself between the congressional Democrats and Republicans and then staking out a policy above and between the two – the apex of a triangle.

At Morris’s urging, Clinton put the triangulation strategy into effect during the 1995 budget battle, which came to be the defining fight of his first term. First he co-opted the Republican idea of balancing the budget. Then he cast himself as the saviour of Medicare and Medicaid, two of the more popular government programmes that Gingrich wanted to cut. This appeal to the Great American middle worked perfectly.

When Clinton vetoed the Republican spending bills, Gingrich retaliated by shutting down the government, first in November and then for 21 days over the holiday season. In the blame game that followed, Gingrich made the mistake of admitting to reporters that he was motivated in part by his fury at being told to exit Air Force One from the rear door rather than the front, after flying home from the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin in Jerusalem. ‘Cry Baby!’ was the famous headline in the New York Daily News, which infantilised the House Speaker, enhanced Clinton’s presidential aura and helped turn the public against the Republican revolutionaries who had stormed Congress.

Clinton now became a more imposing leader. ‘He had stopped acting like a governor, and he had become the president,’ reckoned Donna Shalala, his Secretary of Health and Human Services.³⁶ In foreign affairs, he became more interventionist. Appalled by the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, where Ratko Mladić’s Bosnian Serb army butchered more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, Clinton was finally shamed into action. ‘Our position is unsustainable,’ he told aides. ‘It’s killing the position of the US in the world. This is larger than Bosnia.’³⁷ NATO’s bombing campaign forced the Serbs to the negotiating table in Dayton, Ohio, where in December 1995 an American diplomat, Richard Holbrooke, hammered out a peace deal on American soil.

In his 1996 State of the Union speech a month later, Clinton capped his presidential comeback with his seven-word treatise of triangulation, ‘The era of big government is over.’ Then in the summer, over the vehement objections of liberal Democrats, he burnished his centrist credentials by finally signing welfare reform into law (he had vetoed two earlier versions). In one of the biggest shifts in social policy since the New Deal era, Clinton had made good his 1991 campaign promise to ‘end welfare as we know it’. To do so, he adopted what might be called toxic bipartisanship that prioritised political over national gain. Clinton and Gingrich hated each other. The president was trying to outmanoeuvre his opponents, by neutralising an issue upon which Democrats had long been vulnerable.

During his first two years in office, Clinton had suffered from a political identity crisis. ‘Was he the fiscally restrained free-trade centrist?’ asked William Galston, one of his White House policy advisors. ‘Or was he a New Deal, Great Society Democrat trying to push national healthcare? Or was he a George McGovern 1972 Democrat trying to insert gays into the military?’³⁸

Clinton had described himself, disparagingly, as an Eisenhower Republican. Now, though, he could finally present himself as a bona fide New Democrat, the Bill Clinton he had always promised to be. From the moment he sounded the death knell of big government until Election Day, he was never behind in the polls.

A year into the Republican Revolution, the GOP now looked like losing the 1996 presidential election. In this astonishing political turnaround, the conservative movement struggled even to coalesce around a half-decent candidate. With Gingrich ruling himself out of contention, there was no obvious Newtonian candidate.

The Texas Senator Phil Gramm, a dour former economics professor who spoke like Elmer Fudd, was philosophically aligned but completely devoid of charisma. The billionaire publisher Steve Forbes attracted attention because of his proposal for a flat tax, but, like Gramm, seemed too nerdy to be president. Colin Powell, following his retirement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, became the darling of the press, but was too moderate for conservative tastes. Pat Buchanan this time won a surprise victory in New Hampshire, but faded thereafter. Almost by default, Bob Dole, an elder who commanded the respect if not adoration of his party, dominated the rest of the primary calendar.

Both a generational throwback and ideological misfit, the septuagenarian senator knew in his heart he was hardly the man for these radical Republican times. He admitted as much during a campaign stop at – of all places – Barry Goldwater’s ranch in the McDowell Mountains of Arizona.

‘Barry and I – we’ve sort of become the liberals,’ he joked to reporters. Goldwater, now in his late eighties, laughingly concurred. ‘We’re the new liberals of the Republican Party. Can you imagine that?’³⁹

Dole bravely proved the point during his acceptance speech at the GOP convention in San Diego, when he took on the nativists in the party who had backed Buchanan. ‘If there is anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion,’ he intoned, ‘then let me remind you: tonight this hall belongs to the party of Lincoln. And the exits, which are clearly marked, are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise.’⁴⁰

His error that night was to draw attention to his age. ‘Let me be a bridge to an America that only the unknowing call myth,’ said the veteran, who still suffered from limited mobility in his right arm and numbness in his left after being wounded by German machine-gun fire in the Allied advance through Italy. ‘Let me be a bridge to a time of tranquillity, faith and confidence in action.’ For the baby-boomer duo of Clinton and Gore, the line came gift-wrapped. As an alternative to Dole’s bridge to the past, they offered a bridge to the 21st century.

Victory for Bill Clinton meant he became the first Democrat since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win re-election. For all his prodigious political skills, however, he failed to pass the psychologically important 50 per cent threshold in the popular vote, partly because Ross Perot took 8 per cent. Turnout, at just 49 per cent, was also the lowest in a presidential election since 1924. While the Republicans maintained their majorities in the House and Senate, Clinton nonetheless claimed with some justification that his re-election offered proof the ‘vital American centre’ wanted a more consensual form of politics than the extreme partisanship of the previous four years.

Defeat for Dole was also a rejection of Gingrichism. With suburban white professionals and women deserting the new hard-edged Republican Party, GOP moderates warned that the party might not return to the White House unless it curbed the influence of Christian evangelicals and the radical right. Conservative hardliners, however, drew a very different lesson. For the third election in a row, they complained, the Republican Party had made the mistake of fielding an establishment candidate out of step with the grassroots.

In a quarter of a century covering US politics, only twice have I ever got round to framing newspaper front pages. The first was when Bill Clinton was impeached in December 1998. The second was when he was acquitted the following February at the conclusion of his Senate trial.

Washington in the late 1990s was my first foreign posting. The Monica Lewinsky scandal, as it was unjustly labelled, was my first big American story. The picture framing was partly a vanity project to mark this personal milestone. Yet this also felt like a once-in-a-lifetime story. Clinton was the first US president to be impeached since 1868, when Andrew Johnson also avoided being removed from office by the Senate after his indictment by the House.

Evidently, more seasoned Washington colleagues also wanted mementoes of what we should have called the Bill Clinton scandal. As I came to discover over the following months, the same framed black-and-white newsprint, with the same Washington Post headlines ‘Clinton Impeached’ and ‘Clinton Acquitted’, adorned their study and toilet walls.

Once-in-a-lifetime stories seemed to come along every few years thereafter: the disputed 2000 election, the attacks of September 11, the election of Barack Obama and the rise of Donald Trump. Nonetheless, the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton remains seminal. The further poisoning of the Washington well. The criminalisation of the modern-day presidency. Post-truth politics, and the rise of political lying. The advent of polarised news. The tabloidisation of national life. The corrosive impact of the internet. All were evident in that Clinton melodrama, which saw The New York Times ploughing the same furrows as the National Inquirer and reporters filing genre-busting news stories in which quotes from constitutional-law experts interpreting what the founding fathers meant by high crimes and misdemeanours were interspersed with the most salacious snippets of the sex scandal – the snap of Monica Lewinsky’s thong, the soiled blue dress, the gift from the president to his intern of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the same anthology of poetry he had once given to a young Hillary Rodham. An epic constitutional showdown was interlaced with a tabloid scandal, showing once more how frivolous national life had become since the demise of the Soviet Union. Would Congress have impeached Bill Clinton, ostensibly for having an affair with an intern, had America still been waging the Cold War?

Also it provided a fitting coda to the sensationalist ’90s, dubbed by Vanity Fair the tabloid decade, that had brought Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tapes, Tonya Harding, Anna Nicole Smith, the murder trial of the Menendez brothers, Elizabeth Taylor’s marriage to her seventh husband, Larry Fortensky, the arrest of Hugh Grant on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard for having sex in his car with the prostitute Divine Brown, the William Kennedy Smith trial, when the nephew of JFK was acquitted of rape, the killing of JonBenét Ramsey, the first accusations against Michael Jackson, the Mike Tyson rape conviction, the death of Princess Diana, the South Beach murder of Gianni Versace, John Wayne Bobbitt and his penis-severing wife, Lorena, and the O. J. Simpson trial; not to mention the divorce of Donald and Ivana Trump and his affair with Marla Maples.

Just as the O. J. Simpson trial brought about the symbiosis of crime and entertainment, so politics and sensationalism became similarly synergetic in the W. J. Clinton trial. Watching the first, much-replayed pictures to emerge showing Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton together – the famed ‘beret moment’ when she hugged him on a South Lawn rope line the day after he won re-election – had the same transfixing effect as seeing O. J. being driven down the freeway in Los Angeles. The White House became the white Bronco, although the car chase lasted an entire year. When the author Toni Morrison labelled Bill Clinton America’s ‘first black president’, it had nothing to do with his empathy for African-Americans, which was always inflated. Rather, it was because he was treated like a black perp.⁴¹ The Bill Clinton scandal brought much of the same voyeurism and luridness to the nation’s capital, where scandal has always been the highest – and often the basest – form of recreation. Washington, then, was at fever pitch. In the explosive first days of the scandal, ABC’s legendary White House correspondent Sam Donaldson predicted Clinton might be forced to resign ‘perhaps this week’. Even George Stephanopoulos, his one-time press secretary, suggested the scandal could provide grounds for impeachment. Clinton’s enemies, abetted by the independent counsel Ken Starr, seized upon the president’s affair with the 22-year-old intern as their ‘gotcha’ moment.

For cultural warriors, it was another opportunity to litigate the ’60s, one that pitted the modern-day puritans of the right against the permissive peaceniks of the left. Newt Gingrich, seemingly forgetting Watergate and adopting the sensationalist language of the times, called it ‘the most systematic, deliberate, obstruction-of-justice cover-up and effort to avoid the truth we have ever seen in American history’. Viewing it as the chance to terminate the Clinton presidency, he added to his partisan arsenal the constitutional mechanism of impeachment, the indictment of a sitting president by the House of Representatives.⁴²

Just as impeachment roused Republicans, it rallied Democrats: not so much out of fondness for Clinton as out of contempt for his conservative accusers. ‘What kept us close to the president was the Republicans,’ remarked Chuck Schumer, then a leading light on the House Judiciary Committee, where the impeachment proceedings originated. ‘Their extreme nastiness pushed Democrats into Bill Clinton’s arms, even those who didn’t like him very much.’⁴³

Democratic critics of the president such as the House Minority Leader, Dick Gephardt, a bitter opponent of his welfare reform, circled the wagons.⁴⁴ Prominent feminists, such as Gloria Steinem, also defended him, partly because they did not want to hand his pro-life accusers a victory. Partisanship helped save the Clinton presidency. As a result, impeachment solidified the battle-lines on both sides of the aisle, hardening the trench warfare dynamic that has become a permanent feature of Washington life.

As they fought to save their joint political project, the President and First Lady turned this into a partisan confrontation. They did so by altering the question at the heart of the national debate from ‘Who do you believe?’ to ‘Whose side are you on?’ That was the strategy behind Hillary Clinton’s famed interview on the morning of her husband’s State of the Union address with Matt Lauer of The Today Show, in which she claimed ‘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’.

The White House went to DEFCON 2. ‘We just have to win,’ Clinton told Dick Morris, who had conducted secret polling to test whether the president should lie or tell the truth, the quintessence of Clintonian cynicism.

It was during the impeachment crisis that post-truth politics, the appeal to feelings rather than the marshalling of facts, gained a firmer foothold. Clinton also relied on shameless lying. From his tense-parsing ‘there is no improper relationship’ answer to Jim Lehrer on the PBS Newshour in the opening days of the scandal to his finger-jabbing falsehood, ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,’ Clinton’s early dishonesty worked to his advantage. They bought him time to shore up Democratic support. As the president confided to a close friend, ‘The lie saved me.’⁴⁵ Not until the summer of 1998, when ABC News broke the story that Monica Lewinsky had preserved the blue dress stained with his semen, did the president grudgingly admit to the affair. His untruthfulness now exposed, Clinton requested airtime from the networks for a televised confessional.

‘Indeed I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate,’ he admitted. But then he mounted an unsparing attack on his accusers for pursuing a ‘politically inspired’ investigation led by Ken Starr. ‘This has gone on too long, cost too much, and hurt too many innocent people.’

In the early stages of the scandal, polls showed a majority of Americans were not that concerned about Clinton’s alleged infidelities. Of his primetime petulance, they were less forgiving. Afterwards, his personal approval rating plummeted by 20 points. More than 30 House Democrats voted to launch a formal impeachment inquiry. Senator Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, warned one of Clinton’s aides, ‘You are about three days from having the senior Democrats come down and ask for the president’s resignation.’⁴⁶

However, party unity held, largely because Democrats were so reluctant to hand victory to Newt Gingrich. No senior Democrat publicly called for his resignation. Even Senator Joe Lieberman, the Orthodox Jew who became Clinton’s most voluble and moralistic Democratic critic, said impeachment would be ‘unjust and unwise’. So strong was party allegiance that minutes after the House of Representatives passed two articles of impeachment, Bill Clinton held a pep rally on the South Lawn of the White House with Democratic lawmakers, Vice-President Al Gore and his wronged wife, Hillary, ranked behind him – this ungainly tableau featured on the front page of The Washington Post hanging on my wall.

Public opinion also split along party lines. At the time of Clinton’s impeachment in the House of Representatives in December 1998, 84 per cent of Democrats opposed it. Two-thirds of registered Republicans supported it.⁴⁷ After his acquittal in 1999, his approval rating amongst Democrats hit 92 per cent, proof that the ‘Whose side are you on?’ strategy had worked. When he left office, he enjoyed the highest approval rating of any departing president.

The only politicians to lose their jobs during the impeachment crisis were Republicans. Newt Gingrich, who had turned the 1998 midterms into a national referendum on the president’s behaviour, was the first casualty, because the GOP unexpectedly suffered a net loss of five seats. Afterwards he resigned, bemoaning the savagery of a Republican Caucus that he had made so bloodthirsty – he called them ‘cannibals’. He also admitted to an extramarital affair with a young Congressional aide, his future wife, Callista.

The fall of Bob Livingston, Gingrich’s replacement, was also personally humiliating, for he was impaled on his own penis. On the very morning of Clinton’s impeachment, the Louisianan resigned after Larry Flynt’s Hustler magazine exposed his own extramarital affair. ‘I must set the example that I hope President Clinton will follow,’ he said in a dramatic speech on the House floor. A grotesque irony was that the Speakership then passed to Dennis Hastert, a former teacher considered back then to be irreproachable, who was later exposed as a child molester.

My framed front pages, now slightly yellowed with age, captured much of this drama, but hardly the media zeitgeist. For the Clinton scandal completely altered the metabolism of news, speeding the shift from print to digital and fuelling the growth of cable news channels and talk radio. Public reality, which traditionally had been curated by the major TV networks and prominent newspapers, that tended to be more impartial and consensual, was now being moulded by new start-ups.

With the internet beginning to bypass the longstanding gatekeepers of information, it was the fledgling Drudge Report, an obscure website in the wilds of cyberspace, which broke the story. ‘Newsweek Kills Story On White House Intern: Blockbuster Report: 23 Year Old, Sex Relationship With President’ read its industry-changing headline posted at 11.27 p.m. on Saturday, 17 January 1998, after its iconoclastic founder, Matt Drudge, caught wind that the news magazine had suppressed explosive details of Monica Lewinsky’s affair with the president.

Racing to catch up, Newsweek published a digital piece by its investigative reporter Michael Isikoff, the author of the scoop, on its America Online site, rather than wait for its next magazine issue to hit the newsstands. White House reporters, such as Peter Baker, who was then with The Washington Post, posted their first online stories, even though many of their newsroom colleagues did not at the time have permission to access the internet.

When the Starr Report was published on 11 September 1998, it became America’s first internet moment. Downloads of its explicit details accounted that day for a quarter of internet traffic. In what became the first ‘clickbait’ sensation, CNN got 300,000 hits a minute, a number in those days that was not just unprecedented but unimaginable.

Easier to obtain than printed copies, the digital version of the 453-page report doubled as online porn. Oral sex was mentioned 85 times. Maybe the Clinton saga was the gateway drug to our modern-day information addiction, and perhaps the first recorded case of the screen-time epidemic. It was just that the delivery systems back then were not particularly efficient – dial-up internet and bulky laptops – and the most powerful stimulants, Twitter and Facebook, had not yet flooded the market.

Just as the early online news sites experienced a surge in traffic, so cable news channels enjoyed a ratings bonanza.

Before the Clinton scandal, Fox News, which launched two years earlier, was something of a niche broadcaster available in just 10 million homes. By 2000, in large part because of its blanket coverage of the impeachment process, that figure had mushroomed to 56 million homes. Stoking anger and outrage became its business model – or its ‘radicalisation model’, as the historian Nicole Hemmer described it.⁴⁸ Firebrand anchors such as Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingram and Sean Hannity became the tribunes of this armchair conservative insurgency. By 2002, Fox News had overtaken CNN as the highest-rated cable news network. MSNBC, which also launched in 1996 with an interview with Bill Clinton (something the president pointedly refused to give to Fox News, because it was owned by Rupert Murdoch and run by Roger Ailes), would eventually emerge as its liberal counterpoint.⁴⁹ Cable’s polarisation industrial complex had been born.

To sustain their 24/7 coverage of the scandal, continuous news channels softened the lines between reportage and comment. Partisan pundits trading in shrill sound-bites helped fill airtime, and quickly realised that the more outspoken their comments, the more they would be invited back. Green rooms came to be packed with what the journalist Joe Klein labelled para-journalists, ‘people whose main function was not to report but to perform – whose bilious on-air patter required immediate, simplistic answers to complicated questions’.⁵⁰ The argument culture of modern-day cable news, with its peanut gallery of pundits eager to talk but less willing to listen, came of age. One commentator who could also be relied upon for a pithy quote and an entertaining few minutes was Donald Trump, who called Clinton’s televised statement ‘a disaster’ and suggested he should have taken the Fifth Amendment, the constitutional protection against self-incrimination.⁵¹

Because there was now such a feedback loop between the right-wing media and right-wing politics, Fox News and talk radio heightened the bloodthirstiness of Republicans. So even though polls suggested the push for impeachment was damaging the GOP, and the results of the 1998 midterm elections proved it without question, the pressure from the right was irresistible. Despite various exit ramps being available to Republican leaders, they kept on pressing down a road so rarely travelled, even though they knew it was unlikely to end in Clinton’s ousting.

The political ramifications of impeachment would stretch long into the future. Though Clinton suffered the ignominy of becoming only the second president to be impeached, the biggest long-term Democratic casualty was his wife. When the email imbroglio broke early in the 2016 campaign, focused on her use of a private server as Secretary of State, voters already suffering from Clinton fatigue understandably questioned whether they wanted to live through another scandal-prone presidency. The lies from that era hardened the impression that the couple was evasive, untrustworthy and entitled.

Hillary Clinton’s attacks on Donald Trump’s misogyny, and her ability to capitalise on the notorious Access Hollywood tape in which he bragged about sexually molesting women, were undercut by her husband’s affairs. Not unreasonably, she was accused of enabling Bill Clinton’s behaviour and of showing little sympathy towards the women involved. Clinton defender James Carville gave the game away when he sneered, ‘You drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there’s no telling what you’ll find.’

One of Donald Trump’s first lines of defence after the ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’ Access Hollywood tape first surfaced was to claim he had heard Bill Clinton saying worse things about women on the golf course, an accusation which, even if not true, had the ring of plausibility. The billionaire even paraded some of Clinton’s accusers, including Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, ahead of the first presidential debate, a stunt that many commentators considered monstrously exploitative but which for others raised legitimate questions about her husband’s history of sexually abusive behaviour. Hillary Clinton complained in her 2017 campaign memoir What Happened, ‘He was just using them.’ But those women, all of them credible, had accused her husband of far worse – in Juanita Broaddrick’s instance, a brutal rape in 1978.

To survive the Access Hollywood scandal, the billionaire adopted the 1998 playbook. Like Clinton, he pleaded for partisan allegiance and framed the question as ‘Whose side are you on?’ Just as Clinton held that South Lawn pep rally hours after his impeachment, so Trump waded into a crowd of placard-waving supporters who had gathered at the foot of Trump Tower in the darkest hour of his campaign. The candidate’s counter-attack won him time, mobilised his base and preserved his political viability. Trump also benefited from the seedier side of Bill Clinton’s legacy: the redefinition of what constituted disqualifying behaviour for presidential candidates. ‘Slick Willie’ had dramatically lowered the bar.

The double paradox of the Clinton impeachment, then, was that it made it harder for his wife to shatter the glass ceiling and easier for Donald Trump to become president. Hillary Clinton became a repeat victim of her husband’s infidelities.

In those twilight years of the second millennium, the USA looked to be enjoying the same dominance it achieved at the Los Angeles Olympics. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and that whirlwind victory in the Gulf War emphasised its status as the hegemon in a unipolar world. France’s Foreign Minister, Hubert Védrine, described the United States, not altogether affectionately, as a ‘hyperpower’. James Baker, the former Secretary of State, referred to a global hub-and-spoke system, with America as the central hub through which every country would now have to go.⁵² In this Pax Americana, Madeleine Albright, the first female to head the State Department, described the US, justifiably, as ‘the indispensable nation’.

With a reformist leader, Boris Yeltsin, installed in the Kremlin, Russia was expected to spurn authoritarianism and embrace meaningful democracy. Even after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, there were hopes China might follow suit, as Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms moved the country inexorably towards a more market-based economy – which partly explained the Clinton administration’s support for its entry into the World Trade Organization.

The thesis of Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay The End of History, which proclaimed ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’, seemed prescient rather than precipitate. Democracy was on the march. At the beginning of the ’90s, 65 countries were truly free, according to Freedom House, a group promoting democratic change. By the end of the decade that number had jumped to 85.

For all the forecasts Japan would overtake the United States to become the world’s richest nation, the US economy became the global star performer. In 1997, the economy grew by a staggering 8.2 per cent. By the end of the decade, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had soared by 309 per cent. The country enjoyed full employment while productivity levels exceeded those of the post-war boom.⁵³ Out of America came almost a quarter of global economic output.

With the Cold War over, the US Treasury enjoyed a peace dividend. By 2001, military spending accounted for just 3 per cent of GDP, the lowest level since the 1940s. Still, America spent more on defence than the rest of the world combined. 1999 saw the first balanced federal budget since 1969, the year of the moon landing. America’s winning streak as the world’s largest economy, which stretched back to the 1880s, looked set never to end. So buoyant was the mood that some economists peddled a business-cycle version of Fukuyama’s end of history thesis, a utopian end to recessions.⁵⁴

Bill Clinton’s much-vaunted bridge to the twenty-first century looked impressively sturdy, even if the true engineers were emergent tech giants such as Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon.⁵⁵ Whereas it once looked like Sony, Toyota, Mitsubishi and Honda might dominate the corporate world, Silicon Valley became its new high-tech workshop. On 31 December 1999, the NASDAQ Composite closed at 4069. On the same date ten years earlier, it had ended trading at 455.⁵⁶ In the BBC Washington bureau at the time, all of us correspondents became amateur day traders. The profits from a batch of Silicon Valley shares purchased at breakfast would often pay for a decent lunch and dinner. Bill Gates, the 44-year-old founder of Microsoft and nerdy avatar of the New Economy, ended the century as the world’s richest man.

Thirty years after planting the Stars and Stripes on the Sea of Tranquillity, America dominated cyberspace too. The internet passed through 13 servers, nine of which were in the US. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), an organisation founded in 1998 with the backing of the US government to maintain the core infrastructure of the worldwide web, was headquartered in Los Angeles. Americans rushed to explore and conquer this new frontier. At the beginning of the ’90s, just 2 per cent of the population were online. By 2002, most Americans had access.

America seemed to be making a painless transition from the industrial to the information age, and from a manufacturing-based to a service-based economy. The emergence of this New Economy, focused on information technology, the internet, globalisation and high-tech companies, fuelled talk of this new paradigm of indefinite growth.

As the new millennium approached, the country looked confidently to the future and proudly on the past. A welter of books celebrated the American Century, a contestable term when first coined by the magazine magnate Henry Luce in 1941 that now was undisputed.

Amidst this wave of patriotic nostalgia, a site was finally allotted in 1995 for the World War II Memorial at the opposite end of the Reflecting Pool from the Lincoln Memorial. Three years later, the NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw published his runaway bestseller The Greatest Generation, a tribute to the Americans who stormed the beaches of Normandy and hauled up the flag at Iwo Jima. The Spielberg epic Saving Private Ryan, another homage to the thousands of veterans who confronted the wall of bullets at Omaha and Utah beaches, followed shortly afterwards. Senator John McCain’s 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, recounting his family’s wartime service and his selfless heroism in Vietnam, was a central reason why he emerged the following year as such an arresting presidential candidate. Vietnam vets, often ostracised following their return from South-East Asia, were repurposed as all-American heroes.

As part of this national stocktaking, the contribution of presidents neglected or maligned by history came to be re-evaluated. The author David McCullough published Truman, a revisionist tome that transformed the reputation of the prime architect of the post-war liberal order that underpinned US authority.

Following his death in 1994, the country also made peace with Richard Nixon. All five living US presidents attended the commemorations in California, the first presidential funeral since LBJ’s in 1973. Speaking on behalf of the nation, Bill Clinton readily conferred forgiveness: ‘May the day of judging Richard Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.’ Bob Dole, who broke down in tears, claimed ‘the second half of the twentieth century will be known as the age of Nixon’. Through all these mawkish eulogies, the word Watergate was never uttered, another sign of America’s self-contentment.⁵⁷

On the world stage, Clinton continued to assert himself more assuredly. In Northern Ireland, he was pivotal in bringing to an end The Troubles. Had it not been for his personal lobbying, and his wise decision to appoint as his Northern Ireland envoy the former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement would not have been finalised. My favourite moment during the Clinton years came that historic night in Belfast, when BBC colleagues whose entire careers had been spent covering The Troubles lined up to get Mitchell to sign photocopies of the newly minted agreement.

The president also pushed successfully for the enlargement of NATO, with the Soviet Union’s former clients Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary joining its 12 founding members. Having absorbed some of the lessons from Bosnia, he acted more decisively in Kosovo, even though he was still squeamish about inserting US troops and preferred to fight war from the air.⁵⁸

In South Asia, he calmed tensions in the nuclear showdown between India and Pakistan, which again displayed the skills as a peacemaker he learned in his alcoholic boyhood home. In his final months, with an eye on a Nobel Peace Prize, he tried to pull off his own Camp David. However, although Clinton pressured the Israel Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, into offering Yasser Arafat what was arguably the best deal the Palestinians could reasonably hope for, the PLO leader balked. From the West Bank to West Belfast, the United States had indeed become the indispensable nation. No other country came close to boasting its diplomatic leverage, unique convening power or military might.

At the dawning of the new millennium, America continued on with its victory lap. So self-congratulatory was the mood that organisers of the midnight gala on the National Mall in Washington dispensed with the term ‘The American Century’ and opted instead to call it ‘America’s Millennium’ – a bold claim for a country that had made a negligible impact for 776 of the previous 1,000 years.

That night I was on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for a concert that brought together a rag-bag roster of performers – Kenny Rogers, Bono, Aretha Franklin, Luther Vandross, Diane Keaton, John Glenn, Jack Nicholson, Muhammad Ali, Will Smith and even the Welsh crooner Tom Jones. Top billing, though, went to Bill Clinton, the notoriously late-running president who, out of respect for the Gregorian calendar, managed for once to turn up on time.

‘Never before has our nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity, social progress, and national self-confidence with so little internal crisis or external threat,’ he boasted in a short speech, which on a night of drunken revelry served also as sober analysis. America’s primacy went unchallenged, and as fireworks skipped from the Lincoln Memorial down the Reflecting Pool to illuminate the Washington monument, it was entirely fitting that this mighty obelisk resembled a bright shining number 1.

Thereafter, the hangover was quick in coming. From the outset of the new century, America experienced a dramatic and unexpected turnaround. Even though doomsday predictions of a Y2K bug failed to materialise, it felt nonetheless as if the United States had been infected with a virus causing its operating code to malfunction. A harbinger came on 31 December, before the touch-paper had been lit on those fireworks in Washington, with the unexpected announcement from the Kremlin that Yeltsin had nominated Vladimir Putin as his successor. Here perhaps was the Y2K bug in human form: a former KGB spymaster and ultra-nationalist authoritarian, whose arrival on the world stage single-handedly turned the end of history thesis into a pumpkin, even before the clock had struck midnight.

At home, the run-up to the new millennium brought a timely reminder of America’s vulnerability to Islamist transnational terror. Al Qaeda had plotted to usher in the New Year by bombing LAX International in Los Angeles, an attack thwarted at the Canadian border when a vigilant US Customs and Border Protection officer stopped a vehicle packed with explosives. In October, however, there was no stopping the jihadists who successfully carried out an attack on the USS Cole during a routine refuelling stop in Yemen. Seventeen US sailors were killed when two suicide bombers rammed a small boat packed with high explosives into its hull.

On the home front, the New Economy was revealed to have the same frailties as the old. In March, the heads of the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ took the unusual step of issuing a joint statement urging brokerage firms to review how much credit they were extending to investors.

A few weeks later, the dotcom bubble, inflated by overvalued Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) and the stampede to invest in the digital trailblazers of the New Economy, burst like a party balloon in the hands of an over-eager toddler. In a single week in April, the NASDAQ fell by 25 per cent, bringing to an end a 17-year bull market run. Even the digital economy, it became evident, had ultimately to adhere to old-fashioned rules of profit and loss.

A string of corporate scandals over the coming years involving New Economy giants such as Enron, the Houston-based commodities and energy corporation, and WorldCom, the Mississippi-based telecommunications behemoth, exacerbated the effects of the crash. America was paying the price for what Alan Greenspan described in December 1996 as the ‘irrational exuberance’ of an overvalued stock market. All that intoxicating talk of business cycles being relegated to history now sounded like an inebriated boast. In March 2001, the US economy went into recession for the first time in a decade.

The turn of the century brought unmistakable signs of a nascent backlash against globalisation, as American workers grew more concerned about threats from abroad to their livelihoods. At the Battle of Seattle in November 1999, some 50,000 demonstrators shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization, a siege blamed on anarchists and extreme environmentalists but which also involved organised labour – a combination of union muscle and green activism dubbed ‘Teamsters and turtles’.⁵⁹ The following year, blue-collar protesters again took part in the A16 demonstrations in Washington DC, targeting the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. In Seattle and Washington, we were seeing the first stirrings of a blue-collar revolt.

For workers in the Rust Belt, that bridge to the twenty-first century more resembled a new highway that bypassed their decaying towns. Disruptive technologies, dramatically altering the ways in which businesses, industries and consumers operated and behaved, turned out to be a jobs killer in the old industrial heartland. Between 1990 and 2007, machines replaced up to 670,000 US manufacturing jobs. A ‘digital divide’ had also opened up, a phrase first coined in 1996 to describe the discrepancy between the haves and have-nots of the information age, which was aggravated by the lack of affordable access to the internet in poor and rural areas.

The labour market had changed, and not necessarily for the better. Over the previous 25 years, employment growth had been focused on the upper and lower strata of the economy, in highly paid professional occupations and low-wage service jobs. Missing were the manufacturing jobs that had traditionally helped workers without college degrees to enter into the ranks of the middle class. Increasingly there were good jobs and bad jobs, with fewer opportunities between the two. ‘Job polarisation’, as economists started calling it, became more pronounced in the 1990s, a process attributed to deindustrialisation, deregulation and deunionisation. From the end of World War II to the late ’90s, union membership fell from a third of the American workforce to just 13.9 per cent.⁶⁰ Attitudes towards unions also evolved. In the public mind they went from being organisations that protected workers to organisations that burdened US corporations with unnecessary costs, paving the way for more lay-offs, plant closures and foreign outsourcing.

By the end of the ’90s, disparities in wealth were becoming more glaring – what the economist Paul Krugman dubbed the ‘Great Divergence’. In 1970, the CEOs of America’s top 100 companies had earned 39 times the pay of the average worker. By 1999, they were paid 1,000 times more than ordinary workers. In the 1990s alone, remuneration for senior executives rose by 442 per cent. From the early ’70s to the late ’90s, the only income group not to experience a decline in real wages was the top 10 per cent. ‘We are now living in a new Gilded Age,’ observed Krugman in 2002. ‘The America of Wall Street and Bonfire of the Vanities was positively egalitarian compared with the country we live in today’.⁶¹

As the new century dawned, there were warnings America’s social fabric was not just fraying but ripping apart; that the country was becoming more atomised as well as more polarised. In his seminal 2000 study, Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital, Robert D. Putnam drew attention to how lower participation rates in organisations such as unions, parent–teacher associations, the Boy Scouts and women’s clubs had reduced person-to-person contacts and civil interaction. Institutions of American association were in decline. Also of concern for Putnam was what he called the ‘individualising’ effect of television and the internet. The proliferation of cable channels, fragmentation of the media and explosion of websites brought to an end the simpler, more communal era when Americans gathered around their television sets to watch, say, the final edition of M*A*S*H, The Waltons or the ‘Who Shot JR?’ episode of Dallas, and then talked about it the next day around the water cooler. An increasingly rare exception was the farewell episode in 1998 of Seinfeld, a show famously about nothing that became a cultural touchstone for the carefree aimlessness and national stasis of the ’90s when history had supposedly run its course.

During this period, it was noticeable how I spent more time covering bizarre ‘Only in America’ stories. The rise, for instance, of creationism, the literal belief in the origin story set out in the Book of Genesis, as opposed to Charles Darwin’s heretical theory of evolution. Then there was the war on Harry Potter. One autumn afternoon, I recall heading to a bookstore in suburban Washington, where a conga-line of children dressed in the red and gold colours of Gryffindor were waiting to meet J. K. Rowling. This was newsworthy not only because of the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter books, but because Rowling, a church-goer herself, had been accused of promoting witchcraft. Both biblical literalism and the demonisation of Harry Potter spoke of a decline of reason and a rejection of science, trends that were accelerating, and not just in the Bible Belt. No longer were these fringe views. In some conservative states, they had become mainstream thinking.

With the clarity offered by hindsight, it has become increasingly clear that, for all the peace and prosperity, the ’90s were in fact pregnant with America’s post-millennium decline. The celebratory mood in which the country greeted the new millennium looked more and more like decadence before the decay. The transition from the old economy to the new was anything but pain-free. Reforms presented as being in step with the march of modernisation proved to be terrible slip-ups. Talk of a new economic paradigm sounded like the pitch for seed money from an overambitious Silicon Valley start-up.

Clearly, the Clinton years were a period of excessive and reckless financial deregulation. By far the most egregious mistake was the repeal of the Depression-era Glass–Steagall Act, which tore down the firewall between commercial and investment banking. Financial institutions such as Citigroup and even the insurer AIG became buyers and sellers of the most risk-laden products, derivatives and credit default swaps. Commercial banks, which had long been pillars of financial rectitude, became infected with the risk culture of investment banks. To compound this error, the Clinton administration signed into law the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in December 2000, which exempted credit default swaps from regulation – contracts that Warren Buffett, the billionaire and fabled ‘Oracle of Omaha’, described as ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’.⁶²

During this regulatory free-for-all, accountancy standards upheld by the Financial Accounting Standards Board were loosened, partly to enable big practices, such as Arthur Andersen, to rake in consultancy fees from the very companies they audited, a blatant conflict of interest. Even well-intentioned policies, such as initiatives by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to boost home ownership amongst the poor, had ruinous consequences. In credit-deprived areas, loans were granted to borrowers with a high risk of defaulting, a heedless lending policy that fuelled the subprime crisis, when a sharp fall in property prices after the burst of the housing bubble led to four million foreclosures. Whether to those struggling to get a foot on the housing ladder or to Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe, the Clinton administration acted like a barman lining up shots to the drunk before closing time and then handing him the keys of his car to drive home.

When it came to regulating the New Economy, Clinton opted for the same laissez-faire approach. It should be ‘kept to a bare minimum’, in the words of Assistant Attorney General Joel Klein, the head of the Antitrust Division at the Justice Department.⁶³ The rules for the twenty-first century would be lax.

Technology firms were not given an entirely free rein. In the late 1990s, the Clinton Justice Department mounted a landmark prosecution against Microsoft for illegally maintaining its monopoly in personal computers. But the New Economy would create dozens of new Microsofts, giant big-tech monopolies such as Amazon (founded in 1994), Google (1998) and eventually Facebook (2004).

Partly because there were so many early high-tech casualties, the erroneous belief took hold that market forces would serve as a regulator. Another mistake was to think online companies would be additive rather than alternative, that they would duplicate rather than destroy. The Clinton administration did not foresee the devastating impact of e-commerce: of how Amazon, for instance, would kill off bricks-and-mortar bookshops, and then, as its online inventory expanded, cripple entire shopping malls – and end up paying zero corporation tax. Nor did they predict how company names would become verbs. Reluctant to act as sheriff, Washington allowed Silicon Valley to become a regulatory Wild West. The ‘move fast and break things’ ethos trumpeted by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spoke of its cowboy culture. ‘Fake it until you make it’ became another mantra of the New Economy. The tech start-ups were not so much the workshop of the world as its chaos factory.

The same utopianism that surrounded the creation of the New Economy fuelled idealistic claims about the democratic potential of the internet. Digital citizenship and e-politics would bolster public participation and make lawmakers more attentive and responsive. New civic spaces would open up, the online equivalent of public squares and town-hall meetings. Crowdsourcing would make political candidates less dependent on super-rich donors, reducing the corrupting influence of big money. It could even heal the partisan rift.

‘Partisanship, religion, geography, race, gender and other traditional political divisions are giving way to a new standard – wiredness – as an organizing principle for political and social attitudes,’ wrote Karen Breslau of Wired magazine in the spring of 2000 in a wildly optimistic essay entitled ‘One Nation, Interconnected’.⁶⁴

Even in the infant years of the internet, there were portents of how it would degenerate into a forum for division, cynicism, hate, crazed conspiracy theories and the dissemination of misinformation. Of how algorithms promoted anger, and connected people sharing the same prejudices and fears and turned them into keyboard warriors. Of how the decision to exempt Facebook and Google from the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which gave them legal protection from publishing false and defamatory content, would allow the conflict culture to metastasise. The paranoid style in American politics had now found its natural home.

Just consider the rise of Alex Jones, a shock jock who had accused the US government of faking the moon landing and planning the Oklahoma City bombing, and who in 1999 founded infowars.com. This widely read site turned him into one of the web’s most demented purveyors of conspiracy theories, the untitled head of what the author Kurt Andersen called ‘a confederacy of paranoids’. By 2016, Jones’s YouTube channel had 2.4 million subscribers, while his Infowars Facebook page had drawn more than 650 million views.⁶⁵ Jones would later claim 9/11 was an inside job and the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, where a gunman murdered 20 first-graders, was a ‘false flag’ attack perpetrated by the Obama administration as a predicate for stricter gun controls. Yet that did not stop Donald Trump, a fraternal conspiracy theorist, from appearing on his show when running for presidency. Jones even claimed that President-elect Trump called him after the election to thank him for his help – the fanciful boast of a deranged liar, maybe, but tellingly not one that was denied by the Trump camp.⁶⁶

What seemed in 2000 like major Clinton legacy items – NAFTA, welfare and criminal justice reform – arguably ended up doing more harm than good. It was when the administration was functioning at its optimal level, with the president triangulating with Pythagorean glee, that some of the more lasting damage was done. NAFTA was widely perceived as a jobs killer. Even as economists trumpeted the benefits of the pact in lower consumer prices, higher productivity and a tripling of trade between the United States and its closest neighbours, NAFTA was easy to scapegoat for the decline in US manufacturing jobs. Just as Ross Perot had predicted, it came with the ‘giant sucking sound’ of jobs leaving America. While employment in the Mexico auto industry rose by over 400,000 jobs since 1994, the US auto industry shed a third of its jobs, some 350,000 positions.⁶⁷

Initially welfare reform was deemed a transformative success, slashing welfare rolls and boosting employment. It became central to the peace-and-prosperity narrative. Over time, however, the shrinkage of the safety net meant more Americans fell into poverty. The number of families living on less than $2 per person per day more than doubled between 1996 and 2011.⁶⁸ By 2012, more than three million American children spent at least three months each year existing on next to no money.⁶⁹

The impact of the 1994 crime bill, along with the president’s support for ‘three strike’ habitual offender laws, is more clear-cut. It led to the imprisonment of millions of low-level drug offenders and, with the clank of a jailhouse door, presaged the age of mass incarceration. Clinton oversaw the biggest increase in the federal and state prison population in American history. By the end of his presidency, the United States had the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Racially, the policy was flagrantly discriminatory. Crack was virtually identical, chemically, to powder cocaine, and yet its users, who were predominantly black, were treated as 100 times more criminal than the affluent whites who preferred to snort narcotics after cutting up lines with a credit card.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996, which Clinton signed electronically in a ceremony streamed live on the internet from the Library of Congress, paved the way for the biggest overhaul of telecommunications since the New Deal era, and helped speed the rise of the internet. But media ownership came to be consolidated in the hands of fewer corporations, as foreshown by the merger in February 2000 of America Online, the pioneering internet provider, and Time Warner, the dream marriage between the old media and the new. By 2016, 90 per cent of the major media companies were owned by six corporations – Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, CBS, Comcast and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation – as opposed to 50 companies in the early 1980s.

Liberated from ownership constraints, giant radio conglomerates came into existence, the most influential of which was Clear Channel (which later became iHeartMedia). From coast to coast, it nationalised shrill shock jocks who ended up having such a denationalising effect. In the decade after its enactment, right-wing talk radio exploded. The Telecommunications Act helped make syndicated stars of Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and the Trump favourite Mark Levin. Beck had an audience of six million listeners a day, bigger than the readership of all the major newspaper mastheads in America.⁷⁰

The origins of the opioid crisis are found in the early 1990s, when doctors over-prescribed powerful painkillers like OxyContin, promoted by misleading ad campaigns from pharmaceutical companies such as Purdue Pharma. Opioids that should have been more strictly regulated by the Food and Drug Administration were handed out like Halloween candy: to kids who had picked up knocks on the American football field; to middle-aged people with mild back ailments; to Rush Limbaugh, who booked himself into rehab after revealing to his Dittoheads that he had become addicted to OxyContin and hydrocodone, prescription drugs dubbed ‘hillbilly heroin’. Between 1991 and 2011, painkiller prescriptions tripled and addicts commonly made the deadly switch to harder opioids such as heroin, which were often cheaper and more readily available. Since 1996, the crisis has contributed to the deaths of more than 400,000 Americans from drug overdoses. In 2016 alone, 47,000 people died from overdosing on opioids.

Twenty years on, much of Clinton’s foreign policy looks hubristic and ill advised. His aggressive pursuit of NATO expansion, a spoil of Cold War victory, backfired terribly, for it fuelled the feelings of national victimhood exploited by Vladimir Putin. After the Cold War, NATO was pretty much obsolete and foreign-policy thinkers such as George Kennan, the author of the post-war strategy of containment, warned that the enlargement was a ‘strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions’.⁷¹

The Clinton administration’s response to the threat from Al Qaeda was inadequate, even negligent. US targets were hit repeatedly throughout the ’90s: in November 1995, a car bomb exploded outside an office building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans and two others; in June 1996, a truck bomb exploded outside the Khobar Towers apartment complex, again in Saudi Arabia, murdering 19 US servicemen and wounding hundreds; in 1998, the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people, including 12 US citizens. The president retaliated to the embassy attacks by ordering US forces to bomb a pharmaceuticals plant in Khartoum, Sudan, where Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network was suspected of manufacturing chemical weapons, and six of the terror leader’s bases and training camps in Afghanistan.

Yet although the military action came with a grandiose title – Operation Infinite Reach – it was feeble and counterproductive. As even the State Department admitted, its main effect was to bring the Taliban and Al Qaeda into closer alignment. Up until the strikes, the Taliban had been wary of sheltering Arab jihadists on its soil. Afterwards, it more willingly offered them safe haven. Coming just weeks after Clinton had admitted his affair with Monica Lewinsky, the most perilous phase of his presidency, the cruise missiles were inevitably seen as weapons of mass distraction. Parallels were instantly drawn with the plotline of the 1997 movie Wag the Dog, in which a Hollywood producer fabricated a war to deflect attention from a presidential sex scandal.

Throughout his presidency, Clinton failed to comprehend the murderous magnitude of the threat, despite the first attack on the World Trade Center and warnings that jihadists could strike again on American soil. The loudest warning came from three leading national security thinkers, Ashton Carter (a future defence secretary under Obama), John Deutch (a former CIA chief) and Philip Zelikow (who ended up working as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission). In 1998, in the aftermath of the embassy attacks, they published an ominous essay in Foreign Affairs outlining their fears of ‘catastrophic terrorism’ targeting major US cities. Citing the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, they raised the spectre of a Pearl Harbor-like event that ‘would divide our past and future into a before and after’.⁷²

The following year, the former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman presented a report to Congress that also proved prescient. ‘Americans will likely die on American soil,’ they warned, ‘possibly in large numbers.’

The Clinton administration’s response to the most existential planetary threat, global warming, was mixed. Though he signed up in 1997 to the Kyoto Protocol limiting emissions, Clinton made little effort to push for its Senate ratification (in another example of Clintonian diplomatic double-speak, he signed the Rome Statute setting up the International Criminal Court, but did not send it to the Senate to be ratified). Though he cast himself as a modern-day Theodore Roosevelt, protecting more than four million acres of public land in the form of national parks and wilderness, he was criticised for not doing enough to pressure Detroit into manufacturing more fuel-efficient cars. Ralph Nader, the consumer crusader turned environmentalist, exploited these weaknesses in the 2000 election. He polled almost 100,000 votes in Florida, enough to cost Al Gore the presidency.

A trashiness pervaded the ’90s, evident not just in the string of supermarket tabloid scandals but also in the rise of tabloid talk shows. Seeking to emulate the success of The Oprah Winfrey Show, the networks launched more raunchy rivals The Maury Povich Show, The Jenny Jones Show and Ricki Lake. The former mayor of Cincinnati, a politician who wanted to become a celebrity, presented the most extreme iteration of the format, The Jerry Springer Show. In what TV Guide called the worst television programme of all time, he became the carnival barker of a modern-day freak show, which featured, among others, ‘the man who married his horse’, a woman who claimed to have slept with 251 men in ten hours and a self-styled ‘breeder for the Klan’.⁷³ It was aggressive, vulgar, foul-mouthed, unashamedly populist, proudly anti-elitist and a ratings winner. Small wonder Springer complained years later that Donald Trump ‘stole my show and took it to the White House’. The members of the studio audience who chanted ‘Jerry, Jerry, Jerry’ and booed the unfaithful wife or the cheating girlfriend were not dissimilar to the supporters who thronged Donald Trump’s rallies and yelled ‘Lock her up!’

Television tastes were evolving. In 2000, for the first time, a reality TV show, Survivor, became the most watched programme of the year, as presaged by the 1998 Peter Weir classic The Truman Show. The show’s catchphrase, ‘The tribe has spoken,’ inadvertently summed up the clannish politics of the moment. Its producer, Mark Burnett, a former British paratrooper and Falklands War veteran, would go on four years later to produce another ratings winner, a business show with a survival-of-the-fittest theme called The Apprentice. At the Emmys in 2016 just weeks before the presidential election, the host, Jimmy Kimmel, took aim at the British showrunner. ‘Thanks to Mark Burnett, we don’t have to watch reality shows any more, because we’re living in one.’

So much of what was unattractive about ’90s America was on display in the O. J. Simpson trial. The circus-like proceedings. The celebrity culture which made stars out of the attorneys (Johnnie Cochran, Marcia Clark, Robert Shapiro); the judge (Lance Ito, who played to the cameras); a cop alleged to be racist (Mark Fuhrman); bit players (like Kato Kaelin, who parlayed his witness-stand limelight into various appearances on reality TV shows); and even a Kardashian (O. J.’s close friend Robert Kardashian, the father of Kourtney, Kim, Khloé and Rob, sat alongside the defence team throughout the trial, and first appeared before the media on the day of the Bronco car chase, when he read a letter penned by O. J., which sounded like a confession). The extent to which the criminal justice system, like politics, had become performance art reliant on bumper-sticker jargon: ‘If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit’.

There was the post-truthism of a manifestly unjust verdict, a victory of feelings over facts. Though the evidence presented in that LA County courtroom overwhelmingly pointed to Simpson’s guilt, some jury members admitted afterwards the evidence presented in court was secondary to their desire to retaliate against the Los Angeles Police Department for the Rodney King beating. Their deliverance of a ‘not guilty’ verdict was as much a protest as a judgement. As the panellists left the courtroom, one of the African-American jurors, a former Black Panther, even raised his clenched fist in a black power salute.

America’s racial divisiveness was again on global view. While a majority of whites were convinced of his guilt, polls showed six out of ten African-Americans thought ‘The Juice’ was innocent. When the trial ended with his acquittal, jubilant African-Americans celebrated as if O. J. had scored one of his magical, weaving touchdowns.

By contrast, white viewers were stunned and speechless. ‘Shit’ was Bill Clinton’s response, after watching the verdict in the office of his African-American personal secretary, Betty Currie.⁷⁴ Here, the US president spoke for the rest of the world. How could America have got it so wrong? Had the country gone berserk? The questions asked incredulously by international onlookers as the ‘not guilty’ verdict was read to a stunned courtroom found an echo on Election Night in 2016.

In the late ’90s there was a warning that politics was not immune from the same hoopla as the O. J. trial. It came from an unlikely quarter, the normally sober-minded state of Minnesota, and in an improbable form, Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura, a star of WrestleMania best known for his glittering skin-tight pants and luxuriant pink feather boas. The free-wheeling Ventura, who had first raised the possibility of running for public office on his radio talk show, railed against political correctness and the political establishment – one of his opponents was the Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey III, the son of the former vice-president. Campaigning with the slogan ‘Retaliate in ’98’, his body-slam candidacy took on a populist momentum all of its own. A curio quickly became a phenomenon. His shock victory demonstrated how quickly the political order could be upended by an outsider with name recognition railing against ‘politics as usual’, who understood how to manipulate the modern media. Not insignificantly, Ventura’s grassroots campaign was one of the first to harness the power of the internet.

Having run in Minnesota as a Reform Party candidate, Ventura was talked of as the party’s prospective presidential nominee in 2000 – Hulk Hogan, his friend from the pro-wrestling days, suggested they don leotards for one final bout before he took up residence in the White House. Ventura, however, had pledged to serve out his first term as governor, and therefore pushed another celebrity candidate as a kind of placeholder. The luminary he had in mind was his fellow grapple fan and friend from the WrestleMania circuit, Donald Trump.

The ’90s had been an unhappy interlude for the struggling New York tycoon. They began on the ski fields of Aspen, Colorado, when his first wife, Ivana, an Olympic skier, ran into her husband and his mistress, Marla Maples. This fractured love triangle produced the first tabloid scandal of the decade, when the break-up of his marriage coincided with the decline and fall of his casino empire.

At the beginning of 1990, Trump owed more than $4 billion to 70 banks. Even an illegal loan from his father, Fred, who bought $3.5 million worth of chips at the Trump Castle in Atlantic City and then walked out of the door without using them, could not save him from insolvency.

The sight in 1991 of a beggar proffering a tin cup outside Tiffany on Fifth Avenue brought home the abject state of his finances. ‘I looked at Marla and said, “You know, right now that man is worth $900 million more than I am.”’⁷⁵ In another retelling of that moment, Trump claimed he said, ‘That bum isn’t worth a dime, but at least he’s at zero.’⁷⁶

After restructuring his mammoth debts, Trump’s financial fortunes changed in the mid-’90s.⁷⁷ By the summer of 1996, in an article headlined ‘An Ex-Loser Is Back in the Money’, Fortune celebrated his ‘Houdini-like escape’.⁷⁸ In his 1997 bestseller The Art of the Comeback, Trump told the story of his financial recovery, and discussed his political prospects. ‘The problem is, I think I’m too honest, and perhaps too controversial, to be a politician,’ he wrote. ‘I always say it like it is, and I’m not sure a politician can do that.’ When Jesse Ventura talked up his candidacy, however, Trump started seriously exploring a run.

In a straw poll of delegates at the Reform Party convention in 1999, Trump came a close second to the movement’s founder, Ross Perot. Revelling in his newfound political popularity, he appeared on Larry King Live in October and announced, Perot-like, the formation of a presidential exploratory committee headed by his friend Roger Stone. Afterwards, Trump embarked upon a media blitz that once more demonstrated his gift for self-publicity. Oprah Winfrey would be his ideal running mate, he teased. His then girlfriend, Melania Knauss, would become his wife, so she could serve as First Lady.

In another sign of things to come, Saturday Night Live lampooned him with a sketch based on an imaginary strategy meeting between Trump, Perot and Pat Buchanan, whose rival campaign for the Reform Party nomination had run into trouble because of his horrific claim that America need not have confronted Hitler.⁷⁹ ‘The Reform Party needs a new crazy leader,’ said a Ross Perot impersonator, looking expectantly at Trump and Buchanan. ‘What we need is a real nutbag.’

The Wall Street Journal took Trump more seriously, and allotted prime real estate on its op-ed page for a characteristically self-aggrandising column, ‘America Needs a President Like Me’. ‘Let’s cut to the chase,’ it began breathlessly. ‘Yes, I am considering a run for president. The reason has nothing to do with vanity, as some have suggested.’

In what read like a preview of his Twitter feed, Trump promised to negotiate better trade deals and threatened to bomb Pyongyang. Denouncing the ‘striped pants set’ running US foreign policy, he vowed to reverse any move to normalise relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

In parts, he sounded clairvoyant: ‘I believe non-politicians represent the wave of the future.’ For now, though, he presented himself as a centrist. ‘The Republicans are captives of their right wing. The Democrats are captives of their left wing. I don’t hear anyone speaking for the working men and women in the center.’

Jesse Ventura was his model: ‘the embodiment of the political qualities America needs’. Trump pledged to run solely for a single term, so he could return to the job in New York he loved doing. ‘I would center my presidency around three principles,’ he concluded, ‘one term, two-fisted policies, and no excuses.’

In outlining his presidential manifesto, Trump sounded at times like a New York Democrat. On abortion, he was ‘totally for choice’. On healthcare, he was borderline socialistic. ‘We must have universal healthcare’ based on the Canada model, he wrote in his campaign book, The America We Deserve. ‘We need, as a nation, to re-examine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing.’

On other issues, such as gun control, he claimed to be ‘very conservative’. His Cabinet dream team included Oprah, the General Electric CEO Jack Welch, the Teamsters boss Jim Hoffa (the son of James), Jeb Bush and Steven Spielberg.⁸⁰

An irony of his run, given his nativism 15 years later, was that Trump framed his battle with Buchanan as a choice between tolerance and intolerance. To draw more attention to his opponent’s anti-Semitism, he toured the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. ‘We must recognise bigotry and prejudice and defeat it wherever it appears,’ he said, high-mindedly.⁸¹ Only ‘the really staunch right wacko vote’ would back a racist like Pat Buchanan, he told Tim Russert on Meet the Press.⁸² As the political commentator Steve Kornacki cleverly put it, Trump was fighting Trumpism.

Only in his demonisation of the Central Park Five, a group of African-Americans wrongly convicted of the rape and assault of a white female jogger attacked in 1989, were there shades of the racism that lay in store. In response to the attack, he had placed ads in four New York newspapers calling for the state to adopt the death penalty. ‘BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY AND BRING BACK OUR POLICE,’ he wrote in all caps. In The America We Deserve, he boasted about demanding the death penalty for the five blacks. Nor did he make any effort to conceal his misogyny. ‘The only difference between me and the other candidates,’ he said at one point, ‘is that I’m more honest and my women are more beautiful.’⁸³

Early in election year, Trump decided to end his bid after Buchanan received the endorsement of the former KKK leader David Duke and a self-styled black nationalist Marxist called Lenora Fulani. No longer was he interested in being the figurehead of a party, as he put it, that now included a Klansman, a neo-Nazi and a communist. Nor did he want to be associated with the crackpots he had encountered at a Reform Party event in California, where, he grumbled, ‘the room was crowded with Elvis lookalikes, resplendent in various campaign buttons and anxious to give me a platform explaining the Swiss-Zionist conspiracy to control America’.⁸⁴

The Reform Party’s then head, Pat Choate, was not unhappy to see the back of him. ‘Donald Trump came in, promoted his hotel, promoted his book, he promoted himself at our expense,’ he complained. ‘All this was was a serious hustle on the media, and I think the media should send him a massive bill on it.’⁸⁵ So ended Donald Trump’s first semi-serious bid for the presidency.

In 2000, the career trajectory of his future presidential rival was very much on the up. That November, Hillary Clinton won the New York Senate seat left vacant by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a victory she celebrated in the presidential suite of the Hyatt on 42nd Street, the hotel that had established Trump’s deal-making reputation. If the ’80s had been the making of the New York billionaire, the Clintons had dominated the ’90s. Reflecting on that roaring decade, Hillary Clinton had asked, ‘Which part of peace and prosperity didn’t you like?’⁸⁶ By 2016, voters had compiled a laundry list of complaints.