USED AND ABUSED (IMPEACHMENT: AMERICAN CRIME STORY)

 

Recently, while clearing out an attic, I came across a copy of The Economist from February 1999 with the headline 'The End?' emblazoned on its cover.

The cover also depicted a brush sweeping into a dust pan photos of President Bill Clinton, Special Prosecutor Ken Starr, Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones as his impeachment trial in the US Senate approached the end.

Given the renewed focus on this tawdry tale as a result of Ryan Murphy and FX's 10 part dramatisation 'Impeachment: American Crime Story,' the editorial of February 13, 1999 in The Economist makes for a grim, yet fascinating read.

"It is hard to remember where it all began; only that, while it lasted, almost everyone did things and said things they wish they had not," the writer mused.

"As at the end of a drunken orgy, there is a need to clean up: sort through the wreckage, sweep the floor, throw open the windows and repent." 

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know it wasn't the end.

And the mess? Well, that wasn't cleaned up either?

We now know the Lewinsky affair was just the beginning of a culture war which still is being waged today.

It is a deep rooted division where partisanship trumps morality and the only thing that matters appears to be rubbing the rival side's noses in the dirt.

22 years on and we're still not sure if that bitterness will ever end.

The Monica Lewinsky scandal wasn't simply a tawdry moment in the nation's history.

It was a political trauma that America really hasn't recovered from.

The Republicans may finally have got their revenge over the Clintons with Donald Trump's shock defeat of Hillary in the 2016 Presidential election.

But at what price?

The GOP remains in the grip of a narcissistic huckster who may yet run in 2024 or anoint a successor in his own image.

In a toxic political climate fuelled by partisan mainstream and social media and a politicised justice system, half truths, doctored reality and bare faced lies could be turned on opponents to smear and even be used to suppress them.

Not that the allegations against Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair were false.

We all know President Clinton disgraced himself by having a relationship with the White House intern.

However it is the power dynamic of that relationship which is also troubling now that we are in the era of #MeToo.

And it is made all the more uncomfortable by the pattern of allegations against him about extra marital affairs, sexual harassment and, in one case, sexual assault from Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broderick. 

On the path to the White House in 2016, Trump reminded the world of these allegations while successfully batting away queries about his own questionable sexual attitudes and history.

And that's what makes Ryan Murphy's 'Impeachment: American Crime Story' such a deeply unsettling watch.

Beanie Feldstein is cast as Lewinsky, a head in the clouds intern who is moved from the White House to a job in the Pentagon after her affair with Clinton.

In her new role, she befriends Sarah Paulson's disillusioned former White House official Linda Tripp who becomes her confidante and ultimately her betrayer.

Moved out of the White House following the death of deputy counsel Vince Foster, Tripp harbours animosity to the Clintons and alleges to anyone who'll listen that her boss wasn't the victim of a suicide.

As they bond, Monica implies she is romantically involved with someone in the administration who is employed in the President's 2016 re-election campaign.

That someone is, of course, Clive Owen's President Bill Clinton - unbeknown to his wife, Edie Falco's Hillary.

As the affair with the President goes through false peaks and very deep troughs, Monica in a moment of heartbreak confides in Tripp.

Unable to hold her water, Tripp alerts Margo Martindale's publishing agent Lucianne Goldberg and soon word gets out to GOP operatives and hacks who are already salivating at the prospect of the President being subpoenaed to appear in the lawsuit by Annaleigh Ashford's Paula Jones against him for sexual harassment while he was the Governor of Arkansas.

With Dan Bakkedahl's Ken Starr's Whitewater investigation into the death of Vince Foster going nowhere, the Special Prosecutor's probe mutates into a dubious inquiry into the potential cover-up by the President of sexual impropriety.

The discovery that Linda Tripp has been secretly recording phone calls with Monica sets in train events which sully all involved from Clinton and Lewinsky to Tripp, Starr and the army of Republican Party operatives who are desperate to claim a Democratic President's scalp.

Written by Sarah Burgess, Flora Birnbaum, Halley Feiffer and Daniel Pearl, 'Impeachment: American Crime Story' is a decent account of a very indecent episode in US politics.

Burgess, Birnbaum, Feiffer and Pearl put their audience through the trauma again of living through the salacious details of the Clinton-Lewinsky saga and the terrible political behaviour it inspired.

However the show is at its strongest when focusing on the women at the centre of the scandal.

Clinton's treatment of Lewinsky, Jones and Broderick is deeply unsettling.

However the eagerness of Starr and the hard right to also politically exploit their testimonies in a witch hunt, with no real empathy or pastoral care for the women involved, is equally shameful.

It's bad enough being used and abused sexually but it's equally traumatic and demeaning to have intimate details of what happened paraded publicly for political advantage.

Feldstein does a really effective job as Lewinsky - capturing her initial naivete about the relationship with Clinton and the subsequent horror of having confidential conversations recorded by Tripp and paraded so publicly for political ends.

Ashford too engages our sympathies as the even more naive Jones whose case is exploited by her vain husband, Taran Killam's Steve Jones and Judith Light's Conservative Christian activist Susan Carpenter-McMillan, only to be left to fend for herself when the lawsuit goes nowhere.

Showrunner Ryan Murphy and his fellow directors Michael Uppendahl, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre and Rachel Morrison do a thorough job diving into the detail of the scandal and packaging them for a 21st Century audience.

The recreation of 1990s Washington DC is spot on and they marshal the cast effectively - although occasionally the show slips into soap opera.

As for the cast, the show is dominated by Sarah Paulson as Linda Tripp.

Physically transformed to resemble Tripp thanks to some prosthetics and a fat suit, she really turns in a performance worthy of Emmy recognition - portraying the civil servant as cantankerous, egotistical, exploitative and, in her own way, incredibly naive.

Believing she is smarter than most, Tripp uses Lewinsky for her own ends, only to be used by the Republican establishment and find herself being treated with disdain in the court of public opinion.

Paulson accentuates Tripp's inability to see this reality in a performance that is a career high.

Owen's portrayal of Bill Clinton is initially undermined by poor make up that distracts from his performance.

Vocally he nails Clinton's husky, Southern drawl and while the charisma that the President undoubtedly had is dialled down, the English actor does a good job highlighting his evasiveness when confronted with the exposure of the affair and his manipulation of Lewinsky during it.

As Hillary, Falco gets to deliver some devastating lines when the affair is exposed - although, as skilful as she unquestionably is, she never quite overcomes the sense that she is depicting Carmela Soprano in the White House.

Colin Hanks and Darren Goldstein impress as Mike Emmick and Jackie Bennett, prosecutors in Starr's office - the latter being the more bullish of the two.

Hanks gives the sense of a lawyer not entirely comfortable with the route the investigation is taking but going along with it, while Goldstein's Bennett is prone to flashes of temper and seems to want a win against the Clintons at all costs.

The detention of Lewinsky at a hotel in Pentagon City is very well handled, with Murphy and his writers doing a stunning job highlighting the aggressive male power dynamics deployed against the intern and the questionable manipulation of her rights.

Bakkendahl does an effective job too capturing the holier than thou zeal of Starr while he oversees a questionable fishing expedition to politically damage the Clintons.

Starr, of course, would later face claims of his own extra-marital affair which only compounds the sense while watching Murphy's miniseries that the witch hunt was less concerned with morality and was more about a scorched earth policy of nabbing a huge political victory.

Killam and Light amuse as Steve Jones and Susan Carpenter-McMillan.

Cobie Smulders and Billy Eichner also have a lot of fun portraying the right wing attack dogs Ann Coulter and blogger Matt Drudge - emphasising the ego at play.

Martindale too is enjoyable as Lucianne Goldberg, as is Danny Jacobs as the frustrated Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff who doggedly pursues stories about Bill Clinton's sexual improprieties only to see his colleagues buckle when they have the biggest scoop at all.

Blair Underwood, Brent Sexton, Christopher McDonald, Kevin Pollack and Rae Dawn Chong are effective as Clinton cronies and embattled colleagues in the administration -  Vernon Jordan, Dick Morris, Robert S Bennett, Bernard Nussbaum and Betty Currie.

While Fred Melamed gets some great moments as Lewinsky's attorney William H Ginsburg, Mira Sorvino provides plenty of compassion as her mother Marcia Lewis.

In light of recent controversies, Alan Starzinski's frat boy boorishness as a contributor to the Starr Report about going into the most prurient details about the President's sexual life will also be noted by many viewers.

Inevitably in the bid to dramatise real events, Murphy and his writers change some of the details while remaining largely true to the story.

With Monica Lewinsky on board as a producer, it is inevitable that the show rightly focuses on the treatment of women by Clinton and those who sought to humiliate him into resigning.

Living through the events again that led to Clinton's impeachment, it is hard not to disagree with the closing sentiment of the Economist editorial.

"When Americans look back over the Presidency of Bill Clinton, they will see much that impresses them; economic good times, balanced budgets, reform of the welfare system, the dogged pursuit of peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

"Yet all has been tarnished by what flowed from things that should never have happened in the first place: the President's own sexual wantonness and his own recourse to lying. 

"It will be said of Mr Clinton that, in some deep way, he never seemed to feel or understand the weight of the office he held; and from that carelessness, that squandering of his own authority, came all the other excesses America has seen.

"Even after all that has happened, a genuine expression of regret would mark an end of sorts. "

"There will be stage-managed 'sincerity,' no doubt - there has been an abundance of that throughout. But a genuine expression of repentance? That has always seemed too much to hope for."

('Impeachment: American Crime Story' was broadcast on FX in the United States from September 7-November 11, 2021 and on BBC2 in the UK from November 9-December 21, 2021)

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