his public crusade took a heavy toll on the administration. With the President under close scrutiny, Republicans swept off-term elections in November 1994, capturing both houses of Congress for the first time in more than 40 years. Clinton then faced the unenviable position of presiding over a divided government.

If Kenneth Starr proved a thorn in his side, the President nevertheless contributed mightily to his own troubles. Between November 1995 and May 1996—while he was under investigation for possible financial improprieties—Clinton carried on a sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Then the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the President didn’t enjoy executive immunity against civil claims, thus allowing Paula Jones, whose legal team still maintained close contact with Starr, to move ahead with her sexual-harassment suit.

Further complicating matters, Lewinsky, who had been transferred to the Department of Defense, began confiding in Linda Tripp, a 48-year-old disgruntled secretary who had also been rotated out of the West Wing and over to the Pentagon. Tripp secretly recorded their conversations, in which Lewinsky disclosed sordid details of her relationship with the President, and handed over copies to Paula Jones’s lawyers. The lawyers in turn subpoenaed Lewinsky, in an attempt to establish that Clinton had exhibited a pattern of initiating sexual encounters with his subordinates.

All the while Kenneth Starr, frustrated by his inability to make headway in the Whitewater probe, sought and received permission to extend the scope of his inquiry. Armed with insider information from Jones’s legal team, he began constructing a shaky case against the President, claiming that Clinton had engaged in a criminal conspiracy to suborn perjury and obstruct justice. In a 445-page report that he submitted to Congress in September 1998, along with 3,000 pages of supporting documents, Starr alleged that, by helping Lewinsky secure a job in New York, the President had encouraged her to offer false testimony in the Paula Jones civil suit. He also charged the President with lying to friends and associates in an effort to encourage them to offer false testimony before a federal grand jury.

Matters came to a head in late 1998, when the House of Representatives passed two articles of impeachment against the President.

House Republicans badly misjudged public opinion. As it became clear that he had all but lied about the Lewinsky affair on national television, Clinton’s personal approval ratings plummeted. Yet even in early 1999, as he faced a trial in the Senate, his job performance numbers remained extremely high—over 70 percent, according to some polls.

By contrast, Kenneth Starr quickly burned through any residual good will he might once have enjoyed. Only 19 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing, while 43 percent disapproved. In effect, he struck most Americans as a ruthless prig who would go to any lengths to bring down

the President. That his office consistently—and illegally—leaked details of the federal grand jury investigation only further contributed to the growing sense that he was a partisan hack.

Ultimately the Senate acquitted Clinton on both counts. The President may have done a great deal to undermine his personal credibility, but most Senators agreed that his trespasses did not warrant his removal from office.

Around the time of Clinton’s impeachment, many commentators drew parallels to 1868, when the House of Representatives impeached—and the Senate acquitted—President Andrew Johnson. The legal writer Jeffrey Toobin, in The New Yorker, called the events of 1868 a constitutional “fiasco” and “the low point in impeachment history.”

In fact the comparison was a poor one. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Andrew Johnson violated federal laws by appointing former Confederate officials to state and local offices. He also refused to carry out his responsibilities under the 1867 Military Reconstruction Act and called for the lynching of a United States congressman. Johnson’s offenses, in other words, were highly impeachable and may very well have warranted conviction. Certainly, many would have agreed they were graver than Clinton’s affair with a White House intern and his subsequent efforts to conceal that affair.

The lasting tragedy of the Clinton trial, and of the popular comparison to 1868, may be that many Americans now regard the impeachment process with a skeptical eye. Because of the popular perception that Kenneth Starr and his Republican allies abused their authority, impeachment seems just another blunt tool in the never-ending, mind-numbing cycle of partisan warfare.