On January 21, 1998, the political maelstrom that eventually led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment began with a news-alert bow shock when it was revealed that he and I—during my tenure as a White House intern—had begun and maintained a long-running relationship.
What have we as a nation—and I personally—come to understand in the 25 years since? Let me share some thoughts.
1. You can make the right decision and still have regret. Also, don’t judge your insides by other people’s outsides. (Full disclosure: I learned these from my therapist.)
2. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you are so fucked.
3. In 2023, we are (sadly) closer to the reality of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale than we were when the book was published in 1985.
4. The blame-the-woman mindset has thankfully receded over time through social conditioning. One prime example: What began in 1998 as “the Lewinsky Scandal” or “the Lewinsky Affair”—an overheated trope straight out of Watergate or John le Carré or Britain’s notorious Profumo Affair—underwent a nomenclature upgrade as the years marched on. The culture and the media adapted—at the insistence of many offended observers and arbiters, including this magazine—to rebrand the whole narrative as “the Clinton Scandal” or “the Clinton Impeachment” or other taglines that were more in keeping with the original power dynamics. (Yes, I’m still lobbed in there on Wikipedia…but there’s time.)
5. As evidenced by some members of the political-operative class in this country, bullying, both online and in public, has become not only an accepted line of work but an ever-growing profit center. (It has also contributed to too many innocent people’s suffering.)
6. And yet…bullying comedy has gotten tired. The Tonight Show With Jay Leno died in 2014. For me, not a day too soon. At the end of Leno’s run, the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University analyzed the 44,000 jokes he told over the course of his time at the helm. While President Clinton was his top target, I was the only one in the top 10 who had not specifically chosen to be a public person.
7. How to measure progress? In 1998, the 105th Congress was made up of 65 female members and 67 members who identified as Black, Hispanic, Asian or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Native American, or multiracial. In 2023, the 118th Congress is composed of 149 female members and 133 members who identify themselves in diverse categories.
8. Finding joy—hunting for it, even—is an essential part of life. You mustn’t wait for joy to find you. (Corollary: Disneyland is still the happiest place on earth.)
9. I wish I could say I get royalties now. I don’t. But at least the lyrics got better. (IYKYK.)
10. It took me 22 years to be able to watch The West Wing—which, yes, I agree, was brilliant. (And thankfully, no one wore a beret.)
11. As the years pass, one’s taste in partners gets better. (Wink.)
12. Two benchmarks of social triumph, 1998–2023? The freedom to marry whomever one wants was made possible (2015) and protected (2022). #MeToo is now a baseline, not an aberration.
13. Grief reigns in the kingdom of loss. I refer to not only the loss of a loved one but also the loss of a hope, a dream, or love itself. It seems we don’t finish grieving, but merely finish for now; we process it in layers. One day (not today) I’m going to write a short story about a vending machine that serves up Just the Right Amount of Grief. You know, the perfect amount that you can handle in a moment to move yourself along, but not so much that you’ll be caught in an undertow.
14. Turns out our parents are not “dumb.” Quite the opposite. (But they are still annoying at times.)
Discussion about this post