Free Adventures in Correspondentland by Nick Bryant Page B

of consequences, my luck held. On the return flight to Washington, after attending Rabin’s state funeral, the then house speaker Newt Gingrich was so enraged that President Clinton declined to speak to him aboard Air Force One on the flight back from Israel that it contributed to his decision to starve the federal bureaucracy of congressional funding. This led directly to the government shutdown in late-1995 and early-1996, which in turn meant that Clinton came to rely more heavily on the team of White House interns, since regular staffers were not allowed to show up for work. One in particular caught his eye. She was a 21-year-old from Beverly Hills. Her name was Monica Samille Lewinsky.

What luck in those early years of my nascent career to have a guardian angel with lax morals, a chaotic personality, an appetite for everything and, better still, presidential ambitions. As a student journalist, the first story I ever managed to get published by a newspaper in London was about Governor Bill Clinton. It was a trifling diary item about a bar in Little Rock called Slick Willie, his then nickname, which had come up with a range of cocktails to mark his run for the White House – although even then the press was showing more interest in his penchant for Arkansas cocktail waitresses.
    Six years later, as a young BBC reporter, President William Jefferson Clinton landed me my first permanent foreign posting, when scandal once more engulfed him, and we discovered that his taste in women now extended to voluptuous White House interns.
    During the impeachment saga, it was often said that cameramen who had amassed vast sums of overtime pay splurged it on motor cruisers and small yachts on the Potomac or at Chesapeake Bay, which they inevitably christened Monica . Had the BBC paid its correspondents piece rates, I would have hurled the champagne towards the hull of a vessel named Bill or, perhaps, Just William . That diary story not only gave me the pleasure of seeing my workappear for the first time in print but also got me my start as a high-society gossip columnist. The Lewinsky scandal – though it should truly have been called the Bill Clinton scandal – made me a Washington correspondent. It was a job I had coveted from the time I realised I was not about to become the next Le Corbusier, turned my back on architecture and switched instead to studying American political history.
    To meet him, of course, is to be exposed immediately to the Clinton Treatment: the mauling handshake; the empathetic nod; the piercing stare, fixed and admiring; the instant intimacy; a gravitational pull with the power to suck people into his orbit. Often, it is said that Clinton comes not only with his own force field but also his own personal weather system, and that he’s so expert at the art of seduction that he can make even the most fleeting acquaintance feel as if he or she is the single most important person in the room. Still, when I first encountered him during the 1992 New Hampshire primary campaign I came away thinking there was something much more transactional about his celebrated interpersonal skills. The feeling was of being the most important voter in the room, or, in my case, the most important journalist.
    I was over from Oxford at the time conducting research for my thesis on Jack Kennedy, a leader with whom Clinton was intermittently compared. I was trying to persuade him to agree to a short interview for his old university rag. Always obliging, the one-time Rhodes Scholar did not need much cajoling and suggested I contact his chief of staff in Little Rock, Betsey Wright, the sorter of his details, the keeper of his secrets and the freewheeling aide immortalised by the actress Kathy Bates in the movie Primary Colors . For a top-ranking aide in the midst of a presidentialcampaign, Wright could hardly have been more helpful. However, a candidate’s time is not only donor money but also votes, and it was