It was all about sex, and what is sex, and whether lies were told about sex. During four hours and three minutes of questioning there was not one question about Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate and the other issues the independent prosecutor has been investigating for four years. Instead, the aim of the questioners was to establish that President Clinton had lied when he said he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky. President Clinton's strategy was to continue to assert that whatever actions he engaged in with Ms Lewinsky, they did not fulfil a technical and tortuous definition of sex, and therefore he had not lied.
So during 243 minutes we were treated to question after question about whether sex included various acts, which were painstakingly listed, described and repeated. The questioners came back again and again to the ploy of detailing a specific physical act and asking Mr Clinton whether he thought it constituted sexual relations.
The President refused to get involved in such parsing of physical acts. Instead, as soon as the questioning moved onto the physical details of his relationship with Ms Lewinsky, he read a prepared statement and then for the rest of the four hours, refused to go further than that.
His prepared statement said: "When I was alone with Ms Lewinsky on certain occasions in early 1996 and once in early 1997, I engaged in conduct that was wrong.
"These encounters did not consist of sexual intercourse, they did not constitute sexual relations as I understood that term to be defined at my January 17th, 1998, deposition [for the Paula Jones lawsuit] but they did involve inappropriate intimate contact. These inappropriate encounters ended at my insistence in early 1997."
The President did concede that he had also taken part in "inappropriate sexual banter" on the telephone with Ms Lewinsky. He said he would provide the grand jury with information, but, "in an effort to preserve the dignity of the officed I hold", he did not wish to go into specifics on some matters.
The definition of sex in the Paula Jones case referred to by President Clinton stated: "For the purposes of this deposition [in the Jones case], a person engages in `sexual relations' when the person knowingly engages in or causes contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person."
President Clinton went on to justify his maximalist definition of sexual relations. "I bet that the Grand Jurors, if they were talking about two people they knew and said they had a sexual relationship, they meant they were sleeping together, they meant they were having intercourse together."
The clear inference from the President's strategy was that he did engage in various physical acts with Ms Lewinsky that were not sexual intercourse. While most people would regard acts such as oral sex as being sexual acts, President Clinton argued that the above definition from the Jones case did not.
Indeed he was at his Jesuitical best on the subject of oral sex "performed" on him. This was not within the definition "because if the deponent is a person who has oral sex performed on them, the contact is with the lips of another person. It seems to me selfevident that that's what it is".
In other words, oral sex performed by him on someone else is sex. The reverse is not.
There was more of this extraordinary forensic analysis of verbal descriptions of sex acts. Asked if he touched another person on the breast, would that be within the definition, he said: "If the person being deposed, in this case, me, directly touched the breast of another person, with the purpose to arouse or gratify, under that definition, that would be included."
Kissing the breast would also be within the definition, he said, reading the definition again to make sure.
But when his questioners moved on to other more unusual acts including "telephone sex" and acts involving a cigar, the President simply referred to his initial statement and refused to answer the questions specifically.
He struck a tone of protectiveness about Ms Lewinsky herself, complaining that when giving her testimony to the grand jury she had been kept by lawyers and FBI officers for several hours "as if she was a serious felon".
A smile looking dangerously like one of fond reminiscence appeared just for a moment when he said he was aware Ms Lewinsky "has a way of getting information out of people either when she's charming or determined".
He gave a weaker impression through to the (too many) occasions where he could not remember details he was asked about. Conceding that he had an exceptionally good memory, there were nevertheless many details he said he could not remember. However, the advance billing suggesting that Mr Clinton flew off the handle under pressure on a number of occasions turned out to be false. He raised his voice and wagged his finger only to attack the lawyers for Paula Jones and less directly the Starr investigation itself.
He claimed the Jones team were funded by his political opponents and used a "dragnet of discovery" to uncover damaging information. He went on to accuse the Jones team of taking a bogus law suit against him, digging up anything else they could on him and then leaking it illegally to the press.
Initial indications last night were that the broadcast had not done President Clinton the damage his opponents had hoped for and supporters feared. Indeed, the President managed to appear reasonably dignified despite exchanges such as the following:
"You did make sexual advances on Kathleen Willey, is that not correct?"
"That's false".
"You did grab her breast, as she said?" "I did not."
"You did place your hand on her groin area, as she said?" "No, I didn't."
"And you placed her hand on your genitals, did you not?" "Mr Bennett, I didn't do any of that and the questions you are asking, I think, betray the bias of this operation that has troubled me for a long time."
The effect on the American public may have been to make the questioners appear far more offensive than the President.