Polls yesterday showed President Clinton helped or maintained his high political standing with his televised admission of an extramarital affair, but his personal standing is damaged. Congressional Republicans said the scandal will not be over until it is decided whether he committed perjury, but the mood of the American public does not support impeachment.
The polls showed that a majority of Americans did not want Mr Clinton to resign or be impeached. However, several members of the Republican Party, which controls both houses of Congress where any impeachment proceedings would be decided, reacted negatively to Mr Clinton's speech.
Former vice-president, Mr Dan Quayle, called on Mr Clinton to put the country's interests before his own and resign. "The best way to put this behind us - do what's in the best interest of the country - and that is for Bill Clinton to leave," Mr Quayle said.
The moral majority leader, the Rev Jerry Falwell, also called for the President's resignation. "I do think the President tonight should resign.
"I think he should step aside and allow Mr Gore to come in and attempt to restore some level of moral sanity and dignity to the White House that has been so maligned and so denigrated the past five years," he said.
"I'm interested in the evidence, not in what the President wants us to believe," said Representative Bob Barr, the Georgia Republican who led an attempt to impeach Mr Clinton after the Lewinsky case surfaced in January.
"We have a President who says, `I am a liar. I am a perjurer.' That puts him in a very weak position internationally," Mr Barr said.
Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said: "It was rhetorically very powerful but not a speech we can accept at face value. There's a lot of wiggle room on the issue of perjury, which needs a lot of technical analysis."
Three key Republicans - House Speaker, Mr Newt Gingrich of Georgia; Senate Majority Leader, Mr Trent Lott of Mississippi; and House Judiciary Committee Chairman, Mr Henry Hyde of Illinois - were not available for comment.
Mr Clinton said he had misled people about the relationship partly out of concern that the inquiry of independent counsel, Mr Ken Starr, was politically motivated - a charge vigorously denied by the President's critics.
The Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, Mr Orrin Hatch of Utah, said he was "really offended when he [Clinton] started to attack Ken Starr at the end. If I hear another Democrat complaining about the $40 million [spent on the probe] I am going to blow my cork . . . It is really offensive."
Around the world, Mr Clinton provoked conflicting emotions of support and condemnation yesterday - laced with heavy doses of derision for admitting to an inappropriate relationship with Ms Monica Lewinsky.
In Europe, the story dominated morning radio and television bulletins.
Television stations repeatedly played back-to-back tapes of Mr Clinton denying a sexual relationship with Ms Lewinsky and his TV address admitting their relationship was "not appropriate".
Political leaders were slow or reluctant to comment. But political analysts reflected fears in many foreign capitals that Mr Clinton's trouble with women has paralysed the world's only superpower.
Nearly two-thirds of American women - 63 per cent - surveyed after Mr Clinton's address were satisfied with his explanation, compared with 43 per cent of men, according to a CNN/USA Today poll.