After seven months of Clinton and Lewinsky, the distinguished historian of the Kennedy years, Arthur Schlesinger, could take no more. "It is demeaning for America and seems idiotic and stupefying to the rest of the world that a crisis of the American Presidency should turn on the definition of sexual relations," he wrote last August. And it still seems demeaning, idiotic and stupefying.
But how President William Jefferson Clinton not only survived this tale of sex, lies and audio-tapes, increased his personal popularity, saved the Democrats from an electoral rout and toppled Newt Gingrich as Speaker is even more amazing for the historians.
It is a saga which has brutally illustrated the gulf between the Washington Establishment and the America outside the capital's Beltway motorway ring-road; between the media and their audience; between the liberals and the conservatives. It has opened up a painful debate on the relationship between public actions and private morality and whether Americans even want to know about politicians' ethics as long as the good times roll.
For Irish-Americans there was the problem of reconciling the tawdry behaviour in the White House with the knowledge that they had a President whose commitment to the Northern Ireland peace process had reversed 70 years of hands-off diplomacy and State Department adherence to the British line.
Last January when the Monica Lewinsky story broke, the Washington insiders were ready to write him off. Veteran ABC White House correspondent, Sam Donaldson, predicted: "If he's not telling the truth, I think his Presidency is numbered in days. This isn't going to drag out. We're not going to be here three months from now talking about this."
But of course we were. The White House war room or spin machine, call it what you will, swung into action after the initial knock-down and with Hillary Clinton's steadying hand began the long haul for the survival of the President. She rallied the demoralised staff assuring them: "We've been through worse than this. We'll be OK."
For almost four years, independent counsel, Ken Starr, had been investigating both Clintons going back to the failed Whitewater property development in Arkansas in the 1970s. He could find no criminal conduct but now he seized on the evidence of a cover-up of the rather desultory affair between the President and Monica Lewinsky.
Aamerica was fascinated by the culture clash between the strait-laced son of a preacher who sang hymns as he jogged around the Washington suburbs and the baby-boomer generation President whose appetites kept getting him into trouble.
The President who had first promised full co-operation "more rather than less, sooner rather than later" quickly retreated inside the legal stockade thrown up by attorneys. The finger-wagging denial of ever having sexual relations "with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" was good enough for his supporters even if they had private doubts.
The feverish mood of the first days of revelations which had brought the TV anchormen rushing back from reporting the Papal visit to Cuba subsided and the pictures of the plumpish girl in the stylish beret gazing adoringly at her President on a rope-line diminished.
To the amazement of the political establishment, the Washington insiders and the media, the American public refused to echo their calls for the President's head. In fact his approval ratings shot up to a record 70 per cent the week after the revelations and stayed around the mid-60s ever since.
Starr, too, had run into trouble. While he hauled White House staff, secret service agents, Lewinsky's mother, girlfriends and the hated Linda Tripp before the grand jury, he could not get at Lewinsky herself. Through her lawyer, Starr knew she would retract her sworn denial of having had sexual relations with the President but she would not testify that Clinton had urged her to commit perjury and conspired with her to obstruct justice in the Paula Jones civil suit.
Oral sex in the windowless study off the Oval Office was never going to be enough to impeach the President. Adultery was a personal matter between the Clintons but was not an impeachable "high crime and misdemeanour". Perjury and obstruction of justice are impeachable offences in theory but most Americans quickly made up their minds that lying about an affair and trying to cover it up was going on all the time all over the country so what was the big deal?
And of course there was the economy, stupid. Clinton won in 1992 by trashing George Bush's running of the economy and by 1998 it was running at full steam and America was very happy. Economic commentator, Robert Samuelson, wrote back in April: "Most Americans simply can't be bothered. The thriving economy has sent consumer confidence sky-high. By and large, Americans don't want to jeopardise their own well-being - or the country's - with a full-blown political crisis."
Besides, Starr was not coming up with the goods. The early reports about Lewinsky's dress with genetic material were now dismissed as Tripp's fantasising and the yellow press exemplified by Matt Drudge, the Internet muckraker.
But there really was such an incriminating object and Starr got his hands on it when in July he offered Lewinsky immunity in exchange for her testimony and full co-operation. Suddenly Clinton was in serious jeopardy again.
Now he was going to have to testify under the threat of what the DNA tests on the dress would reveal. His situation seemed impossible. Starr was ready to close the trap.
He had Lewinsky's detailed testimony about 10 sexual encounters in the White House backed up by entry logs. He had the DNA evidence and he had Clinton's sworn denial to lawyers of Paula Jones that he had sexual relations with Lewinsky. If that's not perjury, what is?
Well, as the lawyer President told the grand jury: "it depends on what `is' is." America watched fascinated while its President, at times contrite but mainly defiant, kept Starr and his lawyers at bay during hours of cross-examination relayed by video to the grand jury.
THE video was released by the Congressional investigating committee several weeks after the event but his performance greatly helped Clinton who had appeared testy and not sufficiently contrite in an earlier TV broadcast to the nation when he insisted that his answers about his relations with Lewisnky had been "legally correct".
Writer Joe Klein, author of the thinly disguised novel about Clinton called Primary Colours called the broadcast "the most embarrassing four minutes in the history of the American Presidency since Richard Nixon's resignation speech".
Within a few days of this low moment, Clinton had become the warrior President ordering cruise missile strikes on terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and a chemical plant in Khartoum which was suspected of making nerve gas agents.
Then came visits to Russia and Ireland, the brokering of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement in Washington, another stand-off with Saddam Hussein and a stunning electoral performance by the Democrats who had been consigned by the pundits to sink with a disgraced President.
By the end of the year, it was the performances of the Republicans and the media which were being trashed as Clinton was hailed as indestructible and Hillary was credited with being the saviour of her husband and the party by her nation-wide campaigning.
As for Starr, the indignation at his voyeuristic report and his grilling by White House lawyers about his own strong-arm methods left him shaken. He probably wished he had never heard of Whitewater or Lewinsky.
The Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill which had the job of investigating whether the President committed perjury and obstructed justice had a majority of conservative Republicans who were not as sensitive to opinion polls as their colleagues in the full House of Representatives. They wanted blood as Clinton's lawyers tried to fob them off with legalese in his answers to their 81 questions.
Back in February, Washington's most famous hostess, Sally Quinn, husband of Ben Bradlee who as editor of the Washing- ton Post helped bring down Richard Nixon, wrote about the media: "The Lewinsky story is electrifying to them. This one has the thrill of the chase. Everyone wants to get to the truth and they want to get to it first. Washington journalists have not been as energised over a story since Watergate."
Mrs Quinn is now among those media who are being ridiculed for their misreading of the mood of the country and her scorn of a President who "is not of this town and who will be gone in less than three years, if that. The establishment rallies to preserve its institutions against interlopers who might corrode or undermine them."
Susan Carpenter McMillan, confidante of Paula Jones who lit the fuse that exploded the Lewinsky bombshell, now is a wiser woman.
As an extraordinary year for America and the world drew to a close, she said: "I've finally just come to accept that this must be God's will that nothing is ever going to happen to this man."