Monicagate is tragedy recycled as US farce

If he were not so untouchable and, worse still, unfashionable a figure, at least one of Karl Marx's dictums ought to be on the lips of American journalists right now. "Everything in history," Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, "happens twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce".

As it begins to reach its climax with the immunity deal this week, the Monica Lewinsky saga is fulfilling the formula perfectly. It is Watergate with revolving doors, madcap misunderstanding, eyes at the keyhole and trousers around the ankles.

The US of the 1990s has an eerie capacity for sad parodies. It's as if there is a limited stock of epic events, so that each of them is continually reprinted and reduced, losing its original force and becoming a caricature of itself. The patriot militia of the War of Independence end up as the nutcase neo-fascists of the Michigan Militia.

Martin Luther King's heroic leadership of the black struggle is travestied in the racial gesture politics of contemporary black leaders like Mayor Marion Barry and Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. Bill Clinton, at his worst, in setpiece "visionary" speeches, comes across as a poor echo of John F. Kennedy. And Watergate is recycled as the sheer idiocy of Monicagate.

Watergate was the historic high point of the free press. Never has the role in a democracy of brave, dogged and skilful journalism had such an epic vindication. For the generation of journalists to which I belong, it shaped our sense of what the job was about - holding those in power accountable for the way they used it.

It may have given us delusions of grandeur. But overestimating the importance of your own profession is a lot less dangerous than underestimating it.

Now, the big words of Watergate - "impeachment", "investigation", "independent counsel" - have lost their meaning in the grotesque charade of Kenneth Starr's pursuit of Clinton. Instead of an attempt to defend democracy from a president who threatened it, we have an attempt to annul the 1996 presidential election.

Instead of investigators checking the abuse of power by an overweening president, we have the abuse of power by unaccountable investigators. Instead of a heroic press battling to assert public accountability, the press is at the very heart of the scandal.

Recently, in his new media magazine Content, Steve Brill meticulously traced the origins of the Lewinsky scandal and of many of its more celebrated media stories. Because he got Kenneth Starr to admit that his office routinely leaked material to selected journalists, Brill's work received considerable publicity.

But the core of it, perhaps because it is so devastating in its revelations about the broader role of the media, has not been widely discussed.

Yet what it shows is something quite stunning - that the scandal and the media coverage are not separate things. They have been, from the start, utterly interwoven. The story started with Linda Tripp's desire for a book deal. Her agent Lucianne Goldberg told her, in Goldberg's own account, that "for her to have a real book deal, she had to get some of what she knew into a mainstream publication of some kind".

Tripp and Goldberg contacted Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter who eventually broke the story. He, in turn, told them that he needed more than just a Clinton sex story, and that it would have to relate to "something official". They therefore set about creating precisely that.

One of the crucial elements of the story last January was the existence of records from a courier company showing that Lewinsky had sent love letters to Clinton. It now seems that these letters were specifically sent so that they would be recorded and revealed. According to Goldberg, "We told Linda to suggest that Monica use a courier service to send love letters to the President. And we told her what courier service to use. Then we told (Isikoff) to call the service." And who owned the courier service? Goldberg's brother. What happened, then, is not that the press reported an event but that an event was created in order to be reported by the press.

The next stage in the process was to give Newsweek the "something official" that made the story more than just a kiss-and-tell exercise. That "something" was the Paula Jones law suit. Jones's lawyers began to receive anonymous phone calls urging them to subpoena Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp.

According to Goldberg's son, Linda Tripp made these calls herself. Goldberg herself, asked if she urged Tripp to make the calls, replied: "Do you think I had to? . . . hell, I guess you could say so". And, of course, once Jones's lawyers asked Clinton under oath about his relationship with Lewinsky, the story could be presented, not as a sleazy snooping exercise, but as a matter of law and truth.

Once this high-minded excuse had been created, the story could be published. And once it was published, high-mindedness went out the window. Steve Brill tracked some of the stories that ran in the "all Monica, all the time" phase of the media frenzy down to their original sources. Most of them came from uncorroborated leaks from Starr's office.

Some of them were even more shaky, the most egregious example being the widespread report that Bill and Monica had been seen in flagrante by a secret service agent. This story's source, it turns out, was a Washington lawyer who had heard his wife talking to a friend of someone who used to work at the White House who had been told by someone who worked with him that this last person had seen the President and the intern in a compromising position. This is the real scandal. There are serious public issues involved in the allegations against Clinton, principally the behaviour of an employer towards an employee. But they are so heavily outweighed by the collusion between the media, the special prosecutor and the right-wing groups intent on destroying Clinton for all the wrong reasons that they have become effectively irrelevant.

The irony is that all of this now represents Clinton's greatest asset in his fight for survival. The public mood is weary and sceptical. So much has been written in newspapers and spoken on television and so much of it has turned out to be nonsense, that a bizarre consensus has formed.

It is that (a) Clinton is guilty as hell and (b) so is everybody else. For a scandal to become an epic moment in history, it needs, not just a villain but some heroes. Watergate played out as it did not just because Nixon was a crook but because it was possible to believe that Woodward and Bernstein were the opposite of crooks. This time, there are no Woodwards or Bernsteins, just an awful lot of petty Nixons. If Clinton is forced out, how will they find a president who more accurately reflects the tenor of the times?