White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

by Nancy Isenberg

By the time the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998, Clinton’s enemies were primed to portray the flawed president as a character in a Tennessee Williams play. “Slick Willie” had finally been caught in a tawdry sexual escapade suited to a trailer park—he had befouled the Oval Office. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr claimed that his official investigation was not about sex, but about perjury and the abuse of power, yet his final report mentioned sex five hundred times. Harper’s Magazine contributing editor Jack Hitt claimed that Starr was intent on writing a “dirty book,” recording (and relishing) every trashy detail of a sad soap opera. President Clinton’s legal team countered that Starr’s sole purpose was to embarrass the president. This was white trash outing on the grand national stage. Impeachable offenses demanded the “gravest wrongs” against the Constitution, or “serious assaults on the integrity of the process of government,” if they were to rise to the standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” By recording every salacious detail, Starr was trying to equate high crimes with low-class lewdness.