Lewinsky, scared, angry, and upset, wants to wait for her mother, who lives in New York, to arrive before she decides what to do. The agents want Lewinsky to tell them everything about the affair, to coöperate with the Starr investigation, and to participate in an undercover operation to implicate the President. Neyfakh’s narration captures the often surreal details of political scandal. Lewinsky, like Mitchell, resists these pressures. Each scene tells the story of a woman who is romantically linked to a political figure, held at a fancy hotel against her will, put in a situation of tremendous political import and personal stress, and pressured by powerful, manipulative men. Attorney General, John Mitchell, who was in cahoots with Nixon. This opening has fascinating parallels to the thrillingly crazy opening scene of “Slow Burn” Season 1, which centered on Martha Mitchell, the wife of the then U.S. Then they take her to a nearby Ritz-Carlton, where two men from the office of the independent counsel Ken Starr clarify the stakes: twenty-seven years in prison, for lying on an affidavit in which she denied a relationship with Clinton. agents, “and that the Attorney General of the United States had authorized a criminal investigation into her actions,” Neyfakh says. The men tell Lewinsky that they are F.B.I. She sees Tripp coming toward her, down an escalator, and Tripp gestures to some men behind her, in dark suits and carrying badges. Her affair with Clinton, which lasted for about eighteen months, consumes her thoughts, and she has confided about the relationship to Tripp. Lewinsky has come from the gym, and she’s still dressed in workout clothes. (Lewinsky did not participate in the podcast.) She’s waiting to meet a friend from work, Linda Tripp, for lunch in the food court of “a typical suburban mall, brightly lit, with a movie theatre, a Macy’s, and white tiles on the floor,” Neyfakh says. ![]() As we meet Lewinsky, it’s January 16, 1998, and she is a twenty-four-year-old former White House intern. Neyfakh is a gifted and trustworthy storyteller, with a gently wry tone the details in his writing are lightly comic and well chosen, evincing empathy and amazement. “Or is there something we’re not appreciating about what it was like to live through this story in real time?” “A lot of people didn’t.” (That, at least, has changed dramatically, in part because of Lewinsky’s own articulate writing and speaking on the subject.) Neyfakh wants to explore “the ideas that swirled around the Clinton saga-ideas about sex and power and privacy and character,” and to consider whether our attitudes and perspectives have changed. ![]() “But I honestly don’t know if I did,” he says. Neyfakh says that he hopes that he felt sympathy for Monica Lewinsky at the time. As a “child of Democrats,” Neyfakh says, he “took Clinton’s side and believed sort of vaguely and ambiently that Ken Starr was in the wrong.” This reaction was common among adult Democrats, too, though many were chagrined by Clinton’s behavior. Part of what he seeks in the series, which will comprise eight episodes, is to “get into the minds of people who followed the scandal and talked about it and argued about it,” and to figure out why they reacted as they did. In 1998, the year the mayhem began, Neyfakh was in middle school. If it’s painful for Democrats, it’s appropriately so. And I’m pleased to report that “Slow Burn” Season 2 is, so far-I’ve heard two episodes, the first of which was released today-a riveting listen, narratively fascinating, with relevant and urgent themes. Focussing on Bill Clinton’s misdeeds provides no such political comfort. We could hope that the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, whose workings were mysterious, would ultimately prove to be another slow burn, with a Presidential resignation to follow. In its first season, its audience, presumably largely progressive, could revel in Watergate’s absurdities, and in Richard Nixon’s amusing hubris and short-sightedness, while being reassured, almost subliminally, about our own era. For “Slow Burn,” the story is a bold and curious choice. ![]() January, 1998, when the public first became aware of Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, felt more like spontaneous combustion, and the fire of scandal and political histrionics raged on for the next thirteen months, through Clinton’s impeachment and acquittal. They were different kinds of scandal, with vastly different causes, trajectories, and outcomes, and the Clinton impeachment didn’t feel like a slow burn, as Watergate was. The impeachment saga of Bill Clinton, the subject of the second season of “Slow Burn,” the Slate podcast hosted by the Slate staff writer Leon Neyfakh, would seem, at first, to have little in common with Watergate, the subject of its first.
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