That performance on Friday afternoon was masterful. The last question thrown at Bill Clinton about his attitude to his Republican tormentors could have been scripted to give him that wonderful moment. The squared shoulders, the last goodbye with the line: "I believe anyone who asks for forgiveness - has to be prepared to give it."
How could anyone do that? Go through the shame, the family difficulty, the ridicule and criticism of the entire world - and still come up word-perfect?
Hollywood Babylon has given way to Washington Babylon, where no intrusion, deception or betrayal is unthinkable in the left-right power struggle for the heart and mind of America.
Events might make history, but people make events, and the personality and decisions of Bill Clinton are at the centre of America 1998, the year of the scandal. How much of what we see is real? And what gives a person who is, arguably, the most important man on earth the brass neck to carry on regardless while the entire world is being regaled with details of his casual infidelity and continual lies?
After all, for most people research shows that life's peak stressful experiences are divorce and moving house. To those millions reduced to tears and frenzy by the arrival of the moving van, the gargantuan pressure on one white American male in his fifties is hard to comprehend, something like the concept of infinity.
There are several threads that might explain Bill Clinton. One is that he is part of a social permissiveness, perhaps a result of the "permissive society" in which he came to manhood during the 1960s. This relaxation of behaviour has meant that elected public figures found to have been derelict in their duty are no longer required to fall on their swords. Looking back less than 20 years to the Falklands War, it seems incredibly quaint that Lord Carrington felt he had to resign over a failure to anticipate the Argentine invasion.
The day of ministerial responsibility for mistakes lower down the chain has disappeared from the Westminster system with scarcely a murmur of regret. Remember the blatant evasion of Michael Howard, when Home Secretary, as Jeremy Paxman asked him the same question 14 times.
In our own country politicians clearly do not regard questionable personal behaviour, of the sort which our society would not condone in the rank-and-file member, as being any cause for apology, let alone resignation.
Similarly, the argument that Clinton should have resigned at an early stage in this messy, embarrassing affair, to save his wife as much as his country the painful investigation, is not plausible. Honour of that kind belongs to another era. And if your adversary's behaviour is of doubtful pedigree, you are even less inclined to hang your head and say fair cop, or whatever the appropriate Washington phrase.
You do not get to be president of the United States if you are a shrinking violet. Rather a person should arrange at an early stage of their ambition to be dipped in a permanent solution of titanium with a cast-iron trim. The next step is to be dipped in gold since the essential of American politics for many many years has been lots and lots of money. Clinton, with his bright-poor-boy background, did not have this so he has had to play the money-generation game, to his own frustration no doubt, as well as his wife's. The constant demands of meeting and greeting fund raisers has eaten into time that could have been spent planning and implementing a better United States.
Only a person with boundless energy and physical strength could have survived the past year under the circumstances. Energy is everything, as the late entertainer Peter Allen used to sing. Napoleon had it, Margaret Thatcher had it, Eamon de Valera had it. How much sleep did Clinton get in 1998? Even with the hide of a buffalo, there must have been times (the night before the grand jury questioning, for example) when Morpheus was not on call. We have observed the ups and downs of the bags under his eyes, which not even the skilled television makeup could mask.
Did he ever get close to madness? Was he deeply depressed? Whispers have come out of the White House describing his rage, his late-night sessions with advisers and calls to friends when he expressed his fury with the hard right Republicans desperate to bring him down. A very filtered version of that was detectable in his first public admission of his "inappropriate and wrong" dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, when, while expressing sorrow, his defiance was evident.
Norman Mailer said in a BBC interview on the night Clinton was acquitted that being a good actor is a major part of being a politician: all that baby-kissing and hand-shaking. Mailer should know, as he once tried for mayor of New York. But this wise old crow's analysis of Clinton is not so much psychological as circumstantial. "He was so lucky," he declared. "He was just turning into a very indifferent president, along came Lewinsky and now he's a martyr."
One alternative, extreme view of Clinton is that it is his female characteristics, not his female associates, which brought him down. Feminist writers and Internet commentators such as Virginia Vitzthum picked up on author Toni Morrison's declaration that Clinton was "the first black president" and went on to declare that he could also be the first woman in the White House.
"Clinton's androgyny may be part of what Kenneth Starr has against him," Vitzthum wrote. "Starr correctly assumed that men in Congress would share his own revulsion at Clinton's kinky hybrid of male power-tripping and womanly waffling."
Gennifer Flowers, of the alleged 12-year affair with Clinton, has weighed in with claims that Clinton liked to dress up in her lingerie and make-up.
"Mr President the nation wants to know, which is it: briefs or boxers?" That brazen question put to Clinton by a young female student shortly after his election set the tone for a most peculiar presidency. Would anyone have asked Dwight Eisenhower about his underwear?
Little did we know at the time that it would be a late 90s thong, triumphantly displayed by a love-hungry girl from Brentwood, that would expose a good deal more of Bill Clinton than his underwear to an audience of billions.