Clinton's popularity had already slumped when the New York Times and Washington Post injected Whitewater into the brew.
This was a fictitious land scandal that no amount of repudiation could make go away: his exonerations were routinely buried; every new wild allegation got headlines.
In an interview with me on Air Force One for Talk magazine he called it, rightly, "one of the shameful episodes of the last eight years". He was the first president exposed to the hysteria and monomania of the Internet age - the 24-hour news cycle with unchecked gossip sanctified by vacuous punditry, all of which has so insidiously diluted the standards of mainstream media.
Of course, as he wryly put it, he himself gave the process "a little help". He said it straight-faced and I couldn't be sure whether he was exercising droll English understatement, inhaled at Oxford, or was genuinely downgrading Monica et al. The latter, I think.
The loud raspberry for all his grandiloquent plans was the Republican triumph in 1994. They retook both Houses for the first time in 40 years, presaging a Republican White House in 1996.
Clinton was finished. And then with one bound he was free. It did not look that way at the time. The press thought he was toast; the networks turned their cameras on Newt Gingrich. But while Gingrich strutted, Clinton plotted the greatest comeback in modern political history.
Just as he had done in defeat in Arkansas, he asked everyone what he had done wrong. He really wanted to know; intellectual curiosity, especially about his own failings, is Clinton's first great strength; the other is resilience. Secretly, he called on "Charlie", the brilliantly volatile polling strategist Dick Morris, who pressed him to triangulate, meaning he should steal the best ideas from left and right. He did. He married Democratic opportunity with Republican responsibility, focusing on a quilt of small initiatives. He got California schools wired for computers, as the pilot for a national programme and free cellular phones for community crimewatch groups.
He told post offices to put up photos of deadbeat dads, issued an order for teenage mothers on welfare to work or be in school. He upgraded meat inspection, toughened pesticide restrictions, enacted a Bill for cleaner water. He read presidential histories, studied videos of FDR and Reagan at their most seductive, and revved up his long-winded speaking style.
AND he raised millions for clever advertising. The begging would come to haunt him but he did it all with such stealth that Newt and company thought he was a pushover and twice shut down the government in 1995 when they could not get their way on the budget - calamitous PR for them.
It was clever politics by Clinton but it was also good government. The timetable for a balanced budget impressed Wall Street and accelerated the great investment-led boom. It took guts for Clinton again to go against his party's instincts and insist people on welfare should be pressed into work.
In 1996 he won more convincingly than in 1992, albeit still with a minority of the popular vote. In his second term, of course, Houdini submersed himself in a padlocked iron cage a mile deep in boiling water and left his fate to a gaggle of witches, a silly young intern, and Inspector Javerts. And yet, again, with one bound he was free.
He was thoroughly deserving of censure for deceit in the Monica debacle, though not impeachment. Curiously, such a measured rebuke might have finished Clinton. His luck was that the attempt to force him out represented such an arrogant over-reaching by the Republicans and the intolerably pious counsel Kenneth Starr that it won him sympathy. The feeling was hardly diminished by the revelation that the self-righteous prosecutors in Congress had their own quota of "youthful indiscretions". When Americans went to the polls in the middle of the impeachment process, they voted seats to the President's party, the first time since 1882 this had happened in the sixth year of a presidency.
Clinton also showed good judgment. He kept on showing up for work every day for the typical 15 hours that exhausted all those around him. If he had conspicuously spent his time defending himself, or moped, he would have lost his appeal in a country where the religion is work.
The defining moment of his presidency came when he strode into a bristling joint session of Congress in the thick of the scandal in January 1998. Chin up, radiating optimism, he delivered a masterful State of the Union speech. He belaboured the Republicans, sitting on their hands, with a massive federal surplus. What shall we do with it? He paused, then looked around the chamber: "Save social security first!" At that key moment, even Gingrich felt obliged to applaud. The idea had come to him during rehearsal of a turgid passage. "See?" he had said to his speech writers, "I've still got it."