Think you know the full story of the Starr investigation and President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky? In 1998, for the first time in our nation’s history, the director of the United States Secret Service was asked to testify against a sitting president. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr wanted to question Director Lewis Merletti about President Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky. Starr issued a motion to compel Merletti, and agents protecting the president, to testify as to what they may have seen or heard regarding Clinton and Lewinsky’s intimate liaisons. Merletti argued that if agents were permitted to testify about anything other than criminal acts, it would compromise the trust and confidence tenet critical to the mission of the Secret Service and thus jeopardize the safety of the presidency and the country. But there was something more to the story. An anonymous source inside the Service—self-identified as “Deep Throat”—falsely alleged that Merletti not only facilitated the Clinton/Lewinsky relationship but had a deal with the president: keep quiet about Lewinsky, and in return, become the director of the Secret Service. Drawn from interviews and previously unreleased documents from the National Archives, Trust and Confidence is the only inside account of the battle between the Secret Service and the independent counsel as well as the important connection between the Secret Service and Monica Lewinsky.

that occurred over the course of four decades beginning with the Nixon administration and extending up through the second Bush administration. All of these cases -- Watergate, Whitewater, and others --

How the Clinton administration betrayed its progressive principles and capitulated to the right When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he ended twelve years of Republican rule and seemed poised to enact a progressive transformation of the US economy, touching everything from health care to trade to labor relations. Yet by the time he left office, the nation’s economic and social policies had instead lurched dramatically rightward, exacerbating the inequalities so troubling in our own time. This book reveals why Clinton’s expansive agenda was a fabulous failure, and why its demise still haunts us today. Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein show how the administration’s progressive reformers—people like Robert Reich, Ira Magaziner, Laura Tyson, and Joseph Stiglitz—were stymied by a new world of global capitalism that heightened Wall Street influence, undermined domestic manufacturing, and eviscerated the labor movement. Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Al Gore proved champions of this financialized world. Meanwhile, Clinton divided his own party when he relied on Republican votes to overhaul welfare, liberalize trade, and deregulate the banking and telecommunications industries. Even the economic boom Clinton ushered in—which tamed unemployment and sent the stock market soaring in what Alan Blinder and Janet Yellen termed a “fabulous decade”—ended with a series of exploding asset bubbles that his neoliberal economic advisors neither foresaw nor prevented. A Fabulous Failure is a study of ideas in action, some powerfully persuasive, others illusionary and self-defeating. It explains why and how the Clinton presidency’s progressive statecraft floundered in a world where the labor movement was weak, civil rights forces quiescent, and corporate America ever more powerful.