At this distance of 20 years, we can reconstruct what might be called “the Clinton rules”:

1. Don’t be defined by impeachment. Bill Clinton delivered his 1998 State of the Union address exactly one week after the Drudge Report posted the sensational news of his affair with a White House intern. In his lengthy address, he did not reference the scandal at all. At intervals during the following year, Clinton made statements about major turning points in the scandal—for instance, his grand-jury testimony. But most of the time, the president took pains to show himself as engaged in anything and everything else. Message: The Republicans are obsessed with my sex life; I am focused on my job.

2. Express contrition for proven wrongdoing. After Clinton’s early denials of a relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky were exposed as false, he expressed contrition for his offenses while arguing that impeachment represented an excessive response. “I don’t think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned,” he declared at the White House prayer breakfast on September 11, 1998. “It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine: first and most important, my family; also my friends, my staff, my Cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people. I have asked all for their forgiveness.”

3. Leave no fingerprints on any countermeasures. Through 1998, one Clinton accuser after another was felled or tainted by damaging revelations of sexual scandal: House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his would-be successor, Robert Livingston; House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde. Perhaps others in Congress were kept in line by fears that something similar might befall them. The counterattacks came from people like the Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. Despite ample speculation that the White House political operation was somehow involved, nobody could ever prove a link.