New York Times :
It has been more than sixteen years since the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. The 22-year-old White House intern is now a low-profile 40-year-old. The once-embattled President Bill Clinton has assumed a postpresidential role as global philanthropist and the first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is now a former senator, a former secretary of state, and a potential 2016 presidential candidate.
And yet, it seems difficult these days to escape the scandal that rocked the late 1990s and led to Clinton’s impeachment.
In response to attacks on the Republican Party as waging a “war on women,” Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has repeatedly recalled Clinton’s White House indiscretions. Paul said on “Meet the Press” late last month that Clinton had taken advantage of a young intern. “That is predatory behavior,” he added.
On Monday, The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, unloaded a trove of documents from Clinton’s White House years from Diane D Blair, a close friend of Hillary Clinton who died in 2000. The Blair papers include diary entries based on conversations with Hillary Clinton, private memos and letters that had been kept at the archives of the University of Arkansas, where Blair had taught political science.
The correspondence reveals new insights into how Hillary Clinton dealt with the setbacks in the White House, such as her struggles to pass a health care overhaul and difficulties in dealing with journalists whom she described as having “big egos and no brains.”
“I know I should do more to suck up to the press,” Hillary Clinton told Blair in 1996, according to the documents. “I know it confuses people when I change my hairdos, I know I should pretend not to have any opinions, but I’m just not going to,” she continued. Then, Hillary Clinton said, “I’m used to winning and I intend to win on my own terms.”
