Monica Lewinsky has earned a permanent, unlooked for, and unwelcome place in the political history of the United States. Her naïve infatuation, at the age of 22, with American President William Jefferson Clinton, placed her at the center of a sordid White House sex scandal that dominated political news in 1998, plunged the American people into shock, confusion and disillusion, and culminated in the historic impeachment trial—only the second in American history—of the 42^nd President.

The privileged daughter of affluent Beverly Hills parents (her doctor father and writer mother divorced when Monica was 13), she graduated with a psychology degree from Lewis and Clark College in May of 1995 and became an unpaid White House intern a month later. She met President Bill Clinton in November of 1995 and became an employee in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs in December 1995. When, at that time...