In December 1994, the surgeon-general of the United States, Dr Jocelyn Elders, an old Arkansas friend whom Bill Clinton had brought to Washington, attended a conference at the United Nations on the prevention of AIDS. Someone asked her whether she thought sex education courses in schools should include some discussion of masturbation. She replied: "I think that is something that is a part of human sexuality and it's part of something that perhaps should be taught. But we've not even taught our children the very basics."
It was the kind of vague, top-of-the-head answer that officials tend to give at conferences.
A few weeks later, Bill Clinton was informed these innocuous remarks would be appearing in an article in a news magazine. His then chief of staff, Leon Panetta, called Dr Elders and told her that her resignation was to be on his desk by 2.30 that afternoon. According to her own account, given to Jim Dwyer of the Daily News in New York, Clinton himself called her an hour later, and "most of what he said was `I'm sorry, but this can't go on.' I asked him, `Do you know for yourself what I said?' He said: `They told me. I think we can't have any more of this'. " She was fired.
In the light of the Starr report, Bill Clinton's brazen hypocrisy stands out with stark clarity. What the forgotten episode of Dr Elders suggested about the weird irrationality of his attitudes to sex, and about his willingness to sacrifice his friends for political advantage, has now been placed under the most merciless microscope.
Every dark crevice of the man's psyche has been exposed, digitalised and pumped into cyberspace. Never in all of past history has a human being been stripped so utterly bare before the pitiless gaze of so many people. Never in the future will Bill Clinton be able to regain his dignity. He may - and probably will - cling on as President, but his presidency, with all the term implies about authority, gravity and greatness, is over.
We have to step back and ask: "How did this awesome thing happen?" The obvious answer is that it happened because Clinton is a vile man. But it's hardly a good answer. Vile men, even when they are presidents, don't get treated this way. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson behaved even more contemptibly about sex than Clinton has done. Neither, during his lifetime, was exposed.
Or consider ex-president Ronald Reagan. Reagan admitted after he left office that the Iran-Contra operation was, in spite of what he told an independent counsel, carried out with his knowledge and approval. He told the New York Times in February 1990 that "it was a covert action that was taken at my behest".
That operation involved massive breaches of the law in areas that went to the heart of the US constitution and had real consequences for human life. It was illegal to sell arms to Iran and illegal to fund the Nicaraguan Contras beyond limits set by Congress. Reagan did both of those things and then lied about it. He is still greatly loved in some quarters.
So it is simply not the case that the United States holds its presidents to high moral standards and that Clinton has been destroyed because he fell below them. What has happened instead is that, for partisan political reasons, Kenneth Starr has been allowed to place in the public domain all the sordid details of Clinton's sexual activities with Monica Lewinsky.
His report is presented as a legal exercise to which the sexual minutiae are an unfortunate but necessary adjunct. Only when you read it in its entirety do you realise it is the other way around. This is a sexual indictment for which the legal exercise of proposing impeachment is a mere pretext.
In truth, when Starr's report is not dealing with sex, it is almost risible. He makes, for instance, a charge of "abuse of authority", a phrase that seems designed to bring back memories of Watergate and to assure his readers that there is a real, epic political principle at stake.
But consider what these charges actually are. One of them is that in helping Lewinsky to get a job in the private sector through his friend Vernon Jordan and others, Clinton may have been seeking to "benefit . . . an ex-paramour".
After this banal statement of the obvious, Starr draws a conclusion so exaggerated that it reads like a parody: "The President's actions discriminated against all of those interns and employees who did not receive the same benefit." Effectively, the charge is that Clinton abused his authority because he did not get Vernon Jordan to find a nice job at Revlon for everyone who works for the US government.
This kind of hyperbole is matched by a strain of scary self-righteousness. Clinton abused his authority, according to Starr, because he did not obey Kenneth Starr's commands immediately and without question. Clinton is supposed to be impeached because he "acquiesced" in the Secret Service's court challenge to Starr's demand for revelations. He is also to be impeached because he went to court claiming that his advisers should not have to testify.
Yet Starr himself concedes in passing that Clinton's claim to "executive privilege" is "constitutionally-based". Moreover, Starr tries to have it both ways. While damning Clinton for trying to stop his advisers from testifying, he suggests elsewhere that, on the contrary, he told them lies "knowing that they would relay the falsehoods to the grand jury". But if Clinton wanted these people to tell lies why did he try to stop them from testifying?
Or consider one of Starr's most apparently damaging accusations of criminality: obstruction of justice. The allegation is one of witness-tampering in the Paula Jones case, the witness in question being Clinton's secretary, Betty Currie. There is one rather awkward problem, however. Betty Currie was not a witness in the Jones case.
Not only had she not been issued with a subpoena, but she had not appeared on any list of prospective witnesses. Starr's whole case rests on a sub-clause slipped into a typically sonorous sentence: "It was foreseeable that she might become a witness in the Jones matter." For all the legal verbiage, the accusation is actually that of tampering with someone who might foreseeably, in some eventualities, become a witness. Is that a high crime?
Starr's report is riddled with such tendentious stuff, but only when it is dealing with legalities. It saves all the rigour for the real point of the exercise: creating unforgettable images of a powerful man having sex with a young woman. Vague and slipshod when dealing with what is supposed to be the heart of the matter - breaches of the law - it is positively scientific when it comes to the sleazy detail. It is interesting to note that, according to the New York Times, "most of the narrative describing the relationship between the President and Monica S. Lewinsky" was written by Stephen Bates, a lawyer and journalist. Among the publications for which Mr Bates has written is the porn magazine Playboy.
Starr's justification for the fact that the vast bulk of his report is taken up with material which would not be out of place in that publication is that Clinton's bizarre contention that oral sex is not "sexual relations" made it necessary to go into detail.
This is a plausible explanation for the inclusion of some graphic material. It is an utterly implausible explanation for the inclusion of masses and masses of vivid, almost anatomical description. Unfortunately, in order to write about this, it is necessary to go into some of that detail. What follows is not suitable for children.
Starr had a legitimate legal need to show that Clinton touched Monica Lewinsky's breasts and genitalia. He could easily have done so in one paragraph of raw description and added a note to the effect that, if this evidence were challenged, he could supply more of it. Instead he repeats the detail obsessively.
Even allowing, however, that it was necessary to give a minute description of each of 10 sexual encounters, Starr includes a great deal of material that is by his own standards utterly irrelevant.
Two aspects of his narrative, indeed, involve acts that are outside the scope of what he is trying to establish. By definition, they do not involve contact with Monica Lewinsky's breasts or genitals.
One of these is phone sex. Starr helpfully provides the reader with a definition of this activity: "Phone sex occurs when one or both parties masturbate while one or both parties talk in a sexually explicit manner on the telephone." It specifically precludes, in other words, the kind of intimate physical contact with another person that Starr is anxious to prove. Yet, he gives repeated accounts of phone sex between Clinton and Lewinsky, including such details as the president falling asleep midsentence after one such conversation.
The other is private acts of masturbation. On two occasions, Starr tells us of Lewinsky seeing "the president masturbating into a bathroom sink" after an encounter with her. Leave aside the sheer personal cruelty of placing such images of another human being on the Internet for the whole world to read. What legal point is being made here? What bearing does Clinton's behaviour alone in his own bathroom have on Starr's need to show that he and Lewinsky made intimate sexual contact with each other?
The only possible answer is "none". And the only possible conclusion from that answer is that the purpose of the Starr report is not to remove Clinton from office through the solemn process of impeachment but to drive him from office through shame, ridicule and the stripping away of his personal, rather than merely his political, dignity. As the initial shock wears off, and as we remind ourselves that even liars, hypocrites and adulterers have human rights, we will start to see what an appalling thing that is.