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BILL CLINTON came towards me, arm outstretched, a welcoming smile on his face. Like almost everyone who has met the president, I was immediately embraced by his charisma and his obvious intelligence as well as being flattered by his apparent interest in my few meaningless social remarks.
This was in January 1992 when he was the newly elected president, a 46-year-old chubby former governor of Arkansas, and I was the newly arrived Washington correspondent. The occasion was the Renaissance Weekend, a gathering in South Carolina of 1,500 friends, acquaintances and "wannabes" brought together by Phil Lader, America's next ambassador to Britain.
An invitation had come my way through a close friend of Clinton's who clearly thought the occasion needed a little light relief from a foreign quarter. The ostensible purpose of the weekend was to talk about "personal and national renewal" in a group that seemed committed to feel my pain.
My contribution to the affair was a learned talk on the similarities between fly fishing and Machiavelli, an event attended by the few who knew the difference between a Blue Winged Olive and an Adams Irresistible. Most of Clinton's future cabinet was there and my involvement in the weekend was to gain me entry to many interesting places in the years ahead as other participants assumed my invitation must have come from the president himself.
I left the weekend convinced that Clinton and his wife Hillary were an outstanding choice to lead the world's last remaining superpower. They were smart, funny, self-effacing and charismatic and they were from my generation with an apparent understanding of the needs and ambitions of the children who had grown up in the heady days of flower power and protest.
This view had been reinforced in the preceding months of the election campaign. Following George Bush, the Republican candidate, around the country it was clear that he and his party were tired and out of touch with the people. Clinton, by contrast, connected wherever he went and there was an infectious enthusiasm to his campaign. That enthusiasm among the press and public swept Clinton into the White House and temporarily masked the obvious signs of an immoral and amoral man with a deeply flawed character which were to become evident once he took office.
It was with a profound sense of disillusionment and eventually anger, therefore, that I watched as the man I had thought represented my generation emerged as one of the worst examples of the old ways. First there was the Whitewater debacle, then the repeated bimbo eruptions, the Paula Jones sexual harassment case and the stories from insiders of a man who clearly cannot see a principle without wanting to compromise it.
Of course, there have been corrupt American presidents before. But what was so dispiriting to watch was the effect one man could have on a city and ultimately on the whole nation. As corruption and compromise became the order of business, the standard to which people and policies were held fell precipitately.
Officials remained in office who had taken bribes, kept mistresses, and lied about it. Others, taking their lead from the president, refined dissembling and dishonesty to an art form. Far from being the open and honest administration Clinton had promised, it became one of the most corrupt in history.
What made this especially galling was that I had identified so closely with Clinton and his people. Now I found he was just another sleazy politician and I was becoming just another cynical journalist.
The Republicans seemed little different. Newt Gingrich, the standard-bearer of a new and dynamic Republican party, got away with paying a $300,000 fine for lying to Congress and allowed to remain in office.
However, the problems America has been grappling with as it marches towards the new century are not simply rooted in its lack of moral leadership. The Clinton presidency has coincided with the end of the cold war and a growing sense of isolation across America, fuelled by a media obsessed with sex, violence and trivia.
The percentage of foreign news on network television declined from 41% in 1990 to 23% just five years later. The average length of those stories dropped from 1.7 minutes to 1.2 minutes. While Americans became more ignorant about foreign affairs, the world looked for leadership and found none. Instead, there was a dispiriting mix of opportunism, as illustrated by Gerry Adams dancing in the White House as Clinton cynically tried to woo the Irish-American vote, and a lack of strategic vision, illustrated by America's policy of appeasement towards China for short-term economic goals.
Such strategies have added to the sense of disillusionment and a feeling that I might be watching a great nation in terminal decline. Certainly, as I drove to work through the potholes of Washington's streets or heard yet another story about corruption in the nation's capital and saw another broken-down police car, it sometimes seemed as if I was in a Third World city.
Yet there is another side to Washington. The church my wife and I attend is filled to capacity every Sunday. It has an excellent children's choir called the God Squad and a congregation of young and old who take pride in their faith. Such dedication is reflected all across this Gomorrah on the Potomac where all faiths have a devoted following. It is the same story across America, where strong beliefs exist beside extraordinary violence and apparently few moral virtues.
A survey conducted earlier this month revealed that 96% of Americans believed in God, 90% pray regularly, 71% believe in an afterlife and 41% attend church once a week. Another poll found that 3% of the population believe they are God.
Such revelations reflect the America I have come to love: on the one hand there are people who have a high sense of moral purpose. On the other hand, there are enough kooks, wackos and slightly mad folk to keep journalists busy for many years to come.
The past five years have provided the opportunity for all the extremists to have their say. The arrival of the Internet has provided the first forum in history for all the disaffected to gather in one place to exchange views and reinforce prejudices. It is hardly surprising, for example, that the right-wing militias' favourite method of communication is e-mail and that forums on the Internet are the source of many of the wild conspiracy theories that drive the media.
Among the vast majority of the American people and the small minority of extremists, recent years have seen a disconnection from government in general and Washington in particular. Such is the level of distrust and disgust, that people outside Washington see their nation's capital as a home to a group of self-serving politicians whose work is largely irrelevant to the lives of ordinary working folk.
The trouble with the perception is that it is largely accurate. This may be the greatest country in the world but politically it is driven by a process so corrupt that it resembles the kind of hopeless nation Americans feel impelled to reform. In a democracy, such a disconnection between a people and its government is disturbing.
The information age, however, is truly giving power back to the people and Americans have shown themselves supreme masters of their own fate. Left alone, the best of the Americans are clever, hard-working, principled and creative and these qualities have made the United States the most powerful economy in the world.
The leadership vacuum needs to be fixed, however. A nation that has always needed a sense of moral purpose needs the leadership to find its way through the uncertainties of a post-cold war world. As families disintegrate, inner cities divide along racial lines and the nation state is threatened by the growth of the Infosphere, America needs a man in the Oval Office who wants more than to win friends and a place in history.
After five years in Washington, I may be leaving The Sunday Times but I am not leaving America. I have fallen in love with the country and its people and remain convinced that the nation will triumph over the crises that lie ahead. These will show the people the true nature of the leaders they have elected and real political change will inevitably follow. Americans will do what they do best: adapt to a new world and make it their own.
Matthew Campbell, Foreign Editor of The Sunday Times and the newspaper's former Moscow correspondent, is to succeed James Adams as Washington Correspondent.
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