A careful reading of both history and the Kenneth Starr report on President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky furnishes direct and compelling evidence that Clinton’s misadventure was prophesied, and that he knew of the prophecy and struggled heroically against its fulfillment.

The prophecy was first publicly uttered in 1963, inStanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. In that film, US Air Force General Jack Ripper, unleashing his plot to trick his country’s government into unleashing a full-scale nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, explains to his second-in-command that his plan is needed to stop “the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” Ripper believed that our nation’s only hope against the Communist menace lay in maintaining “the purity and essence of our natural fluids,” and he identified the primary agents of the conspiracy as women intent on extracting from him what he called his “life essence,” and what we now call “DNA material.”

“I first became aware of this during the physical act of love,” Ripper explains. “A profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness, followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. . . . I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.”

Ripper’s world view, then, was that of a titanic battle between two superpowers, with the evil superpower—the Communist government of the Soviet Union—determined to weaken the American superpower by cajoling its leaders into ejaculating their life essence, thereby causing them to lose their will to rule the world.

Seen in this light, Clinton’s struggles with Monica Lewinsky, as described in her testimony to Starr, are the struggles of an American president to ward off the assaults of a Communist agent trying to rob him of his “essence.”

At first, it is clear, Clinton resisted mightily. Lewinsky’s account describes a woman fully intent on sexually assaulting a president who tries at first to resist her blandishments. Lewinsky “told a visiting friend that she was attracted to [President Clinton], she had a big crush on him, and I think she told me she at some point had gotten his attention, that there was some mutual eye contact and recognition, mutual acknowledgment.”

After some months of getting nowhere near his essence with such tactics, she upped the ante on November 15, 1995: “In the course of flirting with him, she raised her jacket in the back and showed him the straps of her thong underwear, which extended above her pants.” Their first sexual encounter followed shortly thereafter, but even so the president held firm. Initially, according to Ms. Lewinsky, the president “would not let her perform oral sex to completion.”

So it was to go for seven straight sexual encounters, extending from the end of 1995 until February 28, 1997. Each encounter is a struggle by Ms. Lewinsky to draw into her mouth a sample of the president’s essence, with the president each time standing firm for the cause of freedom. “I told him that I wanted . . . to complete that,” Lewinsky testified. “And he said . . . that he needed to wait until he trusted me more.” Two days later, “Again, he stopped her before he ejaculated.” Six weeks after that, “Once again, he stopped her before he ejaculated.” And so it went on January 7, January 21, and February 4, 1996.

On February 19 of that year, Clinton broke up with Lewinsky, but was able to maintain his distance only until the following April 7, Easter Sunday—at which time their struggles resumed, with the same result: “Ms. Lewinsky performed oral sex. The President did not ejaculate in her presence.”

Not until February 28, 1997, did Lewinsky finally have her way with Clinton. “And I continued to perform oral sex and then he pushed me away, kind of as he always did before he came, and then I stood up and I said . . . I care about you so much . . . I don’t understand why you won’t let me. . . . make you come; it’s important to me; I mean, it just doesn’t feel complete, it doesn’t seem right.” Helpless now, the president acquiesced. “For the first time, she performed oral sex through completion.”

When finally he was deposed by Starr, Clinton said, of this episode, “I was sick after it was over. . . .” Small wonder. He alone, mindful of Kubrick’s prophecy, knew full well the consequences of his defeat. And sure enough, look at what followed in the wake of his failure: Lewinsky left, bearing on her navy blue dress from the Gap the sample of presidential essence that would prove Clinton’s undoing. And historians will note, in due time, the eerie coincidence of the subsequent collapse of the Russian economy, the fatal weakening of Clinton’s ally, Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and the sudden rise to political power again of the Russian Communist Party.

Who knows where the train of consequences will end? One thing, however, is abundantly clear: The theft by Lewinsky of Clinton’s life essence was not, as Hillary Clinton imagined, part of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy,” but rather of the Communist conspiracy envisioned by General Jack Ripper.