WASHINGTON — The last time Congress tried to impeach a president, the White House chief of staff had one rule: No one who wasn’t working directly on impeachment, including the president himself, was ever allowed to talk about it.

John D. Podesta, President Bill Clinton’s wiry, uber-disciplined chief of staff, delivered the message during a senior staff meeting. White House staffers were supposed to stay in their lanes, doing their jobs, or risk being fired. Any water cooler discussion about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, or the impeachment proceedings, and “I will break your neck,” Mr. Podesta recalled telling his staffers, using an expletive. And that especially applied to Mr. Clinton.

Mr. Clinton’s aides had studied Watergate, and their takeaway was that the public believed President Richard M. Nixon was being buried by the scandal, in part, because he talked about it endlessly. So their approach was that the only way to survive and to keep his job approval rating up was to demonstrate that the White House was still working, and that Mr. Clinton was still doing the job he was elected to do for the people.

The strategy of controlling and disciplining Mr. Clinton worked. While a Republican-led House impeached him in December 1998, Democrats picked up five House seats the month before, his approval rating soared to 73 percent in the days afterward, and he was acquitted of the charges by the Republican-led Senate in February 1999.