A debate ensued in the press over whether the photographer had violated journalistic ethics and invaded our privacy for prurient interests. That led to speculation by some journalists that we had “posed” for the photo in hopes that our embrace would be captured on film.

  Hello? As I told a radio interviewer a few weeks later, “Just name me any fifty-yearold woman who would knowingly pose in her bathing suit―with her back pointed toward the camera.”

  Well, maybe people who look good from any angle, like Cher or Jane Fonda or Tina Turner.

  But not me.

  SOLDIERING ON

  “Thank you, Mrs. Clinton,” said one of Kenneth Starr’s deputies. “That’s all we’ll need for now.”

  David Kendall sat next to me in the Treaty Room during an interview with the independent counsel to clear up some final matters in the investigation of the mishandled FBI files. “They’ve got to ask these questions, just so they can say they asked,” David assured me. He was right: the questions were brief and perfunctory. Kenneth Starr was in attendance but said nothing during the ten-minute Q and A.

  David later remarked that the prosecutors had seemed more smug than usual―“like the cats who swallowed the canary,” in the words of one lawyer in the room―but I didn’t pick up any unusual frequencies that morning. I was just grateful that the case was closed on one more of the non-scandals being probed by the OIC. It was January 14, 1998, and Starr’s inquiry was in its fourth year. Like every other investigation in the independent counsel’s portfolio, Filegate was a dry hole. A midlevel White House employee in the Office of Personnel Security had blundered by using an outdated list to order FBI file summaries for current staff, and had inadvertently been sent files on some security pass holders from the Reagan and first Bush Administrations. But it was neither a conspiracy nor a crime. The previous fall, Starr had finally conceded that Vince Foster really had committed suicide. (Robert Fiske had reached that conclusion three years earlier, but it took four more official investigations, including Starr’s, to confirm it.) Starr had also run into a dead end in his original probe of the Whitewater land deal. The culture of investigation followed us out the door of the White House when clerical errors in the recording of gifts mushroomed into a full-blown flap, generating hundreds of news stories over several months.

  The most active litigation we were contending with was a civil case unrelated to the OIC investigation. Paula Jones’s legal team was being paid for and guided by the Rutherford Institute, a legal aid organization with a fundamentalist rightwing agenda. Bill’s lawyers had fully expected the case to be thrown out of court on a motion for summary judgment before it got to trial, but the Supreme Court had decided to let the case proceed.

  Jones therefore was entitled to depose witnesses, including the President. Bill was scheduled to be interviewed under oath on Saturday, January 17, 1998.

  Although there had been opportunities to settle with Jones out of court, I had opposed the idea in principle, believing that it would set a terrible precedent for a President to pay money to rid himself of a nuisance suit. The lawsuits would never end. With the wisdom of hindsight, of course, not settling the Jones suit early on was the second biggest tactical mistake made in handling the barrage of investigations and lawsuits. The first was requesting an independent counsel at all.

  Bill had been up late the night before, preparing for his testimony. When he left, I wished him luck and gave him a big hug. I waited for him in the residence, and when he came back, he looked agitated and exhausted. I asked him how he thought it went, and he told me it was a farce and that he resented the whole process. Although we had planned to go out with friends to a Washington restaurant, he wanted to cancel in favor of a quiet dinner at home.

  As usual, there was a lot on everyone’s plate at the beginning of the new year. The White House was rolling out new initiatives every week in anticipation of the upcoming State of the Union Address. While moving towards a balanced budget, the President planned significant expansions in Medicare and education, as well as the major increase in child care benefits that my staff had advocated to double the number of eligible children.

  Then on Wednesday morning, January 21, Bill woke me up early. He sat on the edge of the bed and said, “There’s something in today’s papers you should know about.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He told me there were news reports that he’d had an affair with a former White House intern and that he had asked her to lie about it to Paula Jones’s lawyers. Starr had requested and obtained permission from Attorney General Janet Reno to expand his investigation to look into possible criminal charges against the President.

  Bill told me that Monica Lewinsky was an intern he had befriended two years earlier when she was volunteering in the West Wing during the government shutdown. He had talked to her a few times, and she had asked him for some job-hunting help. This was completely in character for Bill. He said that she had misinterpreted his attention, which was something I had seen happen dozens of times before. It was such a familiar scenario that I had little trouble believing the accusations were groundless. By then, I also had endured more than six years of baseless claims fomented by some of the same people and groups associated with the Jones case and the Starr investigation.

  I questioned Bill over and over about the story. He continued to deny any improper behavior but to acknowledge that his attention could have been misread.

  I will never truly understand what was going through my husband’s mind that day.

  All I know is that Bill told his staff and our friends the same story he told me: that nothing improper went on. Why he felt he had to deceive me and others is his own story, and he needs to tell it in his own way. In a better world, this sort of conversation between a husband and wife would be no one’s business but our own. Though I had long tried to protect what was left of our privacy, I could do nothing now.

  For me, the Lewinsky imbroglio seemed like just another vicious scandal manufactured by political opponents. After all, since he had started running for public office, Bill had been accused of everything from drug-running to fathering a child with a Little Rock prostitute, and I had been called a thief and a murderer. I expected that, ultimately, the intern story would be a footnote in tabloid history.

  I believed my husband when he told me there was no truth to the charges, but I realized that we faced the prospect of another horrible and invasive investigation just at the point when I thought our legal troubles were over. I knew, too, that the political danger was real. A nuisance civil action had metastasized into a criminal investigation by Starr, who would undoubtedly take it as far as he could. Leaks to the media from the Jones camp and the Office of the Independent Counsel implied that Bill’s testimony in his sworn deposition may have conflicted with other witness descriptions of his relationship with Lewinsky. It appeared that the questions in the Jones deposition were designed solely to trap the President into charges of perjury, which might then justify a demand for his resignation or impeachment.

  This was a lot of bad news to absorb in one morning. But I knew that both Bill and I had to carry on with our daily routines. Aides in the West Wing were walking around in a daze, muttering into their cell phones and whispering behind closed doors. It was important to reassure the White House staff that we would deal with this crisis and be prepared to fight back, just as we had in the past. I knew that everyone would be looking to me for their cues. The best thing I could do for myself and those around me was to forge ahead. I could have used more time to prepare for my first public appearance, but that was not to be. That afternoon, I was scheduled to give a speech on civil rights to a large gathering at Goucher College at the invitation of our old friend Taylor Branch, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Martin Luther King, Parting the Waters. Since I was not about to let down the college or Taylor, whose wife, Christy Macy, worked for me, I headed to Union Station and caught a train to Baltimore.

  David Kendall telephoned me during the train ride, and it was good to hear his voice.

  Other than my husband, he was the only person with whom I felt I could talk freely. The year before, Starr had subpoenaed notes from conversations I’d had with White House lawyers about Whitewater, and a court had ruled that attorney-client privilege did not apply to government-paid lawyers. According to David, the OTC was likely planning to subpoena every employee, friend and family member who might have information about the Lewinsky case.

  As the Amtrak train lumbered through the Maryland suburbs, David told me he had been hearing snippets of rumors since the day before the Jones deposition. Journalists had called him with questions about another woman’s involvement in the case. He thought it might be a troublesome development, but not serious enough to set off any alarms. Now he confirmed that on January 16, Attorney General Reno wrote a letter to the three-judge oversight panel recommending that Starr be allowed to expand his investigation to the Lewinsky matter and possible obstruction of justice. We later learned that Reno’s recommendation was based on incomplete and false information provided to her by the OTC.

  Bill had been blindsided, and the unfairness of it all made me more determined to stand with him to combat the charges.

  I chose to keep going and fight back, but it wasn’t pleasant to listen to what was being said about my husband. I knew that people were wondering, “How can she get up in the morning, let alone go out in public? Even if she doesn’t believe the charges, it has to be devastating just to hear them.” Well, it was. Eleanor Roosevelt’s observance that every woman in political life must “develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide” had become a mantra for me as I faced one crisis after another. No doubt my armor had thickened over the years. That may have made things endurable, but it didn’t make them easy. You don’t just wake up one day and say, “Well, I’m not going to let anything bother me, no matter how vicious or meanspirited.” It was, for me, an isolating and lonely experience.

  I also worried that the armor I had acquired might distance me from my true emotions, that I might turn into the brittle caricature some critics accused me of being. I had to be open to my feelings so that I could act on them and determine what was right for me, no matter what anyone else thought or said. It’s hard enough to maintain one’s sense of self in the public eye, but it was twice as difficult now. I constantly examined myself for traces of denial or hardening of emotional arteries.

  I made my speech at Goucher’s winter convocation, then returned to the Baltimore train station, where a mob of reporters and camera crews was waiting for me. I hadn’t been so swarmed in years. The journalists were yelling questions, and someone shouted above the rest, “Do you think the charges are false?” I stopped and turned to the microphones.

  “Certainly I believe they are false―absolutely,” I said. “It’s difficult and painful any time someone you care about, you love, you admire, is attacked and is subjected to such relentless accusations as my husband has been.”

  Why is Bill Clinton being attacked?

  “There has been a concerted effort to undermine his legitimacy as President, to undo much of what he has been able to accomplish, to attack him personally when he could not be defeated politically.”

  It was not the first time I had said this, nor would it be the last. With any luck, people might start to understand what I was saying. In my view, the prosecutors were undermining the office of the Presidency by using and abusing their authority in an effort to win back the political power they had lost at the ballot box. At that point their actions became everyone’s concern. I felt as if I had the dual responsibility of defending my husband and my country. They couldn’t beat his positions or the successes of his policies, and they couldn’t undermine his popularity. So they vilified him―and, by extension, me. The stakes were as high as they could get.

  Like me, Bill did not back out of any prior commitments. He went ahead with previously scheduled interviews for National Public Radio, Roll Call and PBS television. He discussed foreign policy and the up coming State of the Union Address scheduled for Tuesday, January 27. Then he patiently responded to each question about his personal life with essentially the same answer: The allegations weren’t true. He didn’t ask anybody to lie. He would cooperate with the investigation, but it would be inappropriate to say more at this time.

  Our old friend Harry Thomason flew in to offer help and moral support. Ever the television producer, Harry thought that Bill’s public statements were coming off as too tentative and legalistic and urged Bill to show how outraged he felt about the allegations. And so he did. At a January 26 press event designed to focus on funding children’s afterschool care, as Al Gore and Education Secretary Richard Riley and I stood by his side, the President issued a forceful denial that he’d had sexual relations with Lewinsky. I thought his show of anger was justified under the circumstances, as I understood them.

  Washington was obsessed with the scandal to the point of hysteria. New facts were emerging daily about the mechanics of what was essentially a sting operation to entrap the President, including secret, illegal tape recordings. The Administration made a pitiful yet valiant attempt to preview initiatives in the upcoming State of the Union address, but the airwaves were saturated with speculation and predictions about Bill’s ability to remain in office.

  The next day was the State of the Union address, and I kept a long-scheduled commitment to go to New York to appear on the Today show that morning. I would rather have had a root canal, but a cancellation would have created its own avalanche of speculation.

  So off I went, confident that I knew the truth but dreading the prospect of discussing such matters on national television. Bill’s advisers and mine weighed in with advice.

  Some worried that I would antagonize Starr if I talked about the partisan nature of his investigation.

  David Kendall felt no need for such constraints.

  Matt Lauer was hosting the show that morning without Katie Couric, whose husband, Jay Monahan, had tragically lost his battle with colon cancer three days earlier. Everyone was in a somber mood on the set in New York’s Rockefeller Center. I took a seat across from Matt, and immediately following the seven o’clock news, he began the interview.

  “There has been one question on the minds of people in this country, Mrs. Clinton, lately. And that is, what is the exact nature of the relationship between your husband and Monica Lewinsky? Has he described the relationship in detail to you?”

  I answered: “Well, we’ve talked at great length. And I think as this matter unfolds, the entire country will have more information. But we’re right in the middle of a rather vigorous feeding frenzy right now, and people are saying all kinds of things and putting out rumor and innuendo. And I have learned over the last many years being involved in politics, and especially since my husband first started running for President, that the best thing to do in these cases is just to be patient, take a deep breath and the truth will come out.”

  Lauer mentioned how our friend James Carville had described the situation as a war between the President and Kenneth Starr. “You have said, I understand, to some close friends, that this is the last great battle. And that one side or the other is going down here.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I’ve been that dramatic,” I said. “That would sound like a good line from a movie. But I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this. They have popped up in other settings. This is―the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast rightwing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for President. A few journalists have kind of caught on to it and explained it. But it has not yet been fully revealed to the American public. And, actually, you know, in a bizarre sort of way, this may do it.”

  Later, when David Kendall called to discuss my appearance, I told him I had thought about him as I was going in to the interview.

  “I heard your words of wisdom ringing in my ear,” I said.

  “And which words of incredible wisdom were you hearing?” said David, going for the bait.

  “Screw’em!” I laughed.

  David, who was raised as a Quaker, chuckled and said sheepishly, “It’s an old Quaker expression.”

  “Oh, like ‘Screw thee’?”

  We were both laughing hard now, letting off steam.

  Sure enough, the “vast conspiracy” line got Starr’s attention. He took the unusual step of firing off a statement complaining that I had cast aspersions on his motives. He called the notion of a conspiracy “nonsense.” As they say in Arkansas, “It’s the hit dog that howls.” My comment seemed to have touched a nerve.

  Looking back, I see that I might have phrased my point more artfully, but I stand by the characterization of Starr’s investigation. At that point, I didn’t know the truth about the charges against Bill, but I knew about Starr and his connection to my husband’s political opponents. I do believe there was, and still is, an interlocking network of groups and individuals who want to turn the clock back on many of the advances our country has made, from civil rights and women’s rights to consumer and environmental regulation, and they use all the tools at their disposal―money, power, influence, media and politics―

  to achieve their ends. In recent years, they have also mastered the politics of personal destruction. Fueled by extremists who have been fighting progressive politicians and ideas for decades, they are funded by corporations, foundations and individuals like Richard Mellon Scaife. Many of their names were already in the public record for any enterprising journalist who went looking for them. A few in the media began searching.