I was thankful for the support and counsel I received during this time, particularly from Don Jones, my youth minister, who had become a lifelong friend. Don reminded me of a classic sermon by the theologian Paul Tillich, “You Are Accepted,” which Don had once read to our youth group in Park Ridge. Its premise is how sin and grace exist through life in constant interplay; neither is possible without the other. The mystery of grace is that you cannot look for it. “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness,”

  Tillich wrote. “It happens; or it does not happen.”

  Grace happens. Until it did, my main job was to put one foot in front of the other and get through another day.

  IMPEACHMENT

  By the end of August, there was detente, if not peace, in our household. Although I was heartbroken and disappointed with Bill, my long hours alone made me admit to myself that I loved him. What I still didn’t know was whether our marriage could or should last.

  The day-to-day was easier to forecast than the future. We were returning to Washington and a new phase in a never-ending political war. I hadn’t decided whether to fight for my husband and my marriage, but I was resolved to fight for my President.

  I had to get a grip on my feelings and focus on what I needed to do for myself. Fulfilling my personal and public obligations drew on a reservoir of different emotions―

  requiring different thinking and different judgments. For over twenty years, Bill had been my husband, my best friend, my partner in all of life’s trials and joys. He was a loving father to our daughter. Now, for reasons he will have to explain, he had violated my trust, hurt me deeply and given his enemies something real to exploit after years of enduring their false charges, partisan investigations and lawsuits.

  My personal feelings and political beliefs were on a collision course. As his wife, I wanted to wring Bill’s neck. But he was not only my husband, he was also my President, and I thought that, in spite of everything, Bill led America and the world in a way that I continued to support. No matter what he had done, I did not think any person deserved the abusive treatment he had received. His privacy, my privacy, Monica Lewinsky’s privacy and the privacy of our families had been invaded in a cruel and gratuitous manner. I believe what my husband did was morally wrong. So was lying to me and misleading the American people about it. I also knew his failing was not a betrayal of his country. Everything I had learned from the Watergate investigation convinced me that there were no grounds to impeach Bill. If men like Starr and his allies could ignore the Constitution and abuse power for ideological and malicious ends to topple a President, I feared for my country.

  Bill’s Presidency, the institutional Presidency and the integrity of the Constitution hung in the balance. I knew what I did and said in the next days and weeks would influence not just Bill’s future and mine, but also America’s. As for my marriage, it hung in the balance, too, and I wasn’t at all sure which way the scale would, or should, tip.

  Life moved on, and I moved with it. I accompanied Bill to Moscow for another state visit on September 1 and then on to Ireland to meet Tony and Cherie Blair and to walk the streets of Omagh where the bombing occurred. The detonation of 500 pounds of explosives in a busy shopping area did not succeed in shattering the cease-fire, as the bombers had hoped. It simply inspired people to work even harder for peace. Shocked hard-liners on both sides of the conflict softened their positions in response.

  Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, announced publicly that violence in its seventy-seven-yearold war to end British rule was “a thing of the past.” Following Adams’s public statement, David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader, agreed to meet with Sinn Fein for the first time. All sides concurred that such hopeful developments would not have been possible without the direct diplomacy of Bill Clinton and his envoy, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell.

  The agony of Omagh was a reminder of the worthy risks Bill was willing to take for peace around the world, of all the good he had accomplished. Bill spent innumerable hours trying to persuade the Irish, Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, Kosovars, Israelis, Palestinians, Greeks, Turks, Burundians and others to give up past grievances and overcome barriers to peace. His efforts were sometimes successful, sometimes not. Many of the successes were fragile, as we later learned in the collapse of the Middle East peace process. But even the failures forced people to come to grips with the pain and humanity of the other side. I was always proud and grateful that Bill persevered in the search for peace and reconciliation.

  The huge contingent of reporters who followed the President to Russia and Ireland was looking for more than a peace mission story. They were watching both of us closely for clues to the state of our marriage. Did we stand close together or apart? Was I frowning or crying behind dark glasses? And what was the significance of the knitted sweater I bought for Bill in Dublin, which he wore to Limerick for his first golf game in more than a month? I desperately wanted to restore a zone of privacy for myself and my family, but I wondered if that would ever be possible again.

  While Bill was negotiating with foreign leaders abroad, Joe Lieberman, Senator from Connecticut, admonished him publicly. Lieberman, who had been a friend since Bill had worked on his first campaign for the Connecticut state senate in the early seventies, took to the Senate floor to denounce the President’s conduct as immoral and harmful because “it sends a message of what is acceptable behavior to the larger American family.”

  When Bill was asked by reporters in Ireland to respond to Lieberman’s speech, he replied: “Basically I agree with what he said. I’ve already said that I made a bad mistake. It was indefensible, and I’m sorry about it. I’m very sorry about it.” It was the first of many unconditional public apologies my husband would make on his long journey of atonement.

  But I realized that apologies would never be enough for hardcore Republicans and might not be enough to avert a meltdown within the Democratic Parry. Other Democratic leaders, including Congressman Richard Gephardt of Missouri, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, condemned the President’s personal actions and said he should in some way be held accountable. None, however, advocated impeachment.

  By the time we returned to the White House, there were several challenges on my mind, personal and political. Bill and I had agreed to participate in regular marital counseling to determine whether or not we were going to salvage our marriage. On one level, I was emotionally shell-shocked and trying to deal with the raw wound I had suffered. On another level, I believed Bill was a good person and a great President. I viewed the independent counsel’s assault on the Presidency as an ever escalating political war, and I was on Bill’s side.

  When people ask me how I kept going during such a wrenching time, I tell them that there is nothing remarkable about getting up and going to work every day, even when there is a family crisis at home. Every one of us has had to do it at some time in our lives, and the skills required to cope are the same for a First Lady or a forklift operator. I just had to do it all in the public eye.

  Even if I was undecided about my personal future, I was absolutely convinced that Bill’s private behavior and his misguided effort to conceal it did not constitute a legal or historical basis for impeachment under the Constitution. I believed he ought to be held accountable for his behavior―by me and by Chelsea―not by a misuse of the impeachment process. But I also knew that the opposition could use the press to create an atmosphere in which political pressure would grow for impeachment or resignation, regardless of the law. I worried about the Democrats who might be stampeded into calling for Bill’s resignation, and tried to concentrate on what I could do to help get them reelected in November.

  In spite of polls showing large majorities against impeachment, many Democrats up for reelection believed that, unless they were tough on the President, they would lose their seats. It was a legitimate concern in some districts. In much of the country, however, impeachment and Starr’s investigation could tarnish Republican candidates who sought to exploit the process.

  In early September, David Kendall discovered that the OIC was ready to send a referral on impeachment to the House Judiciary Committee, which would then decide whether the matter should go to the full House of Representatives for a vote. I had studied this area of the law in 1974, when my duties for the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment staff had included writing a memo outlining the procedures for impeaching a President and another on the standards of evidence required to trigger an impeachment. According to the Constitution, the House must approve by majority vote the articles of impeachment, which are similar to a criminal indictment of a federal official. The articles are then sent to the Senate for trial. Although a jury in a criminal trial must be unanimous for a guilty verdict, only a two-thirds majority of the Senate is required for conviction and removal from office. The Constitution reserves impeachment as a remedy for only the most serious of offenses: “Treason, Bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution designed impeachment to be a slow, painstaking process because they believed that it should not be easy to remove a federal official, particularly the President, from office.

  In 1868, the House of Representatives impeached President Andrew Johnson for defying Congress’s wish that a harsh post-Civil War reconstruction policy be imposed on the South. I thought the House was wrong, but at least they acted against Johnson on grounds of his official actions as President. Johnson was tried and acquitted in the Senate by one vote. Richard Nixon was the second American President to face impeachment proceedings, and I knew firsthand how carefully that process safeguarded the use of grand jury evidence, following the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. That investigation was carried out under tight security and confidentiality for eight months before articles of impeachment having to do with President Nixon’s actions as President were presented to the Judiciary Committee. Chairman Peter Rodino and Special Counsel John Doar set examples of discreet nonpartisan professionalism.

  David Kendall asked for an advance copy of the OIC’s referral to the House Judiciary Committee so that he could draft a response―a request grounded in simple fairness and precedent from the Nixon impeachment. Starr refused. On September 9, Starr’s deputies drove two vans to the Capitol steps and delivered copies of the over 119,000-oard “Starr report,” complete with thirty-six boxes of supporting documents, to the sergeant-at-arms.

  Starr’s piece of grandstanding was appalling; the quick decision by the House Rules Committee to make the entire report available on the Internet, even more so.

  Federal law requires that grand jury evidence be kept confidential so that testimony elicited by a prosecutor from a witness without the clarifying effect of crossexamination cannot prejudice a case or harm an innocent person. This is one of the basic tenets of our judicial system. The Starr report was a compilation of raw grand jury testimony obtained from witnesses who were never crossexamined, and it was released to the public without regard to fairness or balance.

  I have not read the Starr report, but I’ve been told that the word sex (or some variation of it) appears 581 times in the 445-page report. Whitewater, the putative subject of Starr’s probe, reportedly appears four times, to identify a figure, like the “Whitewater Independent Counsel.” Starr’s distribution of his report was gratuitously graphic and degrading to the Presidency and the Constitution. Its public release was a low moment in American history.

  Starr recommended that the House Judiciary Committee consider eleven possible grounds of impeachment. I was convinced that he had overstepped his legal authority.

  The Constitution requires the legislative branch of government―not the independent counsel, which is a creation of the executive and judicial branches―to investigate evidence of impeachable offenses. Starr’s duty was to deliver an unbiased summary of the known facts to the committee, which would then deploy its own staff to assemble evidence.

  But Starr appointed himself prosecutor, judge and jury in his zeal to impeach Bill Clinton. And the more I believed Starr was abusing his power, the more I sympathized with Bill―at least politically.

  Starr’s list of impeachable offenses included charges that the President lied under oath about his personal behavior, obstructed justice and abused his office. Bill never obstructed justice or abused his office. He maintained that he did not lie under oath. Whether or not he did, a lie under oath about a private matter in a civil suit was not grounds for impeachment, according to the vast majority of constitutional experts and historians.

  The day after Starr delivered his report to Congress, Bill and I attended a Democratic Business Council reception, where I introduced him as “my husband and our President.”

  Privately, I was still working on forgiving Bill, but my fury at those who had deliberately sabotaged him helped me on that score. My schedule was loaded with events, and I showed up for every one of them. That day, there was a speechwriting meeting, a colon cancer prevention event, an AmeriCorps reception and several other appearances. If the White House staff saw me carrying on as usual, I hoped it would encourage them to do the same. If I could get through the day, they could, too.

  For weeks Bill had apologized to me, to Chelsea and to the friends, Cabinet members, staffers and colleagues he had misled and disappointed. At a White House prayer breakfast with religious leaders in early September, Bill offered an emotional admission of his sins and a plea for forgiveness from the American people. But he would not give up his office. “I will instruct my lawyers to mount a vigorous defense using all available appropriate arguments,” he said. “But legal language must not obscure the fact that I have done wrong. If my repentance is genuine and sustained … then good can come of this for our country as well as for me and my family. The children of this country can learn in a profound way that integrity is important and selfishness is wrong, but God can change us and make us strong at the broken places.”

  Bill cast his political fate with the American people. He asked for their compassion and then went back to work for them with the same commitment that he had brought to his Presidency from his first day in the White House. And we continued with our regular counseling sessions, which forced us to ask and answer hard questions that years of nonstop campaigning had allowed us to postpone. By now, I wanted to save our marriage, if we could.

  The public response to Bill’s forthright apologies raised my spirits. The President’s job approval was holding steady through the crisis. A solid majority of about 60 percent of Americans also said that Congress should not begin impeachment proceedings, that Bill should not resign and that the explicit details in the Starr report were “inappropriate.”

  My own approval rating was nearing an alltime high and would eventually peak somewhere around 70 percent, proving that the American people are fundamentally fair and sympathetic.

  Although the case for impeachment was both unpopular and unjustified under the constitutional standard, I assumed that the House Republicans would pursue it if they thought they could. The only way to avoid impeachment was through a strong showing in the November elections. But the party in the White House traditionally loses congressional seats in midterm elections, as we had in 1994, and especially in a President’s second term. Democratic candidates everywhere were feeling justifiably nervous about the President’s political health.

  On September 15, a delegation of about two dozen Democratic Congresswomen met with me in the Yellow Oval Room. The representatives sat on couches and chairs, while butlers served coffee and pastries. The women had come to urge me to take a public role in the upcoming election, but I think they also wanted to see and hear for themselves how I was holding up and what I was planning to do next. Once they realized that I was serious about standing up for the Constitution, the President and the Democratic Party, they asked me to get out and campaign for them.

  We talked about how to direct the voters’ attention away from impeachment and back to the issues that mattered to voters―federal help to reduce class size and to help with school construction, Social Security and health insurance reforms, better foster care and adoption practices and protection of the environment.

  “I’ll help you in any way I can,” I said. “But I also need you to help hold the party together, and to keep the Democratic Caucus members where they belong―behind the Constitution and the President.”

  “We are not here to talk about the President’s behavior,” Representative Lynn Woolsey told reporters after the meeting. “We are here to talk about what’s important, more important to the people of this country.” Woolsey later explained: “We told her that as women, we know that women can do more than one thing at a time in an emergency… So we asked her to get on a plane and stop at places where her voice so desperately needs to be heard.”

  And so I did. Campaigning in dozens of congressional races, my frenetic schedule kept me occupied all day. But the nights were difficult, especially after Chelsea returned to Stanford. Bill and I had only ourselves, and it was still awkward. I didn’t avoid him as I had before, but there was still tension between us and not as many shared laughs as I was used to on a daily basis with my husband.

  I am not the sort of person who routinely pours out her deepest feelings, even to my closest friends. My mother is the same way. We have a tendency to keep our own counsel and that trait only deepened when I began living my life in the public eye. It was a welcome distraction when my good friends Diane Blair and Betsy Ebeling came to stay with me for a few days in mid-September. I was blessed with close friends, but once the relentless investigating started, I felt compelled to protect them from being dragged into any probe. After August 1998, I felt even more cut off and alone because I did not want to talk to Bill as I always had before. I spent a lot of time alone, praying and reading. But it made me feel better to have friends around who had known me forever, who had seen me pregnant and sick and happy and sad and could understand what I was going through now.