CHAPTER 3

The Night We Met the Clintons

Until a few weeks before the New Hampshire presidential primary in 1992, we had never really met them—met the Clintons, that is.

We were unfamiliar with Hillary Clinton’s unwavering resolve. We’d never seen her up close, this proud feminist, litigator, and children’s rights advocate. We didn’t know that she’d helped plot her husband’s campaigns, held her own as a political infighter, and joined the fray when Team Clinton went after his detractors.

Nor had we really met her husband, Bill. We didn’t yet understand how a hard-charging bear of a man could be the same sort of guy who’d bite his lip and turn all misty-eyed when his emotions welled up. We’d never seen the way he’d lean in with that raspy whisper, his face a few shades shy of a garden beet’s, and place his hands on listeners, male or female, making them feel he was theirs alone.

At the time—January 1992—Hillary and Bill Clinton, the first couple of Arkansas, were little more than a blip on the electorate’s radar. And then, in an instant, they were Breaking News.

On the most media-hyped night of the year—Super Bowl Sunday—they were on network television. There was the forty-five-year-old governor with the salt-and-pepper mop offering a confession that would make the public jaw drop.

A no-name candidate. Dropping the A-bomb. With his wife perched right beside him. Then pushing ahead full throttle with his campaign. This was an all-in gamble to get out in front of a sex scandal, to deflate it and to own it by owning up to it.

I have acknowledged causing pain in my marriage, he allowed, with the cameras rolling. I have said things to you tonight—and to the American people from the beginning—that no American politician ever has.

And his wife had nodded in support, adding that she empathized with the other party in the equation, a private individual who’d been besieged by the media and the circumstances (not by her spouse, necessarily)—as if, in Hillary’s words, the poor woman “got hit by a meteor and it’s no fault of [her] own.”

It had all begun to snowball two weeks earlier. Bill Clinton had appeared in his first high-profile cover story, for New York magazine. The headline got right to the point: “Who Is This Guy?” The article inside, by journalist Joe Klein, quoted an influential fund-raiser who branded Clinton “the very heavy favorite” to win the Democratic presidential nomination. The next week, there he was again, beaming from the cover of Time. The cover line: “Is Bill Clinton for Real?” The magazine described how this untested politician, just a month before the breakout New Hampshire primary, had been “anointed—prematurely—as the front runner” against the Republican incumbent, George H. W. Bush.

Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s first press secretary, vouches for his relative obscurity. Those were drowsier days, she points out, when daily papers controlled the narrative flow of the race; when just one cable news network, CNN, was on the air; when the terms “weblog” and “blog” wouldn’t be coined for another five years. “It wasn’t like it is now,” she recalls over lunch at an outdoor restaurant in Washington, D.C., “where [candidates] are out there for two years and actually get covered [by the press]. They weren’t on TV. People didn’t know who Bill Clinton was. His name-ID, I’m sure, was under 20 percent.” Indeed, at an event in South Carolina at the time, a local newspaper editor had confronted the candidate, point-blank, “Aren’t you the guy who gave that awful speech for [Governor Mike] Dukakis at the 1988 Democratic Convention?”

That guy, exactly. If Clinton had made any national impression whatsoever, it was thanks to his interminable nominating speech, a numbing thirty-three minutes in all, delivered four years earlier in Atlanta. Its crescendo had come as he announced, “In closing…”—the very phrase inciting the delegates to bellow their approval.

If he was ill-defined, then so too was his wife. Hillary Rodham Clinton had gained early fame as Wellesley’s first-ever student commencement speaker. She had a raft of accomplishments in the civil justice and legal arenas. But she was a newly minted public figure outside her home terrain (Illinois, Yale Law, Arkansas power circles, and the corporate board of Walmart). “This was the first time that anybody had ever seen Hillary,” recalls CBS News correspondent Steve Kroft. “She had never really been on [national] television before.”

All that changed on January 26, 1992.

If ever there was a time to introduce a presidential aspirant, it was the night when some eighty million viewers would tune in for the nation’s most hallowed secular fiesta. During the game, CBS had aired a ten-second teaser. To the sound of a ticking stopwatch, a video clip showed flash bulbs popping. A telegenic candidate and his wife waved at a crowd from a podium. The voice-over promised, After the game, a 60 Minutes exclusive interview with Governor and Mrs. Bill Clinton.

Super Bowl XXVI turned out to be a rout. The Washington Redskins pummeled the Buffalo Bills, 37–24. And for other such blowouts, most fans would have bolted midway through the third quarter. But on this night, thirty-four million stayed glued to their Barcos and their Naugahyde. They stayed through the postgame interviews and the locker-room champagne. They stayed for what was, back in the day, an unprecedented televised morality play.

In the months and years that followed, that particular Super Bowl Sunday would come to be remembered as the evening when much of America would first lay eyes on a married pair who, respectively, would become the forty-second and not-quite-forty-fifth presidents of the United States. And due to the topic that night—a politician’s implied admission of adultery—the nation was getting a nasty foretaste. They were meeting a man who, before the decade was out, would become the second American president ever to be impeached, a man undone by the most politically divisive and personally destructive sex scandal in Washington history.

It had come together in a blur.

Bill Clinton was under siege. Though he’d gained traction among Democratic mandarins, not a single primary voter had yet gone to the polls. On top of it, he was suddenly getting a punishing share of unsolicited publicity. His face was gracing not just Time but also the front page of the Star, a supermarket tabloid.

Eura Gean Flowers went by the name of Gennifer. As a reporter for the NBC affiliate in Little Rock, Arkansas, Ms. Flowers in 1977 had met and become familiar with the state’s attorney general, Bill Clinton. By 1992 she was working as a local nightclub singer and by day as an employee of the Arkansas Appeal Tribunal—a $17,500-a-year position she had recently managed to land through then-governor Clinton’s good graces. Gennifer Flowers—yes, Flowers; yes, Gennifer with a G—was a thistle-teased ersatz blonde with a fetching swagger. She seemed to have a soft spot for shoulder pads. She possessed, as Norman Mailer once described a bottle blonde in his novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance, “a full pout on the mouth, [that made her appear] as spoiled and imperious as the breath of sex.” She was self-assured, articulate, and, incredibly enough, quite credible.

In the Star’s exclusive—for which Flowers was paid $150,000—she went into salacious detail about what she claimed was a twelve-year romance with the guv, a liaison that both she and Clinton had previously, and vehemently, denied.

The Star was on a tear. The week before, the tabloid had printed a story saying that Clinton had had relations outside his marriage with at least five women, including Flowers—a conjecture that Clinton’s rapid-response troops had successfully downplayed, if not discredited. But now the Star was publishing a three-part bombshell (“Mistress Tells All—The Secret Love Tapes That Prove It”… “They Made Love All Over Her Apartment”). The first installment’s most salient revelation was that Flowers had squirreled away an hour’s worth of cassette recordings, which captured recent personal phone conversations she had had with her nominal boss. Flowers praised her lover’s stamina in the sack. And, as if to pride herself on a discerning palate, she divulged that theirs was “the best sex I ever had.” This was steamy stuff for reporters who, in those weeks before the primaries, tended to get their jollies from sitting in coffee shops with farmers, talking Medicare and crop rotation.

To be sure, the press corps was in a bind. For the last half of the twentieth century, legitimate news organizations had resisted using unsubstantiated reports about officials’ personal slipups. Journalists were also loath to recycle the morsels dished out by the tabs, which occupied the lowliest strata on the editorial food chain. White House correspondents, for example, had been aware of both JFK’s and LBJ’s extracurriculars, and yet they’d remained mum to maintain the dignity of the office and their own privileged niche on the West Wing’s perimeter.

But now that technology could provide proof—in the form of clandestinely recorded conversations—such civility was in eclipse. Here was corroboration. Here were the delicious echoes of Watergate. And despite the assertion that Flowers, in the words of Clinton’s spokesmen, appeared to be peddling “trash for cash,” the presence of the tapes suggested that her revelations were hardly garbage.1 Flowers’s threat of releasing the evidence was a major buzz kill for the high-flying campaign.

As Clinton continued with his public appearances, the media felt newly emboldened. It wasn’t so much that reporters resented being misled by a politician (though they certainly did). Or that they would somehow seem complicit in an act of press-pack self-censorship (which they certainly would have been). But the idea of being upstaged by a tabloid skeeve-sheet like the Star? Not a chance.

Journalists began hounding Clinton, who held his ground, or, more accurately, his quicksand. “The allegations in the Star are not true,” he said at one campaign stopover. “She’s obviously taken money to change her story.” But the denials—including a refutation by Hillary Clinton—were falling on deaf ears. Besides, the governor’s reputation was being cited by Republican operatives, who didn’t disguise their glee. One GOP strategist remarked sniffishly to New York magazine, “We hear [Clinton has] a history with the ladies. Are we worried? You guess.”

Clinton, truth be told, had sown his share of nummy oats. One of his closest aides, Betsey Wright, had actually come up with a phrase—“bimbo eruptions”: a code blue that would go out when one of the governor’s alleged lady friends came tumbling out of the bushes.

Many of the rumors, it turned out, proved bogus. But not infrequently they had legs. And curves. Five years before, when Clinton was pondering a presidential run, Wright reportedly presented him with a veritable scroll of rumored companions. According to David Maraniss in his Clinton biography, First in His Class, Wright sat down with the governor in the quiet of her own living room and went over the names of some of his purported liaisons—not once but twice. “Okay,” she said, according to Maraniss’s account. “Now, I want you to tell me the truth about every one.” (Clinton decided to sit out the 1988 race—for other reasons. As he persuasively claimed at the time, he was only forty, and both he and Hillary worried about “the impact of prolonged absences” on their daughter, Chelsea, then seven years old.)

But with this new election cycle, new squalls of warrantless rumor began to lash the campaign. In Vanity Fair, Sidney Blumenthal—who would become a close adviser to (and sometime apologist for) both Bill and Hillary Clinton—provided a laundry list of slurs. The governor did coke in his office. The governor had romped with the 1982 Miss America, Arkansas’s Elizabeth Ward, who quickly batted down the story. According to Blumenthal, such scabrous fictions were partly the invention of campaign reporters who, hoping to impress their peers with “inside dopesterism,” sometimes floated stories to sound as if they were on the cusp of the gossip curve. “In recent months,” wrote Blumenthal, “a partial list of unsupported rumors [had depicted supposed incidents in which] Bill Clinton propositioned the young daughter of Ron Brown, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.… Hillary Clinton has had a number of affairs. Hillary is gay. And so on.”

If such innuendos weren’t enough, the Clinton camp had to squelch one persistent and plainly libelous allegation. As shown in the campaign documentary The War Room, George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s deputy campaign manager for communications, would bark during a phone call, “If you went on the radio and said that Bill Clinton is the father of an illegitimate black child, you would be laughed at.” On the other end of the line, according to the movie, was an ally of the formidable independent candidate for president, Ross Perot. “Believe me,” Stephanopoulos continued, “it’s been looked at by every major national news organization. Everything. And it is completely bullshit.… People would think you’re crazy.… People will think you’re scummy.”

As time went on, this drip-drip-drip of dubious tips, according to historian and legal scholar Ken Gormley, among others, would have Clinton propositioning “the lead baton twirler for the University of Arkansas football squad”; Clinton fathering more than a dozen out-of-wedlock children; Clinton appearing in photos (as stated in a memo by a lawyer for a plaintiff in one anti-Clinton lawsuit) with his former Whitewater land-deal partner “[Susan] McDougal on the hood of [a] car having sex.… (Them, not the car.)” All, in the end, pure hooey.

But back in 1992, it mattered little if a thousand Flowers bloomed. That January, there was but one thorn that mattered.

A press release about the Star story was faxed to ABC News, as described in Hedrick Smith’s PBS documentary The People and the Power Game. ABC’s field reporter Jim Wooten read the release and, with a video cameraman in tow, broached the subject with the candidate. “Well, first of all, I read the story,” Clinton insisted. “It isn’t true.” Wooten, who felt he needed other sources to support or counter the Star’s say-so, telephoned New York and gave the segment a thumbs-down. “There isn’t enough substantiation,” Wooten said, “so it’s unfair.” Peter Jennings, the anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, agreed. “There was a great battle royal here about whether you put it on the air,” Jennings would later tell PBS. The ABC team decided to sit on the footage.

Stations subscribing to ABC’s news feed, however, had no such compunctions. Local news shows had hours to fill, stiff competition, and generally less-accountable news executives calling the shots. News staffs in ABC’s supply chain received an uplink of the actual snippet of Wooten and Clinton, and several channels simply ran the clip, unexpurgated. Their justification: a candidate actively denying an unsubstantiated tabloid report was, in its way, news.

Some news outlets naturally followed suit. Soon, others used the occasion as an excuse to “cover the media covering the story,” as Clinton campaign mastermind James Carville would note, allowing the media “to cover its favorite subject, which is, of course, the media.” Still others would come at it sideways, as “a tortured colloquium on whether or not infidelity was a legitimate issue,” in the words of David Brock (at the time a right-wing muckraker, who would dissect the scandal in the American Spectator).

One night that week, the phone rang as Clinton’s campaign manager, David Wilhelm, was sound asleep. A threatening voice, as Sidney Blumenthal would report a few months later in Vanity Fair, began to tick off a roster of supposed Clinton mistresses. “You’re through, Wilhelm,” the stranger said, before hanging up. Another Clinton aide fielded an even more foreboding call after he’d turned in for the night: “Your heart is going to be torn out. You’re going to be dead.”

Daylight hours brought little relief. Traveling reporters whispered quiet zingers. Fund-raisers grew uneasy with Clinton’s viability, insisting that peter problems, once made public, invariably incinerated a candidate’s chances. Chief campaign strategist Paul Begala saw the handwriting on the parapet wall. “If we don’t turn this into a positive,” he remarked, “we’re going down.”

Hillary Clinton herself—initially resistant to having her husband engage in a full-dress discussion of their marriage (believing it would rob them of their privacy, to say nothing of the effect it might have on their daughter, Chelsea, by then age eleven)—eventually bought into the plan for a counterattack. “I was persuaded that if we didn’t deal with the situation publicly,” she would explain in her memoir Living History, “Bill’s campaign would be over before a single vote was cast.”

The Clinton camp began to scramble. George Stephanopoulos was the campaign’s floppy-banged pivot man for communications. Two weeks shy of his thirty-first birthday, he had not yet evolved, as he would by year’s end, into politico-dreamboat status. At the Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, Stephanopoulos hunkered down with James Carville, the campaign’s top strategist. Carville was a roguish, shoot-from-the-lip veteran of numerous election bouts.

The pair were the governor’s most invaluable aides: Stephanopoulos, the former altar boy, a Greek American with an Ivy League degree and a jones for a tussle (he’d been conditioned from his stint on the well-pummeled Dukakis campaign); Carville, the wily, wiry consultant with his chaw-jawed speaking manner, whose competitive juices and heavy Louisiana accent had first bubbled up from the stewpot of the bayou. (Some of the GOP’s most outspoken seers respected Carville’s hot-under-the-collar TV persona. He had an admirable ferocity, and screen presence, that opponents sometimes spoke of in zoological terms: he could look, in the words of Fox News founder Roger Ailes, “like a fish who’s swum too close to a nuclear reactor.”)

James and George had their work cut out for them. On Thursday, the campaign had discussions with ABC’s Nightline to have the governor appear that night. But late in the day, as Carville would recall, the notion was nixed; Bill and Hillary Clinton insisted that they face the cameras together. And since Mrs. Clinton was traveling in Georgia, she couldn’t connect with her husband in time. So the telecast was scrubbed.2

The next morning Stephanopoulos got on the phone with 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft. They had to move fast, and both of them knew it.

Kroft was a forty-six-year-old correspondent who had joined the 60 Minutes stable three years before. Among his more famous elders at TV’s preeminent weekly newsmagazine, he was beginning to throw his weight around. The night before, Kroft recalls, he happened to be having drinks with Anne Reingold, an ex-CBS colleague then working for the Democratic National Committee. They’d both wondered: if the rumored Nightline broadcast didn’t materialize, might Clinton consider a 60 Minutes interview? Reingold was eager to help and, according to Kroft, put him in touch with Stephanopoulos.

“Our situation was so serious,” Stephanopoulos would observe in his memoir, All Too Human, “that the only hope was the media equivalent of experimental chemotherapy. 60 Minutes was strong enough to cure us—if it didn’t kill us first.” (Stephanopoulos declined to be interviewed for this book.) For Kroft, any further delay could be disastrous; he couldn’t risk losing the story to, say, a local reporter, should Clinton decide to issue a mea culpa on some windswept tarmac. And so: the Hail Mary pass on Super Bowl night.

“Do you want to do this?” Stephanopoulos pressed him.

“Yeah, but you’ve got to understand something,” Kroft said, explaining that his boss was traveling in San Francisco. “We don’t have a show. I have to go to Don Hewitt. I have to ask him about this to see if we can get some time back from the network to do it.”

According to Kroft, Stephanopoulos—possibly preoccupied by the primary maelstrom—asked, “What do you mean you don’t have a show?”

“Well, we’ve got the game.”

“What game?” Stephanopoulos supposedly inquired.

“The Super Bowl?” said Kroft.

Stephanopoulos, recalls Kroft, paused a moment. “You mean this would be on after the Super Bowl?”

Today Kroft sits in his 60 Minutes office overlooking the Hudson River, two decades after that conversation. He contends that the lure of the big game helped close the deal. “The subtext was clear,” says Kroft, who recalls that he also conferred with Clinton campaign chairman Harold Ickes. “There was a mutual need that [Bill Clinton] wanted to address this once. And we said, ‘Look, if you come on 60 Minutes you can say, “I talked about this on 60 Minutes, and I’m not going to talk about it again.”’”

The legendarily aggressive 60 Minutes interview had acquired a dedicated following as a Sunday night blood sport. But it had always afforded the producers an unfair advantage. As the Mother of All Public Grillings, the show’s segments had elements of a show trial. The victim, many times at the darkest hour of his or her public life, was paraded before a stern inquisitor. He sat in surreal light and shadow in a sterile setting: a hotel room, a book-lined office, a nondescript conference room. He faced a series of queries, each more pointed. Even his appearance had a funereal aspect: he had likely chosen somber attire and had been ceremonially daubed in makeup. The encounter, despite its theatricality, had the high seriousness of an inquest.

For the Clintons, however, the format had distinct advantages. If they could paint Prosecutor Kroft as a stand-in for the rest of the press, they might win sympathy as yet another political couple being placed under the media microscope. If they could bristle indignantly about the adultery question, they might get the audience wondering: why should anyone’s extramarital matters have any bearing on his fitness for public service? And the governor, on top of it all, might get points just for showing up. Viewers, in the era before reality TV, sometimes believed that one’s willingness to occupy the hot seat implied he might have less to hide than met the eye.

At this stage, though, Kroft held most of the cards as he and Stephanopoulos set some ground rules. First, the interview would have to be done on Sunday morning, at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, to give CBS time to edit the show and ready the tape for broadcast. Second, the program would run as a short “special edition” (ten to fifteen minutes, tops), which was all the time the network could spare on such a crowded, coveted night. What’s more, the thrust of the segment would have to focus on the Star controversy. “We want to talk about Gennifer Flowers,” Kroft recalls saying to both Stephanopoulos and Ickes. “‘That’s the only thing we want to talk about, and that’s the only thing you want to talk about.’ We [didn’t] want to get into a situation where we’re going to put him on after the Super Bowl and talk about health care.” (Some Clinton insiders would later contend they’d settled on a more wide-ranging interview and that CBS had agreed to air the tape largely unedited—claims that, to this day, the 60 Minutes camp refutes.)

Finally, as Kroft recollects, CBS would have to agree to a key campaign demand. “How would you feel,” Stephanopoulos asked, “about Mrs. Clinton appearing with him?”

“Great,” Kroft replied. “Better.”

To prepare for the interview, Clinton’s team arrived in Boston late Saturday. They were met by Kroft and his boss Don Hewitt, the producer who’d created 60 Minutes—TV’s first newsmagazine—in 1968.3 The producers walked the Clintons through the hotel suite where the interview would be taped the next day. It had a fireplace, two lapis vases, some potted plants, assorted porcelain. The couple would be seated on an eggshell-white couch; Kroft would sit across from them in an upholstered armchair. A water pitcher would be kept full and at the ready. Hillary discussed camera placement, the positioning of the chairs. “She was in control,” Kroft would later tell Vanity Fair’s Gail Sheehy. “[If] you didn’t know she was his wife, you’d have thought she was a media consultant. She didn’t do it in a dictatorial sort of way.… She was very delightful and charming. When they left the room, everybody pretty much said, ‘Boy, she’s terrific.’”

Outside, however, bedlam reigned. “Governor Clinton!”… “Did you have an affair?!”… “Governor! What about Gennifer Flowers?!” James Carville was struck not just by the number of reporters who had come to town on the eve of the broadcast but also by their level of frenzy. “We were in Boston [surrounded by] the hordes of the media,” Carville recalls, speaking from his home in New Orleans. “For, like, five seconds I thought I was going to die. It musta been kinda like being at a Brazilian soccer match and trying to get out of the stadium, and you have no control. You’re pinned. You’re just at the mercy of this throng. And they were, like, throwing microphones at him and everything.” Carville remembers literally being lifted off his feet at one point, swept along on a tide of journalists’ torsos and elbows. Cameras were hefted up and pointed down, shooting the mayhem. Grown men snarled. Flash bulbs and tempers flared. “I think this, of its time, was the worst,” he concedes, never having experienced a press scrum more intimidating. “That’s the most [ravenous] I remember.”

Clinton’s top aides took refuge in a hotel room and strategized their battle plan. Each was acutely aware that their jobs were riding on the way that a few hot minutes of television would play out twenty-four hours hence. “We discussed whether he should make a general admission of adultery—explicitly, unequivocally, using that word instead of a euphemism,” Stephanopoulos would recall in All Too Human. But no dice. “Both Clinton and Hillary were adamant about not using the A word, arguing that it was too grating, too harsh, too in-your-face to the viewers at home.”

Carville and Mandy Grunwald, the canny media adviser, stuck to the essentials. It was important that they admit to previous marital strain. But they had to underscore a larger issue: what had this nation come to when it paid more attention to a potential nominee’s private life than to how he might address the nation’s economic, political, and international challenges?

The session broke well after midnight. “No one could sleep,” Stephanopoulos recounted in his autobiography. So the team repaired to pollster Stan Greenberg’s room to unwind. “We talked about the day ahead and whether we’d even be together a week from now. For us, no matter how tomorrow turned out, it would be a war story, the day we bet a whole campaign on a single interview.… Tomorrow the whole country would be discussing [the Clintons’] marriage.”

Jotting down notes, Clinton’s young communications chief drafted what turned out to be a game-day memo. It urged Clinton, in straightforward terms, Use your family as a metaphor for character. You’ve had problems in your marriage, you’ve faced them, you’ve worked through them, and you’re coming out stronger than ever.

James Carville had barely slept. Due to nervous exhaustion and the anxious anticipation, he spent much of the night crying in his room. (“I don’t mean tearing up,” he would write in his campaign memoir, All’s Fair.4 “I mean sobbing for hours, drained, weeping piteously.”) Nonetheless, he had found time to draft a parallel set of bite-the-bullet bullet points with Paul Begala. Among their pearls, according to Carville’s book:

* [Remain] calm.… Reporters and voters are like horses and dogs—they can sense when someone is fearful.

* [Hillary] is our ace in the hole.… When y’all feel like Steve is going too far… Hillary needs to interrupt and say: “Look, Steve… it’s our relationship; our marriage; our family—and at some point we have to draw a line.”

Begala and Carville advised the governor to don a sweater: “We can’t think of anyone who wears a suit on Super Bowl Sunday.” (Clinton ignored them and wore a dark suit.) They quoted Confucius, referenced Elvis, and cited Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

Clinton had also fielded advice from Dick Morris, the battle-hardened operative who would later become ensnared in his own sex scandal. Morris, according to his memoir Behind the Oval Office, counseled Clinton to be contrite, apologize to his wife in front of the nation, and tick off a list of past presidential infidelity—possibly citing Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson by name. As a kicker, Morris said, Clinton should ask voters—at the risk of sounding presumptuous—that they believe “his past sins would no more interfere with his ability to serve the nation than it had interfered with these other great presidents.” The governor took a pass, not wanting to offend Hillary. “That’s a good line,” Clinton supposedly told Morris, “but if I said it I’d have to find a new place to live.”

Steve Kroft, meanwhile, was getting his own ducks in a row. This was an act that had elements of the high wire and the tripwire. How, then, to delicately ask a candidate about alleged infidelity without appearing sleazy oneself? To prepare, Kroft sought counsel from his producer L. Franklin Devine, and the program’s most confrontational interviewer, Mike Wallace.

Wallace, according to Kroft, “told me, ‘Don’t be mean to him; don’t push him too hard; don’t be too aggressive with the questions.’ Why Mike told me that I have no idea, because I don’t believe that Mike would have handled the interview that way.… I felt like I had to protect the record. [Since this would be the only such interview,] I had to ask him every question that everybody else wanted to ask, and I had to ask him it two or three different ways.” Later, Kroft says, he discovered “from a number of CBS executives [that] Mike Wallace spent a couple of days trying to get it away from me, behind the scenes,” lobbying to be allowed to conduct the interview himself. Hewitt, however, stuck with Kroft, who had brought in the scoop.

Clinton’s widely dispersed team tuned in from Arkansas, Iowa, New Hampshire, and across the country. Gary Ginsberg had left his job as a young corporate lawyer in Manhattan—on the very day the Flowers story had broken—to begin work as Clinton’s new advance-operations director. A Buffalo Bills fan, Ginsberg (now an executive at Time Warner) was sitting with his father in a bar in Minneapolis, the site of that year’s Super Bowl. He was convinced, he now puts it, that “this was going to be the shortest leave of absence anyone has ever enjoyed from a Wall Street law firm. I thought I was going to be back in New York by the end of that week.”

What they witnessed, along with the rest of the nation, was a condensed version of an interview that had gone on for a relentless hour or so, a session with so much offstage intrigue it could have sustained an operetta.

The Clintons sat beside each other on the couch. Two cameras stayed focused on the couple: Bill, with his hands held as if in prayer, positioned between his knees; Hillary, with her arm cozily draped behind his back or straying occasionally to settle on his arm. She wore a thin black headband and a turquoise suit with matching turtleneck. From time to time she examined her husband lovingly, yet she maintained a commanding air, nodding approvingly as he spoke, then jumping in as necessary.

Her husband’s responses were measured, firm, and softly delivered. His tone was emphatic and empathetic. Often, the impression he conveyed was that of an earnest choirboy with all the naughty scolded out of him. At some points, a viewer couldn’t help thinking that he was a nimble actor as well, patting his heart and leaning forward thoughtfully—the Clinton whom columnist Maureen Dowd would come to call the “maestro of faux sincerity.” Now and again he appeared hurt, even vaguely aghast, his bottom lip resolutely chewed or his eyebrows gone all circumflex. At other times he shook his head or narrowed his eyes to express exasperation with his interrogator, who got right to the point.

Kroft: [Gennifer Flowers] is alleging and has described in some detail in the supermarket tabloid what she calls a twelve-year affair with you.

Clinton: That allegation is false.

Hillary Clinton: When this woman first got caught up in these charges, I felt as I’ve felt about all these women—that, you know, they’ve just been minding their own business.…

Clinton: It was only when money came out, when the tabloid went down there offering people money to say that they had been involved with me, that she changed her story. There’s a recession on. Times are tough. And I think you can expect more and more of these stories as long as they’re down there handing out money.

Kroft: I’m assuming from your answer that you’re categorically denying that you ever had an affair with Gennifer Flowers.

Clinton: I said that before. And so has she.

Kroft pressed on, posing The Question from every conceivable angle. Clinton’s responses were even-tempered, but his answers always fell short of the drum-tight categorical.

Kroft: You’ve said that your marriage has had problems.… What do you mean by that?… Help us break the code. I mean, does that mean that you were separated?… Had communication problems?… Contemplated divorce? Does it mean adultery?

Clinton: I think the American people, at least people that have been married for a long time, know what it means and know the whole range of things it can mean.

Kroft: … Are you prepared tonight to say that you’ve never had an extramarital affair?

Clinton: I’m not prepared tonight to say that any married couple should ever discuss that with anyone but themselves.… I think most Americans who are watching this tonight, they’ll know what we’re saying; they’ll get it, and they’ll feel that we have been more candid. And I think what the press has to decide is: Are we going to engage in a game of ‘gotcha’?…

Kroft: I don’t like some of these questions any better than you do.…

But that didn’t stop him from pressing on.

Clinton, while he appeared calm and even chastened on camera, would later admit that he was fuming. After denying a romance with Flowers, he would later recall in his autobiography that Kroft “asked if I had had any affairs.” Then, after stating that he’d “caus[ed] pain” in his marriage, Clinton was gobsmacked. “Kroft, unbelievably, asked me again. His only goal in the interview was to get a specific admission.”

The exchange, which came off as civil, was actually getting progressively testier. To make matters worse, the mood in the room was already at full boil. Off-camera, Stephanopoulos stood to the side, offering the Clintons moral support. Hewitt was ensconced in the adjacent “control room,” with producers and several Clinton aides, including a tightly wound Carville.

Twice there was a break in the taping. And twice, Carville now says, he would shout out encouragement, like an exuberant coach on the sidelines. “When they’d reload the camera and put another magazine in, I said, ‘That’s great, man! You’re doing great!’” Hewitt, in parallel, would swoop in and get on his haunches right next to the couch, making a direct appeal to the governor. “It was kind of crazy,” says Kroft. “Don would come out, in between takes, and knelt down next to Clinton… and said, ‘Look, you’ve got to come clean. You’ve got to tell us.’ Because Don, I think, wanted some resolution. He thought the headlines would be bigger or the story would be bigger if Clinton were more direct and honest about it.

“Nobody knew who James Carville was,” Kroft recalls. “I knew his name, but he was certainly known only to political people at that point. Don threw him out of the screening room because he was saying how good [Clinton was doing].” (Hewitt, in his memoir, Tell Me a Story, recounted saying, “Will someone please shut this guy the fuck up or get him the hell out of here!”)

“Hewitt was pissed at me,” Carville insists, “because he didn’t want Clinton to think he was doing well. He wanted Clinton to think he was doing shitty. [Hewitt] kept telling him, ‘You got to come clean with the whole thing.’ Clinton just looked at him like he was crazy.” (Hewitt, says Carville, later wrote him “a taut letter, kind of a shitty letter, you know: ‘I’ve been in this business for all these years, I’ve never seen [behavior like that]!’”)

Finally, Kroft tripped the switch. He tried to articulate what many viewers were thinking. But he made an observation that might as well have been supercharged in a cyclotron: “I think most Americans would agree that it’s very admirable that you’ve stayed together—that you’ve worked your problems out, that you’ve seemed to have reached some sort of understanding and an arrangement.”

“I wanted to slug him,” Clinton would concede. Here he was—alongside the woman he’d admittedly aggrieved, her hand on his forearm—hearing their sixteen-year marriage characterized as an arrangement. “Instead, I said, ‘Wait a minute. You’re looking at two people who love each other. This is not an arrangement or an understanding. This is a marriage.’”

Instinctively, Hillary pounced. Her candid, coolheaded response was the sound bite heard round the world—the one that would turn Bill and Hillary into household names: “You know, I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man, like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And, you know, if that’s not enough for people—then, heck, don’t vote for him.”

Heck yeah. The wallflower political wife? The pitiable victim of her husband’s philandering? That caricature of a candidate’s spouse had been suddenly, irrevocably sent packing. In a single stroke, Hillary Rodham Clinton had broken it all down to what mattered to viewers—and voters:

• The way that a couple behaves, and forgives, is ruled by its own dynamics.

• Love shouldn’t be judged by fixed moral codes. (When it comes to long-term romantic relationships: It’s complicated.)

• The press (and the political opposition research squads), damn it, should just steer clear of people’s private affairs.

• And, take that, Gennifer-with-a-G.

Hillary Clinton’s broadside was a bracing rejoinder to Kroft’s statement, which had come off to many as patronizing. She had projected righteous indignation and political backbone. (Indeed, as journalist Gail Sheehy would point out, the governor had long recognized his wife’s political appeal: “Some say the wrong Clinton is in the statehouse.… It doesn’t bother me for people to see her and get excited and say she could be president. I always say she could be president, too.”) She had also displayed her steadfast commitment to this newest curiosity on the national stage—this likable, complex, beguiling man.5

Dee Dee Myers was watching the broadcast with other staffers in the open bullpen of the Little Rock campaign headquarters. “People were kind of hanging on every word,” she reflects. “It was pretty quiet; there was no applause moment. And afterward they didn’t have this instantaneous talking-head thing that you would have now, where you go right to a panel of pundits to talk about, ‘How’d he do?,’ where you’ve got MSNBC and Fox and CNN. We thought it went pretty well. We didn’t know.”

Mark McKinnon, who would become media adviser to George W. Bush, as governor and then as president, had also tuned in that night. “I remember thinking two things watching the broadcast,” says McKinnon, who had recently been working in Texas on Ann Richards’s campaign for governor. “It was going to be impossible for Clinton to recover because the charges were so humiliating. And that Clinton was going to recover because the confession was just so candid and audacious. Never before had the American public seen a candidate for president air his dirty laundry so publicly—with his spouse by his side.”

Perhaps the best measure of the segment’s impact was how the opposition viewed it. Carville’s partner at the time (later his wife) was Mary Matalin, the political director of President George H. W. Bush’s reelection campaign. Today she calls the Clintons’ appearance “masterful.”

“All campaigns,” Matalin says from her New Orleans home, come down to “looking at somebody else’s playbook. But they had no playbook to look at. They had to make a brand-new event. And they had to get the wife on board. And they had to get everyone to execute perfectly. And the timing of it. There are very few things in politics that are purposefully make-or-break; there are very few things that are make-or-break, period. But that you on purpose set up a make-or-break moment? That never happens. Nobody does that. That took so much courage.

“Politically, [the Clinton campaign] had to lance the boil,” she reflects. “That has never been done as well before or since. That Super Bowl moment was so brilliant—because it paid forward. [It] was like shooting the elephant in the room, with not a drop of blood on the floor.”

And then the sky fell in—almost literally.

The overhead lights for the shoot, which had been rigged up by a Boston freelance crew, somehow became unmoored, along with their wood-beam mount. The rigging toppled over, barely missing Hillary. “They just kind of popped off,” Kroft remembers, “and came crashing down on the back of the sofa behind the Clintons, and it knocked over a pitcher of water, and they lurched forward [to avoid the] burning filaments and flying glass.

“And she said, ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!’—I’ll never forget that. Which wouldn’t have been the first words out of my mouth. That’s one thing I’ve learned about Hillary, starting then: she has a tremendous amount of self-control.”

Bill Clinton, a tragedy averted, took his wife in his arms, clutched her close, and kept telling her softly that he loved her and that everything would be okay.

Taping was halted. The mood was broken. The TV lights might as well have been the Clintons’ wider world, which all week had seemed to be collapsing around them. But in that instant there was security and love and a ray of hope.

Jim Kennedy, who would later become a Clinton “crisis manager” during his second term as president, recently reviewed the unedited tape. “That scary moment,” he says, “when Bill Clinton grabs hold of Hillary Clinton in a very immediate and protective way and they keep holding on to each other, reveals a deeper truth at the heart of the entire one-hour interview. It was touching because it said something about their relationship that I think is important: that they were together, they were a team, they cared about each other, they were in love. There’s a real bond there despite whoever or whatever tries to come between them.” Kroft, in fact, says that friends of his who knew the Clintons would later tell him, “Bill said that that moment won him six months of good favor with Hillary. He had come to her rescue. He was there to console her”—admittedly after she, on national television, had come to rescue him.

Just as the session ended, Carville was next. He rushed over to Clinton’s side and began weeping. The governor, as he had with Hillary, held Carville and comforted him, saying, as Carville remembers it, “Yeah, we got through this, buddy.”

Carville now insists he was experiencing a mess of emotions: “I probably felt exhaustion, relief, and just the utter sadness of watching these people have to sit there for an hour or however long it was, and to answer these questions. It was just like a fucking—just painful, you know? We’d been four or five days of dealing with this. I probably hadn’t slept.… [But despite] the exhaustion, [it] was, like, ‘It was over.’ And I’d pushed for the 60 Minutes alternative.

“It was just a relief that, you know, my whole standing in the campaign, if that thing would have gone poorly, [might have been at risk]. But it was fine”—even though, he adds, “like everybody else on 60 Minutes, I thought we got kinda like a shitty edit.”

Clinton—and his reputation—seemed to have tolerated the antidote. Yet his aides weren’t quite sure. “The takeaway from the night was, ‘Okay, we put our case out there,’” says Dee Dee Myers, “‘but we have no frickin’ idea how it’s going to play.’ None. Because we were in unchartered territory.… That moment was not something we’d seen a lot of: a politician acknowledging infidelity.”

“In all my years in politics, in running statewide races, I had never—nobody—had [ever] seen this,” Carville says, adding, with a laugh, “I think everybody was a virgin on this kind of thing.”

And with that, as Carville remembers it, the whole group went upstairs to a feast of cold cuts and an ice chest crammed with longneck beers. “I just never tasted a beer that tasted so good in my life.”

Matalin is careful to point out that her husband doesn’t easily tear up. “Campaigns are emotional,” she says. “James has never run to me and sobbed, even at the birth of our kids. That’s just not how he is. But when you’re doing something for someone that’s never been done before, [it] evoke[s] emotion. Maybe James was crying. But that’s not evidence of James being an emotional person. That’s evidence of, ‘Wow, did we just not only dodge a bullet? We just landed on the beach.’”