Chapter Thirty-four

ROCK-BOTTOM TRUTH

Mr. President,” Newt Gingrich said, “we are going to run you out of town.” Gingrich offered his barbed prediction as he was leaving an Oval Office meeting and a group of foreign policy advisers was arriving. One of them asked Clinton: Did he say what I thought he said? Clinton nodded his head, with an expression that said, See what we’re up against?

Gingrich would have been well advised to recall a conversation with Clinton during the government shutdown when, in a moment of confidence, Clinton asked the Speaker, “Do you know who I am?

“I’m the big rubber clown doll you had as a kid, and every time you hit it, it bounces back.” He paused, as though pondering the significance of his own words. “That’s me—the harder you hit me, the faster I come back up.”

Three years later, as spring turned to summer and Starr’s investigation churned remorselessly ahead, Clinton was being hit harder than ever.

Several more hits came in rapid succession in late July and early August 1998. The moment Mark Penn had forecast in February—when the “stand-off” would break and there would be “a clear story to respond to”—was now at hand.

On July 28, Lewinsky reached an agreement with Starr and his prosecutors to provide the story of her relationship with Clinton under oath in exchange for immunity from prosecution on possible perjury charges. For the prosecutors, her agreement came with an invaluable bonus. The long-percolating rumors that she had saved a dress with the president’s “genetic material” on it turned out to be true. Lewinsky’s dark blue dress from the Gap left her closet and arrived in Starr’s evidence locker. The prosecutor chose to tip his hand. He let Clinton’s attorney David Kendall know that he needed a presidential blood sample. Arrangements were made that very night for a prosecutor and federal agents to meet the president in the White House Map Room to draw blood. What looked at first blush like a rite of humiliation was in an odd way a gentlemanly gesture. By seeking the blood sample, Starr was serving fair notice of his evidence. In the wake of Lewinsky’s grand jury appearance, Clinton now faced his own date with the jurors. He now knew that if he tried to lie about the Lewinsky relationship, he would be confronted with irrefutable physical evidence and a rock-solid perjury charge.

This roundabout favor hardly blunted the indignity of the evening. Clinton’s face was flushed with anger as he sat in a chair and rolled up his sleeve while one of his navy physicians drew the sample. A prosecutor and federal agent fixed their gaze on the vial the entire time, fearful that Clinton’s team might try a surreptitious switch. Kendall was no more trusting of the prosecutors. As soon as they left, he ordered a second sample taken for his own side, in case Starr later resorted to fraud. The whole morbid evening was a metaphor for the invasiveness and mistrust that pervaded this year of scandal.

Several choices now confronted Clinton. Before the grand jury, he could assert his Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying against himself. In any normal criminal defense case, this would be the obvious path. But congressional Democratic leaders, who would have Clinton’s fate in their hands in an impeachment proceeding, had made clear this path was politically unacceptable for a president. Yet if he did testify, there was the even more acute dilemma of what to say. Simply coming clean was not an attractive option, since he had uttered several falsehoods months before at the Paula Jones deposition. Sticking with his existing story was an even more perilous path. Many Americans had regarded the Jones case as a burlesque, and could easily forgive Clinton his deceptions there. Lying in front of a federal grand jury was a different matter—that kind of thing sent people to prison.

Beyond the legal consequences were awesome political uncertainties. After the immediate shock of the January disclosures, much of the public had placed the drama in a middle zone between politics and entertainment. Late-night viewers could get their fill of the story on either Nightline or the Tonight Show. Clinton might not have been a compartmentalizer, but in the main the public was: Many people could laugh or argue about Lewinsky in one part of the brain, even as they did not actually conceive of the story as something that could or should topple a president. Clinton realized that events in August could shift that uneasy balance—from tolerance to a public conviction that this president was more trouble than he was worth. Interwoven with all these choices was still another factor, in which Clinton faced a constituency of one. Peace had been preserved between Clinton and his wife by his January denials and her decision to accept them at face value. That peace, he knew, could not easily withstand an admission that he had lied.

Perhaps it is a feature of any modern presidency that crises never arrive in isolation, but it was supremely a feature of this one. On August 5, Saddam Hussein again announced that his country would not submit to United Nations weapons inspections. A similar clash the previous winter had been resolved when the dictator backed down—only after Clinton had assembled a large naval and air armada on Iraq’s doorstep. Now it was plain the retreat was only temporary. A new test of wills was under way.

Still another came two days later. The president was woken up at five-thirty by a call from Sandy Berger telling him that the United States had suffered two nearly simultaneous terrorist strikes on its embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Hundreds were dead, it became clear within hours, including dozens of American foreign service personnel. There was an obvious suspect immediately, and within days U.S. intelligence would confirm the culpability of a man whose name was until then unfamiliar to most Americans: Osama bin Laden.

Amid the crush of news, Clinton mostly kept to his schedule. As his legal troubles mounted that summer, he responded by pushing himself at an even more exhausting pace than usual. Within the past few weeks, on a return trip to Arkansas, he summoned his old boyhood chum David Leopoulos and other friends for a late-night card game that lasted until 5 a.m. He and Hillary Clinton had spent the previous weekend in the Hamptons, at the summer home of director Steven Spielberg. For two days, they sprinted to several fund-raisers, and soaked up support from a long roster of celebrities and tycoons, including screen stars Julie Andrews, Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger, and Chevy Chase; fashion designer Vera Wang; pop music stars Billy Joel and Hootie and the Blowfish; and publishing mogul Mort Zuckerman. “If it weren’t for the 22nd Amendment, I’d give the American people another chance to elect or defeat me because I believe in what we’re doing,” Clinton said to laughter and exuberant applause.

After the bombings, Clinton continued with a trip to California—as usual, a mix of policy announcements and fund-raisers. He knew that everyone who saw him secretly wondered how he was holding up. “No matter what you read, every day has been a joy for me, and I have loved it,” he assured one group of contributors. This remarkable exuberance in the face of adversity was something he had grown up with. Around this time, Hillary Clinton recalled the little sign that the president’s mother had kept in her home: “Lord help me to remember that nothing is going to happen to me today that I can’t handle.”

On August 13, however, the accumulated pressures mounting on the president from nearly every direction did, for a moment, become more than he could handle. He was at Andrews Air Force Base, just outside Washington, for a ceremony to greet ten flag-draped caskets returning from Nairobi. The president who had so often been a comforter to the stricken was now himself the stricken one. A tear’s path was streaked down his face. When he spoke, his voice was barely able to rise above a whisper. The first lady kept looking at her husband with a look of obvious concern. Then, when it was time to leave, the president sat in the back of his limousine, his head bowed, rubbing his hand into the bridge of his nose.

Clinton’s date with the grand jury was now four days away, on August 17. Starr had withdrawn a subpoena in exchange for Clinton’s agreement to testify voluntarily.

He had reached the inevitable: He had no choice but to tell his wife that his testimony to Starr would be different from what he had told her and the nation.

There were efforts to till the soil in advance of the president’s change of story. The New York Times and Washington Post both ran banner front-page stories, citing unnamed sources, disclosing the president’s plans. The first lady had long maintained that she had stopped reading the papers since they left her so upset. These stories would have been hard to miss.

The president had tried to recruit Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the director, to talk with his wife. She begged off, noting that this unpleasant task was his duty. Some lawyer friends, including Kendall, were more willing to at least nudge Hillary Clinton about what was coming. Kendall’s partner Robert Barnett—a longtime friend of the Clintons who no longer represented them after his wife, CBS correspondent Rita Braver, began covering the White House—also gave it a stab.

“You have to face the fact that something about this might be true,” he warned.

“Look, Bob,” Hillary Clinton responded. “My husband may have his faults, but he has never lied to me.”

Her response was characteristic. She had built a wall of disbelief around herself the previous January and never looked out from behind it. She had been in constant contact with her close Arkansas friend Diane Blair during this period, but their conversations always steered wide of Lewinsky. The same was true with close staff members, who revered their boss and felt deeply protective of her. People like Melanne Verveer, her chief of staff, and scheduler Patti Solis Doyle would take each other aside and whisper, “How do you think she’s doing? Have you talked to her?” The answer was always no.

The president’s hope of recruiting proxies to talk with Hillary Clinton was hardly a profile in courage, but on the most important decision facing him during these awful weeks of August he did not waver. August 14 was a Friday, and Clinton’s schedule was largely cleared so that he could spend several hours huddled with Kendall and fellow attorney Nicole Seligman for the grand jury appearance. One item that stayed on the schedule was a meeting with his national security team, at which CIA director George Tenet reported an exciting intelligence lead. On August 20, bin Laden was expected to appear with his top lieutenants at a camp in Afghanistan. With a little luck, Clinton could avenge the embassy bombings by killing the leader of the al Qaeda network that carried them out. The downside was that Clinton’s motives were sure to be challenged, especially if the attack was unsuccessful, by people suspecting that he was using a military intervention to divert attention from his legal problems.

Irresponsible in his private life, Clinton had a deep sense of responsibility in his public life. The Lewinsky scandal had shown that private failures had public consequences, but not in this instance. “Do not give me political advice or personal advice about the timing. That’s my problem. Let me worry about it,” he told his national security team.

He dealt with his other worry the next morning.

As Hillary Clinton later recounted the painful moment, he paced back and forth by the bed before coming to the point of his confession. She was as angry as he feared. “What do you mean?” she gasped. “What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea.”

By Hillary Clinton’s reckoning, the bedroom encounter that morning had left the future of their marriage in doubt. The encounter two days later in the White House Map Room threatened to do the same to the future of his presidency. Under his agreement with prosecutors, Clinton was allowed to testify in the presence of his lawyer, and was spared the indignity of having to appear at the federal courthouse.

That was the only shame he was spared that day. The session began with one of the prosecutors, Sol Wisenberg, reminding the president that he was “under oath” and asking him if he understood that if he gave false or misleading answers, “you could be prosecuted for perjury and/or obstruction of justice.”

“I believe that’s correct,” Clinton replied.

This set the tone for what followed the rest of the afternoon—stern and literal-minded prosecutors trying to pin down a cool and opaque defendant. The problem for Clinton was to find words that could reconcile his version of what happened with Lewinsky with the irrefutable evidence prosecutors had assembled, without acknowledging that he had lied during his deposition in the Jones case. Little surprise, if this contest was going to hinge on mastery of words, that Clinton quickly took command of the session.

He began by refusing to answer directly prosecutor Robert Bittman’s blunt query, “Mr. President, were you physically intimate with Monica Lewinsky?” Clinton responded by reading a written statement acknowledging “inappropriate intimate contact” with the young woman, but specifying that the encounters “did not consist of sexual intercourse” and did not “constitute sexual relations” under the definitions he was presented in January at the Jones deposition. He was not going to answer questions in clinical detail, he said, “in an effort to preserve the dignity of the office I hold.”

With prosecutors prizing every minute of what was agreed would be a strict four-hour time limit, Clinton then spent much of the session running down the clock with lengthy answers denouncing his political opponents. Lewinsky had nothing to do with the Jones case, he said reasonably, and the Jones case had little to do with sexual harassment. “They just thought they would take a wrecking ball to me and see if they could do some damage.”

He mocked the obsessiveness of the prosecutors, who were disbelieving of his claims not to remember key dates and meetings. “I say, sir, just from the tone of your voice and the way you are asking questions here, it’s obvious that this is the most important thing in the world.” Later in the session, he snapped, “I’m not going to answer your trick questions.”

Acknowledging the clear pattern of evasions and concealment he had followed with Lewinsky, he explained himself in commonsense words that no doubt resonated with many on the grand jury, just as they did when a videotape of the session was released to the public a month later. “I did what people do when they do the wrong thing,” he said. “I tried to do it when nobody else was looking.”

Most of all, he masterfully obscured what prosecutors believed were the clear facts of the case in a cloud of verbiage. Some of it was prim and punctilious, as when he explained that the legalistic definition of sexual relations in the Jones case meant that Lewinsky had had sexual relations with him, but not vice versa. “If the deponent is the person who has oral sex performed on him, then contact is not with anything on that list, but with the lips of another person.”

The Starr team was furious at what it regarded as the president’s pettifogging. Bittman recalled that in the Jones deposition, Robert Bennett had assured the judge and the plaintiff’s lawyers that “there is no sex of any kind in any manner, shape, or form” between the president and Lewinsky. Wouldn’t you agree, Bittman sneered, this “was an utterly false statement”?

Clinton smiled and said, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is. . . . If ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” A few minutes later, he added, “I was not trying to give you a cute answer to that.”

Of course, he had been doing that—and he paid for his cuteness. That throwaway line turned out to be one of Clinton’s entrants in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

In an important way, Clinton was honestly describing his worldview. The grand jury session, like the entire eight-month battle, was a contest between Starr’s absolutism and Clinton’s relativism. The prosecutor believed there were truths and lies. Any adult should know the difference and realize that the duty to tell the truth in a court proceeding is inviolate—even if the questions are personal. This was Starr’s moral code. It was just as much a part of Clinton’s code to believe that truth is often not black and white. Human behavior, motives, and language are subject always to many interpretations. Since no one could possess absolute truth, judgment should always be tempered by generosity and tolerance. This might have been self-serving in his present circumstances, but, in fairness, he brought these same values to most decisions in his private and public life. This penchant for ambiguity was central to who he was.

The Starr prosecutors left the session feeling they had accomplished their objectives. They had shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Clinton had lied in both the Jones deposition and again before the grand jury. What Clinton was asking people to believe was absurd—that during a sixteen-month affair he had received sexual favors but scrupulously avoided touching Lewinsky in a sexual way. His version was directly contradicted by Lewinsky, who had described in lurid detail sexual favors he had performed for her. Her account had been corroborated so frequently on other particulars—the dates of her White House visits, the phone calls Clinton received in her presence—that there was no reason to doubt her on this one. Simply put, the former intern was a more credible witness than the president.

Clinton, however, had achieved his goals in the testimony, in ways that the Starr team did not appreciate. With his frequent rhetorical excursions and hair-splitting distinctions, the president had subtly shifted the legal and political contest to more favorable terrain. The case was no longer about a large question: Is the president a truth-teller? Clinton had successfully framed it around a series of ridiculously small ones: Is a president “alone” with a woman if there’s a Secret Service agent standing outside the door? Did people believe Lewinsky that the president had fondled her breasts and genitals, or Clinton that he had not? Starr’s team regarded these distinctions as worth fighting about. A majority of Americans, it would soon become clear, did not find such questions as worthy of a democracy’s attention, and certainly not worth removing a president over.

If the day was a relative success for Clinton, the evening that followed was an extravagant failure. With admirable discipline, Clinton had kept his cool throughout the testimony. As soon as it was over, however, he let down his guard. When he walked out of the Map Room and met his political team in the hallway, Clinton was in a shaking rage.

He was in no frame of mind for the day’s next big assignment: a nationally televised speech to the nation. Clinton needed to tell the American public what he had told the prosecutors, that he had indeed had an improper relationship with Lewinsky. He would also need to acknowledge that he had misled the public for months with his steadfast denials. It was obvious, of course, that Clinton needed to break this news with an apology, and a profession that he deeply regretted his initial lie. The reality of his feelings was more complicated. He told several people that he did not regret his initial evasion. If he had told the truth in January, the public furor might have been such that he would have been forced from office. By August, the public had had time to come to terms with the Lewinsky matter. Most voters had long since reached the conclusion that some kind of improper relationship had taken place, but were willing to keep the matter in perspective.

“The lie saved me,” Clinton told one close friend.

The question confronting him on the evening of August 17, two days before his fifty-second birthday, was how to acknowledge the truth in a way that engendered sympathy for his plight, rather than anger at his recklessness and deception. Clinton was a politician who operated with natural intuition for his audience. His intuition for the right words and right tone rarely failed him as critically as it did on this evening, when his judgment was warped by a toxic combination of fatigue and anger.

Paul Begala was a natural wordsmith who had set aside his own considerable resentment at Clinton’s behavior to write a statement with the appropriate mix of confession, contrition, and commitment to move on. There was one problem: Clinton did not believe it. It was another reminder of an essential fact about the man: Supposedly full of artifice and guile, he was in fact quite transparent, especially about matters close to his heart. There were few closer than this one, and he was determined to say what he really believed. He had written this out in longhand over the previous several days. His words dripped, not with remorse, but with fury at Starr and his investigation.

The drama of this evening—the contest between what was sensible for Clinton to say and what he really wished to say—reflected a familiar tension. There were different poles to his personality, and within his circle of friends and advisers, different sorts of people gravitated to one pole or the other. There was a set of people who he knew would sympathize with and feed his instinct for grievance, and his belief that the forces arrayed against him were deeply illegitimate. Harry Thomason fit into this camp. So did the former journalist Sidney Blumenthal. There was another set of people whom the president depended on to ignore his grievances and give him a clear-eyed view of political realities. Advisers in this category, like Rahm Emanuel and Doug Sosnik, tended to roll their eyes at Blumenthal’s incessant conspiracy theorizing, and the way he would recite all manner of obscure but dark connections between Starr’s team and various right-wing financiers and zealots. This understanding of the conservative shadow world was a principal reason Blumenthal was in the White House. Both Clintons had a huge appetite for it. “I know you all make fun of Sid, but he’s on to something here,” the president would say to more conventional-minded aides like Emanuel or Sosnik.

Blumenthal’s colleagues did not think his views were wrong so much as beside the point. Yes, they believed, Clinton’s enemies were out to get him, but the fixation on this was unproductive. The president’s task was to transcend the right’s viciousness by assuring that he stayed attuned to the politics of Middle America, where most people did not care about ideological crusades or political vendettas and simply wanted Clinton to go about business that mattered to them. Under ordinary circumstances, Clinton liked to vent with people like Thomason or Blumenthal, even though in the end he usually chose the more practical approach of people like Emanuel or Sosnik. But this night, just hours after his grueling testimony, was no ordinary night.

Just a couple of hours before Clinton was due to speak to the nation, his lawyers and political advisers gathered in the solarium of the White House residence to discuss the competing drafts. The lawyers rather liked Clinton’s plan to denounce Starr; tell that SOB where to get off, they agreed. Without exception, the political advisers felt this was a huge mistake. What the public wanted from the president was accountability and contrition; surrogates could take the fight to the prosecutor.

“Mr. President, that’s why God invented James Carville,” said Sosnik, while the Louisiana consultant, who loathed Starr and delighted in saying so publicly, nodded his head in agreement.

Clinton said that mere contrition would let his own supporters down. His people needed something to hang on to, he explained, and a Starr-bashing message would give it to them. Emanuel countered bluntly: “People don’t care about you or your problems, they only care about what you are doing for their problems.” As Clinton argued with his staff, it seemed to several people in the room that the president’s words were directed at one person in particular. He kept looking over to Hillary Clinton, seeking validation. This was not by itself unusual. Advisers had long since learned, in political and policy discussions alike, to give the president arguments that they knew would resonate with her. What was unusual on this occasion was that the first lady had absented herself, psychically if not physically, from the discussion. She sat quietly, with a sullen countenance and an air of total exhaustion. As the debate swirled and the president’s political advisers continued to plead with him to soften his language, she said with impatience: “It’s your speech, Bill. Say whatever you want.” To some in the room, it sounded more like a taunt than advice.

Whatever her intent, Clinton took his wife’s words to heart. His four-and-a-half-minute address, from the same room in which he had testified earlier in the day, started out with an obligatory apology and confession. Then, halfway through, the tone of his voice changed abruptly. So did his appearance, as he narrowed his eyes and stiffened his jaw. Explaining why he had deceived the country about his illicit relationship, he suggested that the prosecutor drove him to it. “I had real and serious concerns about an independent counsel investigation that began with private business dealings twenty years ago, dealings, I might add, about which an independent federal agency found no evidence of any wrongdoing by me or my wife over two years ago,” he protested. “It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.”

The reviews began arriving within minutes. Emanuel, observing the network commentary after the speech, warned Clinton that it was overwhelmingly negative. Soon, though, pollster Mark Penn called with more reassuring news. A clear majority of viewers thought Clinton’s remarks were fine. They were desperate for closure on the scandal, and Clinton’s confession, however grudging, offered that promise. It was only hard-core Republicans and political “elites”—the kind of people quoted by the networks—who were dissatisfied with the speech, Penn reported. It was a vivid example of the dichotomy in public opinion that had existed all year.

But the complaints raised about the speech could not be dismissed as mere static from the “chattering classes.” There were several potential threats. Many of the elites infuriated not just by Clinton’s behavior but by his sullen speech were congressional Democrats. Sosnik had warned the president back in January: If you get brought down, it will be by your own party, not by the opposition. There was also the problem of liberal women, including some prominent examples in his own administration. If an accomplished woman like Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala or Secretary of State Madeleine Albright suddenly announced that she could no longer in conscience serve a president who would carry on a sexual relationship with a young woman on his staff, the public impact would be sensational. In addition, there was already a medium-size chorus of voices—from such people as respected former Georgia senator Sam Nunn and the writer Garry Wills—suggesting the honorable thing for Clinton to do was resign.

He left the next morning for a scheduled vacation to Martha’s Vineyard. In a striking image, Chelsea Clinton stood between her parents and took their hands as they walked, a wounded family still together, across the South Lawn to board Marine One. Observing Clinton during these next days was like watching a man under the pulse of a strobe light. In public, in his sporadic appearances, he presented a flickering image of presidential normality. He still had his planes and motorcades; when he landed at Martha’s Vineyard, he bounded over to greet a crowd of locals gathered behind a rope line, just as ever. Yet there was no disguising—his own spokesmen did not try—that this was a surreal moment for both the public figure and the private man. In both spheres of his life, he had been exposed and humiliated. At their borrowed vacation compound, the Clintons spent most of their time apart. He spent his days in a cottage adjacent to the main house. And when they were together, Hillary Clinton made no effort, even in the presence of staff, to hide her cold rage toward her husband. Indeed, it seemed to some of his advisers that she was publicly orchestrating his punishment—that he be seen as paying her price.

He had been at Martha’s Vineyard for only a day when he made a sudden appearance in the elementary school gymnasium at Edgartown that served as the filing center for White House reporters. The cruise missile strikes he had ordered several days earlier against Osama bin Laden’s training camp had been carried out, the president told the startled reporters, most of whom were slumped over their computers in T-shirts and shorts for what they had assumed would be a barely working vacation. In addition, U.S. forces had hit a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan at which it was suspected that bin Laden’s al Qaeda network had made chemical weapons. After making a brief statement, Clinton flew back to Washington so that he could make a formal statement explaining his action to the nation in an Oval Office address that evening. The explanation fell flat with some.

Three years later, in the wake of September 11, there would be undying controversy over whether the president’s missile strikes were a feckless response to a threat as dangerous as bin Laden. At the time, however, the questions were of a quite different nature. Immediately, there were questions—never satisfactorily resolved—about whether the intelligence evidence was sufficient to justify hitting the Sudan facility. More pointedly, there were questions about Clinton’s motivation in ordering any attack at all. Earlier that year, Hollywood churned out an improbable movie called Wag the Dog, in which an embattled president goes to war with Albania in order to distract the nation from a sex scandal. A few weeks later, the Lewinsky scandal broke, and some people thought the plot was not so improbable after all. “There is a cloud over this presidency,” said Republican John Ashcroft, then in the Senate representing Missouri. His colleague Arlen Specter, Republican from Pennsylvania, was even blunter in casting doubt on the president’s motives: “There’s an obvious issue that will be raised internationally as to whether there is any diversionary motivation.”

Comments like these made plain that the president was not the only one distracted by scandal from the pressing business of the age.

Clinton returned to Martha’s Vineyard for another week. The couple joined in the island’s social scene, pasting on a mask of gaiety as they attended dinner parties in their honor, giving their well-heeled companions a chance to whisper and stare as they looked for any clues about what was really going on with the marriage. The Clintons did not show much affection toward each other, but no overt anger either. Back at the house it was different, as the first lady continued to give her husband the deep freeze. During his many spare hours, he worked the phones—and learned more about just how badly he had stumbled in his televised Lewinsky confession. Some Democratic members of Congress refused to take his calls. Those who did told him how inadequate his speech was, failing to give any sense of what he had put the nation through. Clinton was starting to understand how badly his anger had warped his political judgment. He was also realizing that he would need to show the nation some of the remorse he insisted to friends he genuinely felt.

Over the next several days he tried, haltingly, to do that. “All of you know I’m having to become quite an expert in this business of asking for forgiveness,” he told an African-American church congregation at Oak Bluffs, a village on Martha’s Vineyard. “It gets a little easier the more you do it. . . . But I have to tell you that in these last days it has come home to me again—something I first learned as president, but it wasn’t burned in my bones—and that is that in order to get it, you have to be willing to give it. The anger, the resentment, the bitterness, the desire for recrimination against people you believe have wronged you—they harden the heart and deaden the spirit and lead to self-inflicted wounds.” This was a start, though close listeners noted that he never used a simple word, “sorry.” In fact, anger and remorse were still competing with each other inside Clinton, anger clearly winning. As his vacation ended he left for a planned trip to Moscow, infuriated that the controversy was still shadowing him during an overseas visit. After a news conference in the Kremlin, where an American reporter asked about Lewinsky, he repaired to a back room and erupted at his staff. “Can you believe he’s asking that kind of shit over here! Can you believe it!” An aide frantically waved his finger across his throat and pointed to the chandelier. It was well known that the holding rooms the Russians supplied visiting leaders were bugged, and Kremlin officials were no doubt busy translating Clinton’s tirade even now.

Clinton needed to convince the doubters that his remorse was indeed as deeply felt as his resentment. This was urgent business. By September, Clinton’s political situation had deteriorated badly. Senator Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, told Gregory Craig, an old Clinton family friend who had joined the White House legal team, “You are about three days from having the senior Democrats come down and ask for the president’s resignation.” Meanwhile, soundings by White House aides Sosnik and Podesta made plain that the administration’s women had grown only angrier over the August vacation; a feminist mutiny was by no means implausible. What Clinton genuinely felt inside himself—did he regret his misdeeds or just the public exposure of them?—was a mystery even to some of his closest aides, but his political needs at the moment were obvious. He needed to prove, as ostentatiously as possible, that he had learned his lesson. In so doing, the hope was that he could persuade people to look at his crisis in a personal context, rather than a political one. In this situation, self-restraint was not called for; groveling was.

It began with a meeting with his cabinet, which assembled not in the West Wing but in the White House residence. Clinton began with a remarkable soliloquy in which he apologized for the difficulty and embarrassment his conduct had caused them all. His eyes welling, he said he had turned to Scripture for strength during his ordeal, and then offered his explanation to the essential mystery of the Lewinsky saga: How could he have done something so self-destructive? The answer, he said, was that he had been a deeply angry man for much of his presidency. Frustration at his opponents, rage at Starr, had thrown off the internal balance that people need to be successful in both their private and public lives. He had long wrestled with personal demons. In his emotionally vulnerable state, those demons had gained the upper hand. After this, the rest of the room got a chance to speak. The speeches that followed fell into three distinct groups. Many of Clinton’s African-American cabinet members, including Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater and Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, rushed to their president’s defense, and themselves quoted Scripture on the universality of sin and the power of forgiveness. By contrast, many of his white male appointees mumbled uncomfortably when it was their turn to speak. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin told Clinton that he had “screwed up,” but everyone did from time to time, and it was time to move on. As Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman later recalled his embarrassment, “I think a lot of us just wanted to end the meeting and get out of there.” The principal purpose of this session, though, was to provide a vent for several of the administration’s most prominent women to let loose their frustrations. Shalala, in particular, thought that Clinton’s bit about anger and personal weakness was self-justifying nonsense. She did not think his lapse—an affair with a much younger woman who worked under him—was either trivial or a strictly private matter. In her previous job as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, she had fired faculty for the same. To her, Clinton seemed blind to the moral implications of what he had done, and was taking solace in his conviction that he was an effective president. “I can’t believe that is what you’re telling us, that is what you believe, that you don’t have an obligation to provide moral leadership,” she said. The room tensed up, with colleagues taken aback by the pointedness of Shalala’s challenge and Clinton’s visible anger. “By your standard, Richard Nixon would’ve beaten John Kennedy,” he snapped in retort.

Clinton had never confronted so directly the ambivalence some of his own subordinates felt toward him.

The president did not sleep that night, but stayed up writing on a legal pad for an appearance the next morning. A group of ministers had been previously scheduled to join him in the East Room for a prayer breakfast. The event was open to news cameras, and the breakfast was the occasion to give the larger public what he had given to his cabinet the day before. He spoke in a quiet voice, his body stooped with fatigue. “As you might imagine, I have been on quite a journey these last few weeks to get to the end of this, to the rock-bottom truth of where I am and where we all are,” he told the ministers. “. . . I don’t think there is any fancy way to say that I have sinned.”

Clinton told the ministers he would begin “pastoral counseling” to help him confront personal weaknesses. And he drew a distinction between his legal defense and his personal sense of right and wrong. That legal defense, it was now clear, would rest on tedious and sometimes galling distinctions—the difference between misleading answers and flatly false ones in his testimony. But Clinton wanted people to know that he knew “legal language must not obscure the fact that I have done wrong.”

Then he took his sermon further—a bit too far for some listeners. Perhaps something good could come of this sordid scandal for America’s families, he explained, and that by his example “the children of this country can learn in a profound way that integrity is important and selfishness is wrong,” Clinton explained. “But God can change us and make us strong at the broken places.”