Presswatch: The Everlasting First Couple

...she came to understand other people's base motives, and then she would come out fighting...

...Good man that he is, he rushed over from CNN, and eventually he and the Clintons all ended up in the solarium on the third floor of the White House...

...Coincidentally, on the eve of the speech, Newsweek had suggested an explanation...

...Clinton was in an election campaign, and because his opponents were making nasty charges, the family would play a game at the dinner table...

...His defeat would mean victory over not just sheet-sniffing prosecutors but all those who would criminalize politics with endless investigations...

...that wasn't the real story, anyway...

...Chelsea would pretend she was her father making a political speech, but then her father would say mean things and attack her...

...Bill —a doughy, needy mass of uncurbed appetites and fits of irrationality...

...Bill who spoke from the Map Room that night, and Dr...

...Obviously there was some murk here...

...Jekyll and Mr...

...The American Spectator • October 1998 53...

...For as Alter There may soon be just one person left to cry for them...

...His theory of two Clintons, though, was dead wrong...

...He was supposed to show repentance, but as Orrin Hatch said, in a much quoted observation, he had looked instead like "a jerk...

...52 October 199 8 • The American Spectator also wrote: "In the unlikely event he is pushed from office, it would take only weeks, maybe just days, before a vast national remorse set in...

...Mandela, though, spent twenty-seven years in prison, most of the time cracking rocks, and Clinton's pain has been different...

...But throughout it all, we have always seen them together...

...There is only one Clinton, and he comes in a uniform package...

...He was mad at Starr, and Hillary was mad at him, too...

...It is important that we are able to forgive those we believe have wronged us," Clinton said, "even as we ask for forgiveness from people we have wronged...

...Presumably that meant she had been kept in the dark for seven months...

...Clinton say she probably didn't know back then"—when she had upheld her husband's denials —"whether Lewinsky's story was true...

...Mandela told him how he had found the strength to forgive those who had wronged him, and Clinton remembered it as one of the "most meaningful" moments of his presidency...

...Clinton went on NBC's "Today" and said that she believed him...

...by speaking at a chapel on Martha's Vineyard...

...He also remembered weeping during the speech...

...The Clintons in their single-mindedness are spooky...

...M eanwhile there was another presidential talk, and although it barely made television and did not attract comment, it was infinitely more interesting than the one about Monica...

...Clinton, however, objected...

...The president was working there on his speech, but apparently he put it aside...

...he had wept "uncontrollably...

...Indeed he hadn't just wept...

...On CBS, meanwhile, Bill Plante reported that "friends of Mrs...

...Meanwhile the press wondered how Clinton had miscalculated so badly...

...He was a victim, and so was his wife, and whatever had happened was "nobody's business but ours...

...In the world according to the Clintons there are enemies all over, and they must be repelled whatever the cost...

...Obviously he identified with Mandela: They both had suffered unjustly...

...But sometimes, and usually at night, Dr...

...How could he have so misjudged things...

...Clinton said he remembered the chair he was sitting in when he heard King's speech, and exactly where in the room, and exactly how it faced the television set...

...We destroyed our lovable rogue prince of prosperity over this...

...But when she discovered there was more to it than that—presumably by reading a newspaper—she felt humiliated and betrayed...

...The morning after her husband thumped the lectern and insisted he had never had sex with "that woman," Mrs...

...Reporters guessed the first reference was to Starr and the second to Hillary, but since the White House declined any comment they were unable to tell...

...Nonetheless the aides persisted...

...Clinton marked the 35th anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech by Martin Luther King, Jr...

...At most, he may suffer embarrassment, but nothing has been his fault and he will never feel contrition or shame...

...The anecdote, however, is chilling...

...Clinton would become a martyr to a legal system run amok...

...Their joint sense of grievance showed in the speech...

...The New York Times said the four-minute speech had left a "tidal feeling of betrayal and embarrassment running across the country," but the Philadelphia Daily News, less lofty, said it better: "It's hard to know which to do first—scream, cry or take a shower...

...Clinton" was in charge, "helping to heal the American economy and tap a vein between mindless liberalism and heartless conservatism...

...Aides wanted Clinton to be contrite in his speech, and not go after Starr...

...Then everyone hugged and prayed...

...On the other hand, the Friday before the speech, Andrea Mitchell reported on NBC that "in a marriage that friends say is based on brutal honesty and unconditional love, close friends say she knew everything from Day One, and still went on NBC and denied all...

...priate," he insisted the fault was Kenneth Starr's and not his...

...Jesse Jackson at least had been right about seeing the Clintons together...

...But then, according to Time, "Hillary turned to her husband and said, `It's your speech...

...No matter...

...Actually that might be right...

...Bill Clinton lives in a world constructed to his own choosing...

...In other words, Hillary Clinton had flat-out lied...

...As Jackson wrote in Newsweek, and also said soulfully all over television the next day, "We have seen the Clintons in triumph and we have seen them in trauma...

...At 17...

...Clintons," it recalled Dr...

...It seems that when Chelsea was only six her parents would make her cry...

...It may be he had read Newsweek...

...Obviously the fault was Starr's, and not the president's...

...Well, fine, although a solarium scene as described in Time did seem more realistic...

...Most of the time, Jonathan Alter wrote, the good "Dr...

...Clinton who smiled from Martha's Vineyard the next day...

...Bad people surround him on all sides and try to destroy him out of malice, but despite the terrible things they say, he knows that he is blameless...

...Hyde...

...Even a child of six must be enlisted...

...Clinton, of course, once had a vivid memory of seeing black churches in Arkansas burn down...

...The press may not like Clinton, but it approves of his policies, and it thinks of Starr as unattractive and joyless...

...In a think piece called "The Two Mr...

...On the night Clinton spoke, though, Mitchell reported that "friends say she's known all along something happened, but no details, so she chose to believe her husband's earlier denials...

...The mid-week edition that Time put out just after Clinton's speech began with an anecdote that illustrated this nicely...

...Uncontrollably...

...At first," Time reported, "the exercises reduced the little girl to tears: 'Why would anybody say things like that?'" But as Hillary Clinton later wrote, "She gradually gained mastery over her emotions...

...You say what you want to say,'" and obviously that's what he did...

...Clinton became someone else: "Mr...

...But the consensus of "friends" and "sources" seemed to be that even if Hillary had suspected that something had gone on between Bill and the intern, she had assumed, either out of innocence, love, or blind faith in Bill's good taste and discretion, that it was no more than the usual — a pinch here, a tickle there, and once in a while a quick cuddle...

...Now, however, sources say the First Lady is aware her husband is changing his story...

...He did not mention Starr by name, but he seemed to say he was hying to forgive him...

...Perhaps, then, it was Mr...

...She summoned Jesse Jackson...

...Almost certainly it would see an out-of-office rogue prince as a victim of sheet-sniffers, and Newsweek's Alter may only have been jumping the gun...

...On Tuesday, the day after Clinton's speech, Marsha Berry, her spokeswoman, said Mrs...

...Even as he acknowledged a relationship with Monica Lewinsky that "was not approJOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent and regular Press-watch columnist...

...After all, she said, "I probably know him better than anybody alive in the world...

...Later Clinton recalled a conversation he once had with Nelson Mandela...

...But eventually the truth could no longer be denied, and the press began to ask, What did Hillary know, and when did she know it...

...Clinton had been "misled — she learned about his testimony over the weekend...