THE BETTER HALF
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Instead, says a person who has talked to her about it, Hillary "believed he did something peculiar that was not appropriate, something he was going to be accountable for to her. But the enormity of it hadn't anywhere close to crossed her mind. They both have kind of built-in avoidance mechanisms... That's why he's a survivor. If he sat there and confronted the enormity of how awful it was with his wife, he never would have transcended it."

In Bill Clinton we call it "compartmentalization." Hillary's allies bristle when the same term is applied to her. Says one: "You call it compartmentalization. I call it focus... Her natural reaction is to remain clear-headed and not let the emotional part guide her thinking. If there is an emotional part, it is something for her to take home."

And if, upon hearing of the latest charges, there was one thing she could focus on to the exclusion of whatever she was thinking about her husband, it was her hatred of Starr. She was predisposed to view Clinton as more victim than villain because she has always taken his enemies seriously, and none more so than the prosecutor who had questioned her integrity, made her run the gauntlet of cameras to testify before a Washington grand jury, implicated her in every alleged White House misdeed. "This is a fight that she is goddam well not going to lose," said a former top White House official. Whatever humiliation she felt, "it would be more humiliating to be run out of town and be beaten by him."

Hillary's feelings about Starr served a useful private purpose in steeling her for the fight, but in the end they may have been even more helpful in what became her public defense campaign. Right up until Hillary appeared on the Today show six days into the scandal-- the round-the-clock commentary had been entirely about the scandal: what Clinton had done, whether he could survive--with virtually no one out to defend him. Then Hillary sat down across from co-host Matt Lauer and challenged the press to pay attention to a different story: "this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for President." She shone the light on Starr--his agenda, his henchmen, his ideological gene pool--and suggested that this was the real story, the real danger, rather than anything her husband might have done.

From the commentariat, at least, her "right-wing conspiracy" theory was mocked as the last resort of a woman in denial about the cad she had married. But that perception would change: By the end of the year, a majority of the public had come to agree with her about Starr, their fear of unaccountable government agents more intense than their distaste for even a lecherous, lying President.

Yet if Hillary's Today show performance gave Clinton a lifeline, it was at great personal cost. People close to her say that of all the year's betrayals, this was one of the most painful--that he sent her out there alone, risking her reputation by having her defend him, effectively lie for him, to buy himself some time. "Oh, that did not make her happy," says a close friend. He used her, and she saved him.

Chapter Two: August
Though no one may ever know how the Great Confession went between the two of them, everyone seemed to have an opinion about it, most revealingly within the White House itself. Two irreconcilable story lines began seeping out, one so painful it was hard to hear, the other so cynical it was hard to believe. The President's men were saying Hillary had known all along; the First Lady's press secretary Marsha Berry was calling reporters and telling them no, she hadn't; he deceived her too. It was as though there were an internal debate over whether it was worse for Hillary to appear as a stupid, duped wife or as a conniving hypocrite who had been covering for her husband all year.

Close associates of Hillary's presented the portrait of pain in the days leading up to the President's Aug. 17 testimony: Clinton's fear of this moment had been palpable, says a friend in whom he confided on the eve of his private confession. He had to tell Hillary not only what exactly had been going on in their own house but also admit the fact that he had handed their mortal enemy the weapons that Starr could use to kill them. The next day, the friend could sense how badly it had gone: Hillary seemed a different person--not speaking, not touching, not smiling, barely breathing. She disappeared for the weekend, save for church and a prescheduled birthday party for her husband on the South Lawn, and didn't emerge until moments before he semi-confessed on national television. "It's your speech," she said. "You say what you want to say," which turned out to be bad advice.

If his revelation made a very smart woman appear to have been very stupid about her own husband, her friends make a case that this was nothing new. They say Hillary has always been a bit dense about herself and those close to her in a way typical of a certain kind of overachiever: a woman who can talk about school vouchers, Medicare Part B and the Third Way of post-cold war politics but who didn't see the psychological implications of taking her family along on her honeymoon; who thought it would be a good idea to toughen up six-year-old Chelsea at the dinner table by telling her all the terrible things being said about her father; who didn't know her close friend Vince Foster was in trouble until the day he shot himself. "She has always thought psychological analysis for her was kind of a petty self-indulgence, says one of her closest friends. "She's not interested in it. It's not her thing."