THE BETTER HALF
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Chapter Three: October
Maybe Hillary had fought for her husband in January because her reflexes told her to. And maybe she had stood by him after his August testimony because a First Lady does not have the option of tossing her husband's things over the Truman Balcony onto the lawn. But as summer turned to fall, the state of their union was becoming a burning political question. Republicans didn't have to talk up the prospect of his resigning; Democrats were doing it for them. Even his most reliable friend, luck, was giving Bill Clinton a cold shoulder: Saddam was mocking him, Russia was collapsing, and so were the world markets.

Once back on the job, Hillary found that her every shudder invited scrutiny. There was the way she ignored the President's touch at a speech in Moscow, and the way she charged half a block ahead of him while working a crowd in Ireland. She spent their 23rd anniversary at a women's conference in Bulgaria; he spent it in budget talks at the White House. But the First Couple danced together three times at a state dinner for Vaclav Havel. "Hillary and I, we're doing fine," her husband said.

No one was buying it, any more than they had his public apologies--particularly after the delivery of the Starr report on Sept. 9. "She's never read it," says Berry, "but she certainly has the gist." Clinton himself, sources tell TIME, has complained to confidants that the independent counsel seemed to be going out of his way to hurt the First Lady and make the marriage unhealable. Why else include not only every last soul-destroying sexual detail but also Lewinsky's testimony that the President had told her that he expected to be alone after he left office and that he had had "hundreds" of affairs before he turned 40?

What the gods of conventional wisdom were demanding was another offering: the First Lady must undress her pain before Diane or Oprah so Americans would be convinced that she was--and they were--really capable of forgiving him. This was where Hillary drew the line. "She's tried so hard to protect her privacy and her child," says her top aide Melanne Verveer. "There was enormous pressure for her to say something, but she was adamant that whatever she did she would do in her own time and her own way."

In the meantime, there were serious problems to fix. The fall campaign season could hardly have looked more dire for the Democrats. In mid-September, two dozen Democratic Congresswomen came to the Yellow Oval Room and laid out their desperation to Hillary over coffee and Danish. Their problem was what they called, out of politeness, "the clutter." Clinton himself was useless to them as a campaigner; he was a prisoner of the briefing room and the fund raisers. She was the one politician in the country who would not be interrupted with questions about the scandal. In the miraculous month of October, while her husband made peace in the Middle East, the markets rebounded and John Glenn lifted off, Hillary barnstormed the country. Voters heard her on their car radios when they left for work in the morning and on their answering machines when they came home. The last week of the campaign saw her hitting nine states, with two stops each in Florida and New York. Her appearance in Iowa on the last weekend of the campaign fueled the surge that gave Tom Vilsack the surprise win that made him the first Democrat to be elected Governor there in 30 years. Said his media consultant David Axelrod: "Our voters had a lot more energy than theirs, and she was the major factor in that."

She worked offstage as well, taking on the cases that others thought hopeless. Hillary herself recruited topflight political hand Tony Podesta to set up shop in Illinois and take control of Senator Carol Moseley-Braun's doomed re-election campaign in its final days. "The First Lady was calling me up at home, in the office, from the road and from the White House with suggestions and ideas and a clear sense of what my personal priorities ought to be for October," Podesta says. Infuriated that even women had given up on Moseley-Braun, the First Lady assembled about 50 influential Democratic women in a hotel meeting room and gave them hell. "She talked about strategy and why one election matters, even if you don't live in Illinois," said Adlai Stevenson's III's wife Nancy. "What surprised me the most was how candid she was about what the situation was. [Her speech] was frank and clear and exceedingly personal." Hillary spoke without notes, says Mrs. Stevenson, "but she knew her facts down to the last detail."

On election night, as the President downloaded results in chief of staff John Podesta's office, a television commentator caught Clinton's attention with the observation that Hillary had won the day for the Democrats. "That's right," he announced to the crowd around him. Hillary's morning-after assessment: "We could have done better."

Epilogue
There is a faraway sense in virtually everything Hillary does now, a hint that she is already on her way to something else. It is hard to believe there is anything accidental about the fact that her schedule of late has kept her away from the White House and Washington, where her husband was devoting an unseemly amount of his time to golf. Her visit to New York City earlier this month, something the White House would usually book as a day trip, stretched over three long days and two late nights, all packed with events nourishing her ego and her image and her agenda. Hillary gamely crooned a funny, off-key duet with Rosie O'Donnell. She lighted the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree with Garth Brooks under a full moon, and lingered later than anyone expected at a movie premiere.

It is easy to imagine her having a far better ex-presidency than her husband will. Those who know her dismiss the notion that she might run for the Senate, from Illinois or New York. If anything, it would seem a comedown and would tie her to a capital she has come to hate. A more likely possibility, they say, is that she might head a child-advocacy organization, or run a think tank, maybe connected with his presidential library, or continue the overseas work she has come to love so much, perhaps as U.N. ambassador or head of a major international organization. She also expects to write at least two books: one a memoir, the other on health care.

For now, there is a battle to be fought and a family to heal. During their Middle East trip, at the gravesite of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Hillary yanked her arm from her husband's grasp. The New York Post called it an "icy graveyard brush-off." And yet as Air Force One prepared to take off from Ben Gurion Airport early Tuesday evening, returning to Washington and the impeachment ordeal, Congressman Sander Levin encountered the First Lady as he made his way back to his cabin. She talked for 15 minutes about the history that her husband had made during that trip, how inspired she had been by his speech to Israeli youth, how awed at the importance of his address to the Palestine National Council and how unfair a judgment the House was about to make of his presidency. "You know, he's my President too," she told Levin.

It was more an endorsement than an embrace--but still, Levin found himself wishing the whole country could hear her talk like this. As the House vote neared on Friday, Hillary spoke out for the first time since January. She called for reconciliation. She counted blessings. She invoked the needs of those less fortunate. It was a Christmas card, to us and to him, preprinted but a keepsake nonetheless. Hillary had brought her husband and the country this far, and there was little chance she would let go now.