The First Partner: Hillary Rodham Clinton

When a woman with servants spends the weekend cleaning out her closets, it usually is not a good sign. And when Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters that closet cleaning and hearing a good sermon at church had been the highlights of the past few days she was, by her standards, baring her soul. That Saturday, January 17, 1997, her husband had given a six-hour deposition to lawyers representing Paula Corbin Jones in her sexual harassment case.

Although the Clintons did their best to put up a show of unconcern, anyone who knew William Jefferson Clinton realized that for him to testify under oath about his sexual history was a very bad idea indeed. How this no-win situation was allowed to come about ranks as the greatest mystery of the political partnership of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, which had proved in so many other ways to be a resounding success.

Certainly, it didn't take a Yale-trained lawyer to recognize that there were other options. Even a young Pentagon employee named Monica Lewinsky, who would never be accused of being politically astute, recognized that the Jones case cried out for a settlement, regardless of its merits. In the months before Clinton's deposition was taken, Lewinsky and her Pentagon colleague Linda Tripp thrashed out scenarios that would lead to an out-of-court resolution, thus solving both the President's problem and theirs. As Lewinsky saw it, the imperative was clear. "The American people elected him," she reminded Tripp, I so let him do his stupid job. You know?"

One "game plan" laid out by Lewinsky assigned a key role to Hillary Rodham Clinton: The First Lady would go on "Larry King Live," having let it be knownthat she was prepared to take a question about the Jones case. When asked, Hillary "would respond emotionally. It's hard to see something we don't see from her often," Lewinsky mused. Hillary would then say, "The country is being robbed of its time that the President spends on other issues. They wish it would simply be settled. It's been hard on our family. I would like nothing more than for this to be a non-issue in our lives and in the lives of the American people."

His wife having cleared the way, Bill Clinton could appear the next morning with press spokesman Mike McCurry at his side and make a brief announcement, saying that for the sake of his family and the country he had decided to give Paula Jones the apology she was demanding and settle the lawsuit. It would be "sort of a gallant statement," Monica thought, and given Bill Clinton's high poll ratings, "a two week story," maybe "a three week story" at most.

This was not, however, the scenario the Clintons chose to follow. The Jones deposition might be a minefield, salted with booby traps, but they had negotiated treacherous territory before and survived. Several women who had indicated that they might be prepared to cooperate with Paula Jones's attorneys had already reneged. Notably, Kathleen Willey, an attractive widow appointed by the President to the United Service Organization's Board of Governors, and her friend Julie Steele had backed off from a story earlier reported in Newsweek that the President had fondled Willey and placed her hand on his genitals when she visited the Oval Office one day in November 1993 to ask him for a job.

There were still a few witnesses who might pose problems for Bill Clinton, among themLinda Tripp, who had told Newsweek reporter Mike Isikoff that she saw Willey emerge from the Oval Office that day, disheveled and apparently "joyful" over being the object of the President's advances. Like numerous other female career employees in the West Wing of the White House, Tripp resented the way jobs had been doled out to women who caught the President's eye, and she was furious that Willey, who hadn't been too proud to take the appointment offered her, would be presented to the world as a victim. From Tripp's point of view, her statement to Isikoff had not only been the truth, it happened to defend Bill Clinton against the charge that he was a sexual harasser.

This, of course, was not the way the President's allies saw it. Soon after the Newsweek story appeared, Tripp heard from Norma Asnes, a New York producer and personal friend of Hillary Clinton. Tripp knew Asnes slightly, having met her at an official Pentagon function a few years earlier. Suddenly, however, Asnes had become very chummy. She invited Tripp to spend a few days at her luxurious Fifth Avenue apartment and asked her to come along on a chartered yacht cruise planned for the following summer. And in November, after Tripp's named appeared on the witness list for the Paula Jones suit, Asnes talked of introducing her to executives who could help her find a better-paying job outside of government. Tripp was flattered at first but also suspicious of Asnes's motives. Referring to Asnes's closeness to the First Lady, she told Lewinsky, "Let's not forget whose friend she is." Tripp also expressed her reservations to Asnes, who told her, "I like to enjoy the people I'm with. I like them to be articulate, bright, andmentally stimulating. They don't have to be at my level. It doesn't matter if they're not millionaires."

Far from finding this reassuring, Tripp was insulted. "So I'm one of the plebeians," she told Lewinsky. "I hate to sound like a skeptic. But-why? I mean, we don't know each other that well."'

The question of what-or, more to the point, who-inspired Norma Asnes's desire to play Pygmalion would come to interest Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. His investigators later interviewed Asnes, but in the push to deliver a timely report to Congress, the role played by the First Lady's friend was just one more lead that was never developed. But for Tripp, who had already been called a liar by the President's attorney Robert Bennett, Asnes's approaches were evidence...

nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;Milton offrs new perspectives on the firestorms that have raged about Clinton, from the health-care fiasco to Whitewater to the Lewinsiky scandal. She also examines Clinton's attempts to reconcile a host of contradictions--feminist convictions in painful collision with family commitment; philosophical beliefs in conflict with political reality; the precarious balance between professional ambition, public image, and private life. Lively and evenhanded, this definitive biography is a revealing portrait of one of the most enigmatic women in politics.