Clinton's Crisis: Truth or...Consequences

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And so by Wednesday night it was time for someone to take charge, and it was certainly not going to be the President. He was wiped out, flat on his back, depressed by the enormity of what faced him. That collapse was by itself taken as a confession of guilt even by those who had kept the faith for years. While the President lay dead tired on the sofa, Hillary went to war.

It all had a familiar feeling. Six years ago this past weekend, just after the Super Bowl, Hillary Rodham Clinton held up her head with the velvet band, nodded like Nancy Reagan in her mother-of-the-bride sea-green outfit and saved her husband's dying presidential candidacy on 60 Minutes. Choosing his words carefully, Bill denied he had had a "12-year affair" with Gennifer Flowers; Hillary's expression of faith in him was far more persuasive than his answers; and Clinton went on to victory. To those who wondered why she didn't walk away then, and hasn't since, a close Clinton friend for two decades replies: "They do not have the kind of marriage you and I have."

Whatever the latest charges against her husband, he is protected by her utter loathing of the man who brings them: Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. Hillary has always seen Starr as a deeply compromised, highly partisan enemy appointed out of political vengeance by a three-judge panel headed by conservative Appeals Court Judge David Sentelle. The Clintons have been dodging his searchlights for nearly four years now, as he rooted around old Arkansas land deals and Vince Foster's death and Travelgate and other alleged White House transgressions. The only consolation was that however much Starr tried to stretch his jurisdiction, some things were still out of bounds.

But they weren't off limits to Paula Jones and her lawyers. They have spent the past three years focused only on the President's love life, tracking every woman the President ever worked with, leered at, was alone in a room with, to try to prove a pattern of sexual harassment. Last week they let on they were considering deposing the President's cousin many times removed, Catherine Cornelius, to see if their relationship went beyond kinship. They have suggested that the list of women in their sights is a mile long.

Up until now, the whole Jones operation always had a burlesque quality to it; however plausible her charges that then Governor Clinton tried to seduce her in an Arkansas hotel room, her affiliation with avowed Clinton haters helped the White House dismiss her crudely as just another book-deal-hungry gold digger. The catastrophe for the White House last week was that all the charges that were manageable when they were separate had suddenly become one scandal, indivisible. When Monica Lewinsky, subpoenaed to testify in the Jones case, whispered to Linda Tripp that Clinton had urged her to deny the affair, Starr wired Tripp up for confirmation. Then he went to the Justice Department to demand a skeleton key that would give him access to the whole ugly universe of sexual misconduct. It was Hillary's worst nightmare; the man she hates most in the world now has the right to probe the issues most painful to her. Even if the Jones case were somehow settled tomorrow, which it won't be, Ken Starr will never go away, and all the dark corners of their marriage will now be his for the hunting.