This Is a Battle --Hillary Clinton

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But it was Hillary who pulled it all together, going on the Today show to attack Starr as "a politically motivated prosecutor...who has literally spent four years looking at every telephone call...we've made, every check we've ever written, scratching for dirt, intimidating witnesses." There was a familiar subtext to Hillary's comments. She knows the President better than anyone, she said, and there are no secrets between them. Which means that if she has made her peace with whatever he may have done, surely this is her business and no one else's.

That evening the White House got another assist, from a former stage-production teacher at Lewinsky's Beverly Hills high school named Andrew Bleiler, who revealed his affair with Lewinsky and cast her as a manipulative, star-struck home wrecker. A college schoolmate described her to a Swedish newspaper as a "notorious liar" and "a cheater." Penthouse, meanwhile, was offering Lewinsky $2 million to pose and tell her story; it all played nicely to what has been described as the "nuts and sluts" defense that would carefully paint Lewinsky as a less than reliable witness.

By this time, the temperature was so hot that Clinton was guaranteed the one thing he needed most: an enormous audience for his State of the Union speech that night. For days the pundits had been wondering how he would even manage it, to get up in front of both houses of Congress and the Great American Living Room and act as though nothing was wrong. Any thought of addressing the scandal was dismissed. Instead this was to be purely political, and politically pure.

A few hours before the speech, Clinton had a headache, and aides noticed the muscles of his jaw working the way they do when he is really worried. This time solace came from an unfamiliar source. In the residence, his brother Roger, no stranger to problems of addiction, handed him a silver dollar their grandfather had given their mother. Virginia Kelley carried it throughout her life as a good-luck charm. Clinton slipped it into his pocket as he walked into the House chamber.

Once there, he gave the speech of his life, less for its text than its context. It was detailed, specific and easy to understand, uncharacteristically lean, a fatherly promise to take care of business. He offered something to everyone: a balanced budget for the bond markets, better child care for working parents, a higher minimum wage for the unions, due attention to global warming for the greens, a plan to save Social Security for the boomers, and a last, potent warning for Saddam Hussein.

Then the White House did a very wise thing: it went silent. Sources dried up, officials hunkered down; the denial was out, the policy flag had been squarely planted and the White House decided simply not to respond to any but the most damaging questions. As a senior Republican official said, "The smartest thing they've done all week is shut up." In fact, Clinton and Gore left town altogether, heading to the heartland to sell the previous night's message.

The people who plan the President's trips have never been known for subtlety. When Clinton worked the rope line after his appearance in Champaign-Urbana, Ill., the University of Illinois pep band struck up the theme from Rocky. A few hours later in LaCrosse, Wis., the musical message blaring from the loudspeakers was even more heavy-handed: Taking Care of Business.