The Cost Of It All

Monday, Aug. 24, 1998 By NANCY GIBBS AND MICHAEL DUFFY
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The process of deciding what to say and how to say it began, as it always does with Clinton, late in the game, late at night. Early in the week he was still all business, raising money, threatening vetoes, worrying about Iraq and Africa. Because of the bombings, Hillary was filling in for him Wednesday at campaign events in Wisconsin with Senator Russell Feingold. She told her husband to get some sleep. But Clinton's friend Harry Thomason had just finished his testimony before Starr's grand jury the day before, and had arrived that night at the White House to see to his friend, play their favorite word games, talk things over.

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For months the legal barriers that protected Clinton from Starr had been falling one after another, even as Clinton's denials remained intact. So at just the point when Clinton had to prepare the most important testimony of his life, he had to have the hardest conversations first.

It is taken as gospel in some circles that Hillary Clinton has known everything about her husband all along, that she made her deal with the devil years ago. Neither her admirers nor her enemies can imagine this proud, private woman as a victim, trusting and gullible. But her best friends say otherwise. They will tell you that she loves him, has since law school, the brainy girl who beat out the beauty queens. She always dismissed them; they meant nothing to her.

At least they didn't until now. There is knowing and then there is knowing, and whatever she may have suspected long ago and wondered back in January and feared as each new piece of evidence emerged, she did not fully confront it until last week, when her husband had no other choice but to tell her not just what had not happened but what had.

The private confessions had to be completed by Friday morning, when the New York Times took over with a front-page story suggesting that Clinton was considering admitting to a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky but not to perjury or obstruction of justice. With that, the wheels of speculation spun well out of control, and the day was given over to lawyers and former prosecutors and anonymous aides writing an imaginary speech that the President had still not decided he would give. Hillary, meanwhile, had to play host at his 52nd birthday party on the South Lawn.