Bill Clinton: I Misled People

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But if the Clintons know their Bible, and they do, they know that Jesus made a point about prayers: the real ones are done in secret, not on the street corner, to make an impression, but in a closet, just you and your God. But that is not where Jackson lives. He was actually live on CNN right up until he scooted off to the White House around 10:30, entering through the side door. He met Hillary on the second floor. She was dressed casually, in some sort of warm-up suit, and she and Jackson and Chelsea embraced. "We began to talk about one's faith and the storm," Jackson says. When Clinton came in, they greeted each other and chatted, but the President went into the third-floor solarium for a meeting with Harry Thomason, Clinton's old Arkansas friend, making it clear he wanted Jackson to spend time in the family quarters with Chelsea.

Then, Jackson says, he talked to Chelsea about Adam and Eve. "Of course, at the age of 19 or 20, she knows about sex. She's seen videos, watched television, listened to music. She knows what is expected in marriage and knows what, in fact, happens." It was when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, he explained, that all the cover-ups started. "The moral here is, 'You should have stopped talking to the snake in the first place.'" Later he prayed with the family, and before he left, Chelsea said, "I love Dad. I'll handle it." Both women, Jackson said, knew what they had to do: Chelsea's "mission is to lift her dad up." And if Hillary was, as he said, bruised and humiliated, she was also standing by her man and holding to her vows and joining the legal team for the first time in weeks.

Jackson held a press conference the next day and hit every network, presenting the tableau that the drama had been missing: the repentant father, the angry mother, the isolated daughter. The story needed its cleansing ritual of contrition and penitence and absolution. That was a high bar for Clinton to clear: a coerced confession doesn't count as much as a voluntary one, but he very deliberately chose not to give that back in January, when there was still a chance the lies might work. Still, if Clinton's sex life was his own business and not ours, then the subtext was that it was up to Hillary and Chelsea to punish him, up to them to forgive him. Whatever righteous indignation we may feel was Hillary's to express; any crockery we feel like breaking was hers to throw. And if she can put this behind her, the thinking goes, surely we can too.