THE BETTER HALF
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At the same time, no one was hit harder by the shock wave in January than Hillary. Her marriage was on gruesome display; even if she believed Clinton's denials, she could still foresee the toll. For 22 years they had worked to get to this point, a liberated, second-term presidency with a merry economy, a contented public and the time to spend on the issues she cared about. Instead, every last dime of their joint political capital was going to have to be invested simply in surviving in office.

When the Washington Post first reported on Wednesday morning, Jan. 21, that Starr was officially pursuing charges of an affair between the President and an intern, the White House stopped in its tracks, clutched its heart and crumpled. Hillary's reactions, both private and public, were crucial. In that sense, her calculation was clear: the presidency first, the relationship later. She was virtually alone in her will to fight. "I don't think there was a person in the White House who gave him a snowball's chance in hell, except Hillary," says a former official. "Neither one of them is a quitter. He's a sniveler and a whiner, but when push comes to shove, he's got a backbone of steel--exceeded only by hers."

That force, for a while, was all Clinton had. No one in the White House could manage a convincing denial of the Lewinsky charges. Clinton himself was practically in the fetal position, "freaking out," an associate said, a sort of response that was enough to convince many who had watched him over the years that the stories were substantially true. Only Mrs. Clinton seemed more angry than broken, appalled by the very notion of a sting operation against a President, reminding people how offended everyone had been to learn about J. Edgar Hoover's wiretapping Martin Luther King Jr. and spreading stories about his sex life. Wasn't Starr doing the same kind of thing to the President?

She plotted the counterattack very quietly, in phone calls and by pulling people aside before photo ops and between meetings. But she knew she could not fight alone, and she had little use for the available recruits. Of her husband's staff, says a close ally, "she thinks they are fairly weak, with little backbone and little courage." At the worst moment of his presidency, after the 1994 election wipeout, sources tell TIME, Hillary was even privately advocating the firing of much of the upper echelon of the White House staff. So she needed some kindred spirits to shape the strategy, people who could double as surrogates in the conversations that could not possibly take place in front of her.

David Kendall was a natural choice: unlike Robert Bennett, Clinton's garrulous lawyer in the Jones case, Kendall was Hillary in a gray suit, polished to a smooth, tough sheen, fast on his feet, discreet and unflinching under pressure. Hillary viewed him as that rarest ally, "someone I could count on and trust implicitly," the First Lady told TIME in an interview.

If the months to come brought a fight between the President's legal advisers, arguing to add another brick to the stonewall, and his political aides, urging confession, the fact that the lawyers kept winning said a lot about who was really in charge.

Throughout Hillary's public life, people have looked at these moments, and at her whole partnership with Bill Clinton, with a jaded eye. As far back as 1992, when the couple emerged as a unique partnership in American politics, more than half of those surveyed thought the union was some kind of stock swap; only 22% thought it was a "real marriage," according to a poll done for Vanity Fair. But critics who dismiss her as a faux feminist, someone who craved power and got it the old-fashioned way--by marrying it--miss the point: she didn't need to. At Yale Law School, it was Hillary who was the star, not the husky, glad-handing boy from Arkansas. Her classmates were struck by her fervor to go out and do good, a specific Methodist view of her life as a chance to express her gratitude by serving others. So when she left Washington in 1974 to join Bill Clinton in Arkansas, she probably thought the move was only temporary; he was, after all, already running for Congress.

She maintained her Washington profile, lobbying for children's issues, serving as chairwoman for the legal-services corporation, enjoying a dual life right up until the day it helped cost Governor Clinton his job in 1980. Arkansas voters had had it with the charming, unfocused boy Governor who stayed up all night playing pinball in the basement of the Governor's mansion. And what was that business of his wife's keeping her name? Bill lost to Frank White, a savings-and-loan executive who acted grown- up and had a very shiny, inseparable spouse.

It was Hillary Rodham--soon calling herself Hillary Clinton--who understood the price that would have to be paid. She scraped off the identity she had forged, began applying makeup, bleached her hair, fired Clinton's operatives and recruited Dick Morris to help run an operation that would bear Hillary's stamp of decisiveness and discipline. "She kind of pegged [her husband] as a woolly-headed dreamer who would get killed in the world of practical politics," Morris says. "She acquired a role as his guardian."

Here enters for the first time the Lady Macbeth view of Hillary that has followed her since. But to assume all her efforts were designed to save his job misses the point that she also had to save her marriage. It was at just this time that the rumors of Bill's affairs were rampant, the days when Clinton, according to his masterly biographer David Maraniss, would soothe his 1-year-old daughter with the lullaby, "I want a div-or-or-or-orce." Once Clinton acquired his reputation as a serial philanderer, the questions about the marriage took a very pointed turn: Was she his co-conspirator, who kept cleaning up after him because she was so intent on holding on to her power? Or was she the ultimate family-values conservative, holding her family together for better or worse and in denial about how much worse it could be?

As this year's scandal unfolded, people's assumptions about what Hillary knew and when she knew it often reflect more about them than her. Conservatives from the Lady Macbeth camp and feminists who hated the image of Hillary as victim both held to the view that there were no secrets in this marriage. But this time, at least some of the First Lady's confidants argue otherwise. No, they say, she didn't quite buy the internal White House cover story; that an employee named Monica had a crush on the President; that it had got out of hand; that he had tried to "counsel her," talk about her family problems, her job hopes; that she had eventually been banished; and that the rest was a fabrication by the President's enemies.