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Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, my fellow Americans.

Again, we are here in the sanctuary of democracy,

and once again, our democracy has spoken.

On January 24, 1995, President Bill Clinton

addressed Congress and the American people.

Two years into his presidency, and just months after suffering

the worst midterm election defeat in modern history,

he was chastened and humble.

And now all of us, Republicans and Democrats alike,

must say, "We hear you.

We will work together to earn the jobs you have given us."

After the midterms, the president, I think, felt

that he was almost a hostage in his own White House.

He was unhappy with the White House staff,

he was unhappy with the policy direction,

and so he actually began a very quiet operation

to begin to change his administration.

Beginning in early 1995,

White House staffers began to notice

a change in the president.

His speeches contained

unfamiliar language and cadences.

In meetings, he'd get up abruptly and leave the room.

Many aides felt he was no longer listening to them.

I recall a meeting

that the president's economic advisors

and political advisors were having

about how he was going to spend the next three weeks,

what themes he was going to emphasize.

And I remember somebody from the back of the room,

I think it was Erskine Bowles,

then the president's chief of staff,

saying, "This is all irrelevant."

Irrelevant?

We're the staff.

We are the people who help the president.

Why are we irrelevant?

And he didn't exactly say.

He said there was some other force in the White House.

And again and again there seemed to be instances...

It was almost like in astronomy,

there's a black hole and you can only tell it's there

because planets begin moving into its gravitational orbit.

But you look and there's nothing there.

That was Dick Morris.

Dick Morris was the black hole.

Dick Morris,

an abrasive political consultant from New York,

had a history with the Clintons

that went all the way back to Arkansas.

Other than Hillary Clinton,

he was the most important political advisor

that Bill Clinton had had over the course of his career.

He was there for the very first election to governor in 1978

and had been with Bill Clinton

for most of the Arkansas gubernatorial years.

Morris set up shop in the White House

and began to chair weekly strategy meetings

that were attended by most of the president's senior staff.

Clinton typically dominates

any group or discussion that he's in.

In the meetings on the second floor of the residence,

which we had every week,

Clinton would literally sit there for an hour sometimes,

hardly saying a word, listening to Morris.

When I first started to work for Clinton in the White House,

he had two big negatives:

a third of the country thought he was immoral

and a third of the country thought he was weak,

and I basically went to him and I said,

"I can't do much about the immoral,

but we sure can solve the weak."

And therefore we embarked on a conscious strategy

of making sure people saw Clinton as strong.

The heart of Morris's operation was his polling,

which he used to diagnose where Clinton's weaknesses lay

and how he could correct them.

Polling became absolutely central.

How do we present ourselves as an alternative to Newt Gingrich?

How are people seeing the president?

What sort of policies would make them feel better

about Bill Clinton?

They polled everything.

They polled every last word that came out of his mouth.

They polled where he should go on vacation.

Instead of going to Martha's Vineyard,

that elite island off the coast of Massachusetts,

they had him riding a horse in Wyoming.

I think Bill Clinton's allergic to horses.

But that's what the focus group said would be

a more acceptable vacation.

One of the big problems

was the relationship between Bill and Hillary.

Voters thought that it was a zero-sum game,

that for Hillary to be strong, Bill would have to be weak.

And, as a result, the perception of Hillary's strength

became a perception of Bill's weakness.

The polling made me understand that,

and when I came back to work for Clinton,

one of the first things I did was to tell Hillary,

"You can be as influential as you want to be,

"but do it in private.

"Don't sit in on the strategy meetings,

"don't make the appointments,

"don't make everybody be cleared with you.

"At the bedroom at night, tell him what to do,

but don't let it be seen in public."

Morris's advice hit home.

After the stunning defeat in the midterm elections,

Hillary had received a large share of the blame.

She was outspoken, she was smart, she was hard-driving,

and some people resented her.

Remember, during the campaign,

there was two for the price of one.

Well, people aren't electing two for the price of one.

They're electing the president.

She had been caught out trying to be a co-president.

That just wasn't gonna fly,

and that's when she really had to begin to really reexamine,

again as she did as governor's wife,

"What does the public want from me in this role?"

And to take on gradually

a little bit more of the traditional role of first lady.

Well, welcome to the White House

and to the beginning of the Christmas season here.

Unsatisfied by her ceremonial role as first lady,

Hillary began working on issues important to her,

but not alarming to the public.

She began writing a book about children

and traveled abroad with Chelsea to advocate for women's rights.

She wrote a weekly syndicated column,

and even consulted a psychic in the White House.

But it wasn't enough.

She felt, for one of the rare times in her life,

completely depressed.

She said everything that she was doing wasn't working.

She just didn't know what to do anymore,

because she really wanted to be in there

right at Bill Clinton's side,

fighting all the political battles that he was doing.

The president wants to defend Washington bureaucracy,

Washington red tape and Washington spending,

and higher taxes to pay for less out of Washington.

While the Clintons struggled to find their way back

from the political wilderness,

their rival, Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich,

was dominating politics in Washington.

I think Newt felt like he had led

a great revolution and led the House...

And the Senate that for matter... To victory,

and that he could... we could be the, you know,

the driving force in this city, and that he was, in effect,

comparable or equal to the president.

Gingrich and his newly elected army

of Republican representatives quickly passed bill after bill

from their "Contract with America."

Sensing his strength, Gingrich was intent on drawing Clinton

into a political showdown

that would determine, once and for all, who was in charge.

In the spring of 1995, Gingrich picked his battleground.

I think the central issue

that we challenged the Clinton administration on

was on the budget.

We wanted to balance the budget.

We thought that was the most important domestic policy issue

that existed in the country,

and it was gonna be ugly, as all deficit fights inevitably are.

What you currently have is

a system designed to be a centralized bureaucracy.

In May, Gingrich unveiled a plan

to eliminate the federal budget deficit in seven years

through huge cuts in government spending.

Most of the cuts would be concentrated

in two government health insurance programs:

Medicare and Medicaid.

Gingrich had managed

to shift the focus of power and media attention

from Clinton to himself.

Washington and the media is all about

the new flavor of the month.

And the new flavor of the month

was not the Clinton administration.

You had Newt Gingrich...

I mean, he was a powerful, charismatic figure

who had an answer to every question.

There are three themes that define where we are right now.

And he not only

wasn't afraid to talk, he longed to talk.

His problem was, over time, he talked too much.

With Gingrich in the spotlight,

Clinton seemed increasingly peripheral.

April 18, 1995.

Bill Clinton gives a press conference,

and we're all over him about his lack of power.

Newt's running the town!

Newt's in control!

Yes, Jean.

President Clinton,

Republicans have dominated political debate in this country

since they took over Congress in January,

and even tonight, two of the major television networks

declined to broadcast this event live.

Do you worry about making sure your voice is heard

in the coming months?

Clinton is forced to say

that the president is still relevant here.

The Constitution gives me relevance,

the power of our ideas gives me relevance,

the record we have built up over the last two years

and the things we are trying to do to implement it

give it relevance.

The president is relevant here.

It was awful.

You know, "The president is still relevant."

Just the fact that he felt compelled to say those words

says everything.

I am willing to work with the Republicans.

The question is, what happens now?

About a third of the building has been blown away.

The next day, on April 19, the bomb went off at Oklahoma City.

It was the largest domestic terrorist event

in American history.

That changed everything.

The bombing in Oklahoma City was an attack on innocent children

and defenseless citizens.

It was an act of cowardice and it was evil.

The United States will not tolerate it,

and I will not allow the people of this country

to be intimidated by evil cowards.

Within 48 hours of the incident,

the FBI arrested 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh,

a former soldier with a burning hatred for the government.

His massive truck bomb,

detonated outside the Murrah Federal Building,

killed 149 workers, along with 19 children.

Four days after the bombing,

Clinton traveled to Oklahoma City to console the mourners.

I went with him

down to Oklahoma City for that Sunday morning.

On the flight, we worked on the speech some more.

He was very focused on what to say.

I remember we went into what I think they call the Cow Palace,

and I've never been in a setting

that was as eerily silent as that one was

except for the sound of sobbing.

ROBERT McNEELY: He stood there for hours

and met with every single person and talked to everybody.

It's kind of a throwaway line now, "I feel your pain,"

but he literally could.

I mean he could take people and just hug them

and connect to them in a way and really listen to them.

You have lost too much,

but you have not lost everything.

And you have certainly not lost America,

for we will stand with you.

He really found a way to embrace the country

to help them channel their grief, their confusion.

It gets him out of the mode of reacting to Congress

and into the mode of being a national leader,

the person that the country can look to for assurance

and reliance and strength.

To all my fellow Americans beyond this hall, I say,

one thing we owe those who have sacrificed

is the duty to purge ourselves

of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil.

He spoke to the country as a unifying, a healing figure.

But, very subtly and appropriately,

he also drew attention to the fact that

the rhetoric Timothy McVeigh was using was not all that different

from the rhetoric that the talk show hosts and the militias

and even some of the members of Congress were using.

Let us teach our children that the God of comfort

is also the God of righteousness.

Those who trouble their own house will inherit the wind.

Here was a president who had been, by many people,

deemed not to be strong,

who suddenly was being viewed as both sensitive and strong,

which was a great and very powerful combination.

At that moment, perhaps for the first moment,

he inhabited the presidency.

Bill Clinton had begun to find his voice at home,

but he commanded little respect on the international stage.

For two years, Clinton had stumbled through a series

of foreign policy mishaps.

An ill-considered action in Somalia

had cost the lives of 18 U.S. soldiers

and deterred the president

from asserting American military power around the world.

Without strong U.S. leadership,

the world's problems were reaching a critical state.

In Central Europe,

Bosnian Serbs had begun wiping out

the largely Muslim population in their own country.

In 1995, the massacres in Bosnia were in full swing.

Daily rivers of blood.

Really, it was appalling.

After two years of this kind of savagery,

Bill Clinton had a disaster on his hands.

This was genocide in Europe.

Since becoming president,

Clinton had deferred to European countries

with soldiers in Bosnia

as part of the United Nations peacekeeping operation.

One has to understand

that when you are in a peacekeeping operation,

which is an international effort,

one president cannot call the shots.

One president cannot take the decision.

Particularly when the president's country

has no troops on the ground.

Clinton's reluctance to send American soldiers to Bosnia

collided with growing calls for U.S. intervention.

Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something.

I have been in the former Yugoslavia.

We must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country.

The ongoing scenes of this horrific genocidal slaughter

going on by the Serbs against the Muslims

was just undermining Clinton's image day after day.

Clinton would complain,

"The media's trying to force me into a war and I don't want it.

I'm not going to go into my own Vietnam."

And every night, these images came on the screen.

The violence in Bosnia reached a climax in the summer of 1995.

A new set of European leaders implored Clinton to act.

"The position of leader of the free world,"

complained French president Jacques Chirac, "is vacant."

Privately, Clinton had begun to rethink his policy.

Haunted by his failure

to stop a genocide in Rwanda the previous year,

he could no longer stand idly by.

Finally the president set up a trip wire

where if the Bosnian Serbs attacked,

it would trigger a massive NATO military response.

On July 11, 1995,

Bosnian Serb soldiers overran the city of Srebrenica

and murdered more than 8,000 defenseless men and boys.

That was a real shock

for everyone.

And for that to happen in Europe,

many decades after World War II,

was something that nobody could sit back and swallow.

For Clinton, the wire had been tripped.

On August 30, fighter planes from NATO bases across Europe,

acting on the president's go-ahead,

launched a massive attack against Serbs in Bosnia called

"Operation Deliberate Force."

He didn't blink.

And there wasn't tension on him, there wasn't pressure on him,

he wasn't sweating and worrying about,

"Did I do the right thing?"

We knew then, we knew that day,

that we had a commander-in-chief

who was rational and comfortable with the use of force.

For the next two weeks, NATO pilots flew 3,500 sorties,

as millions around the world

watched the air war unfold on television.

The NATO action began early this morning,

the harsh light of fires and explosions

coloring the night sky.

Some people watched the bombardment from their houses,

but after more than 10,000 deaths here

in the last three years,

most Sarajevans had given up any hope

of outside intervention.

Last night it came on a scale

which could yet change the course of this war.

On September 14, Serbian guns ringing Sarajevo fell silent.

Two months later,

Clinton convened the warring parties in Dayton, Ohio,

to negotiate an end to hostilities.

The parties have agreed to put down their arms

and roll up their sleeves and work for peace.

Finally, when you got tough and you said, "Enough already,

"we don't accept genocide at the end of the 20th century

in our backyard," they got serious and it stopped.

And then the United States... Not the Europeans...

Led the Dayton peace process.

And to this day, imperfect as it may be, it has held.

The Dayton Peace Accords

were a triumph for Clinton's foreign policy

and restored his standing as leader of the free world.

The same month,

he visited the troubled country of Northern Ireland,

where crowds hailed him as a peacemaker.

The young people... Catholic and Protestant alike...

Made it clear to me not only with their words,

but by the expressions on their faces that they want peace.

After three years as president,

he had developed a new vision of America's interests abroad.

It would come to be known as the "Clinton Doctrine."

It's easy to say that we really have no interests

in who lives in this or that valley in Bosnia,

or who owns a strip of brush land in the Horn of Africa,

or some piece of parched earth by the Jordan River.

But the true measure of our interests

lies not in how small or distant these places are,

or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names.

The question we must ask is,

what are the consequences to our security

of letting conflicts fester and spread?

We cannot, indeed, we should not,

do everything or be everywhere.

But where our values and our interests are at stake,

and where we can make a difference,

we must be prepared to do so.

There was a Clinton Doctrine,

but it wasn't purely a military doctrine.

It was a national security doctrine.

President Clinton thought

the United States is an indispensable nation.

You can't do things without the United States.

It may not be only the United States,

and it's certainly not doing it alone,

but it's the United States that brings the decisive edge

in being able to get things done.

And that where you can make a difference, you should.

In the latest poll I saw,

86% of the American people said, "Balance the budget now.

Don't wait, don't postpone, don't give us promises."

Even as Clinton brought peace to Europe,

the ideological war at home was heating up.

Speaker Newt Gingrich was standing by

his balanced budget proposal, daring the president to veto it.

Once again, Clinton hoped to use his powers of persuasion

to end the impasse.

He was thinking,

"What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna capture these guys.

"Because A, I'm smarter than they are,

"and B, that's my whole life's learning,

"is how to capture people.

"And I'm gonna do it through sheer force of personality.

"I can sit down with Newt Gingrich,

I can sit down with the devil himself, and I can cut a deal."

Gingrich would not yield to Clinton's charms.

Unless the president agreed to huge cuts

in Medicare and Medicaid,

Congress would refuse to appropriate money

for the federal government, shutting it down.

The one thing that the House of Representatives has

is the power of the purse.

They can deny money.

It is the only thing

that the House of Representatives alone can do,

can refuse to vote an appropriation.

So, inevitably, whatever the fight was going to be,

it was going to come down to us denying the White House money.

Clinton seemed caught between two toxic political choices.

If he opposed Gingrich's balanced budget plan,

he would be portrayed

as a defender of big government deficits;

if he gave in,

he would effectively cede control of the government

to Gingrich and the Republicans.

But there was a third option.

Dick Morris had been polling

the Republicans' proposed budget cuts

and believed he had found an opening.

I did a poll for Clinton

where I tested each of those cuts and its impact.

And I said to him,

"Do you want the four-hour briefing

or the one-word briefing?"

And he said start with the one word.

I said "Medicare."

I said, "None of the other cuts are nearly as important

as the cut they're proposing in Medicare."

The public supported a balanced budget, Morris argued,

but not at the expense of their most cherished federal program.

I said that what's important

is that you take away from the Republicans

the balanced budget issue.

If you can show how you can balance the budget

without cutting Medicare but by cutting everything else,

then you can call their bluff.

And then all of a sudden it becomes a question of,

"What do we cut?" not "Do we cut?"

Morris called his strategy "triangulation."

Clinton seized on it as a way to regain the initiative

from the Republicans.

In June, over the strong objections of liberals

on his staff, he announced his own balanced budget plan,

protecting Medicare and Medicaid.

There is an alternative, a way to balance this budget.

It's not that we shouldn't balance the budget.

We should balance the budget.

I strongly support it; we ought to do that.

I believe we're going to do that.

But we don't have to do it in a draconian way

that hurts the American people.

You know, whether or not to balance the budget,

we can't win that fight.

We're going to lose.

Once you accept that we're going to balance the budget,

now let's have a fight about what we're going to cut

and what we're going to protect.

That's a fight we can win.

Are you going to protect Medicare?

Are you going to protect Social Security?

You want to shut down the government over that?

Let's go.

In mid-November,

with the issue of Medicare cuts still dividing the two sides,

the federal government ran out of money and shut down.

Nearly a million federal employees

were instantly furloughed; government offices closed;

all but the most essential services ground to a halt.

The Washington Passport Agency is closed for lack of funding.

Due to the shutdown of the federal government...

Social Security... Library of Congress...

the National Park Service... is closed indefinitely.

If it ends soon,

the shutdown will have been a temporary inconvenience.

But if prolonged, it could cost the country a lot of anguish

and many millions of dollars.

Clinton took a gamble,

the biggest gamble of his presidency to that point,

in saying, "No, I'm going to let the government shut down

rather than accept the cuts that you're proposing here."

Day three and nobody moves,

least of all the 800,000 federal workers forced to stay home.

The American people should not be held hostage anymore

to the Republican budget priorities.

Work, work, put the government back to work.

Through a first shutdown in November

and then a longer one in December,

neither Clinton nor Gingrich blinked.

It was high-stakes poker.

Whichever side was blamed for the shutdown

would probably lose the next presidential election.

Our conviction was,

ultimately, a president is held responsible for his government.

And that if we didn't blink, at some point the public would say,

"The president needs to get this government functioning."

The pressure on the president was enormous.

Every day, the political damage mounted.

Almost a billion dollars in lost wages,

new Medicare and Social Security claims going unprocessed;

the federal government unable to discharge

even its most basic functions.

And the confrontation played out on television every night.

Day 13 of the federal budget crisis

and the shutdown that's brought parts of the government

to a dead stop.

The major players were all assembled in Washington today,

and they were talking, but not to each other.

Now, one of the major problems we have in America

is we have a president who doesn't mind playing,

he doesn't mind talking, but he seems to hate working.

We're working.

This was all sui generis, this was completely new.

Nobody knew the temperament of the country,

how it was going to play out.

And it was literally hour by hour, certainly day by day.

There was a fear by many Democrats,

even some within the White House, who just thought,

"You know, he's not going to be able to say 'no' to them.

"He wants to get along with them.

He thinks that's the way to save his presidency."

With the government closed,

Clinton prowled the empty halls of the White House,

deprived of the human contact he craved.

Among the few people permitted to come to work

were the White House interns,

including a 22-year-old named Monica Lewinsky.

The daughter of a Beverly Hills doctor and his socialite wife,

Lewinsky was a graduate

of Oregon's Lewis & Clark College.

She had an air of confidence, even boldness,

that set her apart from her fellow interns.

On November 15, the second day of the shutdown,

Clinton and Lewinsky struck up a conversation

in which Lewinsky confessed, "I have a huge crush on you."

There were almost these sparks flying between them

from that first moment when they saw each other,

and as Monica said, "He gave me the full Bill Clinton

and undressed me with his eyes."

Hours later, the two had their first sexual encounter.

It's almost as though there was a part of Bill Clinton

that he had no control over.

That whenever it had the opportunity to come out,

it was gonna come out.

And with no forethought, with no calculation,

with no sense of the consequences,

it was simply gonna happen.

And that's terrifying.

At this hour, U.S. president Bill Clinton

is meeting with top Congressional leaders

in another attempt to resolve their budget standoff.

As Clinton recklessly pursued his affair with Lewinsky,

he and Gingrich were locked in their own high-wire embrace.

The president offered compromise after compromise,

but Gingrich would not budge.

Unless Clinton agreed to his formula of budget and tax cuts,

he would keep the government closed.

They believed that he was soft, that he could be pushed around,

and that they could have their way.

They believed that he lacked the confidence to stand up to them.

They believed they understood his psychology,

and they thought that they had the political upper hand.

But Clinton sensed that his political enemies

had overreached and were out of step with the American people.

It was our theory

we were gonna win if it got to this point.

The polling showed it, we felt confident about it.

We thought we had a winning hand.

People don't really hate the government;

they just don't want the government

spending too much money.

They want the government doing the right things.

And they don't want the government shut down.

As long as they insist on plunging ahead

with a budget that violates our values,

in a process that is characterized more by pressure

than constitutional practice, I will fight it.

I am fighting it today, I will fight it tomorrow.

I will fight it next week and next month.

I will fight it until we get a budget

that is fair to all Americans.

There is a moment I will never forget in the Oval Office.

We had been going through negotiations on the budget.

And there were some of us that were nervous

that President Clinton might go too far,

that he might want to go so far in compromising

that he might hurt himself politically.

And so we kept putting different offers on the table,

and they kept coming back and saying,

"Not good enough, not good enough."

And we finally reached a day

where he wanted to do one more compromise, one more step.

Newt Gingrich said, "No."

And Bill Clinton basically looked at them and said,

"You know, Newt, I can't do what you want me to do.

"I don't believe it's right for the country.

And it may cost me the election, but I can't do it."

And my first reaction was

he's drawn a line that he had to draw.

He understood that he would have to take a risk of not winning,

and winning was what he was always about.

From that moment, I think, in many ways,

it became a renewal of Bill Clinton in terms of who he was,

both within himself and with the American people.

- We want to work! - We want to work!

As of last night, the public appeared to be more sympathetic

to Mr. Clinton's position.

46% blamed the Republicans, 27% Mr. Clinton.

Many traditional Americans, including some Republicans,

were outraged that a speaker of the house

would shut down the government.

You know, Newt Gingrich is not the president.

He shouldn't be acting like he's the president.

Suddenly, Bill Clinton became the embodiment

of traditional America.

He's the president of the United States.

Whether you agree with him or not,

no one has the right to shut down the government

when he's the president.

Finally, Senator Bob Dole,

worried that the shutdown would hurt his presidential campaign,

corralled the necessary votes in the Senate

to reopen the government.

Clinton had won.

In the weeks that followed,

Clinton staked out a middle ground between the two parties

with a vision of government that was neither enemy nor savior.

The era of big government is over.

But we cannot go back to the time

when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.

It was a real change in his vision of how the presidency

could work.

He had started with this heroic notion of the presidency...

Passing big laws, doing grand things...

And then the public just rejected it.

It hit a brick wall of what the public thought of government.

And he realized that he had to change how he was president,

and he had to rebuild that public trust in government.

Capitalizing on his momentum,

Clinton announced a stream of initiatives

designed to show middle-class Americans that he understood,

and could improve, their lives.

After the government shutdown,

we adopted a political strategy based on one word... values.

And our concept was

that we would help you raise your child better.

We have worked very hard to help communities fight crime.

"I'll provide you with drug-free school zones,

school uniforms, medical leave for your children."

Reduce teen smoking by raising the price of cigarettes,

putting into place tough restrictions on advertising...

I'll give you all of these weapons

to raise better children.

This is a V-chip,

and it will be required to be put in all new television sets.

Not even the Republicans could stand in Clinton's way.

After trying to move heaven and earth,

big swaths in his first two years,

he started feeding us up small pieces of bills.

And he'd get into our knickers with ideas

that we really could not vote against:

a hundred thousand cops on the street.

A Republican gonna vote against more law enforcement officers?

It was a politics of the possible,

not the things he dreamed of doing,

but the things he could do.

He crafted a whole new view in American politics,

literally a third way, a moderate way,

and achieved the results the American people wanted.

Three years into his first term,

Clinton had pulled one of the greatest Houdini acts

in presidential history.

With approval ratings on the rise,

he could once again call himself the Comeback Kid.

But as with nearly every Bill Clinton comeback,

it was soon followed by yet another scandal.

Yesterday, a trove of documents from Mrs. Clinton's old law firm

that various investigators issued subpoenas for months ago

were suddenly discovered in the office

of one of the Clintons' aides.

In January 1996, a sheaf of Hillary's old billing records

was discovered in the private residence of the White House.

The documents showed that she had done legal work

for her old friend Jim McDougal

while he was engaged in fraudulent real estate deals

in Arkansas.

The Whitewater inquiry,

which had receded from the front pages,

suddenly came roaring back.

There's the issue of why it took the White House so long

to turn up the billing records.

This is a pattern: delay, deception, withhold.

The discovery of the billing records

for Hillary Clinton's work

for Jim McDougal and Madison Guaranty was explosive.

Everyone had been looking for those billing records.

There were subpoenas all over the place to turn those over.

And then all of a sudden, they just show up.

Our job is to get at the truth

and the truth will speak for itself, so thank you very much.

The Whitewater inquiry was now in the hands

of a new independent counsel.

Kenneth Starr had been appointed

by a panel of conservative judges to replace Robert Fiske.

Starr was a respected jurist

and former official in the Bush Administration.

At first, his appointment

caused little consternation in the White House.

The jury was out initially

because Starr had quite a sterling reputation.

He was well known in judicial circles.

He was not rabid.

He was considered a very good conservative,

a very good court of appeals justice, so people were hopeful.

In fact, however, Starr would prove to be

a far more aggressive independent counsel

than his predecessor.

Unlike Fiske, who determined to finish his work quickly,

Starr would follow his investigation wherever it led,

no matter the cost in time or money.

I came to believe it was a persecution,

not a prosecution.

It was an investigation in search of a crime,

which is not how investigations are supposed to work.

They were not investigating an allegation of a crime.

They were looking for a crime.

To Starr, the sudden appearance of Hillary's billing records

seemed anything but accidental.

The discovery of the Rose Law Firm records

was a very significant event.

It was a significant event

because there had been a subpoena outstanding

for those law firm records for a long, long time.

And the Rose Law Firm said,

"We don't have them, and they were taken away."

And there were issues as to,

well, why would law firm records leave the law firm?

They weren't individual records, they were law firm records.

So, why wouldn't they be there?

Where are they?

Mrs. Clinton!

Good morning, how are you all?

Mrs. Clinton, how important is this week

in terms of turning your image around?

Oh, I think it's important to talk about the book I've written

about America's children,

and that's what I'm going to try to do,

plus answer all the questions.

The discovery of her missing billing records

undermined Hillary's efforts

to recede from the public spotlight.

The Rose Law Firm records were found in the living quarters

of the White House in August.

As she set out on a national tour

to promote her book on children,

she could not escape questions about Whitewater.

It's an important question, Mrs. Clinton,

because Republicans on the Senate banking committee...

She was totally under siege.

So was the president,

but he allows this kind of thing much more easily

to roll off his back.

Hillary becomes obsessed.

She has an enemy, the enemy is the special prosecutor,

and one or the other is going to be killed.

In Ken Starr, though, Hillary had met her match.

Behind his avuncular smile, he was relentless and implacable.

On January 19, Starr subpoenaed Hillary,

the only first lady ever to have been forced to testify

before a grand jury.

Rather than take her testimony in the White House,

he insisted that she come to the federal courthouse

in downtown Washington.

I think the idea that they would make her come to the courthouse

and to the grand jury was intended to humiliate her.

Would you rather have been somewhere else today?

Oh, about a million other places today, indeed.

In the end, Hillary's billing records proved little.

They showed that she had represented Jim McDougal,

but didn't prove she'd known he had used fraudulent loans

to prop up the failing Whitewater development.

Though many urged him to drop the investigation,

Starr redoubled his efforts.

He re-opened all the files that Fiske had closed;

he chased down and challenged every privilege

that had been afforded not just to President Clinton

but to previous presidents.

He decided to re-interview everybody,

bring 'em all back to the grand jury.

The independent counsel focused on finding witnesses in Arkansas

who could testify to the Clintons' participation

in fraudulent real estate deals 15 years before.

People at the lowest level were hurt.

People's lives were ruined.

People were left in debt that they took years to get out of.

They broke people.

I mean, investigators invaded high school campuses

to put the thumb screws on high school kids for information.

In May, Starr was able to convict Jim McDougal

of loan fraud.

Under the threat of imprisonment,

McDougal agreed to cooperate.

Suddenly, he claimed that Bill Clinton

had known about his illegal loans.

After Jim McDougal is convicted, everything changes.

Up until that point,

he never pointed the finger at the Clintons.

He never indicated that they were involved in wrongdoing.

But once he's convicted,

all of a sudden he begins coming up with stories

that implicate the Clintons.

McDougal's testimony was confused and contradictory;

few believed him.

Unable to find other credible evidence,

Starr felt stymied and increasingly determined

to find something that would stick to the president.

There's no question at all that at this point,

the Starr prosecutors believe

that the Clintons are hiding evidence

and lying when they deny that they had involvement

in some of McDougal's enterprises.

And conversely, the White House thinks

that these Starr prosecutors have shifted

and now all they're doing is a president hunt.

As Starr scoured the president's past for evidence of crimes,

Clinton's prospects for the future

were looking brighter than ever.

By the time that he is heading into summer,

looking toward the fall for his reelection,

President Clinton is a new man again.

He's no longer the figure of ridicule,

the weak figure he had become in 1994.

He's standing strong again with the public.

And his opponents are looking weak.

Clinton's Republican opponent

in the presidential election that fall

was Kansas senator Robert Dole.

With the economy strong and Clinton resurgent,

Dole could do little but characterize the president

as a free-spending liberal.

The federal government is too big

and it spends too much of your money... your money.

To force the issue, the Republican Congress in August

sent Clinton a welfare reform bill

he had already vetoed twice.

Welfare reform had been a key part

of Clinton's "New Democrat" philosophy,

but he was aware of how much liberals in his own party

hated the bill.

Bill Clinton authentically believed in welfare reform.

That's welfare reform in the abstract.

He wasn't being asked to sign welfare reform in the abstract.

And so the question was, do you sign it and proclaim a victory

knowing that to do so

is to leave many in your own party's base hugely demoralized?

Or do you veto it

and accept the consequences of vetoing popular legislation

just a few months before the election?

It was an agonizing choice for Bill Clinton.

In August, the president signed the welfare reform bill.

When I ran for president four years ago,

I pledged to end welfare as we know it.

I have worked very hard for four years to do just that.

Today, the Congress will vote on legislation

that gives us a chance to live up to that promise.

Clinton's decision was the last straw for many on the left.

Several of his closest political allies resigned in protest.

It made him someone who was capable of anything.

And it no longer mattered what party he was in.

You couldn't tell what he would do

and what he would be willing to go along with.

With welfare reform behind him,

Clinton solidified his grip on the race.

Deprived of his last best campaign issue,

Bob Dole waged an anemic race.

Clinton, meanwhile, campaigned with gusto.

We will together build a bridge to the 21st century

wide enough and strong enough to take us to America's best days.

Will you do that?

He was in his element.

He was shorn of this great burden

that had been over him in '94.

He was out making the case in the best, most positive

and toughest way he could, and he was loving it.

Clinton was no longer the issue.

People weren't asking how he became president,

or, "This guy's illegitimate."

He was now looked upon as the president.

In November, Clinton won by a margin

that had once seemed inconceivable,

taking 31 states and 70% of the electoral votes.

I, William Jefferson Clinton, do solemnly swear...

That I will faithfully execute

the office of president of the United States.

That I will faithfully execute

the office of president of the United States.

The reelection in 1996

is obviously one of the great comebacks in American politics.

A president who had been written off as roadkill

just two years earlier

managed to come back to a very convincing reelection in 1996,

the first Democrat to win a second term

since Franklin Roosevelt.

Clinton had survived,

some believed by selling his soul;

others, by finding it again.

As he gave his second inaugural address,

Bill Clinton sought to turn the page

on the ugly partisan battles of the last four years.

The American people returned to office

a president of one party and a Congress of another.

Surely they did not do this

to advance the politics of petty bickering

and extreme partisanship they plainly deplore.

The one part of that speech

that I think mattered more to him than any other

was his reference to the scriptural phrase

to be the repairer of the breach, from Isaiah.

They call all us instead to be repairers of the breach.

He really felt like he had come through

this trial by fire and storm and that the country had too,

and that now we could repair the breach

and move forward together.

He felt, he really believed, that he had this chance

to build this bridge to the 21st century,

and that we had to do certain things

that would help all people to get there.

As Clinton strode triumphantly down Pennsylvania Avenue

flush with victory,

there was no hint that he had already set in motion

events that would soon divide the country as never before

and nearly destroy his presidency.

Buoyed by his convincing reelection,

Bill Clinton sailed confidently into his second term.

The economy was booming, lifting millions of people

into better jobs, better homes and better lives.

We have much to be thankful for.

With four years of growth,

we have won back the basic strength of our economy.

With crime and welfare rolls declining,

we are winning back our optimism,

the enduring faith that we can master any difficulty.

Around the world,

American prestige and power had never been higher.

Even Clinton's longing to "repair the breach"

with Republicans seemed possible.

It was two different worlds.

1997, beginning of Bill Clinton's second term,

was totally different from the first term.

It was American politics the way it should be.

A Republican Congress working with the Democratic president,

trying to find areas they would agree on,

the hatred toward Bill Clinton was gone.

The hatred toward Hillary Clinton was gone.

Things had finally quieted down.

But in Bill Clinton's life,

things never stay quiet for long.

By early 1997, at great risk to himself and his presidency,

Bill Clinton had been carrying on

his affair with Monica Lewinsky for over a year.

I've asked myself a number of times

why he put himself and his presidency in jeopardy

in such a careless way.

The presidency is probably the loneliest office in America.

Regardless of your friends,

regardless of how good your marriage is,

regardless of anything, you are alone there at the top.

And maybe Bill Clinton,

who so much needed and wanted to be loved,

couldn't say no to someone who was going to give him affection

and wanted affection back.

There is something in his being that needs that adoration.

And she was forthcoming with it.

And she, Monica Lewinsky, just gave him something

that he needed at that time, to be adored.

The previous spring, Lewinsky's superiors in the White House

had begun to notice her attraction to the president.

Quietly, she was transferred to a job across town

at the Pentagon.

There, Lewinsky befriended a career civil servant

named Linda Tripp.

Like Lewinsky, Tripp had come to the Pentagon

after years working at the White House,

first in the Bush administration

and then, less happily, in Clinton's.

Linda Tripp didn't like the Clinton people.

She didn't like their politics,

she didn't like their personalities,

she didn't like their social lives,

and she simmered with resentments.

And she finds this young woman a couple cubicles away,

Monica Lewinsky, who decides to cry on her shoulder.

It was very much a big sister-little sister,

mother-daughter relationship.

Monica would tell her everything.

Linda genuinely cared about Monica,

but there was one overriding emotion,

and that was what Bill Clinton was doing.

And... I'm telling you, this was an angry woman.

Shortly before meeting Lewinsky,

Tripp had approached conservative literary agent

Lucianne Goldberg about writing a tell-all book

on the Clinton White House,

but the project had gone nowhere.

In the fall of 1997,

she contacted Goldberg with a new project:

the true story of an ongoing affair

between a White House intern

and the president of the United States.

She called me and she said,

"He's having an affair with a girl who's 23 years old."

And I said, "Yeah, yeah."

You know, the kind of agenting that I did,

I heard a lot of wild stuff and people have to prove things.

So she said,

"No, I'm not kidding you, he's having an affair with...

and I know the girl and I talk to her every day."

And I said, "Well, can you prove this?

"Do you have pictures, is she willing to step forward,

is she willing to go on the Today show and say...?"

And she said, "Well, no, I'm sure she wouldn't.

This is a big secret."

I said, "Well, you got to...

"you got to do something to prove to me

"so I can prove to a publisher that this...

this wild story is true."

And I said, "You say you talk to her every day,

how about taping your phone conversations?"

And she agreed that that would be a cool idea

and she went to RadioShack and bought a tape recorder

and plugged it into her phone.

Linda, I don't know why I have these feelings for him.

I never expected to feel this way about him.

And the first time I ever looked into his eyes close up

and was with him alone, I saw somebody totally different

than I had expected to see.

And that's the person I fell in love with.

Linda wanted the world

to know about this,

and I think the motivation was no...

you know, no deeper, no more shallow than that.

That was it.

She wanted the world to know about this relationship.

She came to believe that fate did call her

to expose these defects in this president to the country.

On the other hand,

she becomes entwined in a scandal

that she helped to create.

He was supposed to call me again,

I wasn't home and I was afraid to call.

What happened?

I don't know.

I saw him for 60 seconds.

So how was it?

I mean, we hug, and I gave him the paperweight.

So, what did you wear?

I knew if the story broke huge

that people would start calling Linda, and Linda would say,

"Call my agent."

And they would call her agent,

and her agent would make a book deal,

and then would make some money, and she would get a little money

and I would get ten percent of it,

and that's the way the world works.

Goldberg suggested Tripp reach out

to Newsweek's Michael Isikoff.

Before long, the two were having regular conversations.

She would kind of tease me

and she told me early on that there was a woman,

who had been an intern,

and that she was having an ongoing affair

with Bill Clinton.

I was taken aback, as anybody would be.

So, I wanted to get Linda Tripp to tell me as much as she could.

And so I kept talking to her.

Linda Tripp was not just talking to Isikoff.

She had also begun sharing her story

with the independent counsel investigating the Clintons.

By 1997, after more than two years,

Kenneth Starr's investigation into Whitewater had stalled.

Short on evidence or reliable witnesses,

he had too little to bring charges

against the president or first lady.

We know that they were running out of gas,

and running out of rope, and had just about completely failed,

until Monica came along.

In early January 1998,

Starr's office received a phone call from Tripp.

She revealed the existence

of her tape recordings of Monica Lewinsky.

At first, Starr saw little value in the tapes.

A presidential affair, no matter how sordid, was not illegal.

But there was something in Tripp's story

that caught Starr's attention:

the president had asked his friend Vernon Jordan

to help find Lewinsky a job in the private sector.

Could this be an attempt, Starr wondered,

to buy Lewinsky's silence?

I'm just... I'm starting to get a little nervous about Vernon.

Why?

I just want everything to be easy.

I want him to call me and say,

"You know, how does this amount of money,

doing this here sound?"

And I say, "That sounds great."

He says, "Okay, consider it a done deal."

Clinton had good reason to worry about whether Lewinsky

would keep their affair secret.

She had just been subpoenaed to testify

in a sexual harassment lawsuit against the president

brought by a former Arkansas state worker named Paula Jones.

Tipped off to the affair, Jones' lawyers believed

the president's relationship with Lewinsky

would demonstrate a pattern of behavior.

I thought it showed

President Clinton's proclivity to make sexual advances

to extremely young, low-level employees,

and President Clinton

had obtained jobs for Monica Lewinsky

as part of his effort to control her.

Highly relevant to Paula Jones' case.

Ken Starr was watching the Jones lawsuit

with great interest.

If Clinton was trying to influence Lewinsky's testimony,

he would be committing a major crime.

Suddenly, Starr glimpsed a bridge from Whitewater

to a potentially more fruitful area of investigation.

The bridge is that the president and those close to him

may be encouraging Monica to lie in the Paula Jones case

and therefore suborning perjury.

That's the little connection they make.

It's tenuous at this point, but they go for it.

With Starr's determined efforts,

three seemingly unrelated threads

from Clinton's past and present...

Whitewater, Paula Jones, and Monica Lewinsky...

Had suddenly come together

in one potentially devastating investigation.

And a single reporter threatened to upend the whole thing.

I knew we had

a blockbuster of a story.

And, of course, I had to call Starr's team.

And fair to say that when I did, they freaked out.

They realized that were I to publish a story,

it would blow their investigation wide open.

Starr hoped to convince Lewinsky

to secretly tape record the president

before Isikoff's story tipped him off.

On January 16, he sent Linda Tripp to meet with Lewinsky

at a food court at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

Before the friends sat down, FBI agents swooped in.

The FBI grabs Monica in front of the Cinnabon

and takes her upstairs in the Ritz-Carlton,

and tries to get her to flip.

But Monica basically just drives them crazy with her histrionics,

with her refusal to talk.

They felt like one of these scenes in a movie

where a bunch of grown men

are trying to change the diapers of a baby

and don't know how to do it.

Monica's crying, she's kind of wailing out loud.

What they weren't counting on,

what they hadn't figured out is,

"So what to do we do when Monica is not going to tell us

whether she had an affair with Bill Clinton?"

Unable to secure Lewinsky's cooperation

against the president, Starr still had a card to play.

The next day, January 17, 1998,

Clinton was scheduled to give his deposition under oath

in the Paula Jones lawsuit.

If he lied about his affair with Lewinsky,

Starr would be able to bring a charge of perjury.

He was about to testify,

and they knew he was going to lie about Monica

and that was, if you want to call it, the trap.

"And when a man is asked about this,

"a married man is asked about this, he's going to lie.

"And once he lies, we got him.

We got him!"

The whole purpose is to get the president.

If you're not out to get the president,

you should say to the president,

"You know, you're going to testify in this lawsuit.

"You know, we know about your relationship

with Monica Lewinsky."

They're trying to trap him into committing perjury.

You may show the witness definition number one.

Barred from questioning the president himself,

Starr had to rely on Paula Jones' lawyers.

Lead attorney Jim Fisher began the deposition

by introducing a definition of sexual relations

taken from a federal statute.

In an effort to avoid ambiguity,

I thought I would use a definition

that was well-grounded in federal law.

So I thought that there could be no doubt

that these were unambiguous definitions

for which the law had a well-recognized meaning.

Fisher's efforts to avoid ambiguity

had the opposite effect,

leaving Clinton a loophole through which to escape.

So the record is completely clear,

have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky

as that term is defined in deposition Exhibit 1?

I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.

I never had an affair with her.

If they had simply asked him,

"Did Monica Lewinsky ever perform oral sex on you?"

the gig would have been up.

Instead, they gave him this ridiculously complicated,

hard-to-understand definition of sex, which allowed him to parse.

If I could have done it over again,

I would have just asked the salacious questions.

I would have let him have it.

I was trying to be respectful, and I paid a price for it.

Having said that,

he clearly didn't answer the questions honestly.

If she told someone

that she had a sexual affair with you

beginning in November of 1995, would that be a lie?

It's certainly not the truth.

It would not be the truth.

The turning point was when I started to ask him about gifts

that he had given to her and she had given to him.

And I described some of them quite specifically.

There was a book of poetry by Walt Whitman, for example.

I thought his mood changed visibly at that point.

His face became bright red, there was tension in his face.

He knew at this point

there was a mole.

There was a rat in the woodpile.

Someone has given all of this damning information

to these people.

He was in trouble.

Clinton's secret affair with Monica Lewinsky

was now hurtling toward public exposure.

The very day that the president was deposed

in the Jones lawsuit,

Michael Isikoff filed his story on the Lewinsky affair.

But at the last minute,

his editors at Newsweek backtracked

and decided to kill the story.

Obviously, we had

an enormous scoop here that was going to shake Washington.

Some of my colleagues and some of the editors agreed,

but at the end of the day, the brass at Newsweek

just were not willing to pull the trigger.

Michael told me.

He said, "They aren't gonna run with it.

"They're afraid of it, they don't like it.

Nasty stuff, they don't want to do it."

And I said, "Well, what am I gonna do?

I'm sitting on this thing."

In her frustration,

Goldberg turned to an internet gossip columnist

named Matt Drudge.

A couple of people said,

"Call Matt Drudge."

Or, I said, "Well, tell him to call me."

So at 11:00 that night, he called me and that was it.

It went kaboom!

The president, the intern, the accusations, and the denials.

The allegations that the president had an illicit affair

with a 21-year-old intern

and then attempted to cover it up

blasted through the White House today.

This scandal could unravel the administration.

Over the next 72 hours,

the story made its way around the world.

Caught unawares,

Clinton's cabinet members rushed to his defense.

I believe that the allegations are completely untrue.

I'll second that...

Aides who had worked for him

for five to six years at this point

are just on the floor.

They can't figure out

what they're supposed to think about this,

much less what they're supposed to do about this.

I was convinced that Bill Clinton had been set up.

He's got all these enemies who are out to get him.

He wouldn't be so stupid

as to jeopardize his entire presidency.

For what?

No, that was not the Bill Clinton I knew.

Clinton did confide in the one person

he knew would not judge him.

When the Lewinsky scandal broke,

the president paged me and I returned the call.

And he said,

"Ever since I got here to the White House,

"I've had to shut my body down... Sexually, I mean...

"but I screwed up with this girl.

"I didn't do what they said I did,

but I may have done so much that I can't prove my innocence."

And I said to him,

"The problem that presidents have is not the sin,

"it's the cover up, and you should explore

just telling the American people the truth."

He said, "Really, do you think I could do that?"

And I said, "Let me test it, let me run a poll."

So I took a poll and I tested popular attitudes on that

and I called him back and I said,

"They will forgive the adultery,

but they won't easily forgive that you lied."

Mr. President, welcome.

Thank you, Jim.

Clinton disregarded Morris' advice.

In interviews days after the story broke,

he continued to hide his relationship

with Lewinsky.

The news of this day is that Kenneth Starr,

the independent counsel, is investigating allegations

that you suborned perjury by encouraging a 24-year-old woman,

a former White House intern,

to lie under oath in a civil deposition

about her having had an affair with you.

Mr. President, is that true?

That is not true.

I did not ask anyone to tell anything other than the truth.

There is no improper relationship.

And I intend to cooperate with this inquiry.

But that is not true.

He says, quite indignantly,

"There is no relationship with Monica Lewinsky."

And people begin to focus on the words.

"He said 'is, ' didn't he?

He didn't say 'was. ""

What is he trying to say here? Is he parsing here?

MIKE McCURRY: I didn't notice

the peculiar tense issue until later.

But I did think to myself, I said,

"Boy, there's got to be a stronger denial of this."

And I think some group of us said,

"Look, you're denying this, you've gotta be strong.

"You've gotta get out there and say, you know,

how outrageous this is."

And, of course, I think that was dreadful advice in retrospect.

I want you to listen to me, I'm going to say this again.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.

I never told anybody to lie.

Not a single time.

Never.

These allegations are false,

and I need to go back to work for the American people.

Thank you.

I was watching with a friend in my office and I said,

"That is it, this man is dead meat.

"That is it, because I know that he's lying,

"and if I know that he's lying,

then the rest of the world is gonna know he's lying."

When he went on the air and shook his finger and said,

"I never had sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky,"

and we knew he had,

we realized then that this had the potential

to literally change the course of American history.

The one thing that we can't deal with are lies.

Lies are impossible to deal with,

so please, simply tell us the truth.

The truth has a very powerful way of coming out,

so let's get it out.

But clearly that was not the road that we were on.

Having set off on a course of deception,

there was no turning back.

Clinton continued to press his lie, even to Hillary.

He tells her it's not true.

He tells her that Monica Lewinsky

was a troubled young woman,

that he had just tried to be nice to her,

to mentor her in some ways.

And that's a story that Hillary Clinton hangs onto

like a life raft.

The day after Clinton's denial,

Hillary appeared on national television.

I just think that a lot of this is deliberately designed

to sensationalize charges against my husband

because everything else they've tried has failed.

She focused her energy and her anger and her ire

at the external enemies...

At Ken Starr, at the press, at the Republicans in Congress.

They were the ones who were doing this, not her husband.

The great story here, for anybody willing to find it

and write about it and explain it,

is this vast right-wing conspiracy

that has been conspiring against my husband

since the day he announced for president.

She says, "This is all about the vast right-wing conspiracy,"

and in that moment, sort of sets the tone

for the defense of the president against these charges.

To the Clintons,

the Lewinsky scandal was just the latest front

in a war waged by their political enemies

to destroy them.

The Lewinsky scandal

was not really the Lewinsky scandal.

It was really an attempt by the Republican Party

to have a coup d'état

based on having discovered the president's personal behavior.

This time, however, even some allies of the Clintons

found their protestations hollow.

You can never blame your enemies

for doing what your enemies will predictably do.

You can only blame yourself

for what you have given to your enemies.

If you've given them absolutely nothing,

guess what they're gonna be able to do?

Nothing.

As the scandal raged around him,

Clinton did his best to focus, he said,

"On the job the American people hired me to do."

He's coming to work every day, he says,

and he's going to do the job that's in front of him.

Privately, behind the scenes,

it's a completely different story.

Of course he's obsessed by this.

Of course he's consumed by this.

Of course he is distracted.

He has a meeting with the head of the World Bank, for instance,

who goes back to his office, calls Clinton's chief of staff,

and says, "It's like he wasn't even there."

The president swung wildly between emotional extremes,

from fear to fury.

I think that there was always a part of him

that wondered about the dark side

and about whether he was really a bad person

and whether he was going to be taken down.

But he also had...

And it's possible to have these two feelings simultaneously...

An overpowering sense of his own righteousness.

"I feel like a character in the novel Darkness at Noon,"

Clinton told an aide.

"I am surrounded by an oppressive force

that is creating a lie about me and I can't get the truth out."

In fact, the truth was closing in.

All he can do is buy time.

All he can do is hope Starr doesn't have the goods,

doesn't have the evidence,

that there's no physical evidence that could prove it.

Before long, Starr had his physical evidence.

In July, Monica Lewinsky reached a deal to give her testimony

in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

As part of the deal,

she turned over a blue dress stained with Clinton's semen.

The next day, seeing no way out,

Clinton himself agreed to answer questions

before Starr's grand jury.

Before the president faced Starr, however,

he had to face Hillary.

That morning, Clinton awoke the first lady from a deep sleep.

Pacing the room, he finally confessed he had lied.

It was probably the most shattering moment in her life.

He'd lied to her and he'd used her,

he let her go out and essentially make alibis for him.

And it not only jeopardized

everything they'd worked for all their lives,

but totally humiliated her and Chelsea,

and she couldn't trust him anymore.

Later that day,

Clinton's deposition was scheduled to take place

in the Map Room of the White House.

The president's lawyers

had won an important concession from Ken Starr:

the interrogation could not last longer than four hours.

Good afternoon, Mr. President.

Good afternoon.

Could you please state your full name for the record, sir.

William Jefferson Clinton.

Bill Clinton's strategy was to run out the clock.

And so, he would start talking about

little stories from Arkansas.

He would, you know, take an aside

and give a lecture about justice and the American dream.

And all along, the clock is ticking out.

Let me begin with the correct answer:

I don't know for sure.

Well, it would depend upon the facts.

I think on the whole, people in the uniformed civil service...

If we circle number one... this is my circle here.

I remember doing it

so I could focus only on those two lines...

It depends upon what the meaning of the word "is" is.

The Starr prosecutors walked out

of that grand jury testimony, totally demoralized.

They knew they had been clobbered by President Clinton.

And even though it was just obvious what he was doing,

it was a masterful performance on Clinton's part.

If Clinton could finagle his way out of Starr's legal trap,

he could not, he knew,

escape the judgment of the American people.

And we've got about 45.

That night, President Bill Clinton addressed the nation

in one of the most unusual and anticipated broadcasts

in American history.

Stand by.

Five seconds...

Good evening.

This afternoon, in this room, from this chair,

I testified before the Office of Independent Counsel

and the grand jury.

I answered their questions truthfully,

including questions about my private life,

questions no American citizen would ever want to answer.

Still, I must take complete responsibility

for all my actions, both public and private.

And that is why I am speaking to you tonight.

Indeed I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky

that was not appropriate.

In fact, it was wrong.

For many of those closest to Clinton,

this was the first time they'd heard him admit the affair,

and they were deeply hurt.

People just shook their heads.

They couldn't believe it.

They literally could not believe it.

What a squandering of talent and promise and possibility.

Yes, I felt betrayed.

He lied to me, yeah.

He lied to a lot of people about that,

not least of whom was himself.

The morning after his grand jury testimony

and his speech to the nation,

he and Hillary and Chelsea

head off to Martha's Vineyard for their annual vacation.

It may be the worst-timed family vacation

in the history of the world,

but there they are,

heading out to the helicopter on the South Lawn.

And the staff is sitting in the White House thinking,

"What are we going to do about the walk to the helicopter?"

They decide they can't do anything.

They can't orchestrate it, they can't spin it;

they are powerless to affect it.

And in the end it falls to Chelsea Clinton, a teenager,

to take both of their hands, on her own initiative,

take her father's hand in one, her mother's hand in another

and walk across the lawn,

literally the bridge between her parents

at this moment of crisis between them.

As the Clintons spent a tense vacation on Martha's Vineyard,

Washington was abuzz with talk of resignation

or even impeachment.

At this moment, he was in maximum peril.

Clinton's advisors were acutely aware

that President Nixon was driven out of office

not by the opposing party, but by his own party,

when the Republicans came to him and said,

"Enough, you have to leave."

That's when President Nixon resigned.

And so there was real concern

that Democrats were going to begin bolting,

and they were not returning President Clinton's calls.

They were not happy with this.

There was a real concern that this could be

the beginning of the end.

It had been a quarter of a century

since Richard Nixon had resigned the presidency

rather than endure an impeachment.

Now, many were urging Clinton to do the same.

But Clinton had no such intentions.

There were the inevitable comparisons

between Nixon and Clinton.

I always thought there was a fundamental difference.

Both Nixon and Clinton were convinced

that it was their political enemies

that were responsible for all their troubles.

The difference is that Nixon always suspected

that his political enemies were better than him.

Clinton hated his political enemies

and was convinced they were beneath him.

And that was the reason, at the end of the day,

Clinton was never going to do what Richard Nixon did,

which was to give into them and resign.

Yes, go ahead.

Mr. President,

all these questions about your personal life

have to be painful to you and your family.

At what point do you consider that it's just not worth it

and you consider resigning from office?

Never.

You know, I was elected to do a job.

I think the American people know two or three things about me now

that they didn't know the first time...

this kind of effort was made against me.

I think they know that I care very much about them,

that I care about ordinary people

whose voices aren't often heard here.

And I think they know I have worked very, very hard for them.

Hard work had always been Clinton's salvation

in moments of vulnerability.

Now, as he sought to show the American people

he could still function,

he bore down on a suddenly violent foreign policy crisis.

Early on the morning of August 7, 1998,

two truck bombs exploded simultaneously

outside U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

The death toll reached 200, with another 5,000 injured.

Within hours, the FBI had pegged responsibility

to a little-known terrorist organization called Al Qaeda.

Clinton soon ordered his national security team

to hunt down and destroy Al Qaeda

and its elusive leader, Osama Bin Laden.

CIA had information... it thought it was reliable information...

That Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership

were going to come together at a certain camp,

in Afghanistan, at a certain date, at a certain time.

We went to the president and said,

"We want to be able to land cruise missiles at that camp

while they're there."

The order would have huge political risks.

Clinton knew that it would be widely seen as an attempt

to distract the public from his own personal problems.

Somebody said something about,

"Well, you know, we have to take into account

the political realities in the United States at the moment."

Which was sort of code words for,

"You've got this Monica Lewinsky scandal going on."

And he snapped.

He just very quickly and sharply said,

"You don't think about that.

"You think about national security.

"You give me the national security advice

"you would give me if this were not going on.

You let me worry about that."

On August 20, Clinton ordered

a series of missile strikes against Al Qaeda,

targeting training camps in Afghanistan

and a plant in Sudan

that the administration claimed was involved

in making chemical weapons.

The missiles narrowly missed their main target.

We didn't kill Bin Laden.

We didn't have that to show for the attack.

And people, frankly,

a lot of people in the Congress and in the media

said this was just an attempt to "wag the dog."

The timing of all of this is more than coincidental,

and I think it may very well run the risk...

the president may run the risk

of having an even more cynical view of his behavior.

He knew that.

He knew that was going to happen.

He knew it would make it worse for him to do this.

But he launched the attack because he thought it was

the right national security thing to do.

That's what we told him.

And he said, "I'll do it anyway,

even though it makes it worse for me."

Things were deteriorating quickly for the president.

On September 9, Kenneth Starr finally delivered to Congress

the long-awaited results of his investigation.

In 450 pages of sometimes salacious detail,

Starr laid out his case against Clinton for perjury,

obstruction of justice,

and abuse of office in the Lewinsky affair,

while dropping almost all reference

to his original investigation of Whitewater.

Lawyers are thorough.

Good lawyers are thorough.

There could be absolutely no gap whatsoever between the facts

and then a reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the facts.

The case had to be proven.

The House Sergeant at Arms

officially unsealed the document at mid-afternoon.

It had been advertised as steamy,

and you could almost see the steam rising

as the boxes came open.

According to the sources,

the report focuses almost entirely

on the president's relationship with Lewinsky.

However this turns out,

it is a turning point in Mr. Clinton's presidency.

It is not an exaggeration to say

that he has less control of his destiny

than at any time since he was elected.

The Starr report was a turning point,

but not in the way the independent counsel

or his Republican supporters had expected.

Polls showed that after four years and $40 million,

most Americans believed the investigations against Clinton

were more persecution than prosecution.

The Republicans had so undercut their own credibility

in the way they were going after him

that people, although they deplored what he had done

and thought it was stupid

and it demeaned the office of the presidency

and tarnished the presidency,

tarnished him and had been a devastating blow

to Hillary and Chelsea and all those things

that went through people's minds,

they looked at the Republicans and they had enough already.

After the release of Starr's report,

Clinton appeared in the Rose Garden

to offer his first full-throated apology to the American people.

I am profoundly sorry for all I have done wrong

in words and deeds.

I never should have misled the country, the Congress,

my friends or my family.

Quite simply, I gave in to my shame.

I have been condemned by my accusers with harsh words,

and while it's hard

to hear yourself called deceitful and manipulative,

I remember Ben Franklin's admonition

that our critics are our friends,

for they do show us our faults.

If Clinton was willing at last to take responsibility,

the American people were willing to forgive him.

He disappoints them every time on some level,

but he always gets up and tries to make it better.

You know, what else can you ask from a sinner, right?

And that's how he would define himself, "I'm a sinner.

"And I try to be better every time,

and I learn from my mistakes and I go forward."

And I think the American public is pretty forgiving of a guy

who sees himself as a sinner.

Weary of the attacks on Clinton,

Americans punished Republican candidates

in the congressional elections in November.

Upsetting precedent,

Democrats actually gained seats in Congress.

I think the message the American people sent was loud and clear:

we want progress over partisanship

and unity over division.

Blamed for the defeat, Newt Gingrich resigned his post

as speaker of the House of Representatives.

To the frustration of his Republican opponents,

Clinton seemed to have won over the American people again.

There are two or three things

that I have witnessed in my political career

that I never could figure out.

The fact that a lot of people

didn't think that that was a serious problem

that he, you know, perjured himself in his testimony,

and that he'd had a relationship

with that woman Monica Lewinsky...

That did shock me,

and I've never quite figured out how in the world could that be

that he'd come out the back end of it

pretty much where he was at the beginning.

It's just one of those things I've never quite figured out.

We should have seen that,

"Okay, we're personally offended, that's our condition."

But if the public isn't, and clearly they weren't,

then get over it.

And we never got over it.

We never got over it.

We still haven't got over it.

Determined to punish the president,

House Republicans, led by Texas congressman Tom Delay,

played their last card: impeachment.

A resolution impeaching William Jefferson Clinton,

president of the United States,

for high crimes and misdemeanors.

The Republicans were gripped

by just unreasoning hatred of Bill Clinton.

They just despised the man

and could not stand that he was going to get away with this.

"Article One: In his conduct

"while president of the United States,

"William Jefferson Clinton,

"in violation of his constitutional oath

"faithfully to execute the office

"of president of the United States,

"has willfully corrupted and manipulated the judicial process

of the United States..."

On Saturday, December 19,

the House of Representatives voted along party lines

to impeach the president on two of four counts

involving obstruction of justice and perjury.

On this vote, the yeas are 228, the nays are 206.

Article one is adopted.

Bill Clinton had become

only the second president in American history,

and the first in more than a century,

to be impeached by the House.

The American people,

I call them to my side here at the podium to verify to you

that the president committed falsehoods under oath.

Republican leaders moved the proceedings to the Senate,

where a two-thirds majority was required

to convict the president and remove him from office.

The Senate will convene as a court of impeachment.

We are here today

because President William Jefferson Clinton

decided to put himself above the law.

This is not about sex.

This is about obstruction of justice.

This is about a pattern, this is about a scheme,

this is about a lot of lies.

For three long weeks, with little hope of success,

13 Republican Congressmen

pressed the case against Clinton.

This is not about sexual misconduct

any more than Watergate was about a third-rate burglary.

Finally, Arkansas Democratic Senator Dale Bumpers rose

to express the sentiments felt by many in the chamber

and the country as a whole.

We are here today because the president suffered

a terrible moral lapse.

A marital infidelity,

not a breach of the public trust,

not a crime against society.

It is a sex scandal.

H.L. Mencken said one time,

"When you hear somebody say, 'This is not about money, '

it's about money."

And when you hear somebody say, "This is not about sex,"

it's about sex.

The Senate adjudges that the respondent,

William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States,

is not guilty as charged in the first article of impeachment.

What had begun with a sexual indiscretion

more than three years earlier

and mushroomed into a full-scale constitutional crisis

was finally over.

This time, however, there was no triumph,

no crowing about "The Comeback Kid."

Bill Clinton knew that this time,

both he and the country had paid a heavy price.

Bill Clinton, in his second inaugural address,

said it was his ambition during the second term

to be, quoting scripture, "a repairer of the breach."

That ambition was not realized in his second term

and it effectively died in 1998, the year of scandal.

The fact that the president was impeached

will always be part of his story, part of his legacy.

It consumed a tremendous amount of energy.

It undercut his standing.

And, I think, limited his ability

to accomplish anything outside of surviving

for almost two years.

And, you know, that's tragic.

Clinton created many of his own problems,

but his enemies exaggerated, enhanced, mythologized, lied,

were utterly hypocritical in their attacks on him.

You know, to the extent that I believe that every human being

is responsible for their own lives,

he holds the responsibility for it.

To the extent that context shapes a life,

his enemies have a lot to answer for.

Clinton had survived, but the impeachment ordeal

seemed to have sapped much of his drive and ambition.

President Clinton has more than 700 days left in office

after he is acquitted by the Senate,

and he promises to use every single one of them

to its fullest.

But the constraints were enormous at that point.

The big aspirations were gone.

The chances of re-inventing Social Security

or re-inventing Medicare just proved too elusive.

He had a Congress

which had just, literally, put him on trial,

and was not willing to do a lot of business with him.

In 2000, Clinton came tantalizingly close

to the great historical achievement

for which he had yearned,

but a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians

broke down in the 11th hour.

The same year, after decades of budget deficits,

the federal budget had a surplus of nearly $240 billion,

an accomplishment for which Clinton was given much credit.

It was only as her husband was preparing to leave the stage

that Hillary finally stepped front and center,

ready at last to take her star turn.

The day the Senate votes to acquit President Clinton

on impeachment charges,

Hillary Clinton is meeting in the White House residence

with Harold Ickes to plot a campaign

for the very same United States Senate.

Literally the end of his crisis is the birth of her new phase.

She said, "I want to be independent.

I want to be judged on my own merits."

And she finally released herself from, you know,

the shadow of Bill Clinton over her

and began making her own decisions.

He then came to her support,

and there was nobody more of a champion

for her Senate race than Bill Clinton.

He was behind her all the way.

So even if I didn't know her

better than anybody in this room,

I'd be for her.

That November, as Vice-President Al Gore

lost the closest presidential election in American history,

Hillary Clinton easily won the Senate seat in New York.

I am profoundly grateful to all of you

for giving me the chance to serve you.

In his final round of goodbye speeches,

Bill Clinton even bid farewell to the Washington press corps.

You know, I read in the history books how other presidents say

the White House is like a penitentiary

and that every motive they have is suspect.

Even George Washington complained he was treated

like a common thief.

And they all say they can't get away...

can't wait to get away.

I don't know what the heck they're talking about.

I've had a wonderful time.

It's been an honor to serve and fun to laugh.

I only wish that we'd even laughed more

these last eight years,

because power's not the most important thing in life

and only counts for what you use it.

Bill Clinton loved being president.

He had to literally be dragged out of there,

clawing the floors to get him out of there

on January 20, 2001.

In fact, when the Bushes show up,

the movers are still desperately trying to move everything;

literally, they're taking drawers from the cabinets

and just dumping them into boxes because Bill Clinton has wanted

to milk every last minute of his presidency right up to the end.

Listen, this guy loved being president.

He even loved being president when it was tough.

And a lot of times I would say, "How does he smile?

"How does he keep laughing?

How does he keep going through this?"

But it was because he got the energy back from the people.

Whatever you think of the man, he wanted to do the right thing

for the people of his county, his state, his country,

and that never changed about him.

Clinton departed the White House for the last time

on Saturday, January 20, 2001.

In the end, he left much as he had come:

a man loved by his friends and loathed by his enemies;

a politician who had achieved a great deal,

yet left behind a curious sense of unfulfilled promise.

I believe he's an argument without end,

that there will be people discussing and debating

the significance of Bill Clinton for a long time.

Bill Clinton will be remembered

as one of our best presidents in the 20th century,

who accomplished an enormous amount,

and he will be remembered

because of his personal recklessness.

And that is tragic,

because so much more could have happened.

Did Bill Clinton help the country,

and was the country better for having him as president?

I think, unquestionably, yes.

But, are there elements of tragedy here as well?

Huge elements of tragedy

in terms of failures and opportunities lost,

and risks made that didn't have to be made?

Undoubtedly.

I know a lot of people think that Clinton's presidency

was a wasted opportunity.

But he came to office in 1992

and left a stronger country in 2000.

I don't know if you can say of a president who served us well

and improved our material good

that it was a wasted opportunity.

And it was sure a lot of fun to watch.

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