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a Shakespeare play, greeted everywhere with wild applause and cheers—this, she said is what drives their adversaries totally nuts, that they don’t bend, do not appear to be suffering.” 9
    At the same time, she milked the victim role. At an appearance before six hundred New Yorkers at Buffalo State College, when she was still an unannounced Senate candidate, she took questions for an hour from her largely female fan base. She couldn’t resist engaging in quintessential Clinton pandering, at one point mentioning, “You know, ever since I first came to Buffalo when I was a young girl . . .” 10
    Clutching a microphone, she delved into a wide range of policy issues. At one point, she touched awkwardly on the subject of divorce. “I know that there are problems,” she said. “I mean, marriage is hard. It is hard work, and I’d be the first to tell ya.” She smiled and the audience rewarded her with sympathetic cheers. When they were again silent, she added one more killer line. “When you have a child,” she said, “you have a special obligation.” The crowd responded with tears and more applause for the woman wronged. The wounded mother who persevered and held her family together. But despite the many carefully dropped hints, public and private, that she might be contemplating divorce, that was never really on the table. All throughout the Lewinsky ordeal, Hillary was far more concerned about her own career than her marriage.
    In the late summer of 1998, as he prepared to confess his affair with Monica Lewinsky in a live address to the nation, Bill Clinton was out of his element. Strikingly so. As eyewitnesses recalled the scene for me, the president’s complexion was gray, his speech unusually slow, his demeanor almost disoriented. He was “practically carried into the room” by longtime Arkansas friends and Hollywood producers Harry and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, one observer recalls. Absent from Bill Clinton’s moment of ultimate humiliation was his wife, his daughter, and even his press secretary, Mike McCurry, who, according to a reporter he spoke to, was so disgusted with his boss’s behavior that he could barely look at him. In an email, McCurry claimed to me that he was present, but admits to having been “frustrated” with the president. “I was not central to deciding what he should say because that was not my role,” McCurry disclosed, a somewhat bizarre statement for a president’s communication director. “But some part of me said, ‘You got to handle this on your own, big guy, because it is about you and not about the White House, the presidency, or our country.’ ”
    Propping up the president by holding his arms, the Thomasons bucked up their fellow Arkansan much as a manager would a wounded prize fighter. “You can do this,” they reassured the gray and sedate president. “You can do it.”
    And so Bill Clinton finally did what he almost never had to do in his life: admit he had lied repeatedly and been caught red-handed. For months the president had blamed everyone and everything for the Lewinsky affair. The Republicans had been mean to him. His mother died. Vince Foster died. Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated. Newt Gingrich and the GOP’s “Contract with America” had defamed him. The “mean-spirited” investigations of his own conduct and of Hillary’s. And, as his staff did, he tried to frame Lewinsky as the problem—the unstoppable predator who pulled a reluctant president into a tawdry affair. He felt sorry for himself, and as such could sometimes be a pathetic sight. “I just cracked,” he told friends. “I just cracked.”
    After the speech, the first family headed to Martha’s Vineyard for a family vacation and what appeared to be a very public flogging of the president by a furious wife and daughter. News cameras showed the president walking with only his dog, Buddy, at his side, while Hillary and Chelsea visibly shunned him. Aides let it be known that