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Mrs. Clinton and her family were doing their best to start “healing” over the revelations—with the not-so-subtle implication that if they could deal with this, then so could the country. 11 Among the leaders of the “let’s move on” caucus were feminists, who all but ignored the president’s workplace seduction of a woman barely out of her teens. They applauded their icon Hillary Clinton for standing by her man. 12
    At the time, there were endless stories about the fate of the Clintons’ marriage, many seeming to originate from sources close to the First Couple. Bill was left to sleep on the couch. His family wouldn’t talk to him. Bill spent hours talking to his dog as if he were a real person. At his 1999 State of the Union address, the president offered a long tribute to his wife and her good works. As he looked up at her in the visitors’ balcony of the House chamber, and on camera, he mouthed the words “I love you” to Hillary. She sat impassive.
    This of course was the official story—shame, then forgiveness, then eventual redemption. It’s what the country was meant to see. But others in the Clinton orbit tend toward the cynical. Most of the drama between the two was for public consumption. It wasn’t really what was going on behind closed doors.
    “They understand that politics is all about narrative,” a senior Clinton aide tells me. It was Bill Clinton who orchestrated his own public whipping, “the chief scriptwriter,” as the aide describes him. Recalling the scene with Clinton alone with Buddy, an aide laughs. “He had to go to the doghouse—literally,” he says, smiling at the mastery. “That wasn’t spontaneous!” To one friend of Hillary’s, the only believable aspect of the Bill Clinton pity party involved his dog. “The most emotional relationship in Bill’s life was Buddy the dog,” he says without a hint of a grin.
    Though it was to her advantage to stick with Bill, Hillary would’ve done it in any case and for a larger rationale. It was the same reason that led her to give up a high-powered law career in New York or Chicago more than two and a half decades earlier to toil in remote Little Rock and gamely fake a southern accent in the backward towns of the Ozarks to appeal to the Bubba vote. She was still, even then, deeply in love with her husband. Hillary felt the same thrill as when she first came across him as a student at Yale Law School, where she overheard a bearded, unkempt young man bragging about the watermelons in Arkansas as “the biggest . . . in the world.”
    “Who is that?” she asked a friend.
    “That’s Bill Clinton. He’s from Arkansas and that’s all he ever talks about.” 13
    “He’s really a difficult person, you know, and certainly difficult when you’re going to be a woman who is totally focused on him,” says Michael Medved, the conservative radio show host, who back then was an unapologetic liberal and a friend of Hillary’s in law school. He was among a number who begged Hillary not to date the guy, whom they saw as a brilliant but self-important ass. “She had the world’s most enormous crush on him,” Medved says. “You couldn’t say anything against him. Bill is without any question the love of her life. Attraction is mysterious.”
    Years of his adultery did tend to make Mrs. Clinton a little less goo-goo eyed about her husband, however, and she was anything but a wild-eyed romantic. Diane Blair was Hillary Clinton’s best friend, going back to the 1970s. (Blair died in 2000 of lung cancer at the age of sixty-one.) A friend of Blair’s recalled for me a story in the 1990s in which Mrs. Clinton became almost obsessed with the book The Bridges of Madison County. The book, by Robert James Waller, was a nationwide bestseller and would later become a film starring Meryl Streep. The First Lady’s interest in the book seemed unusual, but she kept prodding Blair to read it. Finally, Blair agreed while staying overnight at the