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think that he also was aware that he was taking on somebody basically incompatible.” Jackie knew about his cheating and was deeply disturbed. Referring to the intervention he staged with Kennedy before he pursued the presidency, Forbes said, “He did express surprise that his slip was showing to that extent.”
    Betty Ford was less accommodating than Jackie. The Fords had a loving marriage, and there is no evidence that President Ford cheated on Betty, but he was a flirt. Once, when Mexican American singer Vikki Carr came to perform at a state dinner,Betty seethed when she saw the two giggling together. At the end of the evening, she watched as the President escorted Carr out of the White House and overheard the singer ask Ford what his favorite Mexican dish was. When she heard her husband’s reply—“You are”—it was too much for her. “That woman will never get into the White House again,” she declared.
    Each of these first ladies, from Jackie Kennedy to Michelle Obama, has had complete and utter devotion to her husband, and at a cost to her own career, each has been unswervingly loyal to the man she married. When Bill Clinton met Hillary he was in awe of her intellect, and mutual friends warned him to be careful about his womanizing. Susan Thomases, an old friend of both Clintons, told him to give up any hope of marrying Hillary. “She’s too good for you,” she said. “She’s so nice, and she’s so brilliant, and she’s so straight.” But their political partnership worked because Hillary fell in love with Bill and was completely devoted to him. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Thomases issued a warning similar to the one Forbes gave to JFK thirty-six years earlier: “You’re stupid enough to blow this whole presidential thing over your dick. And if that turns out to be true, buddy, I’m going home, and I’m taking people with me.” Thomases says President Clinton didn’t cheat on Hillary during the campaign because he “knew that I would land on his neck with both feet.”
    But Clinton’s past came back to haunt him in the White House. One overnight White House guest of the Clintons remembers hearing the phone ring in the hallway of the second-floor residence around midnight. The President picked it up, and after a moment slumped over and yelled, “Oh shit !” and slammed the phone down. Clinton straightened himself up and continued entertaining his guests well into the early morning hours, as though nothing had happened. The next morning the houseguests—there were alwayshouseguests during the Clinton years—got up and went to the sunny Solarium, with its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Washington Monument and the Mall, to have a quiet breakfast. The Washington Post , the New York Times , and the Wall Street Journal were laid out on a table and right away the guests could see what had upset the President the night before: Paula Jones had just filed a formal lawsuit accusing him of making an unwanted sexual advance toward her when he was governor of Arkansas.
    It was just the beginning. Unlike Jackie, Hillary had no choice but to address her husband’s philandering in a very public way. His affair with Monica Lewinsky, which occurred between November 1995 and March 1997 and was finally revealed to the public in January 1998, shook their marriage to its core. It was “a near crisis in their relationship,” according to Thomases. He had humiliated Hillary, but in the end she would not leave him. Like Pat Nixon during Watergate, she stopped reading the newspapers at the height of the barrage and blamed others, in this case Republicans, for trying to bring her husband down. “She worked out a resolution that worked for her,” Thomases said. “It was important for her to keep their marriage together.” Shirley Sagawa, who was Hillary’s deputy chief of staff when she was first lady, said that Monica Lewinsky was a “terrible distraction” and that members of Hillary’s