Hillary wanted to 'wring Bill's neck' over Monica affair

By RUPERT CORNWELL

As holidays from hell go, they can't come much more hellish than the one Bill and Hillary Clinton spent on Martha's Vineyard in the summer of Monica in 1998.

"I felt nothing but profound sadness, disappointment and unresolved anger," writes the wronged spouse.

"I could barely speak to Bill and when I did it was a tirade. I read. I walked on the beach. He slept upstairs and I slept downstairs."

Thus Hillary Clinton on the ghastly days immediately after her husband finally reversed seven months of lies to confess to her that he had indeed engaged in "an inappropriate intimacy" with the White House intern - the episode that inevitably will dominate the hoopla over her memoirs, one of the most keenly awaited publishing events of the year.

Living History, all 580 pages of it, appears in the bookstores on Monday, preceded by a prime time interview the previous night with Barbara Walters - and by an advance print run of one million by Simon and Schuster.

"I've touched on the good times and not so good times," Mrs Clinton said yesterday (Weds).

But forget the debacle over her plan to reform America's health care, or the roller coaster of Middle East peacemaking. Punters will be parting with $28 for one thing above all: Hillary's version of the Monica Lewinsky affair which threatened her marriage and overshadows Bill Clinton's eight years in the White House, and led to the first impeachment of a sitting President in 130 years.

The excerpts obtained by the Associated Press suggest they will not be disappointed. Ever since the first reports of the dalliance surfaced in January 1998, the 42nd President insisted nothing had happened.

"I did not have sex with that woman."

To Hillary he insisted that he had befriended the intern when she asked for help in getting a job, and that he had "talked to her a few times." But when Clinton was summoned before a grand jury, the game was up. On the morning of Saturday August 15 1998, two days before he was to testify, he woke up his wife, paced at her bedside and "and told me that the situation was far more serious than he had previously acknowledged."

Whether Hillary should have been surprised is arguable, after the Gennifer Flowers affair, the Paula Jones allegations, and sundry other tales of Bill's philanderings during his days as Governor of Arkansas. But surprised she seems to have been, and devastated.

"I could hardly breathe," she recounts. "Gulping for air I started crying and yelling at him, 'What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?' I was furious and getting more so by the second. He just stood there, saying over and over again, 'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea.'"

Until then, according to Mrs Clinton, she truly had been convinced the whole Lewinsky affair was - in her famous phrase which has entered America's political vocabulary - a "vast right wing conspiracy" mounted by her husband's political foes who could still not accept the results of two White House elections.

"I was dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged that I'd believed him at all," Hillary writes. On August 17, Bill Clinton gave his cringe-making testimony to the Grand Jury ("it depends what the meaning of 'is' is") and a few days later, the family left for their long scheduled holiday on the Vineyard.

With some understatement Lisa Caputo, press secretary to Mrs Clinton when she was First Lady, yesterday described the atmosphere at the Clinton's borrowed house at the exclusive resort island as "a bit surreal."

As Hillary tells it, "Buddy the dog came along to keep Bill company. He was the only member of our family who was still willing to."

Whether or not Mrs Clinton was naive in accepting her husband's initial denials, few wronged women have had to live out their humilation and embarrassment in such public circumstances. She gives a hint of her anguish when she writes that "the most difficult decisions I have made in my life were to stay married to Bill and to run for the Senate from New York."

In fact, she says, the latter helped heal the wounds between them, allowing the couple to talk about something other than the future of their relationship: "Over time we both began to relax."

Whatever the precise state of the Clinton marriage, it seems certain to survive. Indeed Living History is probably as much a springboard for the future as record of a turbulent past. Mrs Clinton, by all accounts, has been a resounding success on Capitol Hill since she became Senator in January 2001 and many Democrats wish - none too privately - that she would throw her hat into the ring to challenge George W. Bush next year.

In fact 2004 is out. Far more likely is a presidential bid by Hillary in 2008, assuming Mr Bush is re-elected this time around. She has been careful not to rule out the possibility. In the meantime, she is the Democratic party's most effective fund-raiser after her husband himself.

Her summer-long national tour to promote the book is bound to eclipse the toilings of the nine declared Democratic candidates as they struggle to win national attention. Polls show that if she were to run, Hillary would beat the lot of them hollow. First, however, she will have to banish the ghosts of the past, and Living History, billed as a "complete and candid" telling of her White House years, is clearly part of the process.

She insists that Whitewater, the arcane story of an Arkansas land deal gone wrong, "never seemed real because it wasn't." The only mistake of the Clintons lay in the poor public relations employed as the controversy grew.

For its part, Simon and Schuster, which shelled out an $8m advance, is hoping that the old rule holds true, that books by First Ladies sell much better than ones by Presidents. Proof will come next year, when Bill Clinton is due to publish his own memoirs, for which Alfred Knopf has paid a staggering $10m advance.


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