Clinton & The Clintons | Absolute History

This is the story of a man who made it to the White House from humble beginnings, and of a wife who became a contender for the presidency. It's also a story of political destruction and personal survival. Bill Clinton's first term as US President began in 1993, after he beat the Republican George Bush Sr. Bill won a second term in 1996. There were trophies and triumphs, but there were attacks on the Clintons' integrity by their right-wing enemies. Their financial dealings were questioned, and friendships investigated. Bimbo eruptions scandalized Bill's presidency and led to his impeachment. Jennifer Flowers and Paula Jones preceded the devastating exposures surrounding Monica Lewinsky, the affair that Bill tried to deny. His betrayals cost Hillary the presidency. Barack Obama became President of the United States, while Hillary settled for the lesser role of Secretary of State. At the age of seven, Bill Clinton had a dream. He wanted to make life better for the people of his home state, Arkansas. In 1992, after his nomination as Democratic candidate, he visited his birth town, Hope, Arkansas. He had left home years before, but home had not left him. Members of his mother's family, the Cassidys, were waiting to greet him. Bill received a warm welcome from the extended family he had left behind, including his great-uncle, Buddy, one of the lights of his early life. Bill recalled his early years. I remember living in that old two-story house where I lived with my grandparents. I remember going to my grandfather's grocery store, and big jar of Jackson cookies that were there on the shelf. It was a wonderful little small town where, you know, it seemed that everybody knew everybody else. And it was segregated like all southern towns were then. And I remember my grandmother and grandfather opposing the closing of Central High School to keep black students out. They were for integrating the schools. It was interesting. I mean, my grandfather had a great school education, and my grandmother had graduated from high school from a tiny little school out in Bodcar, Arkansas. Bill was reunited with the uncles and cousins of his youth. His own father, William Blythe, had died before his birth. His mother, Virginia, recalled the difficulties of his childhood. On August the 18th, 1946, I walked to the Malco Theatre in downtown Hope to see a picture called Tomorrow is Forever. And it must have been prophetic, because the next day Bill was born. And I kept looking at this child and didn't feel that I was going to be able to earn enough money. She went back to New Orleans to finish her nursing education. She became a nurse anesthetist. And it was, you know, tough for her to leave me. And during this time she was away, one time my grandmother and I went down on a train to visit her. I remember we pulled out of the station and my mother kneeled at the side of the track and cried because she felt so bad that I was leaving. It's one of my most vivid memories of childhood. Bill's visit to his aunt and other relatives was an emotional journey, a time to revisit the past before facing election for the presidency. During their reunion, his great-uncle, Butty, presented him with a special gift, the Bible he had used in his grandparents' home. It brought back memories for Bill. He was basically raised by his grandparents, his maternal grandparents, for the first two years of his life. And it was an atmosphere of a lot of conflict. His grandmother was, as his own mother described her, a very vindictive and somewhat unbalanced person. And so in that household, even though his grandfather was quite kind to him, his grandfather had a little store, and little Billy used to go to the store and spend time with his grandfather, but the atmosphere in the household was very chaotic. I, you know, sort of almost like bedlam. And I lived in another house, not too far up that way, when I was five and six. And then when I was seven, I moved out. He gave me a family Bible that my grandmother gave me when I was seven, with pictures of my father and mother. It was really nice. Can you use it to be sworn in with? I could, I guess. Might do if it's really nice. The circumstances of his youth forged his enigmatic personality. And Bill's widowed mother, Virginia, had a streak of wildness. Bill's mother was an incredibly flamboyant, pleasure-seeking party girl. She loved the way she looked. She wore sort of outrageous outfits. She would spend an hour every morning putting on what she called her paint. She loved to gamble. When she later moved to Hot Springs, which was a wild west kind of atmosphere with all kinds of mafia characters coming to town and gambling, and there was a racetrack there. And his mother would go to the racetrack absolutely every day. And at night, she would go to nightclubs, and she would often get on the stage and sing country songs and drink and carouse. And so she was a real pleasure seeker. She once said, I don't have any rules. There's only one rule to follow in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and that is enjoy yourself. Bill grew up in the Deep South at a time of social tension. Hope, the name of his boyhood town, became a symbol for the future. Here, Bill was brought up by his grandparents in the frequent absence of his mother. He developed a coping technique for the conflicts that arose later in his personal and public lives. In fact, he's even talked about having had to learn to live parallel lives, the life that he presented to the world and the turmoil that he experienced at home, which he disguised, which he hid from his friends. And he was at his most insightful, I think, when he talked about how he became accustomed to keeping secrets and how he understood what it was like to live a secret life. And at one point, he talked about the sort of disgust that he would feel at having to live these two different lives. And that pattern, I think, certainly was evidence in later life when he became a persistent womanizer. But I think the notion that he could lie and get away with things was partly a product of the way his mother kind of gave him no limits. Neighboring Little Rock was the scene for civil unrest in the 1960s. The young Bill was profoundly moved by the last speech of black leader Martin Luther King. It's the greatest political speech of my lifetime. It was so powerful. It was so true. It was so moving. It was such a wake-up call for the country. I was heartbroken when Martin Luther King died. Washington burned. I was in school there then. I drove supplies down into the burned-out part of the city. It was a terrible time, and it just broke the hearts and spirits of millions of people. It was only two months later when Robert Kennedy was killed. You know, those two deaths, they changed a lot of things for my generation, for this country. And if both of them had lived, I think the last 20 years would have been a lot different for America and much better. Arkansas was divided on racial lines, but Bill's grandparents were unconventional in their attitudes. His political awareness began early. His grandmother and his grandfather ran this small shop in Little Rock, and most of their clientele were local blacks in Little Rock. And I think that gave Bill this ease and this easiness, this fluency around African-Americans. You know, when they talk about him being the first African-American president, he grew up with black kids. The third very important woman influence was one of his early school teachers in his primary school, who I think was the first to realize just how bright he was and how much he could be pushed and how much he enjoyed reading. His mother had been married four times when she died of cancer in 1994. Bill revisited her grave in Little Rock a few years later. Virginia had seen her son become president from the most unlikely background. People who were like the bankers and the lawyers, they thought of the Clintons as white trash. And this was the amazing thing about Clinton, that he came through that, he overcame it. The bright scholarship boy, like so many of his generation, who got a good education and went on and made something pretty amazing of himself. Virginia was buried beside Bill's father. As Virginia Cassidy, she married William Jefferson Blythe, Bill's biological father, who had previously been married twice. He died in an In 1953, Virginia took her seven-year-old son from Hope to live in nearby Hot Springs. She had married Roger Clinton, a heavy drinker with a tendency to domestic violence, but he was the only father Bill ever knew. Roger Clinton was an alcoholic, a good man, and if he ever loved anything in this world, it was Bill. When I was in the ninth grade, I think he was, he kind of got, he got violent with my mother one night and I just pulled through the door and told him he wasn't going to do that anymore. I just said, stand up, I have something to say to you. And obviously he couldn't stand up. And so he got into his face and he said, daddy, if you're not able to stand up, I'll help you. You must stand to hear what I have to say. And some way or other, he stood. And Bill told him then, don't you ever, ever lay your hand on my mother again. I never stopped loving my stepfather or thinking he was a really good person. And later on, I wish I'd known more about human psychology as a child than I did, because I came to realize that he was a good person. And that the problem was not that he didn't love my mother or me or my brother. The problem was that he didn't think enough of himself. In his teens, Bill formally changed his surname from Blythe to Clinton. He now had a younger half-brother, Roger, who became an actor. Ten years his senior, Bill protected little Roger from his father's drunken abuse. My brother took over the leadership role in our family when he was just a kid. In old pictures, it seems like he always had his arm around me. When I was first starting school at the age of five or six, he went down to the courthouse and had his last name changed to the same as mine. Bill was always interested in current events. One morning, he couldn't have been more than seven years old. He read where Arkansas was on the bottom in education. He remarked to me at the time, did you know if Arkansas would let me, one of these days, I'm going to get us off the bottom. Well, you know, you don't pay a lot of attention to a child saying something like that. In July of 1963, I went to Washington and met President Kennedy at the Boys Nation program. He came out and, you know, made a few little comments. We were all standing there in alphabetical order, so Arkansas was near the front of the line, and I was the biggest kid there. So I made sure that I got to shake hands with him, and I remember just thinking what an incredible country this was, that somebody like me who came from a little town in Arkansas who, you know, had no money, no political position or anything, would be given the opportunity to meet the president. When he came home from Boys Nation with this picture of John Kennedy and himself shaking hands, I've never seen such an expression on a man's face in my life. He just had such pride, and I knew then that government, in some form, would be his goal. After graduating from Washington in 1967, Bill won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford to study government. From humble student lodgings, the saxophone-playing 21-year-old launched himself into the pleasures of Oxford University life. He always plunged into things, the social life, the girls, the studying, what he really loved about Oxford. I remember he told me once that in his first year at Oxford he read 300 books, and that Oxford gave him a sense of time, a sense of being in an intellectual environment where he could just pursue his own interest. Bill's time at Oxford coincided with student unrest and protests. There were riots in London's Grosvenor Square over the Vietnam War, which Bill strongly opposed. As a student, he avoided the military draft, and he began to explore politics on a wider scale. It was at Oxford that he pursued this other great interest that he had, which was in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. We'd just had the Prague Spring, the attempt in Czechoslovakia to build a more humane kind of socialism, and the place was still alive with this kind of sense of potential, of peaceful revolution, and so on. Bill loved that. After Oxford and Yale, Bill went back to Arkansas to fulfill his childhood dreams. In Little Rock, the 30-year-old rising Democrat politician was elected Attorney General in 1976. We're working hardest on trying to prepare for the AP&L right here in case it comes before the Public Service Commission starting Monday. At Yale, he met Hillary Rodham from a middle-class Republican family. She was a feminist with a strong sense of her own identity, encouraged by her mother, a closet Democrat. Among other things, her mother, perhaps because of the kind of environment that she grew up in, really emphasized the need to be strong, and she encouraged Hillary to be a very scrappy little girl, and kind of emphasized that, and emphasizing trying to grow stronger when you're faced with adversaries, which is certainly a characteristic we've seen carry through later in life. I had a wonderful upbringing by my parents and my schooling and my church life that opened my eyes to a much broader world than the one just within my own suburb of Chicago. So although my father had very strong beliefs, they were of a Republican party that unfortunately seems to be vanishing in many parts of our country. Bill, the future Democrat president, met Hillary, the Republican daughter, in the library at Yale University. He was standing in the hallway outside the law library at Yale, which is this wonderful Gothic structure, and he was surrounded by all of these fellow classmates who were trying to convince him to be on the Yale Law Journal. I said, look, I'm going home to Arkansas, and I don't, I'm not going to get a big Wall Street job. I'm not going to go clerk on the Supreme Court. I'm going home, be a country lawyer. I don't know if I want to be on the Law Journal. And he was listening politely, but he was watching me because I was watching him because I was in the law library at this long table studying, and I finally thought this is, you know, kind of silly. And finally she just put down the book she was reading and walked the entire length of the law library and walked up to me and she said, if you're going to keep looking at me and I'm going to keep looking back, we at least ought to know each other. And I'm Hillary Rodham. And what's your name? I couldn't remember my name. I mean, I thought that he was great looking and he was fun and he was just somebody who challenged and made you happy all the time. Yeah, I've just never met anybody like Bill. She came to Arkansas and we were driving around one day together and we drove past this beautiful old house. And she talked about what a pretty house it was. There was a sale sign in front of it. And I remember she went away somewhere and I'd pick her up at the airport and I drove her back and I said, you know, I bought that house you liked. She said, what? I said, that house you like, I bought it, so you better marry me because I can't live in this big house by myself. And that's when she finally said yes. Hillary bought her wedding dress the night before. In 1980, their only child, Chelsea, was born. Their love for their daughter would hold their troubled marriage together. Bill's becoming a father and having Chelsea was one of the, you know, really great experiences of his life because it was something his own father never got to do, you know, never got to see his own child. I was there when Chelsea was born and it was still, I guess, the most incredible thing I've ever been through. You know, I just, I still remember how squinched up she was when she came out. I still remember how profoundly grateful I was that, you know, Hillary was okay and that I had lived to see it. I mean, I was very aware at that moment that that's something that my father hadn't done. He would just sit for hours and look at his daughter, you know, trying to take in this miracle. But then he would do things that just would knock me out. I mean, I remember one day when Chelsea was like three months old, she was learning to roll over and I was in another room and he was watching her on the bed in our bedroom and he yells at me, tells me to come in quick and he says, look at this. And I thought he was going to tell me she was rolling over, which of course I knew, which I thought was sweet of him. But no, he was going to tell me, look, she, look at this. She rolls over to the edge of the bed and then she rolls back. She must understand gravity. And I said, oh, right. About 20 minutes later, I hear this plunk as my daughter unlearns gravity. Right. The family made their home in Little Rock, the state capital of Arkansas, where Bill had been elected governor. In all, he held the role for 11 years. Hillary became a working mother, a skilled lawyer. She was the first woman to be made a full partner of the Rose law firm. Until they entered the White House, she had a higher salary than her husband. Aged 32, Bill was the youngest governor in the United States. He was nicknamed the boy governor. All I expect from you is what I will earnestly try and give back. And that is that you be honest and open. Bill and Hillary had become a power couple driven by political agenda, which often challenged tradition. He made some big mistakes in his first two year tenure. He pushed through a very liberal program that did not go down well with with the Arkansas voters. And Hillary was part of that big initial mistake because she kept her maiden name and she sort of kept this persona that she had, which was of a, you know, of an ardent feminist. She didn't wear makeup. She wore thick glasses. And this did not sit well with the citizens of Arkansas who were accustomed to different kinds of women. Within the governor's mansion, Hillary assumed an unusually strong role. She planned strategies with Bill, developing her own pet projects, which she later continued as the president's wife. Hillary was very much his partner. In Arkansas, it is where they first acquired the nickname Billary, which to some people was a term of admiration and to other people it was a term of derision. But what it meant was that she was really very involved in helping him with his campaigns, helping him strategize, making sure he stayed on schedule because he was quite undisciplined. She helped him with some policies. She was involved in getting early child care programs started, rural health care, and then she later worked with him on some education programs. It was a long way to the White House, but the journey for the Arkansas governor was made easier by his magnetic qualities, which won over the Democratic Party. Bill is a man of extraordinary charm for both men and for women. He forges very, very strong friendships and loyalties with his male friends, but of course also with women. I mean, he's big, he's good looking, he's got this endless charm, this easy smile, and as my wife says, he's got a twinkle. Yes, he's hugely attracted to women, and always has been, and of course he's attracted to them as well. But I think it did help him with a number of people, particularly fundraising, where there's an awful lot of very wealthy widows in the Democratic Party. In 1991, with Hillary's prompting, Bill decided that the time was right to make a bid for the presidency. It was a brave move. He would be taking on the incumbent Republican president, George Bush Sr. I proudly announce my candidacy for President of the United States of America. However, during the New Hampshire primaries in 1992, the first sign of trouble began. It was almost an omen for the future. The Clinton campaign was nearly derailed when a woman named Jennifer Flowers claimed to have been his mistress for 12 years. Hillary's reaction to his betrayal was crucial to the continuation of the campaign. For the first time, it put Hillary onto the national stage, because Hillary then, at her suggestion, Hillary decided that they had to knock this story on the head. And they went jointly onto one of the big TV programs. You know, I'm not sitting here as some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I'm sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he's been through, and what we've been through together. And you know, if that's not enough for people, then heck, don't vote for him. Hillary's strategy saved the campaign. She believed in his ability to become the President, and she became his driving force. We cannot stand by for one more year, and watch what is happening to it. This is a woman whose instincts he really, really believed in. It was Hillary, don't forget, in 1991, who woke up one morning in the governor's mansion, at a time when George Bush had about a 70% approval rating, and said, this is the time you're going to run, because we can win this one. And I tell you, it is time for us to take a new direction. I am tired of seeing this country ground down by the we can't crowd. It's time for the we can't Bill's style was in the tradition of his hero, President Kennedy. The common touch, added to his personal charisma, would sweep him to victory in November 1992. With his running mate, Al Gore, Bill was now the 42nd President of the United States. The boy from the poor state of Arkansas, had become the most powerful person on Earth. His election to the White House was a watershed for America, and for the world. He had promised change, and now there were heavy expectations on his shoulders. And his enemies would watch for every chance to bring him down. The White House was also a museum, with the echoes of past presidents and first ladies all around them. Kennedy's elegant wife, Jackie, cast her spell over the historic building. In 1963, she presented on television, the White House she had restored to its former glory. Hillary could not compete with Jackie's elite style, and felt out of place in Washington society. Jackie was much more sophisticated, and perhaps less paranoid than Hillary was. Coming from the background she did, and surrounded by the clan from Arkansas, I think they tended to feel very much outsiders in Washington, and I think they saw a sort of hostile Washington clique around them, whether that existed or not. It probably did a bit, because the Clintons were not very good at the Washington insiders, whereas Jackie, you know, she was fine with that. She had a very nice life in Georgetown when she was a senator's wife. She knew everybody socially. She had no problems about thinking there were outsiders trying to get her. The Clintons failed to recreate the Kennedy's Camelot, that all-too-brief golden age in the White House. Instead, they set a very casual style. Outgoing First Lady Barbara Bush welcomed Hillary. There would be big changes to the Bush White House. I sort of compare the Clinton White House to, after this very regimented, disciplined place, that they were like a couple of dorm parents who were overseeing a bunch of unruly kids, and he was the one who was letting them all stay up past curfew, and she was the one who was trying to impose, in a sort of haphazard way, rules. But it was a place where boom boxes played in the corridors, where there were pizza boxes strewn about in various offices. People didn't wear jackets. There were guys running around in ponytails and earrings, and it was just a completely different atmosphere from what had preceded it. Bill ran a chaotic schedule, which frustrated his staff. He lacked organization, as his friend and a former Secretary of State, Mickey Cantor, explains. People like myself are too obsessive. We want to have an agenda. We want to get the questions answered and move on. So meetings tended to be too long, too much off-point, and the White House was somewhat stuck. He would think nothing of having meetings that would last seven hours, that would go... he would blow the schedule apartment every day. They called it Clinton Standard Time. He was always late. His aides could never predict when he was going to come down in the morning, because he often stayed up till all hours of the night. Bill welcomed many guests to the White House. He was a cordial host at hundreds of events during his eight years as President. Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton loved to be around people. And where most Presidents would go up to bed after a long, long day, and it's 10.30 at night, and people are still in the White House, for most people, that single event in the White House at a dinner, for many people, it's the only time they will be there, and so therefore they're reluctant to leave. And so you would think a President would want to go upstairs, you know, say a good night politely, but leave. He wouldn't. He just loved it. There were White House evenings, unlike any in the time of George and Barbara Bush. The Clintons had a fancy dress ball, where Hillary joined in the fun, for once casting off her feminist side. Hillary dressed up as one of his fantasies, that is as Dolly Parton, with the big blonde wig, and this very low-cut bozis, and red and white gingham-checked blouse kind of skirt, and so on. And Bill could hardly keep his eyes off her, and could barely keep his hands off her. Towards the end of the party, at the end of the evening, she took him by the hand and began to haul him upstairs, and they stopped at that sort of landing, where there's the famous portrait of John Kennedy in the White House. And she looked down at the assembled throng and said, well, the dress is going back in the morning. Then she went like this, and she said, well, I think I'm going to keep the wig, and off they went. As President and First Lady, the Clintons had to behave more formally when receiving heads of state. In October 1994, the President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, was received by Bill and Hillary on the steps of the White House. By then, Hillary was almost a co-president. She had her own staff and office, nicknamed Hillaryland. Now, she was different. She's probably different than any other spouse who ever served in the White House, any First Lady, because of her background, her education, her experience, her training. The fact is that Hillary Clinton had been involved in major issues in the United States for years, in her own right. And so therefore, you sort of had a built-in senior advisor, the senior advisor to the President among this couple. Look, he used to kid about, buy one, get one free. But the fact is, that's exactly what happened. As Bill settled into the presidency, problems from the past reappeared. In July 1993, the suicide of Vince Foster, White House counsel, and Bill's boyhood friend, shocked the nation. At the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, he had been Hillary's colleague, and he knew the secrets of a land deal the Clintons had struck on the whitewater development in Arkansas. He was dealing with all sorts of things that a White House counsel typically would not be dealing with, plus this personal pressure of having his former colleague be his boss, and a very tough and exacting boss at that. She would say, fix it, Vince. And he was a sensitive person. As it turns out, from talking to people who knew him back in college, back in Arkansas, he had a tendency toward depression, and it was exacerbated by his White House experience. Foster's death placed the Clintons under scrutiny. Even as they attended his funeral with their daughter Chelsea, suspicions were growing about Foster's involvement in their business and tax affairs. And in the aftermath of his suicide, they were involved in taking papers out of his office, and the whole question of why they were doing it, what they were taking, became one of the biggest problems going forward that the Clinton White House had to deal with, because there were suspicions of cover-up. All the questions surrounding the Clintons' losses from the whitewater property, Hillary's role in working with this savings and loan that went bankrupt and cost tens of millions of dollars to American taxpayers, began to bubble up in the first year of the Clinton White House. World leaders fell for Clinton's irresistible charm. In 1993, he brought Israel and the PLO together, when their leaders Rabin and Arafat signed a peace agreement. In 1998, he won over Russian President Boris Yeltsin when he visited the Kremlin. Yeltsin put up with an awful lot from Clinton, particularly the enlargement of NATO. I don't think any other president could have got the Russians to agree, even reluctantly, to bringing in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, all of these former members of the Warsaw Pact, bringing them into NATO, which Clinton did in 1999 at their 50th anniversary NATO summit. In 1998, eager to maintain America's historic special relationship with Britain, Clinton put on a glitzy White House dinner for Prime Minister Tony Blair. Throughout his presidency, Clinton used his diplomatic skills in helping British leaders end years of sectarian violence in divided Northern Ireland. It just seemed to me the right thing to do. I decided to change America's policy in the hope that in the end, not only the Irish, but the British too would be better off. Just what a rare find he is as a politician. And that's a good word. You can't move a democracy unless you're a good politician, and he certainly is. While Bill is credited with advancing the cause of peace, Hillary too played her part. She was deeply involved with women in Northern Ireland, as you may or may not know, trying to organise them in terms of trying to create a sense of possibility for the peace. In Dublin too, Bill was hailed as a peacemaker. He had argued his case with the then British Prime Minister John Major for talks with all Irish political parties. It was really Bill pushing it so personally and making it clear that the American presidency was committed, and was committed despite the pleas of John Major, the closest ally, to go ahead and do this. Because Bill believed that there was a political opening at this time, that if you did give Sinn Féin a chance to cut the umbilical cord with the men of violence, with the IRA, if you forced them to be as good as their word in saying we're going to go for the ballot box, then that was a kind of an opening into which he could put his own personal crowbar of charm and pressure and gripping their elbows, and it worked. Clinton tried to end war in the Balkans by sending peacekeeping troops to preserve the terms of the Dayton Accord signed in 1995. Today's agreement moves us closer to the ultimate goal of a genuine peace. But in Rwanda, Clinton failed to end genocide when death squads murdered hundreds of thousands. He decided against intervention. In Rwanda, as I say over and over again, it's one of my greatest regrets. But we look at it backwards and say, well, I had to know that 700,000 or 800,000 people could be killed with machetes in 90 days. And as far as I know, there's no precedent for that in the history of the world. He kicks himself around internally, even today, over Rwanda. He believes he should have done something there, and he is despondent over the fact that he didn't. He thinks it's one of the biggest mistakes he ever made. Pursuing his policy of free trade, Clinton strengthened economic and political ties with China. In 1998, he made a nine-day trip to China. He took time out from his successful meetings with Chinese leaders to join Hillary and Chelsea on the Great Wall. Chelsea and Hillary visited Africa on safari. Only 12 when her father became president, Chelsea had grown into a confident young woman. We have a big problem with drugs, and we have a big problem with people not thinking they have a future. The president celebrated his 50th birthday in August 1996. He honoured Hillary's had not lived to see the occasion. I wish my wonderful father-in-law were still living. I miss him. Lord, I miss my mother. She liked a good party, you know, and she would have liked this tonight. On his first day as president, he had taken her to see the White House Rose Garden, where he first met Kennedy. Virginia died in 1994. Part of that anger had to do with his ambivalent feelings about his mother. On the one hand, she showered him with praise. On the other hand, she was absent a lot. And I think that that caused some conflict within him, and also probably led to some of his attitudes towards women. Well, he later wrote about the deep anger that he had inside, that he was always trying to keep under control. People enabled it, basically. People allowed him to become angry. They were very attentive to him in trying to keep it under control, so he didn't show it in public. They would actually have what they called pre-briefs, where they would ask him really hostile questions, and he would blow off steam. And then he could go out in the public and be, you know, sort of calm in dealing with some of hostile questions. In 1996, Bill was re-elected. He was the first two-term Democrat president since Franklin Roosevelt. At the inauguration gala, Hillary danced with Bill's brother Roger, and Chelsea with her father. Soon, Monica Lewinsky, only a few years older than Chelsea, would threaten not just the Clinton marriage, but also the Clinton presidency. She had an intimate relationship with Clinton in the heart of the White House, where she started work as an intern. Interns are these ambitious, bright, politically motivated kids from well-to-do families who go to the White House, go to the West Wing, to get some experience. Monica proved a temptation too many for Clinton, who had a history of misconduct with women. I rather feel sorry for the guy, in a way, that he calls for a pizza, one of the young interns brings it, and she goes in, turns and flashes her thong at him. And for a middle-aged man of Clinton's appetites and of the kind of restraint under which he was operating, this must have been He took extraordinary risks when he was having his assignations with Monica Lewinsky, not least of which was the fact that this was all taking place in the secret, you know, or not the private office behind the Oval Office, in that little cluster of rooms back there, and he had his secretary bring her in by circuitous routes, and this went on for 18 months. At least one other president with potent sex appeal had liaisons in the White House, Clinton's idol, John Kennedy. There certainly is a thrill about having sexual affairs in the White House. There you are, getting away with it, at the really top level, and I think that always has an appeal, a thrill. Unlike Kennedy, Clinton was caught out. With his marriage and position under threat, he denied the affair, and denied asking Monica to lie. But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. These allegations are false. Kenneth Starr, the independent council investigating Whitewater, was given secret tapes of Monica discussing her relationship with the president, but in a deposition, Clinton had denied their affair. Still supported in public by Hillary, he was forced to testify to a grand jury. Ever the optimist, he seemed confident of the outcome. I am looking forward to the opportunity in the next few days of testifying. I will do so completely and truthfully. I am anxious to do it. The grand jury grilled Clinton for four hours over the embarrassing details of his liaisons with Monica. This is the president of the free world, and we are demeaning not just his dignity, but our dignity collectively by doing this. And I think there came a point where the kind of, you know, the baiting of the president, the people just felt it had all gone too far, and it wasn't being done for any motives other than political. Hillary dismissed the hounding of Bill as a right-wing conspiracy, but he had to admit to the American people that he had misled them. Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part, for which I am solely and completely responsible. Kenneth Starr's report was sent to Congress in September 1998 and then released over the internet. The public were informed of every intimate detail the president had confessed under oath during the grand jury's interrogation. I do. With the support of his loyal vice president Al Gore, Clinton apologized for his behavior at a breakfast prayer meeting in the White House. I don't think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned. Church leaders were impressed by his humility, but would his wife forgive him? Hillary later said, I hadn't decided whether to fight for my husband and my marriage, but I was resolved to fight for my president. After he had appeared before the grand jury, made his statement to the American public, the next day they went up to Martha's Vineyard for a vacation, and by all public indications, they were totally estranged. People around them said that the atmosphere was just arctic, was so cold. Yet, when they got to Martha's Vineyard and moved into the house where they were staying, Bill Clinton was having to deal with an attack on Al Qaeda, which had just bombed two American embassies in Africa. So he was in the middle of coming up with his response. Hillary Clinton kind of put her anger aside and sat down with him and helped him write his speech. I thought that was so revealing of how, even in the middle of a huge crisis like this, the two of them, in the end, worked together. But there was more trouble. Another woman, Paula Jones, accused Clinton of sexual harassment. He paid her $850,000 in an out-of-court settlement. However, he had lied in a deposition, and this obstruction of justice led to his impeachment. Clinton faced the cameras. But I hope it will be embraced by the Senate. I hope there will be a constitutional and fair means of resolving this matter in a prompt manner. I do not regard this impeachment vote as some great badge of shame. I do not, because I do not believe it was warranted, and I don't think it was right. I just don't have bad feelings about that. But neither do I have feelings of anger and bitterness against those who did what they did, whether they believed it or whether it was political or whatever. I do think he has suffered from a persecution complex that also goes back to his mother. It came out later on in his view toward people who were against him. It became a highly developed theory in the White House when Hillary expressed it as the vast right-wing conspiracy. Obviously, there were people on the right who were arrayed against them, but they had a tendency to see a lot of enemies in a lot of places that may not indeed have been enemies. Now that the Senate has fulfilled its constitutional responsibility, bringing this process to a conclusion, it is therefore ordered in a judge that the said William Jefferson... After his acquittal by the Senate, Bill tried to explain his lapses. It happened under circumstances in which people who have lived parallel lives become quite vulnerable. It happened at a time when I was angry. I was under stress. I was afraid I was going to lose my fight with the Republican Congress. As I said, I was in this titanic fight for the future of the country and an inevitable fight with my old demons. So I won the public fight and lost the private one. And then Starr turned the private one into a legal, constitutional, and public one. Hillary became a New York senator. She wanted to be the first female president. Bill had balanced the US budget, but his scandals would still be against her. It's a legacy that was so damaged by a lot of the Clintons' sort of self-inflicted problems. The many investigations, obviously the Monica Lewinsky story is going to be kind of right up there in the first or second paragraph of any assessment written about the Clinton White House. There was one entire year lost as a result of that scandal and the subsequent impeachment proceedings in the House and the Senate. Bill had balanced the economy and achieved much in foreign policy, but it was not enough when faced with a charismatic young newcomer. Hillary lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, who was elected president in a landslide victory. I think Hillary Clinton would have had a better shot at making it to the White House if she hadn't been married to Bill Clinton, because I think Bill Clinton has been baggage for her in the course of this campaign. Whereas an awful lot of what Hillary is about, which is the first woman to make it to this kind of level of American politics, the first woman who really I think is credible in American political terms as a presidential candidate, I think she's been weakened by all of the right-wing animosities that the Clinton presidency has stirred up. Obama did not choose Hillary as his vice president. She became Secretary of State, an important role, but one outside the White House. For Bill, there is always a place called hope.