Clinton rebounded with his State of the Union address. (AP)

Page Two

The State of the Union

It was the day for Clinton's State of the Union address, an event the president and his staff had been working toward for months. Already he had unveiled proposals on Medicare and child care, and he planned to make Social Security reform the centerpiece of the speech. But with the scandal enveloping his presidency, Clinton faced a surreal evening at the Capitol, and his allies feared members of his own party would give him, at best, a lukewarm reception. Would the evening be the first indication that the country was dealing with a crippled presidency?

Nervous Democrats were looking for additional reassurances from the White House that the allegations were false. Clinton's denial on Monday had helped, but more was needed. On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton provided it. That morning she appeared on NBC's "Today" for a long-scheduled interview. Although she had been silent publicly about the allegations, anyone who had talked to her over the weekend knew she was about to reemerge as her husband's most tenacious defender.

This was a role with which she was familiar. Six years earlier, in January 1992, she had stood up for her husband in the face of allegations of an affair with Gennifer Flowers -- allegations that then threatened his presidential candidacy. In a memorable performance on CBS's "60 Minutes," she had declared that she was not "sitting here some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette."

On "Today," she was even more aggressive in her defense. She dismissed the allegations about the Lewinsky affair and, while acknowledging that the charges were serious if true, assured the audience in what may have been carefully chosen words that they would not be "proven true." She denounced Starr as "politically motivated" and, in language that made even some of the president's allies wince, said the allegations were the product of a "vast, right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."

Coupled with the president's denial, the first lady's vigorous performance boosted morale inside the White House and among Democrats around the country. "There's a lifting of the gloom," one friend of the first lady said. "There's a long way to go on this. He [Clinton] may or may not survive. But the fact is that spirits have been raised."

Still there was an air of unreality as the speech approached. Clinton continued his rehearsals at a White House where many on the staff were using State of the Union preparations to keep their minds off the scandal. The final text of the speech was delivered to reporters about 5:30 p.m., a record for earliness among Clinton's addresses before Congress.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats caucused in the late afternoon. When they emerged, House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said, "The president explicitly denied these allegations. He deserves the benefit of the doubt." Gephardt criticized the media for operating on "rumors and half-truths and fourth truths" and then said, "Democracy can't run on rumor mills. I think we all need to take a deep breath and back up." Other Democrats offered defenses of Clinton that ranged from solid to tentative. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said, "I reserve judgment."

Clinton arrived at the Capitol a few minutes before the 9 p.m. speech was to begin and was greeted by congressional leaders. One of those there thought the president looked "very tired and down."

The president entered the House chamber about 9:10 p.m. One Democrat who was on the floor at the time said the mood seemed little different from that on other such occasions. "The members had had all day to process where we were and to figure out what we were going to do," he said. Another person witnessing the event had a different view. It was, he said, as if the entire government -- Republicans, Democrats, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court -- was determined to protect the institution of the presidency, if not Clinton himself, by making sure this event proceeded as normally as possible.

Still another person who had been on the floor for previous Clinton State of the Union speeches said the mood, at least initially, was unlike that for any of the others. "There was an unease," this Democrat said. "People just didn't know what to expect. There was a crackling tension in the air at the beginning. People knew they were in uncharted territory."

Clinton spoke for 72 minutes and was interrupted about 100 times with applause, mostly led by members of his own party. He never mentioned the scandal and acted as if it had never happened. Everyone's effort to project a sense of normalcy had, perhaps without intention, worked to his political advantage. Clinton had turned what might have been an embarrassing moment into a tool to stabilize his presidency. As he prepared to get into his limousine for the ride back down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, he flashed a grin and a thumbs-up to one of his aides.

"I think it was a turning point," an administration official said. "Not from a political or process standpoint. It wasn't a turning point in how the media covers this. But it was a turning point emotionally. Where the average member might have tried to avoid questions about scandal, after Tuesday night they were willing to get up and say we support the president and his agenda and we're going to fight to get it implemented this year."

Back on the Campaign Trail?

"You won't hear any more from Vernon Jordan, you won't hear any more from my husband, because they have to abide by the rules that they operate under when they have these investigations," she said.

Six days earlier, the president had pledged "more rather than less, sooner rather than later" as he dodged reporters' questions during an Oval Office photo opportunity.

With Hillary Clinton's statement, the president's strategy was now in place: deny the broad charges and stay mum on the details, attack the independent counsel for partisan motivations, and focus on the business of the country.

Clinton and his allies had another reason not to answer questions: They were waiting to hear whether Lewinsky had agreed to offer testimony against the president in exchange for protection from prosecution by the independent counsel. "There are only two actors in this play: the president and Monica," one person helping to plot Clinton's strategy had said on Monday. "Both of them have issued very strong and vigorous denials. It seems to me now that the next act in this play is, is she going to recant or is she not going to recant?"

On that front, things lurched along inconclusively throughout the week. On Monday night, Lewinsky's lawyer, William H. Ginsburg, had emerged to face a media scrum and say his client had given Starr's office a "complete proffer" of her testimony, a catalogue of charges she would make under oath in return for an agreement not to be prosecuted. "We are waiting for Judge Starr to decide what to do," Ginsburg said.

Tuesday brought no further developments, nor did Wednesday. On Thursday, Ginsburg and Starr met face to face for the first time in a week. Ginsburg emerged amid speculation the talks had broken down. "With regard to our meeting this morning, we have no comment," Ginsburg told reporters. "We are preparing our defense."

For more than a week, Ginsburg had been a whirling dervish of television appearances. The average American, zapping from one channel to the next, might have thought his remote was broken or every station was airing the same program: the Ginsburg Hour. The California malpractice attorney was stretching his 15 minutes of fame beyond the normal commercial break, but his negotiating strategy baffled lawyers familiar with the pas de deux of scandal negotiations.

There were reports that Lewinsky's verbal proffer paralleled the information on the tapes Linda Tripp had turned over to prosecutors the week before. But the more Ginsburg talked publicly, the more he seemed to dispute what had been reported about the tapes. There was, he said, no dress containing evidence against the president. Whatever gifts Lewinsky had received were trivial, stuff one could find at the "White House souvenir shop." If she and the president had talked on the phone, it was harmless, not freighted with "sexual innuendo" or worse. In an interview on ABC's "20/20" aired Friday night, he disputed a new allegation from Linda Tripp that Clinton had called Lewinsky in the middle of the night at her Watergate apartment while Tripp was there.

No wonder Starr's team had doubts and questions about details of Lewinsky's proffer and wanted a better sense of what kind of witness she would be. The standoff continued through the week, and yesterday Ginsburg announced that he and Lewinsky were returning to California, but not before another round of appearances on Sunday's talk shows.

As those negotiations stalled, a fuller portrait of Monica Lewinsky emerged -- just as the president's defenders had hoped and predicted. Early in the week, there were hints from those close to Clinton that Americans knew little about the former intern, other than that she was young and inexperienced when she came to Washington, and that a different portrait could cast his relationship with her in a different light.

Fifteen minutes before Clinton's State of the Union address was to begin, new information emerged at a news conference in Portland, Ore. Andy J. Bleiler, a 32-year-old former drama teacher at Lewinsky's high school, acknowledged through his attorney that he and Lewinsky had carried on a five-year affair.

Bleiler's lawyer, Terry Giles, said Lewinsky was "obsessed with sex" and had a tendency to exaggerate. He said she had bragged of a relationship with a high White House official whom she sometimes referred to as "the creep." Lewinsky, on the Tripp tapes, also makes a reference to "the creep," in what has been widely interpreted to mean the president.

The Bleiler-Lewinsky relationship added to the mosaic of information about the young intern that was emerging from interviews with others who know her: that she would spend hundreds of dollars to buy a ticket to a presidential fund-raiser in order to station herself along the rope line for a chance to see, and be seen or hugged by, the president; that her dream job, as she once told a friend, was to choose the president's daily wardrobe.

Ginsburg denounced what appeared to be a growing effort to sully his client's reputation. He cautioned everyone to remember that it is not uncommon for young men and women Lewinsky's age to be sexually active. And he ridiculed Bleiler for invoking "the Joey Buttafuoco defense," a reference to the Long Island, N.Y., case a few years back in which Buttafuoco's teenage lover, Amy Fisher, tried to kill his wife and Buttafuoco claimed he too was Fisher's victim.

"He's saying she was the vixen who could not be resisted, the sirens on the rocks," Ginsburg scoffed at Bleiler. "That's unbelievable."