To those inside the room where the questioning took place, Clinton appeared to keep his composure and answered in measured terms. In response to many of the particular questions, his language was imprecise. He said he did not recall certain events or know for sure if he had done some things he was asked about, although he often allowed that it was possible. But when the allegations regarding sex were raised, Clinton answered in firm, declarative sentences or unequivocal one-word answers like "no."

He expressed aggravation at being accused of so many illicit acts by his conservative opponents, echoing what Hillary Rodham Clinton would say later about a "vast right-wing conspiracy" after the Lewinsky story first became public on Jan. 21. By lunchtime, Clinton had been asked about a number of women with no mention of Jones – the supposed focus of the deposition. While they were supposed to be taking a break, Clinton was asked whether he ever gave money to Lewinsky – his answer was no – and challenged a Jones lawyer to ask directly whatever he was getting at.

Jones came personally to look Clinton in the eye as he discussed her allegations, and brought six lawyers. Gathered on the other side of the long conference table in the 11th-floor offices of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom were four of the firm's lawyers representing Clinton, as well as White House counsel Charles F.C. Ruff. Attorney Bill W. Bristow attended for co-defendant Danny Ferguson, the former Arkansas state trooper assigned to then-Gov. Clinton's security detail on the day when Jones has alleged he propositioned her. In addition, Judge Wright, a pair of video camera technicians and a Secret Service agent were present.

The indignity of the event was impossible to avoid. Rather than asking the president direct, perhaps uncomfortable, questions about specific sex acts, Jones's lawyers produced at the outset a written description of what they meant whenever they asked about sexual relations. The document also provided to all a clear, indisputable definition so that no one could later argue about what was intended.

Under that definition, sexual relations meant any contact with someone's groin, buttocks, breast or inner thigh if intended to stimulate sexual arousal. No specific mention was made of kissing lips.

Unbeknownst to Clinton or his lawyers at that point, Jones's legal team had arrived with a secret weapon – full briefings from Linda R. Tripp about her tape-recorded conversations with her friend Lewinsky detailing a sexual relationship the young woman said she had with the president. Four days before the deposition, after Tripp had told her story to Starr and turned over to his office the tapes she secretly made of the telephone conversations, Tripp had made another tape. This one was recorded in person, via a wire worn on Tripp's body at Starr's behest.

On Jan. 16, the day before the deposition, Tripp lured Lewinsky to an Arlington hotel so that Starr's investigators could confront her. As the prosecutors questioned Lewinsky, Tripp left the hotel and went to her Maryland home, where she met that evening with a Jones lawyer.

When the Jones team questioned Clinton the next morning, they were armed with extensive details of Lewinsky's story – including not only her detailed account of sex with the president, but her description of Jordan's efforts to help her find a job.

That information was invaluable to the Jones lawyers, who were trying to prove that Clinton used his governmental power to reward women who succumbed to his sexual advances, in contrast to Jones, who maintained her own career as a state worker had been circumscribed after she rebuffed the then-governor. The lawyers considered Lewinsky's story prime evidence of a pattern of Clinton behavior.

In some ways, Clinton's sworn answers to questions about his ties with Lewinsky conflict with information that has been reported since the deposition. Most notably, he gave Jones's lawyers a significantly different account of his last meeting with Lewinsky.

During the deposition, he said he saw her briefly just before Christmas when she stopped by to visit Currie and he stuck his head out of the Oval Office to say hello. But White House entry logs turned over to Starr's office showed that Lewinsky visited the White House the Sunday after Christmas, Dec. 28. Sources familiar with the session have said she met with Clinton, and the sources said they were not aware of anyone present other than the two of them.

Thanks to Tripp, the Jones lawyers were able to ask especially detailed questions that apparently surprised Clinton, including whether he had ever received a videotape from Lewinsky and whether she had ever been at the White House after midnight.

Clinton testified that he met her sometime in 1995, after she arrived as a summer intern in Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta's office. He said he saw her a few times during the federal government shutdown later that year, when regular workers were forced to stay home and the White House was populated by interns filling in.

According to a sworn statement filed by Tripp in the Jones case, Lewinsky said her sexual relationship with Clinton began on Nov. 15, 1995, the same day he canceled a trip to Japan to stay home and deal with the budget battle with Congress that had closed the government.

In the deposition, Clinton said it was possible he had been alone with Lewinsky. But he said he did not remember any specific instances, describing instead a possible occasion or two when he was working on a weekend and she delivered documents, exchanged a few words and left.

Lewis C. Fox, a retired Secret Service uniformed officer, has testified before the grand jury about his recollection that he admitted Lewinsky to see Clinton one weekend in the fall of 1995 when he was guarding the Oval Office.

Fox has said he believes they were alone for at least the remaining 40 minutes of his shift, although he could not swear definitively that no one else was there.

During the deposition, Clinton said Lewinsky was once in his private pantry when she and other interns brought him pizza during the shutdown. He testified that Currie, who he said had befriended the young intern, was around on other occasions. In any case, he said, he keeps no curtains in the Oval Office or adjoining private study or dining room.

The president said he had nothing to do with Lewinsky being given a paid clerk's position in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs on Nov. 26, 1995. After she left for a Pentagon job in April 1996 – reportedly after a senior White House official decided she was hanging around the West Wing too much – Lewinsky sent more than a half-dozen packages by courier to Currie at the White House. At least some of the messages were intended for Clinton, the president acknowledged, although he characterized them as holiday cards or notes about how to recruit young people to work on White House activities.

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