The woman who perhaps holds the most important key to President Clinton’s political future, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said Monday that she loved her husband and was committed to their marriage, while the woman who holds a key to his legal troubles, Monica Lewinsky, was summoned back to the grand jury investigating her relationship with the president.
One day after his dramatic grand jury testimony and address to the nation, Clinton landed at the Massachusetts resort island of Martha’s Vineyard for a vacation with the first lady and their daughter, Chelsea. The three mingled with invited guests on the airport tarmac, shaking hands and smiling for photographs.
Meanwhile, Clinton’s advisers were busy assessing the reaction to his dramatic and sometimes defensive acknowledgment on Monday night of an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky.
The statements from Mrs. Clinton, conveyed through a spokesperson, represented the first official comments attributed to her since the president’s speech.
“Clearly, this is not the best day in Mrs. Clinton’s life,” said Marsha Berry, a spokeswoman for the first lady. “She is committed to her marriage and loves her husband and daughter very much and she believes in the president, and her love for him is compassionate and steadfast.” Does she forgive him? “Yes,” Berry said. “She believes in this marriage.”
Clinton owes his electoral success to the support of women, and though the early readings of opinion surveys indicate women largely remain behind him, many are taking their cues from how Mrs. Clinton deals with the controversy. If the president were to suffer a substantial erosion of support among women, the political damage could be severe and irreparable, affecting both his governing ability and how Congress might consider any call for impeachment.
Initial reaction Tuesday from Democrats was one of disappointment, followed by a call for the nation to move on beyond the scandal. Their political support is not considered firm at this point.
In other times of political peril, Mrs. Clinton has come to her husband’s defense, inoculating him against further damage. This was true in the early days of the Lewinsky scandal, when the first lady went on television to declare that she believed her husband’s initial denials and that he was the victim of a right-wing conspiracy. She was closely involved with planning the president’s grand jury strategy.
As the scandal has evolved, Mrs. Clinton’s approval ratings have climbed steadily. The poll numbers suggest the nation is more comfortable seeing her as vulnerable than it was when Americans saw her as perhaps too powerful in her role leading the effort for the president’s ill-fated health-care plan in 1994.
Now, elected officials and analysts said, she seems to be benefiting from the fact that more women can identify with her current problems and have rallied to her side.
“She showed strength in her policy positions, and the American people said we don’t want you to be in charge like that, that strength some didn’t like,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) “I do think now there is a very strong identification with her on the part of the American people. We all know what hurt is. We know what disappointment is. We know what humiliation is. We know what it is to have our pride hurt and our privacy invaded.
“The wife and the mother is the core of the home,” Eshoo said. “She is the ultimate shock absorber. She is the center. I don’t know a woman that doesn’t fight to keep her family together. We are totally invested in it.”
Mrs. Clinton benefits, Eshoo said, because “the American people gravitate toward someone who has uncommon grace under pressure and adversity.”
Mrs. Clinton was not the only one who stepped out and supported the president back in January when some thought his presidency would be toppled. Among those defenders, many Cabinet officials affirmed their support of the president.
Commerce Secretary William Daley stood alongside Secretary of State Madeline Albright and Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala to show support for the president. All said they believed his denials.
Reached by telephone in Seattle, Daley said he was “disappointed what we were told then wasn’t a fact.” But he added: “We’re all human. To err is human. To forgive is divine. That’s what we are all taught. In our religion, no one is without sin.”
From Tanzania, Albright said, “I have complete confidence in the president, and he is doing a terrific job for the United States, both domestically and in terms of our foreign policy.
“And,” she added, “he has urged all of us to put this behind us, and for all of us to do our jobs, and that is what I think I am doing here.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), noting that she stood with Clinton in the Roosevelt Room in the White House when he denied any sexual involvement with Lewinsky, said his remarks left her “with a deep sense of sadness in that my trust in his credibility has been badly shattered.”
Mirroring his overall standing in the long-term polls, Clinton still is held in far lower regard by men than women.
Asked about the disparity while campaigning in Illinois, Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun said, “Maybe that’s a generational difference. It’s going to be up to Mrs. Clinton to forgive him.”
Later, she was asked about whether the president should have come forward earlier with an admission about his relationship with Lewinsky.
“I think that the pundits will be deciphering for a long time why he made that statement, given the statement of last night,” Moseley-Braun said. “I believe, based on his statements to me, I was prepared to believe the first statement. That it is otherwise is hurtful to me. I’ll just be honest with you. That is something that I think, if Hillary Clinton can get over it, so can I.”
Indeed, many women, inside and outside of public life, rest their opinion in many ways on that of Mrs. Clinton.
“I think she is steady, she is smart,” said Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, a former member of Congress from Pennsylvania who lost her bid for re-election largely because she supported the president’s budget in 1994. “Most people see her as having dealt with this in a most remarkable way. And I do think she is deeply in love with the president.”
Margolies-Mezvinsky, now a candidate for lieutenant governor, said she considers the president and first lady friends. She said the Clintons have been “working on this marriage, constructively, for many, many years. People must identify with that. Women must identify with that, and they must respect her for the aplomb and sensitivity she has shown.”
Ann DeLaney, the director of a domestic violence center in Indianapolis and the former chairwoman of the Indiana Democratic Party, said that while she didn’t in any way excuse the president’s behavior, “It’s a matter that they deal with, not the rest of us. I didn’t elect him to be my role model. I didn’t elect him to be my husband. I only elected him to lead.
“I think it would be a lot easier for people to find fault if she were less forgiving. But most people say the one hurt the most is Hillary. And if she is willing to forgive, who are we to second-guess that? If their marriage can stand this, it seems to me the country certainly can.”
Skip Rutherford, a longtime friend of the Clintons who stayed behind in Arkansas, said of Mrs. Clinton, “I have seen her under very difficult circumstances perform with grace and class. She has enormous inner strength.
“I really do believe this issue is much more personal than political. This is a long way from Whitewater. This is about human error, a sad situation involving a meaningful relationship that Bill Clinton has with his wife and his daughter.”
That reaction was not universal, particularly among women who worked on the congressional staffs of Democrats. One of them, who asked that her name not be used, said she was moved by neither the president nor the first lady.
“He is spineless,” she said. “He is without character. What makes me angry is lying to people and hanging the party out there and hanging the members out there for as long as they did for no reason other than selfish ones. And for me, it’s unfathomable that somebody would do this with an intern in the Oval Office, a 21-year-old girl. I can’t understand the different standard we have here.
“The other thing I think is new is how I feel about her (Mrs. Clinton). As a woman you admired her so much, and I can’t get my arms around why she would defend someone, holding hands going to church, holding hands getting on the airplane, with her daughter looking over her shoulder. I don’t care how complicated marriages are.”
Lewinsky, according to a source familiar with the investigation, was recalled by Starr to testify on Thursday. She has told the grand jury, this source said, that she had an ongoing intimate relationship with the president but that he never told her directly to lie about it under oath.
On Tuesday, the grand jury heard testimony from former Clinton adviser Dick Morris, who told reporters that he talked to the president in the days after the Lewinsky scandal broke about ways in which the president could respond. Morris also said that the president denied a sexual relationship with Lewinsky or any efforts to cover it up.
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