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By Root 2107 0

was glued to a story involving the personal life of a president, was stuck fast to this one. By Sunday, the Washington Post was already recapping “Washington’s Extraordinary Week.” One article called the twenty-four-year-old Lewinsky “an ebullient, vulnerable ‘child’ infatuated with the president,” and a “despairing, ravaged woman who in tape-recorded conversations describes him as ‘the creep’ and ‘Dear Schmucko.’” A group of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s close friends, including high-ranking White House aides, offered the baffling explanation to reporters that the president had become “emotionally close” with Lewinsky during the time she worked in the West Wing, but that their relationship “never became sexual.” The spin machine now began weaving stories on “deep-background” that Lewinsky’s prattle about a sexual relationship with the leader of the free world was either “fantasy or untruthful boasting.”

As photographers captured the president and the First Lady leaving Sunday services at the Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, with psalm books clasped firmly in their hands, a series of weekend polls revealed wildly fluctuating numbers for the president, swinging from enthusiastic approval to outrage. Public opinion was bouncing around like unstable atoms in a nuclear reactor. A survey conducted by ABC News/Washington Post found that 63 percent of Americans believed that Clinton “should voluntarily resign if he lied in sworn testimony” or if he “suggested [Lewinsky] lie.” At the same time, the president’s job approval remained solid, with 56 percent of those polled saying that the alleged affair with the former intern “was not an important issue.” As one journalist wrote, this was “a crisis with no parallel.” The news media previously had given presidents a “free pass” when it came to their personal lives. “For whatever reason,” observed Republican pollster Robert Teeter, “the worms are out of the can here.”

Democratic allies of the Clintons kept their mouths shut or issued “tepid statements” of support for the embattled president. Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle declared, as if trying to avoid a pool of quicksand: “These are serious allegations which the president has denied, and which deserve an investigation that should be conducted quickly and fairly.” Even the president’s own teammates knew that the “other shoe” could drop at any moment.

To add to the precarious situation, reports were surfacing that Ken Starr was seeking interviews with Secret Service agents in the White House to determine if they had observed any untoward behavior between Clinton and Lewinsky. Rumors were flying around the Internet that several Secret Service agents had witnessed illicit liaisons in the private study off the Oval Office and in the White House movie theater in the East Wing. The Starr team was taking steps to piggyback onto the work of Paula Jones’s lawyers, who had already sought to depose Secret Service agents posted in the White House, to drill into the topic of “other women.”

Panicked congressional Democrats were privately expressing concern that President Bill Clinton—like Harry Houdini tied upside down in a water tank with his arms and legs chained together—“might be unable to recover” from this latest impossible situation into which he had submerged himself. Longtime Clinton friends Harry and Linda Thomason, Hollywood filmmakers who produced the popular television sitcom Designing Women, flew to Washington to offer public relations help. As Bill Clinton and dog Buddy sloshed around the White House grounds through the rain, Harry Thomason advised the president that it was time to take charge, before this intern debacle spun further out of control. The State of the Union address was just days away. Instead of letting the scandal overshadow his ambitious agenda for the country, said Thomason, why not take bold steps to correct the situation now? Another trusted adviser, Harold Ickes, in whose office Monica Lewinsky had worked during the government shutdown, told Clinton bluntly that his comments on radio and television