Word: moments
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Close associates of Hillary's presented the portrait of pain in the days leading up to the President's Aug. 17 testimony: Clinton's fear of this moment had been palpable, says a friend in whom he confided on the eve of his private confession. He had to tell Hillary not only what exactly had been going on in their own house but also admit the fact that he had handed their mortal enemy the weapons that Starr could use to kill them. The next day, the friend could sense how badly it had gone: Hillary seemed a different person...
...benefit of an audience that was looking to Hillary for its own cues. If that view was surpassingly cynical, it had its own history. Back in January, as Clinton was preparing for his deposition in the Paula Jones case, the cameras had "caught" him and Hillary in a private moment, dancing on the beach in the Virgin Islands. As the year unfolded, casual friends of the Clintons noticed something a little creepy in the occasional offhand remark from the First Couple--as in "Buddy jumped in bed with us this morning"--whose only purpose seemed to be to signal...
...nobody's business but our own" walk across the endless South Lawn to a helicopter waiting to swoop them off to Martha's Vineyard for family therapy. Hillary wore blue, with dark glasses. Her eyes never met the camera. The President smiled slightly. Had the family temperature at that moment seemed too warm, it would have been dismissed as phony; too cold, and it would have invited the audience to give up on the rogue husband. Hillary, without saying a word, had to get it just right...
...possible, of course, that the false choices of August--Was this pain real, or was it all being staged?--obscured what was in plain sight. For a family braced for invasion, hardened to humiliation and threatened with oblivion, what more natural course than to take a moment of pain they could no longer avoid and try at least to put it to some use? By letting people see enough of the healing process, Hillary could let their imagination do the rest. Maybe it would help. Nothing could make it hurt more than it already...
That wasn't just Bennett's customary gravitas. It was the sound of conservatism in despair, a bewildered keening that could just as easily have come from Gary Bauer or Robert Bork or William Kristol. All year the political right awaited the moment when everyone would agree that Ken Starr's investigation was the institutional expression of a national consensus, namely that the President's relationship with Lewinsky was not simply wrong but criminal. That means it was something that it was the proper business of government to discover, interrogate, rip to pieces, expose and punish. What happened of course...