Word: personal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...White House stopped in its tracks, clutched its heart and crumpled. Hillary's reactions, both private and public, were crucial. In that sense, her calculation was clear: the presidency first, the relationship later. She was virtually alone in her will to fight. "I don't think there was a person in the White House who gave him a snowball's chance in hell, except Hillary," says a former official. "Neither one of them is a quitter. He's a sniveler and a whiner, but when push comes to shove, he's got a backbone of steel--exceeded only by hers...
Instead, says a person who has talked to her about it, Hillary "believed he did something peculiar that was not appropriate, something he was going to be accountable for to her. But the enormity of it hadn't anywhere close to crossed her mind. They both have kind of built-in avoidance mechanisms... That's why he's a survivor. If he sat there and confronted the enormity of how awful it was with his wife, he never would have transcended...
...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--not speaking, not touching, not smiling, barely breathing. She disappeared for the weekend, save for church and a prescheduled birthday party for her husband on the South Lawn, and didn't emerge until moments before he semi-confessed on national television. "It's your speech," she said. "You say what...
...Starr couldn't help recognizing. "He was quite robustly self-confident... He had to be the youngest Governor in the country at that time...and I just remember him as being very attractive," says Starr. "There was a buzz about him in the elevator. Here was a very accomplished person with all these fabulous credentials: Georgetown and Rhodes, an Oxonian, and then Yale Law School, and here he was, you know, a very young Governor of a state that I had spent some time in, and so I had that sense of connection...
...team had few lawyers with strong criminal-defense backgrounds to provide balance, help plot the next move or weigh in on the treatment of witnesses. "Government lawyers have never had to sit in a room with somebody who is completely innocent," says a former Starr assistant, "and know the personal toll on that person and their families." Starr's ethics adviser, Watergate eminence Sam Dash, signed off on major decisions but not the nuts and bolts. (He resigned in November, calling Starr too strong an advocate for impeachment.) A female attorney was known for her sensitivity to civil liberties issues...