Yeah. I've seen the reports of that. But primarily I don't think that the president's attention drifted off. There were moments, especially at at the earliest days when the story first broke and at the time of the grand jury testimony where that was the focus of his attention.

But if you recall, it was just six days after the story broke that the president walked into the House of Representatives, delivered, I thought, a masterful State of the Union address, really set the terms of the debate on fiscal discipline versus the tax strategy that Governor Bush is still pursuing, and set the terms of that debate and he did it I think with great dignity and he did it with great power. And that was six days after the story broke.

So this was a guy whose attention was on the business at hand, which was to fix on his legislative program and his program for the country to be able to deliver that speech and get up and do it, and I think did a pretty good job with it.

It's also a time in which several former members of the administration have said he was lonely and isolated, particularly in the evenings when the day's work was done.

That's something that he'll probably reflect on after he's out of office, but I think that it was personally a difficult period. And it's a time in which you know who your friends are and you seek them for comfort. There was an intensity to this and a kind of feeding frenzy to this that you couldn't completely ignore.

However, when it counted, Ireland, China, the budget, and the State of the Union, et cetera, there was a guy who got up there and he did his job. And that's really what he told all of us to do.

At some level, I think it's one of the most important aspects of who he is, who his personality is, why he's been able to do a good job for the American public, which is that he could roll out of bed in that kind of an atmosphere and go to work, and go to work for the people.

That ability has been recounted a lot. Another characteristic of Bill Clinton that people are talking about is that--he gets himself into trouble a lot--that he lurches from crisis to crisis, so, therefore, he's got to pick himself up and focus. What about him do you suppose leads to this characteristic where there are a lot of crises, if you look back all the way from the campaign into this year ...

Actually I'd dispute a little of that. I think a lot of it has turned out to be phony and manufactured by his political opponents. We just had the Whitewater report that found out that they didn't do anything wrong. A bunch of these so-called pseudo-scandals were generated by his opponents, fed by the media, and then ended up to be much ado about nothing.

He will find himself in a spot and he'll realize that he's got to apply himself and he'll work at it and he'll work on it and move on. From a policy perspective, one of the things that I greatly admire about him is the guy never gives up. He'll meet a difficult block and rather than just completely throwing it aside, he'll get back up and say "Well, if we can't do that, what can we do?" I think the classic example is health care in 1994. And we passed Kennedy-Kassebaum and this child health insurance program. Now we're working on Medicare and prescription drugs. He's kind of the Terminator. I mean, he just keeps going and going and going.

In August, it emerges that the president was not telling the truth and that he did have a relationship. When did you find out and how did that strike you personally?

Well, I think like the rest of the people who were close to him, I was disappointed by it. And I found out, perhaps even the day of the grand jury testimony as we were preparing for that evening, exactly what he was going to say in his grand jury testimony. And, you know, he's a friend. It was disappointing. Again, it was a situation in which we needed to pull up our socks and move on, and that's what we did.

There were several discussions in the White House that day about how he should address the nation and what kind of a tone, how conciliatory he might be, how contrite he should be. Where did you weigh in on that?

I thought that he had made a mistake; and he should be conciliatory, and let the American people know that. It took us a while to get that message across. But I think that was the right tone, and obviously he understood personally that he had done something wrong and he wanted to atone for that and move on.

Were you disappointed that the speech that night wasn't more conciliatory?

At least in retrospect, it probably didn't have the right balance, and it wasn't until...

By the right balance, what do you mean?

I think he was still dealing with anger about the way this whole independent counsel matter had taken. He was dealing with the anger of what he thought, and I think, was a politically motivated lawsuit, which was at the underpinning of this--the Paula Jones case--and which was thrown out.

In retrospect it probably was a mistake to talk about that to let that be his message to the American people, because I think his message to the American people was that I made a mistake and I want to move past it and continue to try to be a good president.

I think that the American people, quite frankly, are pretty forgiving if you put it on those terms, and ultimately I think they did understand that he was doing a great job for them and they wanted him to keep doing that and that's why he still remains in office.

Was there a time when you really worried about his ability to stay in office? We've heard reports now that there were a couple of instances, one where some Senators called Gregory Craig and expressed a concern about whether they ought to come over and talk to the president about resigning and that Harold Ickes talked to some people in the House about the same thing.

When we came back in September--and of course this grand jury testimony occurred during a congressional recess--we were on the phone with people. But you never know what will happen when they're together, they act differently and they talk differently than when they're separately talking to you on the telephone. So we didn't exactly know what to expect when we came back to town. There was great anxiety about what this was going to mean; what would it mean politically, what would it mean substantively, could we continue our work, et cetera.

There was certainly anxiety expressed in both Houses, and in a funny way, the terms were set fairly early when the Republicans in the House handled the matter in an almost purely partisan way. I think that kind of galvanized people and made them realize what was going on and that our legal team did a pretty good job of explaining the underlying facts, but also the standards for impeachment, what they really ought to be.

However I think ultimately what really set the terms was that the exercise on the other side seemed partisan and driven. And to beat him in this way, in a way that they couldn't have beat him when it came to policy, I think that kind of galvanized both caucuses, and it became a more

But before that, before the House managers...?

Those first couple of weeks it was anyone's guess as to exactly how this was going to play out. We felt strongly that it was wrong to pursue it, given the fact that this was not...

Was there ever a point where you worried personally that this president might not make it in office based on what you were hearing from key Democrats? Did you feel it was close?

No, I don't think I ever felt like it was hanging by a thread or close to tipping the other direction. But there was plenty to be worried about in those days.

After the Starr report was released that first weekend, the political people didn't want to go out on the Sunday talk shows and defend the president. That's when the lawyers went out. Were you one of those who didn't want to go out and defend the president that first weekend?

No, I think we thought it was important to send the lawyers out. And if you remember, I was the next person to go out after the lawyers got the hook. They decided that the American public couldn't quite understand all the legalese, and so I became the surrogate and tried to go out there and explain this matter in ways that maybe ordinary people could understand. And so the following week I got to sit in the dunking tank while your colleagues threw baseballs at me.

In October, once the House begins, the Wye River negotiations are going on...At the same time, so you have this incredibly dramatic moment where the House is considering impeaching the president and the president is also involved in Middle East peace talks. What was it like at the White House running both those parallel...

We were doing that, plus the Congress hadn't done its work for the year, so we were trying to come up with a budget agreement right at the end. That's my recollection of the timing of this. There were definitely a kind of three rings going on. At that point, the president, spent almost full time on the negotiations at Wye. Erskine and I were negotiating the budget deal with the speaker and Senator Lott in which we made some substantial achievements on education and environment and other places.

Then the House was kind of wrapping up its work, and kicking it over past the election about how they were going to handle the matter. And then, of course, they did come back in that lame duck session and vote to impeach him.

After the election, which goes well for the Democrats... You have some kind of an epiphany. Do you remember what that is?

Yes, I think everybody felt like the voters had really rendered a judgment about whether they thought the president should be removed from office. As I said--it was really a historical election. The Democrats actually picked up seats in the House of Representatives. And I think that most of the folks who were Congress-watchers thought this thing was going to be over, that the public clearly was not interested in spending more time on this matter, and they didn't want the Congress to be worried about it. [The public] wanted them to be worried about their business, that this thing would melt away, that [the Congress] would figure out some way of disposing of it, perhaps through a censure motion or something of that nature.

I could sense at some point that there was an effort, led by the whip in the House, Tom DeLay, that that wasn't the way they were going to go, that they were going to go ahead and really pull out all the stops to impeach the president.

But I remember that virtually nobody thought that. And I was thinking about the people who we were sort of counting on and the Republican members who we were counting on to vote against impeachment and that we could never quite get them to publicly say that this was their position.

We took off for Thanksgiving, and I was running in Rock Creek Park, by myself, long run, and I said "This thing is over, they're going down the track. They're going to impeach him. They got the clout to do it. They're not going to let their members off the hook. They're going to beat and beat and beat on them until they vote for impeachment." And...

So you knew you had to let everybody else...

I came back in on Monday, and I'm viewed as not exactly having a sunny disposition to begin with. And I came in and I was sort of the Prince of Darkness that morning, and I said, "Let's get ready for this, we got to figure out what we're going to do, and then we've got to figure out how we're going to deal with the Senate, because I don't see how we're going to get this off the track of impeachment. "

In the 1998 State of the Union speech, the president makes an announcement which is later seen as a master move which sandbagged the Speaker. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came to be?

The save Social Security first message; we had thought about how we were going to position ourselves as the budget was moving from deficit into surplus, and we wanted to use that money to do important priorities, education, Social Security and Medicare and others.

You could see that the surplus was going to loom as a huge...

We saw the surplus just beginning to loom as an issue. Now, it ended up picking up strength as a year or two went by. They had a strategy, obviously, of trying to take the [surplus] and using it as an excuse to cut taxes, which we thought was going back and reversing all the progress we'd made. We fixed on the save Social Security first, and we managed to hold that. We surprised everyone when we stood up and said it.

As a result of the Lewinsky story having broken a few days earlier, the Republicans weren't sure what they were going to do. They finally decided to go to the State of the Union, which was in question up until I think the day of the State of the Union, but they were basically sitting on their hands during the president's statements and applause lines, et cetera. The Democrats were standing up, the Republicans were sitting on their hands.

Finally, when he came to the part of the speech when he started talking about the fiscal posture of the United States, and he said the thing we need to do is to save Social Security first, the Democrats just erupted in applause and the Republicans sat silent. And, finally, Newt Gingrich stood up and the Republicans had to stand up.

I think we put them in a corner from the fiscal perspective that they remain in today, and I think the public is still rejecting. I think they still want this hard-earned surplus to be used for the things that the president outlined in that very 1998 State of the Union.

At the same time he didn't get what he wanted that year, and I guess he now concedes that the two policy casualties of that year were Social Security and Medicare. So to what extent...

Leading up to that period in 1998, and in 1999, we tried to work in good faith to build a consensus for Social Security reform, and we never were able to do it. So I think that...

Did Lewinsky have a policy cost for the administration? And if so, what was it?

In the end, I wouldn't put Medicare in that category. However, our ability to bring people together in a bipartisan way on Social Security, not in that year but then in the following year when we were beginning to build some consensus around some reforms, was interrupted by the impeachment. And I think we never really were able to get back to it.

Sort of disjointed here, but going up to back to the grand jury, you have information about Osama bin Laden, and there is a missile strike ordered. The cynics in Washington thought this was one of those political acts. Tell us what it was like as chief of staff dealing with that.

It was, I think, two days after.. Or maybe on Thursday. Obviously the embassy bombings had taken place in Africa. We had information linking the UBL network to the bombings. We had information about where their training camps were in Afghanistan and the links to the factory in Sudan. And so we met and met about what we ought to do about it and whether we should take action, which in light of the human toll, the cost to American lives and lives of the nationals of the countries where those bombs took place, we thought it was appropriate.

That was done completely within the context, of the national security environment that was separate from thinking about Lewinsky and what was going on there. And I think that...

You must have worried about how the timing would be perceived.

Well, sure I was. I got paid to worry and think about things like that. But this was a case in which Secretary Cohen, for example, was very strong, and it mattered, both his credibility, and the fact that he is a Republican. It made everyone realize that this was on the level, that there were no politics involved with it, that we shouldn't talk about politics in the room and we should try to make the best judgment we could and recommend it to the president. That was the only way to deal with it.

To have tried to hedge it the other way would have been would have been a terrible mistake, both from a policy perspective and politically. So everybody kind of sucked it up , decided that we had to give the best advice we could and try to keep blinders on with regard to the other thing and make the recommendation to the president, and the president took it.

In December, there's a similar situation as the House impeachment vote debate is about to begin. The president is about to bomb Iraq. Tell us about that.

Saddam had thrown out the UN inspectors. We went through some brinksmanship in November in which he said he would accept the UN inspectors. The planes were actually in the air in November and ready to start an operation to try to degrade his ability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction. And he came out with a statement--Tariq Aziz, as I recall, came out with a statement that said they were going to let the inspectors back in, et cetera. So we paused, we pulled back. The planes came back. Then it turned out that he really wasn't moving forward with that.

So we recocked the gun, if you will. And there was a conversation, most of the people were in the air flying back from a historic trip the president made to Gaza and to Israel and where he addressed the Palestinian national congress, and some of us were in Washington. I didn't go on the trip. [During that meeting] we decided we needed to move forward. The Secretary felt very strongly about it, but the whole national security team did, Madeleine Albright, et cetera. I got the job of doing some of the congressional notifications, and I thought that this was going to start taking

In this case, I knew that there was the potential for great criticism of the timing, if not the action. And I think that everybody on the national security team was really quite strong and willing to stand up and say, look, we have to do this, it's in our national interest, it's the right thing to do.

Nevertheless, I envisioned what the reaction was going to be to these congressional notification calls, and it was the only time since I've been in my office where I had to sit down and take some deep breaths before I could actually pick up the telephone and call people.

I reached the Democratic leaders out in their districts. The Senate was obviously in recess, and the House was just coming back.

I was kind of a stunned silence at the other end of the phone, and I said, "Look, this is the right thing to do, we've got to make the right call." And eventually they stuck with us. Secretary Cohen went out there and defended the action, and there was some criticism, obviously, from some of the members, but I think at the end of the day it was both the right thing to do, and in retrospect was perceived to be the right thing t do.

It was done with the knowledge that this impeachment inquiry was going on around us, but without really an option to let that bleed over into the decisionmaking.

When you made those calls, did you get a "Are you out of your mind?" kind of response?

After the 30-second pause, that was probably the first reaction. I think they had to take their own deep breaths before being able to say, "Are you out of your mind?" But I walked through the logic, and I walked through the fact that this was a unanimous decision, and I think people accepted it.

On the Saturday morning of the House vote, the Speaker Livingston makes this dramatic resignation. Did that cause some concern with the president when Livingston resigned? Was there a thought that, well, I might have to resign, too? Was that going through the White House at all?

No. I don't think so. By that time we felt like this was almost a totally partisan exercise, and we were battling against what we thought was an exercise that really had kind of lost its constitutional underpinning