The first time that thought occurred to me was when I was talking to a close friend in the Senate, Kent Conrad, who I've known for 25 years. And I thought that I could get a really good reading on the situation in the Senate, which was obviously the place that we ultimately would end up if the Republican Party stuck together and voted to impeach the president...

...I called up Kent and I said, "How we doing up there?" And he was saying they were about two or three days away from a delegation of senior senators from the Democratic Party coming down and talking to the president about resigning.

I had no sense of that apocalyptic aspect to this matter. This was probably six or seven days after the Starr report had been delivered to the House of Representatives. It was about two weeks after Senator Lieberman had given his speech on the floor of the Senate. That had not been followed by a whole lot of other speeches, but other members of the Senate, including Senator Moynihan and Senator Kerrey had made comments in support of the Lieberman analysis of the situation. And so there was the potential for that happening, just as Kent Conrad had described it. If it had happened, if we'd had ten or fifteen senators, Senator Byrd being one significant one, going to the floor and feeling as though they had to pass judgment on the president so early in the process, it would have had a real harsh affect on our ability to defend the president in the House.

It could have finished him?

I don't know whether it could have finished him. You're talking speculation here. It would have been very, very difficult...

I mean you, yourself said that at that moment you thought that it could finish the presidency...

Prior to that moment I thought it hadn't gone that far. I thought that people were waiting to see how this unrolled. I thought that people were setting back and reserving judgment and watching to see what the president did and what the House did and what the evidence was. And so for the news to come in from someone whose judgment I trust and who is not going to give me a candy coated view, and who would also be someone who could speak honestly with me about the situation, for him to deliver that news...it was a cold shower in the morning. And I realized that we were probably going to be in for a long haul.

And what day is this meeting?

It's a Saturday night.

Which was the 12th of September. Tell us a little bit about that, that meeting Saturday in the private residence?

Well, he had just completed the prayer breakfast speech, which was very important to him. The Starr report had been delivered with a great deal of fanfare and publicity to the House of Representatives. That was the Friday night. And then Saturday, I spent the day talking with John Podesta, with Chuck Ruff , with my wife and my family. And when the president called and said he'd like to talk to me about taking the job that night, I was prepared to go down and spend a little time with him. I went down at 10:00 o'clock in the evening and spent two hours with him.

The meeting took place on the porch on the residence area. I think they call it the Truman Balcony, that is looking out over the south lawn. And we had a very intense and personal, as well as professional, conversation for two hours, one-on-one.

Had the president read the Starr report at this point?

I think he had read summaries; he'd read excerpts. I don't think he'd gone through all of the hundreds of pages. And he certainly had not read the various exhibits attached to them, the grand jury testimony, the interviews, and the graphic material that was yet to be displayed to the American public.

But as I said to you before, he was a man in deep trouble personally, emotionally. And you could tell it. He's a strong man. And I think part of the turmoil in his face and in the way he addressed this issue was that he felt a little bit out of control and almost helpless.

He gathered his resources quite effectively in the course of the following days, weeks, and months. But that night I think was a key transition night for him. I had a sense that he'd had a nap in the afternoon because he had been exhausted from the night before working very late. And that he was sort of rallying his resources, his emotional and personal and intellectual resources, and preparing for all that was going to be and he understood it to be a very long battle.

You described what for you was probably the darkest moment when you got an inkling that some senior Democrats were prepared to either come out in public or possibly even visit the president suggesting that it was time.

It was my first inkling of real danger. There were dark moments that followed that were probably darker and more difficult moments to get through. The day of the impeachment itself was a very sad day. But I would say that that conversation with Senator Conrad was the moment in my experience when I suddenly realized this battle could go either way. It was up in the air.

When did you become aware that in the House you were unlikely to prevail?

I don't think that hit me until probably the first week of December. It was after the election; [the] Congressional election had gone very well. We thought that our defense had gone in to the House Judiciary Committee very well. We thought that the partisanship had divided the House of Representatives so profoundly that the American people were upset about the way in which the impeachment was going forward. All of the promises that had been made about the way in which this proceeding would be run had been broken.

They promised that it would be heroic bipartisanship. It was not. They promised that members of the House would be able to vote their consciences. They were not. There were promises made right at the beginning by Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Hyde that of course the House of Representatives would never, ever vote to impeach the president against the wishes of the American people. And they were proceeding to do so. And that message of partisanship had swept through the country to the extent that we had done much, much better in the Congressional elections than any of us ever expected. Rather than lose 40 seats, which most second term presidents do in their off year election, he actually gained seats.

Coming out of the election, I think most of us in the White House felt pretty good and that what we had to do was not make mistakes. That we had to continue to pursue the high road that we had tried to pursue. Arguing the case on the standards, the Constitutional legal standards for impeachment on the evidence. That whatever and however wrong the president had been, that conduct did not rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

We had been given advice by Republicans in the House that let us get there on our own. "Don't push us. Don't pressure us to vote your way on impeachment. We'll get there. Just give us time." We responded to that advice and we said we were going to be available in the event they wanted to talk to us. But we didn't insist on making appointments with people that we thought would be national in their view rather than partisan.

And so when one after another of these Republican Members of the House of Representatives started holding press conferences and announcing that they were going to vote to impeach the president of the United States. It was only then--and I may have been in some different room--it was only then that I realized that the president was, in fact, going to get impeached.

One of the reasons I think that the president survived all of this, by the way, was that if you go back and look at that period of time that I worked in the White House, from September to February, and you take the impeachment battle out of the equation and you just look at what the president did day by day on the national business, it's really quite extraordinary. It is the president at his very best dealing with the budget issue, dealing with the foreign policy issues where there's the Middle East crisis going to the Gaza strip, negotiating the Wye Plantation peace agreement, dealing with, in the middle of all this, an UNSCOM deadline and air attacks on Iraq. A standing ovation in the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Day in and day out as president, his performance was simply extraordinary. I think even his sharpest critics would agree with that.

This was part of the strategy, as well, from the White House to show him out doing his job as president.

That was his strategy. He said, "The way that I'm going to survive this is to show them that they've got the very best president that they could ever possibly hope to have at this moment in time. And that I can continue to perform as their leader and speak to them with authority about issues that the people care about." And he did so.

Part of that was the economy. Every morning at the senior staff meetings there was the president's economic team. It was very interesting. I was impressed that the secretary of the treasury, who used to be a senior staff member at the White House, attended every one of those. He was the only member of the cabinet, the traditional cabinet post that participated in those senior staff meetings.

His participation there meant that every single member of the president's economic team was coordinating for an hour together on every day whether it was the Director of the Office of Management Budget, or whether it was the Director of the Council on Economic Affairs, Gene Sperling, or whether it was the Secretary of the Treasury, there they were. And the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, there they all were and the economy day in and day out got stronger and stronger and stronger. The president's performance on international affairs got stronger and stronger and stronger.

And, of course, the impeachment team would like to take credit for winning on the merits, but this obviously put together an atmosphere that was very, very important for the president's ultimate survival.

The day of the impeachment vote, Hillary Clinton goes up to meet with members of Congress. Why did Hillary go up that day?

She had wanted to show in some visible way her support for her husband despite all the problems and all the disappointments. She had been looking for some way that was appropriate for the first lady to tell the country, as well as the people that had supported her husband that she was grateful for their support. And I think this was the way that she picked to do it.

She was invited by the Democratic caucus. It was a very, very moving moment in the caucus chambers with the Democratic members. It was a tough day.

You say it was a tough day and I wonder if you could expound on that a little bit...

Well, we knew it was happening. We knew it was going to be a very, very difficult day for the president, for the presidency, for history, for the country. And if you recall, we didn't realize exactly how difficult the day was going to be when we started into it. First of all, we had this very powerful and passionate and emotional speech that the first lady gave to the Democratic members. And then the debate began in the House of Representatives and lo and behold the person who was going to serve as the new Speaker of the House resigned with allegations back and forth about his own personal life. And they had one of those great moments in history, I think, on the floor of the House where the Democratic leader, Dick Gephardt, gave one of the speeches of his career about getting beyond the politics of private and personal lives and putting our nation on a different footing when it came to political debate and discourse.

The emotion built and built and built and then when the vote occurred on the issue of whether or not there was going to be an alternative permitted to censure the president, and it was quite clear that the majority was not going to allow people to vote their consciences, the Democrats walked out. That was a very powerful moment. And then the votes occurred.

The debate, as far as I was concerned, was disappointing, because it was filled more with rhetoric than it was with thoughtfulness and it was disjointed in that everybody wanted to have their minute, but the minutes became duplicative. We have some very talented and very skilled and very intelligent members, but there's only so many things you can say. And each one became duplicative. So that that particular debate is not a debate that will live in history because of the quality of the argumentation and of the ability to mobilize facts. There were no Daniel Websters on the floor during the debate on the impeachment as far as I was concerned.

After the vote, there is a political rally.

I wouldn't call it a political rally.

It looked a lot like a political rally. And, the tone was almost defiant, or perhaps you ought to describe it. But here you have what looked like a very political event with the vice president calling Bill Clinton "the greatest president in history."

The idea for the Democratic members of the House to come to the White House after the debate and the vote was Charlie Nagel's. And his idea was that the president was going to be demoralized. He was going to be going through a tough time. And in politics as well as in life, you want to be with your friends when they're down as well as when they're up. This was a principle that I think everybody could agree with.

There were some other reasons behind it. One of the reasons was that we thought that once the House of Representatives voted to impeach the president of the United States, there would be a presumption of regularity in the way in which they did it. And there might be an enormous amount of pressure, a wave of pressure to try to persuade the president to resign. We wanted to make sure that the world understood that he was not going to resign. That the evidence of impeachable offenses was not there. And we were going to take it to the floor and to the Senate. We wanted to really scotch that issue right at the beginning.

So this was a statement of defiance then?

It was a statement that he was not going to resign and that the Democratic Party did not want him to resign. I guess, to a certain extent you're right. The Democratic members of the House wanted to come down with a specific message to deliver that "We want you to stay and we want you to fight, Mr. President. This is the product of partisanship, not principle, and we're with you."

It became a much more public event than perhaps it should have been out on the south lawn, with public statements. It should have been a solemn and sad moment, but it also should have been a very serious moment of reflection on the question of whether this was good for the country. And it was not intended to be a political rally. It was intended to be arrogant. I know that some people saw that on our side of the Senate and were very critical of what they called a rally. It was essentially an effort to pump up and restore some confidence in our ability ultimately to prevail.

The Senate, of course, was an entirely different kind of atmosphere. Were you pretty convinced from the beginning that once impeached you would prevail during the trial in the Senate?

I go through my life expecting the worst so that when something better than the worst happens, I'm happily surprised. So I can't tell you that I fully expected vindication. There was no vindication in the Senate. We knew that this was going to be a very difficult, very painful process. And we didn't know how it was going to unfold.

As you know, there were no rules that were going to allow us to predict how this was going to happen. And each Senator really was his own master or her own master as to how the vote would be cast. There were some very tough moments over there because of this uncertainty and because we feared that a minority of extremists were going to be able to take control of the process in the Senate the way they had in the House. We were worried that that might drive a wedge into our support as well. So we had many moments of concern in the Senate.

I forgot to ask you, going back to the day of the impeachment vote, did you talk to the president that day after the vote? And if so, what was his mood?

Well, I saw him the morning and I think I saw him in the evening after the vote. He was okay. He was still tired from that trip to the Middle East. He had come back and been thrown immediately into a real serious crisis that was almost a 24 hour crisis because he was putting American men in harm's way in the air attacks of Iraq on the missile sites. So he had the features of a tired Bill Clinton which I think the country has grown to recognize when they see him on television.

But the tiredness and the drawn features were not really attributable so much to the impeachment process as they were to his being president. And I must say that I was impressed with his resilience. I was impressed with his confidence that we were going to get through this.

At what point during the Senate trial did you think that the Clinton legal team had won?

Well, there were two moments and they both had to do with Senator Byrd. The first moment occurred at the conclusion of the president's defense after Senator Bumpers had completed his final argument. It must have been 40 or 50 senators lined up to shake Senator Bumper's hand because he had done a dazzling job speaking for the president. And on that occasion Senator Byrd, after shaking hands with Senator Bumpers, came over specifically, I think, talking to me and told us we had done a very, very good job and he admired our work and he was impressed with it and he wished us luck. I thought that had he been hostile to the president and to the defense team, he wouldn't have done that.

And then the second point; Byrd was a very important figure in the Democratic Party in the Senate. The second and most important moment was when he stood up, was recognized, and moved to dismiss the two counts.

At that point you were pretty confident?

Yeah. That meant that Senator Robert Byrd had made up his mind; that he'd listened to the arguments of the House managers, he'd listened to the president's lawyers, and he'd made up his mind that whatever the evidence showed, he was convinced that the president shouldn't be thrown out of office for it. And that was the point of that speech and that motion. And for him to make it meant that it was going to be very difficult, if not impossible, for the two thirds majority required to remove the president to be obtained. It wasn't there.

When you talked to the president that day--can you tell us about that conversation?

I had a personal one-on-one with him and then he met with the entire team. He was great. He was appropriately grateful and thankful to us. It was also somewhat nervous making; we were talking a little bit about the politics of the previous days and the personalities that were involved and the way in which the procedure went forth. But it was clear that there was a huge burden that had been removed from his shoulders and that he was happy that it was over and he could go forward to be the best president he could possibly be.

There was much talk of a censure option, and many Democrats wanted that option, and it fizzled. Just looking back, what's your best analysis of why that never got off the ground?

The reason it never got off the ground was because the Republican leadership made it quite clear that if any Republican participated in the effort to craft a motion of censure there would be severe consequences inside the Republican caucus for those Republicans who participated in that process.

I believe that there were many Republicans who wanted a motion of censure as well. And I believe also that had there been a serious effort to produce such a motion on the House side, and the effort had been blessed by the leadership on the Republican side, there would have been overwhelming support for it.

Yes, the president's conduct was blameworthy. Yes, the House of Representatives had a right to say something about it. But, no, it shouldn't have been an impeachment. I think that's where most of the members were, but for the people that had taken over leadership of the Republican caucus. They were very, very, I think, intense if not fanatic on the subject. And so you never got a real live chance to try and work that out.

How did the president keep up with you during the proceedings? How attentive, how involved, how intense was his communication with you as the proceedings went on?

He was, I think, very much on top of what was going on, although I couldn't tell you with confidence how it was because I would get up every morning and leave and go to the Hill. I was up on the Hill until the end of the session. We'd come down at 5:30 or 6:00 to work and prepare for the next session. So every day was filled with an enormous amount of work to prepare for the trial.

But, for example, when I was getting ready for my presentation, which was the day after the State of the Union, he [said], "Good luck. I'm thinking that we'll do fine." And then after my presentation, he called me up that night and he said that he thought I did a great job. And actually, I think the first lady called me as well and thought that I'd done a terrific job.

They were following it. And then, every now and then they would read stuff in the newspaper, one of them, and would call up in the evening about [how] they spotted something in the newspaper, [and] what did I think of that. I think they were reading the papers as much if not more than watching the television. But when the president's defense was being presented, when Chuck spoke so powerfully at the beginning, and when we had our second day, which is the day that I still believe is, when Cheryl Mills spoke, that was the day we turned the corner and we realized the moment was with us in the defense. And then I think also with the Bumpers speech which was so powerful and so compelling.

I think the president was following those proceedings very closely on television. But I can't say that from firsthand knowledge. It's just my guess.

What do you remember about the day that the video tape of the president's grand jury testimony was made public?

This was one of the uncertainties about the entire case...how in the event that video tape was ever made available to the public and played to the world, what the reaction would be, how would people respond to that. And that uncertainty, of course, was pervasive in Washington, not only just among the president's lawyers, but among a lot of the president's defenders and in the press. And so everybody was waiting to see and to watch how the president did in his four hours of testimony in very, very difficult circumstances.

Prior to the broadcast, there was a lot of expectations that were inflated, and I don't know how. But people were speculating that the president had lost his temper, that the president had been irritated and angry at the way in which the questioning had been conducted. People were expecting to see something more dramatic than [what] occurred. What the people saw was the president answering questions forthrightly and dealing with the issues, difficult issues, directly. And they saw a television screen that was bifurcated. On the one half of the screen, the president was speaking to the General Assembly of the United Nations and receiving a standing ovation, and on the other half of the screen the president was testifying in front of the Office of Independent Counsel.

And the surprise to us, and it was a surprise [that] was twofold. One, how well the president had done with the American public. Rather than being critical and angry at the president, the public saw him working his way through these issues as a human being, as a citizen and came away with a positive reaction. And secondly, how angry I think they were at Ken Starr, because in a funny way people started turning their anger at this whole process away from the president and at the accusers, realizing that the accusers had gone into issues in graphic detail, unnecessarily so, as a way to try to diminish the president and the presidency.

You were telling a story about the impeachment day as perhaps the darkest moment. And I just want to make sure that we have a clear understanding of why you felt that way that day.

I'm not sure I can add much more to what I said. I do remember that it was dark not only figuratively, but literally. That it was a day that was overcast. It was rainy. It was cold. And it had all the foreboding of a dark moment in our nation's history.

At that point, the president of the United States had been impeached, only the second president to have been impeached...was there a sense among even those loyal to the president, that here was a tarnish that he would never outlive for all his successes in other areas?

I think the president would be the first person to say that this is something that is in the history books for ever now. And he regrets it. He said so at the time. I think he understands history. He reads history. He lives history. So he knows what this sequence of events does to the history books and to his story. It becomes sort of a lead item in the story of the Clinton presidency when he would prefer to have many other.

I would like to say one other thing that I would volunteer at this point. It was a remarkable experience working in the White House--someone who had not worked in the White House before in [their] life--to walk into that Clinton White House and see the diversity of the people that were employed. This is not just an advertisement for the Clinton presidency.

He had assembled in that White House at the senior levels, at the middle levels, all through that White House, women, African Americans, Hispanics. It was really extraordinary. And he deserves some credit for that. This was not part of my job. But you couldn't help but notice it, that these people, wonderful people, excellent people, highly motivated, hard working, highly qualified people were engaged in the public's business in the most responsible way. And that was one of the experiences about working in the White House that I will remember and give credit to William Jefferson Clinton for.

If you could concisely summarize, what do you think his legacy is?

I think that this president will be seen as one of the most highly qualified, most talented, most skilled political leaders that this country has ever seen. In that measuring stick, he is up there, in my view, with the Ronald Reagan capacity to communicate with the nation, with the John Kennedy capacity to inspire a generation. I think he probably had more sense of politics and policy than we'll ever see again in a president, and more intelligence about dealing with it.

I think people will be talking about William Jefferson Clinton as a president and as a person forever because of the combination of incredible forces that are wrapped up in this man. And we know about the flaws. And we know about the lost promise. And we know about the squandered opportunities. But they also shouldn't conceal the reality that this was a time of enormous achievement and transformation of the nation in ways that I think that I've discussed with you: the diversity, the commitment to diversity, to recognizing and celebrating diversity in our country, to dealing with the post Cold War era in a way that made sense. Where the country was not afraid of exercising leadership, of projecting power and influence at the same time that it developed a very powerful economy at home.

So it's going to be a fascinating story that people will be retelling for ever and ever.