I actually was not in the solarium. At that point, I had talked to the president. Several of us talked to the president not long after he concluded his testimony. The question we were dealing with at that point was, "Do you want to go ahead and give this address to the country tonight?" He was very adamant that he did. I think he wanted some sense of finishing this awful day and getting on with his life and getting on to vacation with his family. And he wanted some finality to it. So, he wanted to give that speech.

Again, that's where we probably had not served him particularly well, because we didn't know the degree of frustration and anger that went into that deposition. You could see it much more clearly later when it became public. But at that time, because we hadn't participated in it, we really didn't know except for the read of his legal team how difficult it had been. Knowing that, we probably would have advised against trying to give a very important address to the country-

According to all the reporting on it--and maybe you weren't involved in the substance of it--there is a debate about how contrite the president ought to be.

There wasn't much of a debate on the White House staff. There had been some drafts that circulated. My colleague, Paul Begala, had done a very good job of sitting with the president and getting some sense of what the president wanted to have said. And the first couple of drafts that kicked around in the White House had it about right.

It was not about anything except the president having to go before the American people and acknowledge that he had been very misleading in the way he had characterized his relationship. Moreover, [he] had a real need to apologize to a number of people for his behavior and for the consequences of that behavior.

The president's anger about what he felt he had been put through led him to want to address the other side of the coin. What was the nature of this prosecution and the people who had been trying to get me? There wasn't a big debate in the White House, because really by the time it did boil down to the two or three people he was dealing with, he was again determined to say what he wanted to say.

It's interesting. For all the talk about how Clinton is guided by the spin-meisters and the cabala of advisors, this was a completely unvarnished version of what the president wanted to say. He knew he had to account for his own behavior but he really wanted to get off his chest some of the anger he felt about the quality of the Starr investigation. It was very genuine.

Of course, it was sliced and diced by the punditocracy. It was judged to be inadequate, because everyone said he needed to be much more contrite.

At what point did you realize that the president had misled you and that you had misled the press corps and, in turn, the American people?

It was in that same sequence of things. As you read these stories, you would have to be completely naive not to see that the president is going to move in this direction. It was that weekend before his deposition where we finally had to confront the reality that this had not been an entirely straight story.

I could understand the lawyers' explanation that there was a very complicated definition of sexual relations that went behind that finger-wagging. But it just didn't wash, because it flew in the face of what anyone would commonly interpret as being the meaning of those particular words.

There was, along with disappointment, some anger. ... Because Bill Clinton is such a good guy, as a person that you respond to at a personal level, I think he's been enormously effective in so many ways as president and he has such great capacity for leadership. The overwhelming sense that [he] blew this opportunity to do some extraordinary things for the country [was] the overriding emotion most of us felt as we went into that period.

According to the Woodward book and the way he describes it, after the Starr report is released, there is--in his words again--a primal scream of rage from you and others. I don't know if that's metaphoric or what, but tell us about when the Starr report is released.

It's kind of the opposite of a primal scream. You couldn't hear a pin drop because everyone was either reading the thing on the internet or reading whatever copies of it that were available. It's the quietest I've ever seen the White House.

A lot of people [were] walking around shaking their heads in disbelief at the goriness of the detail and some of the choice little items that are sprinkled in and out of that report. It was not an easy read.

What didn't you believe about it? I don't mean the details.

It was hard not to believe that factually they had buttoned up this. It's written in so much awful, awesome detail that you can't escape some of it. But I remember reading it thinking everything that was the least bit exculpatory had been diminished or pushed aside in favor of everything that would fit the theory of the case they were trying to build. There was certainly some exculpatory information that Starr ignored or suppressed or didn't treat with the same degree of importance within the report that would have led the reader in a different direction. It was written with procescutorial zeal, written to convince people that Bill Clinton was unworthy of being president.

At the same time, you have said it conveyed to you an enormous sense of recklessness on the part of Bill Clinton.

It did. It was inescapable that you would make that conclusion reading it, too. Look, once the president acknowledged that he had a very inappropriate relationship with a subordinate intern, a female employee of the White House, that's reckless enough. But to add the piling on of all these details just only compounded the sense that this was an awful episode for everybody on all sides.

That weekend, you and the political staff did not want to do the Sunday talk shows. Several versions have said, in fact, that you insisted the lawyers go out.

That's right. I don't think anybody felt, given the position that so many people had been put in the White House, that we could carry the ball that particular weekend. I think a lot of us, me included, felt like our credibility was pretty well shot at that point, which is not a good place to be if you're in the business of dealing with the press. So, we said fine to the lawyers. You guys go out and figure out how you make the case.

August 18th is the day that Mrs. Clinton, Chelsea and Bill, the famous shot where they walk out to the helicopter and there's visual distance there. You're on--

Bill Clinton holding on to Buddy for dear life is the way I remember the picture.

You're on the helicopter?

Yeah, I was there waiting to fly off on this happy family vacation. It was very, very awkward for so many reasons because we were all at this very stressful moment, saying goodbye to our families. Of course, I knew we were going to be right back in Washington two nights later, because we were going to take military action against the Osama bin Laden network.

So, we were simultaneously dealing with this really bizarre moment in the life of the White House and then also getting prepared to do what the president as commander-in-chief can do. You had all the tension associated with both of those things going on. And it was a pretty strange moment.

What was it like on that helicopter ride?

Look, the Clintons deserve more privacy than I've given them in some of my previous interviews on this subject and I'm going to be very careful here. I'll say this. It was a family that needed to really go through a healing process. For a lot of different reasons, including the fact that the president was dealing with a difficult decision that he had to make as Commander-in-Chief, it was a family that had not had time to really deal with this matter.

I pretty firmly believe that there had not been many conversations between the Clintons as a couple on this until they were able to get away and be by themselves. I don't know that. It's not for me to say that. If the president and Mrs. Clinton ever want to address that, that's their business. But that was my impression.

And so, it was a family you can easily understand needed desperately to have some quality time together and they didn't need a bunch of aides and the press poking at them.

From a news management sense--I think Carville was talking about this--was there a sense that the president had to be seen taking his medicine by the public?

It was just such an awful time that I don't think most of us thought about anything other than getting through the day and getting through what we needed to get through in order to perform effectively. We had a big test coming up. Remember we had a movie called "Wag the Dog" out. We knew that it was going to look completely improbable at this particular time we were striking out against a terrorist network. And yet, it was the right thing to do because we had good intelligence reasons for doing what we had to do.

We were much more focused on that, on the reality that we had a very serious piece of business that lay immediately ahead of us and there was no way to spin this story.

Anybody who thinks that we had some kind of public relations strategy on how to get through this just misses the point. This was a family that needed to get as far away from publicity as possible. They had to get out the door, get on the helicopter, get to Martha's Vineyard and then basically be by themselves.

And as you recall, we just shut it down. The president wasn't very visible. He wasn't out moving around Martha's Vineyard the way he normally was.

He wasn't playing golf.

He wasn't playing golf. I got in trouble at one point. I think he probably got a little bit lonely and he took his dog for a walk and wandered close enough that cameras could record the event. Then everybody went crazy because the president had been seen in public. But it was not by any design. It was just because the president wanted to take his dog for a walk.

That's a pretty lonely picture.

It was a very lonely picture. My guess is that it was a very accurate picture. Look, there was a lot of anger, a lot of emotion. That's for the privacy of that family and they can share with all of us whatever they want to share.

Can you characterize for us what Mrs. Clinton was like at this moment?

She was exactly like any right-thinking human being would imagine a spouse to be in a moment like that. She was hurt. She loves her husband. She respects the fact that her husband is right at that moment dealing with some serious business. She understands that, but all the enormity of that is really Hillary's story and not Mike McCurry's story. So, I'll let her tell it if she wants to.

Do you remember at what point that you let the president know that you're thinking about leaving?

I had already submitted my resignation long prior to this. [I] set my day for departing in October before these events and the president's testimony, learning that he had not been exactly straight with the White House, the American people on this whole matter. So, I was already sort of half out the door at that point.

Is there a point at which you're thinking, look, I can't leave now?

It's a good question. I think that when I finally left, I felt I was turning over to my successor an opportunity to get things back to normal. The theory that we had at the White House was the president would do well in the mid-term elections. The Republicans would drop the impeachment matter and we'd finally get back to the regular order of business as we went into 1999.

I think if someone had told me in October that the president will be impeached and there will be this historic process that's going to occur next year, I think I would have felt obligated to stay. But I just never believed that that was going to be the course that history would take.

How do you regard the historical legacy of this president--

Not to fault you, because I know you had to ask me this stuff, but we've spent an awful lot of time on the down side of the Clinton presidency. But I firmly believe this.

Twenty, thirty years from now, when people think back on this time in history, Bill Clinton will be a part of it. But what they're going to really think of is the internet. What has happened is a revolution in the way we communicate with each other, the way we do business, probably in the way we report the news and run political campaigns. It's all a part of the change that's occurring.

That happened on Bill Clinton's watch and it arguably may not have happened if the wrong set of policies had been put in place by this president. The new economy will be associated in history with this president and this time. And we don't understand it yet, but I'm firmly convinced that it's going to be more of the historical legacy than Monica Lewinsky.

The White House does have to perform these other vital tasks at the same time as you have suggested you were in the dark. How do you function in that environment?

The way many people functioned and got through that period was by doing the job that they were sent to Washington or sent to the White House to do, because an awful lot of work of government continued during 1998. The press was obsessed by Monica Lewinsky and, therefore, the three or four of us that had to deal with the press everyday had to have that as part of our portfolio.

But remember, 90 percent of the White House walked around not wanting to be anywhere near this story. They went about doing their jobs. The president got out there everyday and had a bill to sign or an announcement to make or an Executive Order to issue. Our goal was to have the president portrayed doing the job he should be doing as president.

The fact that we did that and that the trains continued to run on time is probably what helped rescue Bill Clinton from this political scandal. He got out there. He did his job every single day and the American people said, all right, it doesn't look like the guy is going to succumb to be self-pitying in the midst of all this. He's going to continue to do the job that we, the people, elected him to do.

How did you handle the constant struggle with the lawyers? You have a public affairs responsibility. They have a legal obligation to the president and throughout much of that year, you got to be at odds.

We set up a process for the political public affairs squad to sit down every single morning with the lawyers and just thrash it out so there wouldn't be mixed signals going out [and] we wouldn't go off on our separate tangents. We tried to cooperate, understanding that we had our job to do.

It was not always an easy relationship, but I do believe the lawyers were well-motivated and well-intentioned. I think they were not trying to mislead any of us on the staff. They just had a very difficult assignment in their province.

They were, after all, dealing with a very aggressive prosecutor. They were dealing with someone who was trying to arguably bring this president down. And that required certain things of them as lawyers. I understand that. I respect that even if it put me in some very impossible situations. That just was the nature of the beast.

Of course, I had to rant and rave and throw up my arms and threaten to quit and do all the things necessary so that we could get what we needed for our side. We all had to come together at the end of the day and march forward.

Since the scandal, some people have written, we've seen a new side of Clinton, more relaxed, funnier, more at ease.

Two thoughts about that, post-impeachment. Bill Clinton is now the longest surviving political figure on the scene when it comes to the ranks of leaders of the western democracies. He is, in a way, the titular head of that group now. Being a senior statesman, I think, puts you in a much different position.

He is more relaxed. I think he is more contemplative. I think he is thinking about the future and maybe looking back a little as he looks ahead. But there's a wistfulness to it. There's some sense that this is the Clinton that could have done so much more if we hadn't been dragged into all these other stories, some of our own making, some of his making, some [invented] by some of the president's enemies.

If we hadn't been subsumed in this culture of scandal so often, the Bill Clinton who is out there now, who is so much more relaxed and gregarious and in a way enjoyable to see, could have been doing so much more for all of us.

Does Bill Clinton worry personally about his legacy?

I never saw that. In fact, to the contrary, my experience up until the time I left in 1998 was that he really was adamant that people not think in that sense. He didn't want people to be retrospective. He wanted people thinking ahead.

His brilliance as a politician was that he was always making an argument about the future, the argument about where we were going to build the bridge going into the 21st century. That's what lent energy to his persona as a politician. And I suspect there's still more of that than there is the retrospective view.

I've seen a couple of occasions where he does seem to be a little more reflective. ... But I don't think he's obsessed with it at all. In fact, to the contrary, I think that one of his legacies is to really help everyone understand that politics is about the choices we make for the future. That's one of the reasons why he was so extraordinarily successful as a politician.