THE US: "I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him, 'What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?' I was furious and getting more so by the second." This is Senator Hillary Clinton's account of her reaction when President Bill Clinton woke her on the morning of August 15th, 1998, and told her that the Monica Lewinsky story was true. Conor O'Clery, North America Editor, reports
It appears in leaked extracts from her much anticipated memoir Living History, due out on Monday, in which Mrs Clinton recounts her life story, including her anguish and fury over the affair.
She recalls another conversation eight months earlier on the morning of January 21st, 1998, when her husband sat on the edge of the bed and told her the Lewinsky story was coming out and it wasn't true.
For eight months she was in denial as the media splashed the story almost daily. He eventually confessed to her, on the eve of his testimony to a grand jury in which President Clinton acknowledged "inappropriate intimate contact" and "sexual banter".
Her husband, she writes, "just stood there saying over and over again, 'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea'." She says her husband's eyes filled with tears when she said he would have to tell their teenage daughter, Chelsea.
"As a wife, I wanted to wring Bill's neck," Senator Clinton writes.
He began his confession after pacing at the bedside, and "told me for the first time that the situation was much more serious than he had previously acknowledged.
"He now realised he would have to testify that there had been an inappropriate intimacy. He told me that what happened between them had been brief and sporadic."
In a reference to Mr Clinton's own memoirs, on which he is currently working, she writes, "Why he felt he had to deceive me and others is his own story, and he needs to tell it in his own way." Through it all, Mrs Clinton never stopped loving him, according to the extracts leaked to the Associated Press, apparently with the aim of getting the Monica Lewinsky issue out of the way before the launching of the 562-page book on June 9th.
But she came close to leaving him. "The most difficult decisions I have made in my life were to stay married to Bill and to run for the Senate from New York." The publication of Living History is expected to be one of the political events of the year. Mrs Clinton's book is regarded as an important step in a burgeoning political career that could lead her back to the White House as president.
Conversations with several members of Congress, Democratic and Republican, in Washington this week, reveal an across-the-board acceptance that Mrs Clinton will make a bid for the White House in 2008 - with the intriguing possibility that her opponent will be President Bush's brother Jeb, now governor of Florida.
Even now she tops any poll of likely Democratic candidates for 2004, though she has ruled out running next year.
Composed and smiling, Mrs Clinton refused to comment about her account of the Lewinsky affair to reporters on Capitol Hill yesterday. "I want everyone to read the whole book" which was "about growing up, my values, my beliefs," she said.
Invariably, however, the greatest interest yesterday was in the way she handled the intern scandal in the book.
Initially, she writes, she accepted Mr Clinton's denial of an affair, something that critics have found hard to believe given his history of infidelity.
He assured her he "had talked to her a few times" after Ms Lewinsky had asked for job-hunting help, and that the relationship had been horribly misconstrued.
"For me, the Lewinsky imbroglio seemed like just another vicious scandal manufactured by political opponents," writes the former First Lady, who at the time told NBC that the charge against her husband was part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" and "is not going to be proven true." When President Clinton admitted it was true that August morning, the atmosphere in the family became distinctly chilly. They went on holiday to Martha's Vineyard a few days later.
"Buddy, the dog, came along to keep Bill company," she writes. "He was the only member of our family who was still willing to." While on the island, she felt nothing but profound sadness, disappointment and unresolved anger. "I could barely speak to Bill, and when I did, it was a tirade. I read. I walked on the beach. He slept downstairs. I slept upstairs."
Her decision to run for the Senate in New York helped heal the rift.