On January 21, 1998, after five tumultuous, sloppy, often brilliant, exhausting -- and elusive -- years as President of the United States, Bill Clinton finally landed in a political mess from which he seemed unlikely to extricate himself. That morning, the Washington Post reported the President apparently had been intimate with a White House intern, a young woman named Monica Lewinsky -- and that he had lied about this relationship under oath (in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by a second woman, a former Arkansas state employee named Paula Corbin Jones). The news was received with undisguised glee by the national press, which had repeatedly chased the President down dark alleys of imagined corruption only to find the trails evaporate and the alleged perpetrator basking in what seemed to be illogical levels of public approval. These charges, however, were considerably more accessible (and more plausible) than the previous run of misdemeanors. They combined the President's most commonly assumed depravities: a surplus of libido and a deficit of integrity. The surplus had been expended upon an employee the approximate age of his daughter, and the deficit involved untruthfulness of a potentially criminal sort. Furthermore, there appeared to be solid evidence of Clinton's guilt. There were tape recordings -- the second time in his career that Clinton had allowed himself to be caught on tape in intimate conversations with a woman not his wife. And there were rumors of more revelations to come. That morning, George Stephanopoulos -- formerly Clinton's closest personal aide but now a professional commentator on the ABC television network -- had opened the bidding at the highest possible level: He speculated that these charges were so serious that, if proven, they would lead to impeachment proceedings.

The first televised images of the President that day were startling. For once, this most facile of politicians seemed flummoxed: He looked tired, blotchy, shifty, nervously parsing tenses -- "There is no relationship" -- in an interview with Jim Lehrer of public television on the afternoon the story appeared. Then, a few days later, as rumors spread that he was about to resign, Clinton betrayed a rare flash of public anger. He shook his finger at the cameras and uttered the words that would define his presidency for many: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman -- Miss Lewinsky."

If the President seemed a bit unhinged in public, a more subtle drama was being enacted behind the scenes: Clinton may have been reeling, but he was also beginning to organize a survival strategy. His first task was to convince his staff that the presidency wasn't crumbling. The appearance of business as usual was crucial. Consequently, only a handful of lawyers and political advisors were detached to deal with the scandal, and they were isolated from the rest of the President's team; most everyone else, including Clinton himself, continued working -- with a stubborn, purposeful myopia -- on the substance of the office, which, that week, was the preparation of the annual State of the Union message.

Clinton never mentioned Monica Lewinsky as he proceeded with this work, but his associates found it difficult, at times, to focus on the task at hand. Televisions are ubiquitous in the White House, usually tuned to the all-news networks; now they were broadcasting nonstop mayhem -- the chaos was just a few doors away in the press room, a near riot at the briefing held each afternoon by the press secretary, Mike McCurry, as well as constant, breathless bulletins from the row of television reporters stationed just outside, on the North Lawn. The proximity of the disaster was difficult to assimilate; the West Wing -- usually a pretty quiet place, given the seriousness of the work and the thickness of the carpets -- was even more hushed than usual. Looks and shrugs were exchanged in the cramped hallways, but not many words. It was obvious to all but the most credulous that Clinton was probably lying, but what was there to say?

The President's relationship with his staff was as complicated as the rest of his life. Awe and disappointment were intertwined. The awe was inspired by Clinton's intelligence -- particularly, his encyclopedic knowledge of policy questions -- his perseverance and his ability to charm almost anyone under any circumstances; he was, without question, the most talented politician of his generation. At close range, his skills could be breathtaking: He was always the center of attention; he filled any room he entered. But there was a harshness, a certain brute insensitivity that was inextricably part of these fluorescent energies. All of Clinton's emotional sensitivity seemed to be expended in his work, which meant that there was not much decency or graciousness left over for the help. His self-involvement, self-indulgence, and, all too often, self-pity, were notorious. And yet, the staff was intensely loyal, with a deep sense of political mission. There had not been a truly successful Democratic administration in a very long time; Clinton was the first Democrat to win reelection to a second term since Franklin Roosevelt. The ideological extremism of the Republican opposition and the media's persistent, often niggling, campaign to prove the President corrupt only confirmed the high stakes: The Administration seemed perpetually embattled and the White House staff had been trained to react swiftly, with lethal force, to attacks on the President. This avidity was not to be confused with personal affection for the man.

In the days after the Lewinsky scandal began, however, the staff was the object -- for once -- of a virtuoso Clinton performance. He needed his people to be loyal, to continue to work hard, to not be discouraged. He would lead by example; he would astonish them with his ability to keep his focus, despite the overwhelming distractions. One day, for example, Michael Waldman, the chief speechwriter, was paged by the President as he sat in his office watching television: McCurry was being pummeled with questions about new rumors of an imminent resignation. Waldman wondered if he was about to be asked to write the final Clinton speech. But the President didn't even seem to be aware of the mayhem in the press room. He was calling about the State of the Union message, specifically about a memo he had received from Stephen Carter, the Yale University law professor. "Did you check out Carter's language for the 'Idea of America' section?" Clinton asked casually. "Try to work it in."

In his most private moments, of course, the President wasn't quite so stalwart. Gradually, the news spread of anguished one-on-one conversations with his closest advisors, including his wife -- outrageous conversations, in which Clinton denied his involvement with the young woman and even suggested that Lewinsky had been "stalking" him. There was an odd, dispirited Super Bowl party that weekend, attended by the Reverend Jesse Jackson -- a frequent and sometimes bitter Clinton rival in the past, now a sudden confidant; Jackson stayed on afterward to pray with the President, and to console his wife and daughter. Clinton's old friend, the television producer Harry Thomasson, flew in from California to help with the crisis. Almost all the details that proved, astonishingly, true -- the semen-stained dress, the banal gifts (dreadful gifts, the sort of things one adolescent would give to another: T-shirts, assorted ticky-tack, and a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass), the passionate late-night phone calls, the inference that oral sex might not count as sex -- all became known during those first few days.

But the President also spent hours rehearsing, rewriting, and sometimes rethinking sections of the State of the Union. At these times, Clinton appeared able to lose himself in the work; after a shaky first day or two, he didn't even seem particularly depressed or distracted. "The thing I remember is how smoothly everything seemed to go, more so than in other years," said Sylvia Mathews, the deputy chief of staff whose job it was to keep the speech on track. "We were rehearsing in the Family Theater the weekend before the speech was to be delivered. Usually, he didn't get to full-scale dress rehearsal until the day of the speech. But he was up there, working real hard, extremely focused, rewriting the sections on education and race. He showed up on Saturday with a draft covered with his left-handed scrawls: It was obvious he'd spent the night before working on the text. He'd say things like, 'I've cut out fifteen words here and added a paragraph. Listen to this...' Everything had to get better and better, tighter and tighter."

Over time, Clinton had transformed the State of the Union ritual into more than just a speech. It was now a six-month policy-making process, a central organizing tool for his substantive agenda in any given year. The President believed the speech was his best chance to communicate in an unfiltered way with the American people (usually at mind-numbing length: He'd routinely prattle on well past the hour traditionally set aside by the television networks). The media, inevitably, would deride these gargantuan efforts, but the public seemed to love them, which made the annual exercise all the more satisfying for the President. And so, great care was taken: Briefing books were prepared; wish lists compiled by each department; policy options considered. There was a discipline to the process that must have seemed odd to old friends of the scattered, garrulous Bill Clinton. But this was a different White House from the floating bull session of the first term; and this was a different Clinton -- more reserved, more dignified, more consciously presidential (most of the time). Indeed, as he stood behind the "Blue Goose" -- his full-dress lectern -- in the Family Theater that Saturday and rehearsed his lines before much of his staff, Bill Clinton may have been the only person in the room wearing a jacket and tie.

THE PRESIDENT AND HIS ECONOMIC team had spent most of their energy that year trying to think through a novel political conundrum. In 1997, Clinton had negotiated a balanced budget with the Republican majority in Congress and now, for the first time in forty years, there was the prospect of a surplus. The Republicans wanted that money for a tax cut. "But everyone knew that the budget wasn't really balanced," Robert Rubin, who was then Treasury Secretary, would recall. "Surpluses were being projected -- not the sort of surpluses we eventually got; no one saw those coming at that point -- but we also expected that discretionary spending was likely to exceed the forecast. A tax cut would probably throw us back into deficits. We had a series of meetings, starting in October, searching for a strategy. I think it was John Hilley" -- a presidential aide in charge of legislative affairs -- "who first came up with the idea of using the surplus to preserve Social Security."

Hilley's idea was passed along to Mark Penn, the President's pollster. This was standard operating procedure in the Clinton White House, which spent more money on polling than all previous administrations combined. Not only was every significant policy idea tested, the language that would be used to introduce each new idea was tested, too. Happily, in this case, Penn reported that the public seemed far more interested in preserving its old-age pensions than it was in receiving a tax cut -- and this would be the grand oratorical ploy of the 1998 State of the Union message. The President would oppose a tax cut in an election year.

Clinton wanted to take this stand in the most dramatic way possible; his speechwriters were having difficulty coming up with the right words, though. Then, in the midst of the Saturday rehearsal, as he reached the point where he asked the rhetorical question "What should we do with our new surplus?" Clinton suddenly interrupted himself and said, "Hey, I've got an idea! How about this: 'I have a simple four-word answer. Save Social Security First.' "

The President stopped and smiled. The staff applauded. Then he waved his arms out broadly, and said, "See, I haven't totally lost it."

INDEED, MANY OF THOSE CLOSEST to Bill Clinton believed that he had only recently found "it" -- that he had just begun to master the presidency. This was one of the more distressing aspects of the Lewinsky scandal: He had finally regained his political confidence after a chaotic, often inept, first term filled with abstract victories and concrete defeats -- Mrs. Clinton's failed and foolish attempt at health insurance reform was, for example, far more palpable than her husband's revolutionary effort to eradicate the federal budget deficit. He had learned how to get what he wanted from a Republican Congress in the complicated, end-of-session budget negotiations; he had successfully used military force in Bosnia and was now more comfortable as commander in chief; he had taken the measure of other world leaders and was increasingly confident on the international stage. "He had stopped acting like a governor," said Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, "and he had become the President."

But he was a confounding President. His presidency seemed to proceed simultaneously on two competing, dissonant tracks -- policy and personality -- the latter usually overwhelming the former, particularly in Washington. The general public tended to react more positively toward Clinton than did the political community: favoring his policies, impressed by his gifts, bemused by his personal indulgences. But Clinton had few true allies in Washington; not many politicians, not even in his own party, felt entirely comfortable with him. And he had a terrible relationship with the press. He had come to power at a particularly brutal moment in the history of American public life; his ascension marked the climax of a twenty-year period of lethal partisan warfare, which had begun with Richard Nixon's forced resignation from the presidency and had been punctuated by an ever-escalating series of political show trials and soap operas involving alleged (often trivial) misbehavior by public officials. His ascension also marked the arrival of a new generation to political power: the Baby Boomers, born after World War II. Indeed, Bill Clinton often seemed the apotheosis of his generation's alleged sins: the moral relativism, the tendency to pay more attention to marketing than to substance, the solipsistic callowness.

Many of Clinton's Republican opponents would never accept his legitimacy as President. He had decisively defeated George Bush in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996, but he had received less than a pure majority of the vote in both elections because of the presence of a third candidate, the Independent Ross Perot (the Republicans seem even more intemperate in retrospect, given their vehement and immediate assertions of George W. Bush's victory in the dead-heat campaign of 2000). The press, always more interested in scandal than in substance, seemed to have a particularly difficult time establishing the proper proportion between the two during the Clinton years: Even the most responsible newspapers and networks appeared obsessed with the President's personal failings. Minuscule imbroglios -- like the attempt to fire several career employees in the White House Travel Office -- and standard political maneuverings (the tendency to do business with, and grant favors to, campaign contributors when he was governor of Arkansas) were blown up into major political crises, which were exacerbated by Clinton's attempts to lawyer, and occasionally lie, his way out of trouble. It was said that he had no core principles, that he was too "slick" to be trusted -- and there was some truth to that.

In fact, Bill Clinton was strangely malleable, a creature of his audience, besotted with his ability to charm, constantly trying to please. This worked to his advantage during election campaigns and State of the Union messages, when the audience was the American people. But it could be a disastrous quality when the audience was smaller -- when he fixed upon the priorities and prejudices of the sclerotic Democrats who ran the Congress early in his administration; or when he (rather understandably) allowed himself to be distracted by the obsessions of the media or the special prosecutors investigating him. It was even worse when he inhabited the needs of the sycophants and fund-raisers and favor-seekers who inevitably clot around power -- when he indulged their vanity with access, with personal photos and coffees and overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom. And worst of all was when he allowed himself to believe their flattery and succumbed to their importunings -- at the very end of his time in office, when he allowed these "friends" to convince him to issue presidential pardons to their less-than-savory acquaintances. Clinton's two most important audiences -- the American people and the writers of history -- were, obviously, nowhere on the radar screen his last night in office, when he decided to pardon 177 individuals, including a disgraced financier named Marc Rich, who had fled the country and was prominent on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Ten Most Wanted list.

In the end, the only three Clinton quotations judged memorable enough to be included in the seventeenth edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, published a year after he left office, were:

"I experimented with marijuana a time or two. And I didn't like it, and didn't inhale, and didn't try it again." -- 3/31/92

"I am going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman -- Miss Lewinsky." -- 1/26/98

"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the -- if he -- if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not -- that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement." -- 8/17/98

AND YET, IT COULD ALSO be argued -- despite Clinton's gaudy personal failings -- that he had run a serious, disciplined, responsible presidency. "If you see a turtle sitting on top of a fence post," Clinton would often say, "it didn't get there by accident." A quotation worthy of Bartlett's, by which he meant that the historic prosperity and the global peace that attended his time in office were not accidental. They were, at least in part, attributable to thousands of decisions -- subtle, nuanced, complicated, often risky decisions -- that Clinton and his advisors had made over the years, decisions that lacked the neon explosiveness of the Lewinsky scandal or the Marc Rich pardon, but which were the true work of the presidency.

Furthermore, it can be argued that the reason Bill Clinton succeeded as well as he did in the substance of his presidency is that -- intellectually, at least -- he was quite the opposite of the slickster his enemies imagined: He arrived in Washington with a coherent, sophisticated political vision, which he pursued rigorously, quite often in ways that were politically inexpedient in the short term. He had, by turns, alienated traditional liberals, conservatives, and moderates, but his heresies were schematic. The apparent contradictions in Clinton's agenda -- support for free trade (which should have pleased conservatives) and for universal health insurance (which should have pleased liberals); support for welfare reform (which appalled liberals) and for affirmative action (which appalled conservatives) -- were all part of what he considered to be his larger mission: to manage the nation's transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

He had been proposing that as his political project for years -- he'd first broached it with me in the late 1980s, when he was still governor of Arkansas, well before he decided when he would actually run for President -- but to most ears, the formulation "from the Industrial Age to the Information Age" seemed grandiose at best; it sounded like political boilerplate culled from focus groups.... or worse, messianic Baby Boom hooey. (It was no accident that the other American politician retailing the notion of a "historic" economic paradigm shift back in the 1980s, and who used almost the exact same words as Clinton did, was Newt Gingrich.)

Clinton's ultimate success in this project was mixed, at best. But he never received credit for the essential coherence of his vision because he never found a way to articulate it credibly, much less succinctly -- no small irony, given his ability to communicate. He wasn't even sure what to call the program. He had tried "The New Choice" in 1991 and then "The New Covenant" during the 1992 campaign. He called himself a "New Democrat." He spoke incessantly, and appallingly, about "building a bridge to the twenty-first century" during his 1996 campaign (at his second inauguration, a model of that bridge had been built on the Mall, paved with AstroTurf). His final attempt, destined to be only marginally more successful than the others -- except overseas, where it became the rallying cry of former leftists who had discovered the inevitability of the global marketplace -- was to call his philosophy "The Third Way."

As Clinton prepared his 1998 State of the Union message, the economic transformation he had long predicted -- from the Industrial Age to the Information Age -- was finally beginning to seem something more than a rhetorical conceit. The national economy was behaving in ways that had seemed unimaginable a few years earlier. Unemployment rates were plummeting while inflation rates remained at historic lows; prosperity was rising at all income levels (the incomes of households in the broad middle of the economic spectrum increased by a remarkable 35 percent during his eight years in office). Traditional notions of time and space and borders were being challenged by new technologies -- portable computers, the Internet, cell phones, satellite television -- that were simultaneously transforming not only the global marketplace, but also the most routine ceremonies of middle-class life.

This was a transformation, Clinton believed, similar to the development, at the beginning of the twentieth century, of a truly national economy dominated by vast corporate trusts. At that time, the federal government -- led by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the two presidents Clinton had hoped to emulate -- responded to the economic change by enacting a series of historic reforms to harness the new economy (everything from the passage of a Pure Food and Drug Act to the imposition of an income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve System). Clinton believed his task was to enact a similar series of reforms, appropriate to the Information Age. But, as he prepared for the 1998 State of the Union message, the President could point to no single accomplishment as grand as those of Roosevelt and Wilson. By force of personality and sheer persistence, he had slowly dragged Washington toward a recognition that a revised form of government activism might be appropriate in the anarchy of an instant economy -- but he had won his victories in dribs and drabs; his defeats had been far more memorable.

Clinton was, of course, a fabulous talker. In some ways, he was a better public speaker -- because of his intellectual acuity, his informality, his ability to improvise -- than Ronald Reagan had been; he was the President most comfortable behind a podium since John Kennedy. (Newt Gingrich, Clinton's most vehement Republican opponent, once told me he'd sat through a Clinton State of the Union speech thinking, "We're dead. There's no way we're going to beat this guy.") But the President's oratorical strength was mostly a consequence of his physical presence, a mirage of body language. He seemed incapable of memorable rhetoric; he had never found a way to communicate his larger purpose to the American public, and this was a source of enduring frustration to him.

At first, the 1998 State of the Union message appeared to be the perfect moment to take another crack at it -- and there were several paragraphs, near the beginning of the address, that were as lucid a statement of his political philosophy as he'd ever attempted. But, after the Lewinsky scandal began, the sole purpose of the speech became to insure his political survival (even the Social Security bombshell was destined to be lost in the melodrama). He had decided not to mention the scandal at all that night; indeed, the fabulously self-destructive "I did not sleep with that woman" statement on the day before the speech had been a planned preemptive strike -- suggested by his friend Harry Thomasson -- a foolish attempt to clear the air before his State of the Union address. The air would not be cleared, however. The Lewinsky subtext was everywhere; his staff spent hours scouring the final text for potentially embarrassing double entendres.

THERE WAS APPLAUSE AS THE President made his way into the chamber of the House of Representatives just after nine o'clock on the evening of January 27, 1998. He was greeted warmly, defiantly, by the Democrats who gathered near the center aisle to shake his hand. This had become one of the odder features of the Clinton dynamic: The left wing of the Democratic Party, which had suffered through his assorted ideological heresies, was never so supportive of the President as when he was involved in a scandal. "What kept us close to the President was the Republicans," said Senator Charles Schumer of New York, who was still a member of the House in 1998. "Their extreme nastiness pushed Democrats into Bill Clinton's arms, even those who didn't like him very much."

There were very few House Democrats who could be said to like Clinton at all. Most members of Congress represented narrow, homogenous constituencies; the Democrats tended toward anachronistic Industrial Age liberalism. Just a few weeks earlier, the House leadership had seemed on the brink of outright rebellion against the President -- Minority Leader Richard Gephardt had complained, in a speech at Harvard, about Clinton's willingness to compromise with the conservatives in the budget negotiations of 1997, on welfare reform and free trade. In October, the Democrats had voted overwhelmingly against giving the President "fast track" authority to negotiate new trade agreements. "He was tremendously upset by that," said a foreign policy advisor. "He considered the vote a massive and very personal 'Fuck you, Bill Clinton.' "

But now, Monica Lewinsky -- of all people -- had forced the Democrats back into the fold. They stood and cheered as the President reached the podium. And they cheered again as he opened his speech with an impressive barrage of statistics: "We have fourteen million new jobs; the lowest unemployment in twenty-four years; the lowest core inflation in thirty years; incomes are rising and we have the highest home ownership in history. Crime has dropped for a record five years in a row. And the welfare rolls are at their lowest levels in twenty-seven years. Our leadership in the world is unrivaled. Ladies and gentlemen" -- he paused, slowing down for the ritual pronouncement -- "the state of our union is strong."

He lowered his voice on "strong," delivering it like a hammer blow rather than a trumpet clarion. After savoring the applause -- even the Republicans had to join in -- he moved on to his statement of creed: "Rarely have Americans lived through so much change, in so many ways, in so short a time.... We have moved into an Information Age, a global economy, a truly new world.

"For five years now we have met the challenge of these changes at every turning point.... We have moved past the sterile debate of those who say government is the enemy and those who say government is the answer. My fellow Americans, we have found a Third Way. We have the smallest government in thirty-five years, but a more progressive one. We have a smaller government, but a stronger nation." He was interrupted here by ironic applause from the Republicans. But he pressed on, reciting the three principles of The Third Way: opportunity, responsibility and community -- words that Clinton had made the slogan of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council when he became its chairman in 1991. Ever since, politicians from Tony Blair in England to George W. Bush in Texas had used the same words to win elections; by 1998, however, the formulation was beginning to seem hackneyed and, in revisiting it, the President lost steam. He made a last attempt to summarize his governing philosophy, offering a three-point "strategy for prosperity: fiscal discipline to cut interest rates and spur growth; investments in education and skills... to prepare our people for the new economy; new markets for American products and American workers."