The Better Half
During her husband's greatest crisis, Hillary has come into her own

BY KAREN TUMULTY AND NANCY GIBBS

One Monday in January, five days into the longest year of her life, Hillary Rodham Clinton was making her usual rounds. At the Harriet Tubman school in Harlem, third-graders told her they were studying the four values: honesty, caring, respect and responsibility. "Those are really important values," Mrs. Clinton said. "Boy, that's a big word--responsibility--isn't it?" She went on to visit a literacy program before heading to a 50th anniversary gala for unicef. She was talking about the things she has always cared about, normally to rooms full of earnest activists and an indifferent camera or two. This time CNN carried her live, and the UNICEF ballroom was packed with reporters, all wanting to see if she was falling apart, since her marriage looked as if it had.

"Well, it's nice to see," she told an aide as they drove away in the limousine, in pursuit of silver linings, "that the press now cares about children's issues."

It would not be the last time she would put that rude spotlight to use. All through the year, as she pursued the private rescue of a marriage and the public rescue of a presidency, she was the one person who seemed to see the larger story and shaped its telling. When talk of resignation spread, she was the one who said, Let this unfold. "We've got a fight on our hands," she told top adviser Doug Sosnik. "You be focused on that and not how bad things are." When everyone thought the story was about Bill Clinton, she said it was about Kenneth Starr. When her husband's confession finally confronted her and us with the truth of his lies, she led the way, from denial through fury to a grudging acceptance. The code was always clear: if she can stand by him, she who has been so directly wronged, so should we. And in the fall, when the Republicans promised an election that would give Clinton his comeuppance, she went out and gave the Democratic faithful, many of whom she had let down in the past, something to cling to, straight on to victory in November.

Now at year-end Hillary Clinton finds herself in places she has never been: embraced and admired by more Americans than at any other time in her public life, freed to work on her own causes--and cast as the "single most degraded wife in the history of the world," as Maureen Dowd lethally put it in the New York Times. Public pity, for Hillary Clinton, is an enormous price to pay for popularity. Frustrated feminists and cutting commentators note that her apotheosis comes not in the Congressional Record but on the cover of Vogue, not for what she achieved but for what she suffered. The role was not trailblazing but utterly traditional, born of a mythology of humiliation shared by Princess Diana and Kathie Lee Gifford.

Even beatification, if it comes on these terms, is a kind of punishment for a First Lady who swept into Washington wanting to put her stamp on social policy and bring government back into fashion. Instead she handed Newt control of Congress with her health-care plan and had her place in history established as the first First Lady ever to be forced to testify before a grand jury.

But with those defeats, Hillary also began to accept what Dolley Madison and Lady Bird Johnson had taken for granted, and what Eleanor Roosevelt must have told her when the two communed. As her former chief of staff Maggie Williams put it, "One of the things she's learned about being First Lady is, it's not just about doing, it's about being a symbol." Whatever judgments voters were asked to make about the flaws they would tolerate in a reckless politician whose leadership they valued, she mirrored in her own decisions about a faithless husband whom she loved. She was his salesman, but also our surrogate.

In a sense, it has been ever thus: the history of the Clinton presidency is and always has been the history of the Clinton marriage, which is why the distinction between public and private in this presidency has always been messy. From the start their union was a vessel not only of love but of ambition, a shortcut for two stars in a hurry to reach heaven. She signed on to be wife and business partner in the hope that they could have great fun and do great things by pooling her discipline, his charisma, her vision, his guts. And there was always the risk that if one stumbled, it would bring down the other too.

So it should be no surprise that as the presidency is teetering, people are quick to look for hints that the marriage is too. Those who have socialized with them in recent months see signs both that healing is under way and that it will be a very long, steep climb. The President shows a new tentativeness when he is with his wife, looking to see if she thinks a joke is funny before he laughs, and for the first time deferring to her choice in what movies they select, watching fewer car chases and more dramas. Where she used to have to nag him to get his sleep, the night-owl President can now be persuaded to retire when his up-with-the-birds wife is ready.

Their moments of open affection, when they happen, now have a sepia tone to them. "Flashbacks" is what one friend calls them, because they are brought on by a Christmas carol they both love or a recollection of a long-ago vacation. But those close to them also find reassurance in the fact that they talk of their future together in very concrete terms, musing aloud about where they might live and whether either might land a job that comes with a plane.