From an extraordinary interview with Hillary Clinton, conducted by Lucinda Franks, in the premiere issue of Talk magazine, September 1999:

"Bill has been subjected to so much abuse.... He doesn't make any excuses for what he did. But the reaction was unprecedented and harmful to the country.... People are mean. I think it's a real disservice, the way we sort of strip away everyone's sense of dignity, of privacy. People need support, not disdain."

"And you know we did have a very good stretch," she adds later, referring to the period after Gennifer Flowers. "Years and years of nothing." ...

"My husband is a very good man," Hillary insists. "They are jealous of him. Yes, he has weaknesses. Yes, he needs to be more responsible, more disciplined, but it is remarkable given his background that he turned out to be the kind of person he is, capable of such leadership.... Can you imagine what it took for him to go on after losing everything, to still get up each morning and do your job? You know in Christian theology there are sins of weakness and sins of malice, and this was a sin of weakness."

I tell Hillary I read his mother's autobiography, in which she wrote about the atmosphere of alcohol, violence, and chaos that forced her son to be the man of the house while he was still a child. Hillary leans over and says softly, "That's only the half of it. He was so young, barely four, when he was scarred by abuse that he can't even take it out and look at it. There was terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother. A psychologist once told me that for a boy being in the middle of a conflict between two women is the worst possible situation. There is always the desire to please each one." ...

"He has been working on himself very hard in the last year," she tells me. "He has become more aware of his past and what was causing this behavior." Public office has prevented the president from seeking therapy, but friends told me they expect him to after leaving the Oval Office.

Does she believe, I wonder, that you don't leave someone you love under any circumstances?

"You have to know the real quality of the person," she says thoughtfully. "You have to be alert to it, vigilant in helping. I thought this was resolved ten years ago. I thought he had conquered it; I thought he understood it, but he didn't go deep enough or work hard enough."

"What's the part of the Bible that deals with this?" she had asked at one point.

"Corinthians?" I suggested.

"Love endures all things? No, I love that, but I was thinking of when Peter betrayed Jesus three times and Jesus knew it but loved him anyway. Life is not a linear progression. It has many paths and challenges. And we need to help one another."

"And it is love, isn't it?'

"Yes, it is," she said. "We have love."

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