Being a Hired Hand in the White House Means Serving as a Body Blocker, Containing the Damage and, Sometimes, Fudging the Truth.
But What Do You Do When You Find Out the President Has Lied to You?

Clinton aides, clockwise from top: Paul Begala, Mike McCurry, George Stephanopoulos and Rahm Emannuel. (Photo illustration by Nola Lopez)

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 1; Page W10

Paul Begala felt he owed everything to Bill Clinton. A fast-talking, red-bearded political operative from Sugarland, Tex., Begala got his big break when he joined Clinton's first presidential campaign at the age of 30. He spent long days and nights with the candidate, and after Clinton's victory he became a top strategist on the Democratic National Committee payroll. True, Begala fell out of favor after the Democrats lost Congress, packed up his family and started consulting for corporations back in Texas. But after Clinton won reelection and asked him to join the White House staff, Begala couldn't resist. His wife was pregnant and they had two preschool boys, but it was hard to turn down the president of the United States.

A major chunk of Begala's job was to be a television warrior for the boss, particularly as the wave of scandals – Whitewater, Paula Jones, campaign finance abuses – gathered force. He spent much of the day spinning the working-stiff reporters, but when the White House wanted to "put someone out" – administration lingo for dispatching an official to the talk shows – it was Begala who often matched wits with Ted Koppel or Tim Russert or Sam and Cokie.

He lost none of his competitive fire when the Monica Lewinsky story broke last January. The president had told him the allegations were untrue – he did not have sexual relations with that intern – and that was enough for Paul Begala. He berated reporters for rushing to judgment and feasting on improper leaks from prosecutors. And he made clear that he was not simply spouting the party line. He believed the president.

When Clinton admitted the sexual relationship before Ken Starr's grand jury on August 17, Begala was crushed. It fell to him to write a draft for the president's four-minute television speech that evening, a far more contrite version than Clinton would ultimately deliver. It was Begala who walked Clinton into the Map Room for his brief address and adjusted the microphone on Clinton's tie when a technician said it was too low. He was, in short, a trouper. And when it was over, Begala put on his trademark cowboy boots and took his family on a trout fishing trip.

While vacationing in Utah, Begala told friends he had decided to submit a resignation letter. He had had it with Clinton. "He looked me in the eye and lied to me," Begala told one friend. Then he talked it over with his wife, Diane, and decided this was not quite the same as secretly selling weapons to Ayatollah Khomeini.

In the end, he returned to the White House. "I knew him before he was president," Begala says. "He was a good guy then, he's a good guy now. I like him. He did a terrible thing. But it's bad conduct, not impeachable."

But Begala registered a protest of sorts, relinquishing his role as Clinton's television warrior. For one of the president's staunchest defenders on the airwaves, that spoke volumes.

"I'm not making any bones about the fact that I was angry and disappointed," Begala says. "I temper that, however, with some perspective that this was about an intensely personal act of wrongdoing that no one would want to admit to. I think it's understandable he didn't want to tell me. It's human . . .

"I was very angry. I was very disappointed. I didn't want to have to say that on television. But I didn't want to lie. So you bite your tongue.

"I didn't want to go back out because I didn't want to be discussing my feelings," he says, putting a New Age emphasis on the word. "The first question would be, okay, you lied before, how do we know you're not lying now? I didn't want to go on TV and say I was angry with the president. He's my boss. So I decided to say nothing."

Eventually, though, Begala realized "that my not saying anything was being interpreted as a vote of no confidence in the president." On September 21, the day that Clinton's videotaped testimony would be played for the country, the New York Times reported that Begala had decided never to defend Clinton on television again. The gauntlet had been thrown down. Begala, who had shaved his beard – perhaps hoping that no one would remember his earlier incarnation – agreed to appear that night on "Larry King Live" and "Nightline."

Koppel's first question: "Since you were sent out on a number of occasions to lie in the president's behalf for much of the spring and summer, what guarantee do I have, what guarantee do our viewers have, that you aren't being sent out to do the same thing now?"

Begala deftly turned the question back to Clinton's testimony. He didn't want to talk about his feelings.

In the cloistered, pressurized world of the political staffer, loyalty is the ultimate virtue. It is primal, instinctive, unspoken; politicians demand it and subordinates automatically provide it. To do otherwise is to devalue your net worth in the political marketplace.

Loyalty by definition means backing the boss during the roughest news cycles. The candidate or officeholder inevitably screws up; the staffer is expected to pick up the pieces, contain the damage, serve as a body blocker against the opposition. Curiously, this notion of fierce loyalty is not seen as a mutual proposition; if the staffer makes a hash of things, he is quickly shown the door.

The staff member is expendable, replaceable; the principal must be protected at all costs. After all, the staffer owes his very political existence to his commanding officer. Without the imprimatur of the pol, he is nobody, a garden-variety hack. But once he is welcomed into the bosom of the organization, he is transformed. He struts with an air of authority. His phone calls are returned. Reporters take him to lunch. He is assumed to speak for the candidate, the senator, the governor, the president. He is someone.

He must either remain anonymous, a faceless "aide" feeding his best lines to the boss, or publicly parrot the boss's views as his own. His preferred profile is a low profile. He offers advice behind the scenes, but is never permitted to publicly disagree. He quietly handles the most sensitive tasks, giving the boss deniability if the situation blows up. The staffer makes the trains run on time, the pol merely shows up before departure, waving to the crowds. The staffer accepts his lot in life, grumbling occasionally to other staffers but buying into the essential bargain, wielding power on someone else's behalf and settling for reflected glory. He has signed the unwritten contract of loyal serfdom, and he cannot dissolve that contract without sacrificing the very source of his power.

But there is a kind of duality in becoming a political appointee on the payroll of the United States government. While the staffer literally serves at the pleasure of his principal and can be fired without cause, he also owes a measure of loyalty to the taxpayers who pay his salary. He is not supposed to lie or deceive or engage in illegal or unconstitutional behavior.

As a practical matter, the staffer often finds himself trapped in a gray zone, skating close to the ethical line, ordered to destroy the memo or fudge the truth or fall on his sword so the boss may remain unbloodied. It is here that loyalty undergoes its greatest test. Every staffer, perhaps unconsciously, has a personal tipping point, beyond which he will not endanger himself or fatally compromise his credibility. But in the flexible universe occupied by the staff person, that tipping point is usually set quite high. For most, it is never reached, enabling the aide to muddle through the ethical crisis of the moment.

On rare occasions, the staffer comes to the disheartening realization that he has been betrayed, misled, even lied to by his principal. He must reach a decision based not on the usual calculation of the boss's welfare but on what is best for himself, even if that means abandoning the position and perquisites that feed his ego. After in effect swearing a blood oath to the politician who gave him power, he must consider a wrenching act of disloyalty.

That is the situation in which Bill Clinton's closest aides found themselves after his August 17 confession. They were hurt, angry and demoralized by their witting or unwitting part in deceiving the country about the president and the intern. Yet not one of them walked away from the man who had lied to them, used them, allowed them to stake their personal reputations on a fabricated denial. Some agonized, some wavered, but all continued to defend the admitted liar in the Oval Office. For reasons ranging from personal affection to political dedication to muddled compromise, they remained true to the code of the staffer.

Washington is a get-along, go-along town, so practiced in the art of squishy compromise that a resignation on principle is a singular, newsworthy event.

Perhaps the most celebrated such occurrence in recent history took place the last time a president faced potential impeachment, in what came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre. In October 1973, Richard Nixon directed his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Richardson resigned rather than carry out the president's order, as did the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus. It fell to the solicitor general, Robert Bork, to can Cox, and the double resignations helped plunge Nixon into a huge political firestorm.

There was one other, belated Watergate resignation. Jerald terHorst quit as President Ford's press secretary to protest Ford's pardon of Nixon. "In good conscience," terHorst said afterward, "I could not defend his position as a spokesman in a credible manner." After only a month on the job, he became a historical footnote.

Another Cabinet-level resignation occurred in 1980 when Cyrus Vance quit as Jimmy Carter's secretary of state, saying he could not support the president's decision to launch an ill-fated mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran. Military action also prompted the departure of White House deputy press secretary Les Janka in 1983. He left after repeating to reporters the official line that the United States had no plans to invade Grenada, right up to the day the troops hit the beach.

Three years later, Bernard Kalb resigned as the State Department's spokesman to protest a disinformation campaign that the Reagan administration launched against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Kalb said he wanted to make clear he had not known about the campaign until The Washington Post reported it. "You face a choice – as an American, as a spokesman, as a journalist – whether to allow oneself to be absorbed in the ranks of silence, whether to vanish into unopposed acquiescence or to enter a modest dissent," he said at an emotional news conference.

All these departures involved matters of high policy. But Bill Dixon, like today's White House aides, had to grapple with questions of sex and lying. In 1987 he became the first presidential campaign official of the modern era, and perhaps ever, to resign over sexual allegations involving his boss. Dixon worked for Gary Hart.

Dixon was aware of womanizing rumors involving Hart, and he had warned the candidate that there were rumblings about surveillance attempts to catch him in a compromising situation. That May, a group of Miami Herald reporters staked out Hart's Washington town house and wrote that a woman named Donna Rice appeared to have spent the night there. Dixon rushed to Hart's defense. He called the press accounts "preposterous," "harassment" and "character assassination," portraying Hart as a "victim." He was peppered with questions about Hart's nautical jaunt with Rice on the aptly named yacht "Monkey Business." A couple of days later, Dixon quit the campaign.

"I resigned when I found out that which I was being asked to repeat to the American public was a lie," Dixon says from Madison, Wis., where he now practices law. "I quit because I felt I had to quit. Anyone who worked for Gary at that time felt that Gary let us all down – I'm choosing my words carefully here – by placing himself in a situation where people could think the worst of him. We were hurt by that, angered by it, disappointed by it."

But Dixon unleashed no public blast at the candidate; he slipped away from the campaign and its reporters by lying down in the back seat of a photographer's car. "I didn't want to hurt Gary any more," he says.

As it happens, Dixon is also an old friend of Bill Clinton. He worked with Clinton on the 1972 McGovern campaign. As a prominent activist, he contributed generously to Clinton's 1992 campaign and defended him against Gennifer Flowers's charges. But after the president's August 17 speech, Dixon told reporters that Clinton had "disgraced himself" and should resign. "He treated the nation like fools," says Dixon.

In light of his own experience 11 years ago, Dixon was convinced that some White House aides would head for the exits. "I can't explain it," he says. "If you've been asked to tell lies and you find out you've been asked to tell lies, people of honor have to resign. I bet $100 that some Clinton people would quit, and I lost."

Just once during the Clinton administration have senior officials quit on principle, and it had nothing to do with sex or scandal. In September 1996, Peter Edelman, an assistant secretary of health and human services, and his colleague Mary Jo Bane resigned to protest the president's signing of a welfare reform bill they viewed as far too harsh. Another HHS official, Wendell Primus, had quit weeks earlier after Clinton agreed to end the six-decade federal guarantee of welfare payments.

"I was just so overwhelmed and deeply opposed to what had happened, and thought it was such an enormous breach of faith to a long-standing commitment of the Democratic Party, it couldn't stand with me," Edelman says. "I just couldn't stay. It was really visceral rather than intellectual – a deep, deep feeling that this was wrong."

At the time, though, Edelman and Bane did not return reporters' calls or even put out a public statement. They did send an e-mail message to their staff, which was quickly leaked to the press.

"Both of us felt that we wanted Clinton to be reelected," Edelman says. "As deep a breach with fundamental principle as we thought this was, we live in the real world and didn't want to see a Republican president with this Republican Congress. We decided we would not give any interviews. We didn't do any 'MacNeil/Lehrer,' 'Today,' any of that stuff."

The move was easier for him, Edelman admits, because he was on leave from Georgetown University Law Center and could return to his faculty job. But the decision was complicated by the fact that he and his wife, Marian Wright Edelman, have been friendly with the Clintons for decades. He first met Hillary Rodham after she delivered an address at her Wellesley College graduation in 1969 and invited her to speak to a conference he was organizing. "We've basically been friends ever since," Edelman says. He met Bill Clinton as the newly elected governor of Arkansas in 1979.

"The fact that I'd known him for a long time was not in the equation one way or another," Edelman says. "Whatever personal relationship I've had in the past was irrelevant. This was really a terrible thing he was doing to millions of poor people in the country."

However passionate his beliefs, Edelman was a behind-the-scenes bureaucrat. His work on the welfare bill mainly took place out of the spotlight. The problems and tensions are very different for those who defend the nation's leader week after week before the television cameras. And no one is more visible than the president's press secretary.

Mike McCurry had been through the scandal mill before.

In 1980, he was working for Sen. Harrison "Pete" Williams when a New York Times reporter called to say that the New Jersey lawmaker had been implicated in an FBI sting called Abscam. McCurry called to notify the senator of the Times call – just hours before federal agents reached the senator's home. It turned out Williams was on videotape telling a phony "sheik" that he would help him get government contracts in exchange for an 18 percent interest in a titanium mine.

McCurry had to testify before a federal grand jury for seven hours. He believed that Williams had, at the very least, committed ethical violations that warranted his expulsion from the Senate. Yet McCurry remained his spokesman for another year and a half, fielding hostile media inquiries even after Williams was convicted of bribery and conspiracy. Whatever his personal qualms, McCurry did not believe in abandoning a sinking ship.

Eighteen years later, McCurry found himself at the White House lectern, getting whacked by aggressive reporters over whether the president had sex with Monica Lewinsky and, subsequently, had perjured himself, suborned perjury or obstructed justice. Once again he was defending a politician accused of wrongdoing, this time in the glare of the world's harshest spotlight. But McCurry had learned a lesson. He would not personally vouch for Clinton's denials; he simply repeated what the president's lawyers had told him. He did not want another grand jury appointment.

Still, more than any other White House official, McCurry was put in the position of publicly vouching for the president's insistence that he had no sexual relationship with an intern half his age. And hoping that was true.

On January 21, the day the story broke, McCurry told reporters he would not "parse" or otherwise elaborate on the president's statement that he had no "improper" relationship with Lewinsky:

"I've given you the statement – he's outraged about the allegations."

"He said he has had no improper relationship with this woman."

"He tells people to tell the truth."

"I was careful about what I did and didn't say," McCurry recalls. "You obviously wrestle with this. A certain amount of loyalty goes to the person who hired you and put you in a position of trust. But you realize you have a larger purpose that goes beyond the individual you're working for. You've got an obligation to a larger universe – an American public that pays your salary. You could do a great amount of damage if you're putting out false information."

In hindsight, were there circumstances under which he would have quit? "I don't think there's such a thing as blind loyalty," McCurry says. But he says others argue that "by sticking around, you prevent things from becoming worse."

When the awful moment of truth arrived, McCurry caught a break. Having delayed his planned departure from the White House once because of the Lewinsky mess, he announced in July, when the scandal had briefly subsided, that he would leave by early October. When Clinton admitted lying on August 17, McCurry's plans were already set.

"I frankly did not have to confront that one," he says. "I was already in a state of resignation."

At his final briefing on October 1, McCurry permitted himself a mild slap at the boss. "Frankly, the president misled me too, so I came here and misled you on occasion," he said. "And that was grievously wrong of him, but he's acknowledged that."

McCurry's concern about becoming a "sitting duck" for a Kenneth Starr subpoena was hardly a sign of paranoia. Many Clinton aides, even peripheral figures, have had to hire lawyers to help them prepare for grand jury testimony. In the Lewinsky investigation, Clinton confidant Bruce Lindsey, his secretary Betty Currie, chief of staff Erskine Bowles, deputy chief of staff John Podesta and communications aide Sidney Blumenthal have all made involuntary trips to the grand jury.

In the four-year Whitewater probe, according to the Nation magazine, Lindsey has had to pay more than $1.5 million in legal fees. Former chief of staff Mack McLarty has had to pony up $400,000. Others stuck with six-figure legal bills include Maggie Williams, Hillary Clinton's former chief of staff ($350,000); former deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes (more than $250,000); former deputy chief of staff Evelyn Lieberman ($250,000); former personnel aide Patsy Thomasson ($100,000) and George Stephanopoulos ($100,000). When Paul Begala was weighing whether to join the White House staff, he openly fretted about whether he would wind up with a mountain of legal bills.

Lanny Davis had an even greater concern when he served as Clinton's special counsel, dealing mainly with charges of improper campaign fund-raising. Other White House lawyers warned him not to take notes, for notes could be subpoenaed. Davis ignored that advice. But he worried that if problems were found with the White House evidence he was marshaling – if there were missing documents, or inaccurate accounts – he could be indicted on some kind of coverup charge. Before long, Davis found his loyalty being tested.

Lanny Davis first met Hillary Rodham at Yale Law School. They crossed paths at party functions when Davis was a Democratic national committeeman from Maryland. By 1980, Davis was ready to support Bill Clinton when he considered running for Democratic Party chairman.

In late 1991, Davis, a so-called superdelegate to the upcoming Democratic convention, began working with the Arkansas governor; he was a floor manager for Clinton the next summer. In 1996, the dogged attorney often defended the president on the tube, prompting a thank-you call from Clinton. Before Davis knew it, he was giving up a $725,000-a-year partnership with the law firm Patton Boggs to become the administration's new scandal flack. He quickly felt under siege.

Early last year Davis was playing defense on the campaign finance probe. The papers were filled with stories about John Huang and Johnny Chung, about the president raising millions by schmoozing major donors at White House coffees, about high rollers being rewarded with a night in the Lincoln Bedroom.

The official administration line was that the coffees were not fund-raisers, even though memos were surfacing in which campaign officials said they expected each caffeinated session to bring in $400,000 or $500,000. And the Lincoln sleepover guests were said to have been invited because they were "friends" of the president, not big-bucks contributors.

But Davis had a problem: He didn't believe the denials he was being asked to deliver. He told his colleagues that the arguments simply were not credible, but he was overruled.

"I pleaded internally with people to let me take a different position," he says. "But I was a good soldier, thinking I'm a lawyer and I'll do the best I can for my client with a bad set of facts."

When Davis went on programs such as "Nightline," though, he got eviscerated. Worse, anonymous White House aides were quoted as trashing his appearances. It was then that he considered quitting.

"If they're not going to listen to me, and they put me out to make an argument I don't think is plausible, and then criticize my per formance, I'm in a no-win cycle here," Davis says. "I didn't tell anyone I was thinking of leaving, but I certainly was.

"Would it have been disloyal? The loyalty factor is very, very big, the feeling that I'm contributing to something important. Every time I walked down the driveway, even after a bad day, and looked at the house, I'd think, this is what the presidency is all about. We all felt a part of history."

Davis changed his mind about quitting after Clinton made a great show of giving him a tie in front of the staff – an unambiguous demonstration of the boss's backing, Davis felt – and Er skine Bowles called with words of support. "President Clinton is very nice to work for," Davis says. "He does little things. He called to ask me how my mother was doing when she was sick. He goes out of his way to give you presents. You tend to bond with a guy like that."

Davis announced his resignation a few weeks before the Lewinsky story broke. He was burned out from scandal duty, his wife was pregnant and he wanted to return to lawyering and make some real money again.

Davis has continued to defend the president, making his pitch on television night after night. He makes no secret of checking in with the White House spin team for the day's marching orders. But he also criticizes the White House on occasion or suggests that Clinton release information in the Lewinsky probe that the president doesn't want to provide. This produces some grumbling from his former pals at the White House, but Davis sees it as a form of narrowcasting, the best way to convey his ideas to the commander-in-chief.

Davis gradually came to suspect that Clinton, despite his denials, had some kind of close relationship with Monica Lewinsky, but he had convinced himself that it didn't involve sex – until he learned on August 17 that the president had misled him along with the country.

"If Clinton lied to people, that was wrong, but I didn't take it personally," Davis says. "It's not the same as if a friend had lied to me. Whether I'm disappointed, betrayed, angry or whatever the words are, I don't want to hurt him. My own personal feelings I conveyed to him personally."

Davis's tactical disagreements pale beside the harsh public criticism by George Stephanopoulos. Throughout the 1992 campaign and the first term, Stephanopoulos was Clinton's right-hand man, a trusted aide whose hip style and matinee idol looks turned him into an instant celebrity. It was his service to continued on page 29 Clinton that enabled the formerly obscure Hill staffer to sign a book contract for nearly $3 million when he left the White House at the end of 1996, and to land a coveted perch as an ABC commentator.

So how does he justify beating up on his former boss and spending months speculating about impeachment?

"It's important to be true to myself in all this," Stephanopoulos says. He pauses. "I guess I think loyalty demands fairness, and adherence to the shared enterprise we were engaged in. It does not demand subservience or defending indefensible actions."

The former Clintonite faced a dilemma in trying to transform himself into a major-league commentator. When he agreed with the president, people said he was just spouting the company line. But when he challenged the president, people said he was just trying to establish his independence.

Earlier this year, Stephanopoulos's longtime buddies from the Clinton campaign, Rahm Emanuel and James Carville, took him to lunch at the Palm for a dressing-down. "If I have a right to say what I want, they have a right to defend their boss," Stephanopoulos says. But he didn't tone down his act.

Stephanopoulos disagreed with some of Clinton's policies when he worked at the White House, but kept his mouth shut. "You get the privilege of giving advice in return for the responsibility of defending the final decision," he says. "If the final decision is abhorrent, if you can't defend the grounds for the decision, you have to leave. There are some times you have to think about it."

Now that he's been liberated, Stephanopoulos has felt free, bit by bit, to recast his White House spin years in a very different light. Back in the snows of New Hampshire in 1992, it was Stephanopoulos who called reporters to try to beat back Gennifer Flowers's tale of a 12-year affair with the candidate. Privately, he now says, Clinton was "agitated" and "unsettled" over the charges.

And then there was the time that Associated Press reporter John King handed Stephanopoulos a copy of Clinton's draft induction notice from 1969. Stephanopoulos had been accosting journalists for weeks, denying that Clinton had ever been drafted or ducked the draft, insisting that suggestions to the contrary were part of a right-wing conspiracy. Stephanopoulos briefly retreated from the world, spending the morning in bed watching Julia Child do some cooking.

"I was shaken," he admitted recently in Newsweek. "How can this be? After all of the questions and all of the stories, how can we still be confronted with documents we didn't know about? How can you defend a guy when you don't know the facts? How come the governor didn't tell us?"

Clinton's explanation: He forgot. Stephanopoulos's decision: Stand by his man.

"I had made a choice to believe him and defend him," he says. "Whatever doubts I had were overwhelmed by his word, my own ambition and my belief in our common work."

One zone that no White House aide will touch – at least not with a reporter – is private conversations with the president about Monica Lewinsky. It's hard enough having to talk to the boss about his sex life and his lack of candor; to have such conversations leak out, even anonymously sourced, would violate the staffer's most basic credo. Beyond that, with the exception of the president's Arkansas buddy Bruce Lindsey, his top aides, even those who spend long hours with him and play hearts in the front cabin of Air Force One, are not close friends. They consider themselves the hired help. Their relationship is professional and political. They didn't join the administration to defend Clinton's sexual proclivities, although that, in a bizarre way, has become part of their job.

Hillary Rodham Clinton's staff has a markedly different view of the scandal since she, as the perceived victim, says her husband misled her as well. Her aides, mostly women, remain intensely dedicated to the first lady. But nearly all White House staffers, his and hers, are there because they wanted to advance a New Democrat agenda that they now see jeopardized by the president's recklessness.

Now, during Clinton's greatest crisis, it is this agenda that people like Ann Lewis, Clinton's communications director, keep invoking to explain their decision to stay on. But that was not the first thought that occurred to Lewis. Instead, she says she made her decision "backward."

"I intuitively figured out what I wanted to do, and then you go back and figure out why," says the veteran Democratic operative whose grandmotherly smile belies her aggressive tactics. The most Lewis will acknowledge is "a difficult couple of days, maybe a week" after Clinton admitted lying.

Lewis, a lifelong feminist, had been sent out in the early days of the scandal to defend the boss in words that have come back to haunt her. "I can say with absolute assurance the president of the United States did not have a sexual relationship, because I have heard the president of the United States say so," she told "Good Morning America" five days after the Lewinsky story broke. "He has said it, he could not be more clear . . . Sex is sex, even in Washington, I've been assured."

Rather than dwell on those comments, Lewis recalls her long experience in losing campaigns, where "the people who stuck with you were the people you could trust. That is when loyalty matters, when it's hard.

"Candidates get up at 4 in the morning to shake hands at factory gates," she says. "They take the grief to get elected." And that, in turn, creates opportunities for people like Ann Lewis.

"Where you feel let down personally, the question at the end of the day is, is this someone you still believe in? Is he or she taking the country in the right direction and can you still make a difference? I don't think you make truly important moral decisions by filling out a questionnaire. At least I don't."

There is a healthy measure of rationalization in some of these explanations. Staffers are so accustomed to playing up encouraging news and minimizing the negative that they slip into this mode even when they are talking about their own balancing act. Perhaps their words are just another bit of spin, designed for public consumption. Still, some of their voices betray a slight hesitation, even a touch of anguish.

Erskine Bowles once drew the line at being lied to by the boss. "All I can tell you is: This guy who I've worked for looked me in the eye and said he did not have sexual relations with her," he told Starr's grand jury. "And if I didn't believe him, I couldn't stay."

But when it turned out Clinton was lying, Bowles stayed anyway. "Nobody is more disappointed in what the president did than I am," he told the Raleigh News & Observer shortly before his long-planned return to North Carolina, which he had delayed for a year. "I'm angry with him. I'm disappointed. I think what he did was just dead wrong. At the same time, I know that none of us are all good or all bad. There are lots of things he has done as president that I'm proud to be a part of."

Whatever the conflicting sentiments of those inside the White House bunker, they are, after all, staffers. They live by the code. Loyalty is in their blood.

For each member of Bill Clinton's inner circle, this most personal of decisions involves a process not unlike the larger impeachment debate facing the country. Political factors must be weighed, competing emotions sorted out. Yes, Clinton's behavior was awful and indefensible. Yes, he lied to them and hung them out to dry. Yes, he was incredibly irresponsible to risk his presidency over a tawdry affair with a woman half his age. But were his offenses so grave that he deserves to be booted out of office? And if not, were his offenses so grave that it is impossible to continue working for him? Would quitting in a huff amount to grandstanding? Or is it better to remain and help him salvage what remains of his presidency?

"People's loyalties have been tested by having been lied to," Peter Edelman says. "Everyone there deplores the conduct, but Clinton's in a political fix. If you walk away, you're helping to do Ken Starr's work for him. That makes it excruciatingly difficult for people."

Rahm Emanuel is sitting in his cubbyhole work space that connects to the Oval Office suite, the very spot where Clinton first beckoned Lewinsky to a sexual encounter. On his muted television, members of Congress are wordlessly droning on about the latest release of Ken Starr's evidence.

The Chicago native, lean and intense, speaks in a kind of staccato shorthand, stripping language to its bare essentials, as if he were reciting the tersest of talking points. "He said he misled. He explained why he misled. He apologized."

Emanuel, who began working for candidate Clinton in 1991, had long planned to leave at the end of October, soon after the birth of his second child. But he never missed a beat in defending the president, despite the fact that he had been lied to, despite the many months of scolding reporters for their focus on the boss's sex life.

After some prodding, Emanuel reflects on his service as a senior adviser: "He has given me the best job of my life, a unique opportunity to fulfill a professional dream. I will never, ever in my life have that again. I owe him the best advice I can give him and my loyalty. If it were about the Vietnam War or something like that . . ." His voice trails off. He is staring into the middle distance. Then he begins talking about his values.

"The way my mother and father raised me, you do not get to pick the days you get to be a friend or supporter," Emanuel says. "He was facing a time of need, and those are the days that count. Your own conscience has to speak to you. This is a personal wrong."

In the end, like so many of his colleagues, Emanuel circles back to the ethic of the political staffer.

"He apologized. You can accept it or not. The fact is he knows I'll always be honest and loyal. He never has to question it. We don't have a friendship. Friendship is a two-way street on loyalty. By the nature of my relationship with him – I work for him – it's a one-way street. You have to have a one-way street on loyalty. I'm honored to work here. How many times do you get to leave your fingerprint on the clay of life? I've given him seven years and he's given me a lifetime of memories."

Howard Kurtz, a Washington Post reporter, is the author of Spin Cycle: How the White House and the Media Manipulate the News.