How the White House saw red over Clinton's illicit sex romps. . .
The almost breathtaking scale of Bill Clinton's womanising, both in and outside the White House, will be laid bare in a major new TV biography that is sure to embarrass the former US president.
For the first time, those closest to Clinton, from the start of his political career in the early '70s to his time in the Oval Office, will speak publicly about their sense of betrayal as they witnessed the President's libido run riot.
One campaign chief talks of dealing with "up to 25 women a day" who were trying to get access to the charismatic politician while he was Governor of Arkansas.
Another trusted adviser tells of how she talked Clinton out of making an early run for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1987, warning him that there was a small army of ex-lovers ready to destroy his career.
The two-part, four-hour documentary Clinton, (from the American PBS network) is being billed as a "biography of a president who rose from a broken childhood in Arkansas to become one of the most successful politicians in modern American history, and one of the most complex and conflicted characters to ever bestride the public stage".
Due to première in the US, Britain and Ireland (on Sky channel 166) from Monday night, it features the most complete story yet from the insiders who knew Clinton best.
However, while the documentary does detail his stunning rise and brilliant, instinctive talent for politics, it is the story of Clinton's almost compulsive sexual risk-taking that has grabbed the pre-broadcast headlines.
Close friends and colleagues speak for the first time of how "dealing with Bill's girls" became an almost full-time job and how the Monica Lewinsky affair caused chaos within the White House.
His former loyal adviser, the pollster Dick Morris, recalls the moment a clearly nervous Clinton called him just before evidence of his affair with Lewinsky was about to be made public.
"Bill said to me: 'Ever since I got to the White House I have had to shut down my body'," says Morris, adding that Clinton told him he had been "weak" in the case of the 23-year-old intern and admitted that he had done enough with her to be in serious trouble. He then asked Morris to conduct polls on how he should handle the crisis.
Another aide, the White House legal expert Ken Gormley, recalls the sexual tension between the president and the star-struck young intern. "There were almost these sparks flying between them from the first moment when they saw each other," he says.
The formidable political consultant Betsey Wright worked with Clinton for over a decade and coined the phrase "Bimbo Eruptions" to describe the many rumours of extra-marital affairs.
When Clinton was planning to run for president in 1987, Wright sat him down and confronted him with a long list of women who could potentially wreck his career.
As she went through every name on the list, Bill blithely told her "oh, she'll never say anything". Her response was "how can you know?"
Eventually, as Wright recalls in the programme, "It became clear it was not the time for him to do it."
One of the most dramatic episodes of the biography tells how Hillary Clinton swallowed her pride and pulled the first presidential campaign back from the brink after Gennifer Flowers came forward with taped phone conversations which she claimed proved there had been an affair. White House aides recall how it was almost always Hillary, "smarter, stronger and more pragmatic" than her husband, who was called on to save him after every "Bimbo Eruption".
And what emerges from the four-hour biography is just how addicted Clinton was to risky behaviour and how his wife Hillary was able to put her own feelings betrayal aside and do whatever it took to protect her wayward husband.
Clinton is broadcast on Sky Channel 166 on Monday and Tuesday night.
Originally published in
