Your Voice Your Vote 2024

Live results
Last Updated: April 23, 10:42:16PM ET

Hillary Clinton Reveals Her Pain

ByABC News via logo
June 5, 2003, 9:13 AM

June 5, 2003 — -- When President Bill Clinton finally revealed his intimate relationship with former intern Monica Lewinsky to his family, there was only one member who really wanted to be by his side.

"Buddy [the dog] was the only member of our family who wanted to be with Bill," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told ABCNEWS' Barbara Walters in an exclusive interview about her revealing new book Living History.

Buddy, the late Clinton family dog, accompanied Mrs. Clinton, their daughter Chelsea and the president during the family's trip to Martha's Vineyard right after the president's grand jury testimony on his relationship with Lewinsky.

Bedside Confession

It was only two days before his testimony that the president woke his wife and told her the rumors she had been defending him against were true.

"That was probably the worst moment that I can even imagine anyone going through because what he told me that morning was that he had not leveled with me or anyone else," Mrs. Clinton told Walters. "He had not told me the whole truth about what the relationship was. And I was furious. I was dumbfounded. I was, you know, just beside myself with anger and disappointment."

Mrs. Clinton said that up until his morning bedside confession, she believed he was being railroaded. She hadn't believed he would jeopardize their marriage and family.

The New York senator told Walters in an interview scheduled to air during a special 20/20 this Sunday that she struggled with whether or not she wanted to continue the marriage after the then president broke the news.

Surviving the Storm

"The jury was really out about whether the marriage would survive, whether I wanted it to survive," she told Walters.

The Democratic senator reveals in her new memoir, which goes on sale Monday, that, "As a wife, I wanted to wring Bill's neck," but she finally resolved that she loved him, wanted to keep the marriage intact and supported what he was doing as president.

Mrs. Clinton's 562-page book has been highly anticipated. Simon & Schuster, billed the book as a complete, candid accounting of her years in the White House.