When Hillary Clinton met Bill Clinton she was no fatalist. She fervently believed that a person could control her own destiny and that she could never give herself over to vague forces, or to somebody else’s dominating personality, as she knew her mother had disastrously done in her own marriage.

She did not believe that an individual — particularly herself — was powerless to change either events or the nature of other people, and she went about both tasks tenaciously.

But time after time, in Hillary’s courtship and marriage with Clinton, she was confronted with the obvious: he was beyond her control when it came to other women. It wasn’t his pursuit of extramarital sex per se that so riled her, she once said. She had come to view her husband almost as an adolescent when it came to his sexual sensibilities and compulsions, and attributed them to his unusual childhood.

“There are worse things than infidelity,” she told a confidante in 1989, at a time when Bill believed himself to be in love with another woman. The source of Hillary’s frustration and anger, dating back to their courtship, was her knowledge that she was powerless to change him.

She trusted in the power of rational thought above almost all else, yet he seemed immune to logical reasoning on the subject.

It took Hillary more than two years to make up her mind to marry Bill. She had serious doubts not only about his womanising but about living in Arkansas, his home state, about the intensity with which he pursued his passions (including even his passion for her).

In the end, she married for love, and the shared dream of a grand political future someday in Washington. But that future would be focused on him, not her, she reluctantly conceded to friends who were urging her to pursue a more independent course and separate identity. Going to Arkansas meant forgoing a prestigious job in Washington or New York.

Since her graduation from college, she had been speeding towards national prominence. In Arkansas, she would, by choice, inhabit the more traditional universe in which she would invest her talent and energy to brighten her man’s star — as her mother’s generation had done. She would be the partner, the manager, the adviser. She would follow her heart.

After their graduation from law school in the spring of 1973, she went with Bill on her first trip abroad, to England, and he showed her some of the places he had visited during his year as a Rhodes Scholar. At twilight one evening “on the shores of Ennerdale” in the Lake District he asked her to be his wife.

She said no. She didn’t want to rush into a decision, she later explained.

Many years afterward, Hillary said the marriage almost didn’t happen. Bill proposed many times. “I never doubted my love for him, but I knew he was going to build his life in Arkansas. I couldn’t envision what my life would be like in a place where I had no family or friends.”

Not long after their return from Europe, Hillary made her first visit to Arkansas, almost as a consolation for saying no to his marriage proposal. Bill had asked her to come with him “to see how she liked it”. He urged her to take the Arkansas bar exam. which she did. She also took the took the DC bar exam, so that she could practise in Washington.

The District of Columbia Bar Association notified Hillary that she had failed. For the first time in her life she had flamed out. She kept this news hidden for the next 30 years. Her closest friends and associates were flabbergasted when she made the revelation in a single throwaway line in Living History, her biography: “When I learnt that I passed in Arkansas but failed in DC, I thought maybe my test scores were telling me something.”

This failure, a blow to her ambition, must have played a role in the decisions she now faced. Bill was offered a position on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment investigation of President Richard Nixon. He turned it down but recommended Hillary, who jumped at the opportunity.

If things fell into place, it represented a perfect solution to their dilemma as a couple. Bill was planning to stand for the House of Representatives. If he won, he would begin the job in January 1975, about the same time the impeachment process was likely to end. He and Hillary could accede in the capital as the city’s golden young couple.

Venomous rumours and allegations would follow Bill Clinton throughout his political career — some of them true, some of them wildly exaggerated, many of them outright false — and they were a major factor in his first campaign.

Clinton was running for a seat in a strongly Republican congressional district, and he generated antipathy, on the far right especially. Conservative preachers around the state took to the pulpit to denounce the Clinton campaign as an iniquitous den of drug use and perfidious women.

Though Hillary became a dominating presence at headquarters, Bill fitfully continued a relationship with a student volunteer on his campaign. He told his staff to watch for Hillary’s car in the driveway and often sent the young woman out the back door to avoid confrontations.

Hillary had the student banned from headquarters. She made it known that she thought women from Bill’s past, and by implication any others still in his orbit, were intellectually from another world than her and Bill’s, and thus represented no serious competition.

Hillary’s relationship with Bill during the period was often explosive. She was fiercely determined to keep her man and make sure the political dream was kept on track, as much on her terms as possible.

“They would constantly argue, and the next thing you know, they’d be falling all over each other with ‘Oh my darling . . . come here baby . . . you’re adorable . . .’ then throwing things at each other, and then they’d be slobbering all over each other,” a disaffected Clinton aide said.

Clinton lost the congressional election by only 6,000 votes. But it was only the beginning. Four years later, aged 32 and married, he was elected governor of Arkansas with 63% of the vote.

When he took the oath of office, a limitless future seemed to stretch out before him. But the Clintons’ first two years in the governor’s mansion would be disastrous, marked by huge political mistakes, some of them a result of Hillary’s tin ear, some the result of her refusal to act like a traditional first lady, some the result of Bill’s tendency to want to do too much, too fast.

Hillary saw ominous signs before Bill did. A month before the next governorship election she told him that he “might actually lose”. As the first results came in on election night, he told her it was over.

Bill’s collapse after his loss was psychologically and emotionally absolute. He was utterly undone, wounded so critically that Hillary feared he might never recover. “He couldn’t face people,” said Deborah Sale, a friend from his childhood. “It was unbelievably devastating. He just thought it was the end of his life.”

Hillary “basically had to take care of him”, said Sale. “She is very strong. She felt there had to be some way to shore him up. She felt that recovering politically was absolutely essential to his recovering emotionally. They had to have some sense of hope that there might be a political future for him because he really saw that as a way, as his path in life.”

If she failed, the path she had chosen in life — with Bill, and their grand future as a couple destined to do great things — would be inaccessible.

At Hillary’s behest, Bill phoned her friend Betsey Wright in Washington and asked her to come to Little Rock. Wright, a political organiser from Texas, had moved to Washington in 1973 with the specific idea of advancing the electoral career of Hillary Rodham. She had no doubt that Hillary could have reached the Senate or perhaps the presidency on her own. Now, in effect, she was forming a partnership with Hillary to put Bill’s political career back together.

She arrived with only a suitcase. She left Little Rock 11 years later.

Hillary, in the words of Dick Morris, another of the key political strategists who came on board and stayed, was “really taking his career in hand . . . She was always very much the person who would ram home the need to run negative ads, to be aggressive. For the most part, Hillary, Betsey and I always saw eye to eye, and it was Bill who was sort of the odd man out as kind of the naive do-gooder who would come along eventually.”

She became his campaign manager, and she was motivated: if Bill lost this election, his political career — theirs — was finished.

Bill, and Hillary, won re-election, 55% to 45%. He began leading a charmed and, on the issues, extremely intelligent political life. His politics and profile were getting national attention. He wanted to run for president in 1988.

Hillary installed Betsey Wright as his chief of staff, with an office just outside his own. She was determined that her husband would never again drift on the job with unchecked ease — whether towards women or ennui.

On May 7, 1987, Senator Gary Hart grudgingly withdrew his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination after details of his extramarital sex life became a media sensation.

Bill was both the immediate beneficiary of Hart’s withdrawal and its victim as well. It put more pressure on him to run, and quickly to wrap up the support of many of Hart’s backers. But, as Webb Hubbell, one of the Clintons’ friends, noted: “The rumours about Bill had been rampant for years — he was a man with an appetite, people said. He couldn’t pass up a pretty face.”

The coverage by the mainstream American press of Hart’s extramarital life was a departure from journalistic tradition, which had allowed presidents and leading politicians considerable running room in keeping their affairs private.

In Arkansas, no stories had appeared in print about the Clintons’ marital problems, despite the familiarity of every statehouse reporter with the rumours and some of the reality.

However, a new standard was taking hold based on the Hart experience. If a politician’s sex life, particularly indiscriminate sex, could be seen to cast doubt on matters of judgment and stability, it might well be considered legitimate news.

Clinton sought Dick Morris’s advice about how to confront the “infidelity issue”, expressing “a tremendous terror of the race . . . which led him to a feeling that this was a terribly inhospitable environment upon which to tread”, according to Morris.

To some friends, he asked whether an expression of “causing pain in my marriage” would be sufficient to keep the press at bay. At a school softball game in which his eight-year-old daughter Chelsea was playing, he approached Max Brantley, a friend whose wife had been at college with Hillary.

“He was using Hart’s withdrawal as a sounding board,” said Brantley, “asking, you know, do you ever outlive your past mistakes? Are they ever forgotten? Are they ever forgiven? Or do you carry them all your life? . . . Everybody makes mistakes, and it’s not right that they should have to pay for them forever and ever and ever. It was pretty clear what this discussion was all about.”

Betsey Wright could see uncharacteristic doubt and fear gnawing at him. In the post-Hart atmosphere, the rumours about Hillary and Bill’s marriage and sexual activities were becoming thunderous, especially when it was learnt that he had booked the Excelsior hotel in Little Rock for an announcement.

For five years, Betsey had watched and listened as Bill made arrangements for assignations and slipped out of the office for meetings with various women. Sometimes the troopers gave her sly heads-ups. She had no doubt that a few of them were soliciting women for him.

Wright also recognised that “Hillary had long ago made some peace with his womanising and the trade-offs. And that what she wanted out of the relationship was worth putting up with some of that . . . She was as aware as I was that those women were not people that he wanted any deep relationship with.”

But Gary Hart’s defrocking had terrified Wright. On several occasions she tried to tell Bill how vulnerable she thought he was, but he kept evading the issue. The question raised by Hart’s withdrawal, he said, should not be about a candidate’s sexual life but whether he could be a good president.

She felt Bill could be finished politically by a humiliation similar to Hart’s. There had been “huge schisms” in the Clinton marriage since Wright had arrived in Little Rock to help rescue Bill at his lowest ebb, “when Hillary did really drastic things” (which Betsey has never spelt out). But Betsey thought no situation between Hillary and Bill was as fraught — and dangerous to Chelsea — as the one they would face if Bill now sought the presidency.

Two days before his scheduled announcement at the Excelsior, Betsey asked to see Bill privately in the governor’s mansion. She arrived with another person, whose name she has never disclosed. “I just thought he had to confront the issue,” she said later. She did not want Bill to be able to deny that the conversation had taken place — as he had done after previous confrontations with her about women, including Gennifer Flowers, a nightclub singer who had had an affair with him.

Contrary to later media accounts, Betsey did not bring to the mansion a “list” of women she knew Bill had been with, though investigators would later try to subpoena such a document from her. Rather, there was a serious conversation about the implications of Hart’s withdrawal in which she insisted that Bill recount for her and the other person present “all of the women he had been with, when and how often”.

She explained much later: “Specifically what I said was, ‘Let’s walk through all of the women who might decide that they had a bone to pick with you who might emerge in the middle of the campaign.’ And of course I was horrified because I thought I knew everybody. And he came up with these people I didn’t know about.”

When they had reviewed the names a second time to evaluate which were most likely to seek out the press or be tracked down by reporters, she told him it would be disastrous to declare his candidacy, devastating to Chelsea and his marriage.

Friends from around the country were already flying into Little Rock for the declaration they expected Bill to make. After his meeting with Betsey, he took several of them aside and, with each, shared his growing sense of doubt.

Mickey Kantor, a California lawyer, said that Chelsea had approached Bill and himself while they were talking and asked her father about a planned summer holiday. When Bill said he might be running for president and not able to go, Chelsea responded, “Then Mom and I will go without you.”

The next day, at the Excelsior, with Hillary next to him and wiping tears away, Bill announced he would not be a candidate in the 1988 presidential election. Hillary seemed relieved on one level and angry on another. Whatever her indignation at the new journalistic environment, she knew that Bill’s own irresponsibility was the reason for his decision, and an abdication of more than just his marriage vows.

Most of his closest friends and associates believed he immediately went into another deep depression of the sort he’d suffered after losing the governorship in 1980.

Whatever the case, it is certain that over the next three years the Clinton marriage teetered, as his actions became increasingly compulsive, even bizarre, and deeply hurtful to Hillary.

Wright noted, “there was an adrenaline cutoff immediately, and the funk after that. I mean, he just thought his life was over. There was nothing else for him to do. And he was nutty . . . reckless. I couldn’t get his attention in the office of the governor. He was tired and burnt out on being governor. There wasn’t anything to capture his interest in the job. He really got careless with fooling around.”

Wright concluded toward the end of 1988 that Bill was “having a severe midlife crisis”. She told him, “Bill, you’re crazy if you think everybody in this office is oblivious to the fact that you’re having an affair. You’re acting like an idiot. We’re all seeing the way you giggle, the way you shut the door, you know, this is just dumb. Too many people on this staff know about it.”

The troopers knew about it, she said. Hillary and Bill were screaming at each other in the mansion. Plus, Wright could see “he was playing some games with some of the women I had on staff, and I had been able to keep all of that under control. Heavy flirting. They would amazingly have to run errands out to the mansion when Hillary wasn’t there, and stuff that was just

driving me crazy. He wasn’t doing his job. He wasn’t paying attention. He was resisting trying to make his appointments. And he was having this affair”.

Clinton was having a series of assignations, she was convinced, that were increasingly heedless even by his standards.

“And I really did eventually become quite depressed over all of this. And I’m sure I was driving him crazy then, too . . . By the time the whole thing came to a head he just went crazy in ’89.”

She added: “I talked to Hillary several times during that period by phone, and we were pulling our hair about him. He was a mess. During one of the conversations she said, ‘There are worse things than infidelity’.”

Gradually — in pieces from her and Bill — the story came out that Bill had told Hillary he wanted to leave the marriage. Hillary had not been very specific, but she was clear enough.

According to Wright, “Hillary said, ‘What you have to remember, Betsey, is that he is an adult and he is the governor, and we have to let him be responsible for his actions.’ And I said, ‘Hillary, you’ve always been so much better about standing back and doing that. I always feel like I’ve got so much invested in this, and it hurts me when he acts like an idiot.’ And I was never able to stop beating him over the head . . . She would pull back. I used to be in awe of her ability to do that. And I don’t think she ever stopped doing that . . .”

The woman’s name was Marilyn Jo Jenkins. She was Hillary’s worst nightmare: an attractive, accomplished, rich antagonist with whom Bill believed himself to be in love. He wanted to end his marriage. Hillary refused. She would fight to keep her marriage and her family together, she told Betsey Wright. She had invested too much into her partnership with Bill to abandon it.

Jenkins was about the same age as Hillary, a Southerner, a beauty, a divorced mother of two young children.

She and Bill probably began seeing each other in 1988. Around this time, he was asking some fellow governors whose marriages had deteriorated how they had dealt with the political consequences of divorce. He was clearly suggesting that he might be in a similar situation.

When Wright confronted him on the subject in the spring or early summer of 1989, Bill confirmed he had fallen in love with another woman, but now he wanted to fix his marriage to Hillary. He also confirmed to her, Betsey said, that Hillary had refused to give him a pass out of the marriage. “And that he had thought he was really in love with this woman, but he had also decided he wanted . . . he’d rather save the marriage with Hillary.”

Meanwhile, “in trying to calm our relationship and feeling depressed”, Betsey made arrangements for Bill and herself to see a therapist together.

Hillary consulted Diane Blair, a close friend and fellow exile from Washington. “We were doing our usual long walk and she was very concerned,” said Diane. “She was thinking that they had not made much money. Chelsea was there now. What if she were on her own? She didn’t own a house. She was concerned that if she were to become a single parent, how would she make it work in a way that would be good for Chelsea. Hillary never went into details — absolutely never. And I doubt she did with anyone.”

With his and Hillary’s life in turmoil, Bill had to decide whether to seek another term as governor in November 1990. Hillary began talking seriously to friends about running for governor if he didn’t.

He had little time to make a decision, and Hillary had shown no inclination to consent to divorce. He continued to surreptitiously see Jenkins, and professed to at least one person to be in love with both her and his wife. To Dick Morris, with whom he discussed the possibility that he might seek a divorce, he seemed “dithering and depressed”.

If he wanted to become president, whether in 1992 or later, it must have seemed a far reach on his own, without Hillary, with the weight of an ugly separation dragging on him, and his relationship with Chelsea altered perhaps irrevocably.

Hillary and Bill decided they would work at saving their marriage and his political career; it was a commitment, and Bill understood his obligations not to be unfaithful. Betsey Wright’s interpretation was that there was a “negotiation”, after which “Bill had to be a puppy dog and do everything she wanted him to do . . . I watched the same thing play out after Lewinsky. She would take it [abuse], but she was going to get something out of it, too. So she ran for the Senate”.

As it happened, Bill and Jenkins continued to remain close and see each other on a number of occasions until he and Hillary reached the White House. He called either her office or home 59 times between 1989 and 1991, according to phone records.

In November 1990 he was re-elected governor in a landslide. Two years later he was elected president.

Hillary had once intimated to Diane Blair that once in the White House his sexual compulsions would by necessity be tempered — if not by the grandeur of the presidency then by the fact that he would be locked up in a golden cage with the nosiest press corps in the world constantly on the prowl.

In the second year of Clinton’s presidency, however, Wright — who had not followed him to Washington — began hearing from the Clinton inner circle that there were “troubles” developing again. She called Nancy Hernreich, who had worked for him in Arkansas and was now his administrative chief of operations with an office just outside the Oval Office.

“I said, ‘Nancy, there are just too many rumours coming to me about what’s going on in the Oval Office. I trust you’re not letting him in there by himself with hardly anybody, much less some female, as all the rumours are.’

“And she said, ‘We promised him that he would never live under an iron thumb like yours again’.”

Senior members of Clinton’s White House staff confirmed that, now that Wright no longer sat outside his door, it was felt the inhibiting and suffocating aura that had come to permeate the governor’s office in Little Rock would not be re-established in the White House.

© Carl Bernstein 2007

Extracted from A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, by Carl Bernstein, to be published on June 5 by Hutchinson at £25. It will be available for £23 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

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