"I could hardly breathe," she writes. "Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him, 'What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?' I was furious and getting more so by the second." Former President Bill Clinton did not confess his affair until the morning of Saturday, Aug. 15, 1998, the weekend before he admitted as much to a grand jury, New York's junior senator reveals in "Living History," her much-anticipated memoir of eight years in the White House. Hillary Clinton writes that the President "just stood there saying over and over again, 'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea.'" "I was dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged that I'd believed him at all," she writes. Never stopped loving him She says the President's eyes filled with tears when she told him he would have to confess to their teenage daughter as well. "As a wife, I wanted to wring Bill's neck," she says. Still, she insists, she never stopped loving him. "The most difficult decisions I have made in my life were to stay married to Bill," she writes, "and to run for the Senate from New York." In the 562-page book, which goes on sale Monday, Clinton vividly — and frankly — describes the pain of betrayal and says there were plenty of tirades and tears before she came to terms with what happened. An advance copy of the book was obtained by The Associated Press, which released details of it last night. The First Lady-turned-senator was paid a $2.85 million advance toward the $8 million book deal. The book lists for $28 but is already on sale at Amazon.com for $19.60. There was no word last night from the ex-President on what he thinks of his wife's decision to dish the dirt on the affair that led to his impeachment trial and almost toppled his presidency. A source close to Lewinsky said Clinton had no choice. "Why would people want to read it otherwise?" the source sniped, adding that "Monica isn't really thinking about this book. She's moved on with her life and is trying to do other things. This is the past." After her infamy, Lewinsky opened an Internet-based handbag company and recently served as host of the Fox reality series "Mr. Personality." A former staffer to Hillary Clinton was shocked at just how explicit her former boss, who has said she won't run for President in 2004 but has not ruled out 2008, is in the book. "This seems like a gamble. I hope it works, but I think it's going to open a lot of old wounds," said the ex-staffer. When Clinton was running for senator, she dismissed questions about her personal life as invasions of her privacy. But many have wondered just why — and how — she stood by her man. Her book shows, for the first time, the gamut of emotions she wrestled with in private. Months before her husband owned up to the truth, Clinton says, she accepted his story that Lewinsky was no more than a young intern he had befriended. He told her that he "had talked to her a few times" after she asked for job-hunting help — and that the relationship had been horribly misconstrued. "For me, the Lewinsky imbroglio seemed like just another vicious scandal manufactured by political opponents." Six months later, with the President preparing to testify before a grand jury, Clinton was still adamant that her husband had done nothing wrong. But on that morning of Aug. 15, 1998, he woke her up. Fesses up at last He paced at the bedside, she says, and "told me for the first time that the situation was much more serious than he had previously acknowledged." "He now realized he would have to testify that there had been an inappropriate intimacy," she writes. "He told me that what happened between them had been brief and sporadic." Clinton describes in bitter terms the subsequent months of chill between herself and the President, never more painful than when they went to Martha's Vineyard for vacation right after his testimony. "Buddy, the dog, came along to keep Bill company," she writes. "He was the only member of our family who was still willing to." While on the island, she felt "nothing but profound sadness, disappointment and unresolved anger. "I could barely speak to Bill, and when I did, it was a tirade. I read. I walked on the beach. He slept downstairs. I slept upstairs." She says her decision to run for the Senate from New York provided a healing bridge for them. "Bill and I were talking again about matters other than the future of our relationship," she writes. "Over time we both began to relax." She was the first First Lady to run for elective office, defeating former Republican Rep. Rick Lazio of Long Island in 2000. She was sworn into the Senate the month her husband left office, January 2001. Clinton recounts their last day at the White House, waltzing down a long hallway in her husband's arms, and concludes that what he did was morally wrong but not a betrayal of the public. Whitewater under bridge On the Whitewater matter that dogged them for much of their time in the White House, the former First Lady acknowledges only "public relations mistakes in how we handled the growing controversy. Whitewater never seemed real because it wasn't," she writes. The final report on the Whitewater investigation questioned the First Lady's truthfulness. Independent counsel Robert Ray's report concluded that the Clintons' mid-1980s Arkansas land venture benefited from criminal activity and that the President and his wife gave factually inaccurate testimony. But there was not enough evidence to prove the former First Family engaged in wrongdoing. Excerpts from Hillary's book
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