A Scandal Unfolds   

A behind-the-scenes look at the reporting that triggered the most serious crisis of the Clinton presidency.

On Tuesday, January 13, Newsweek investigative reporter Michael Isikoff got a tip. It was hot. So hot it caused him to gasp, turned his face ashen and forced him out of his office near the White House to breathe fresh air. Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had opened an investigation of the president of the United States over possible obstruction of justice and perjury in connection with the Paula Jones lawsuit. Starr had set up a sting that very day of a young woman who had indicated on tape that she had a sexual relationship with the president.

"I was totally blown away," says Isikoff, 45, who has been dogging questions about Bill Clinton's private behavior since the 1992 presidential campaign. "It was clear to me that this thing now had entered a completely different realm."

Isikoff had heard in March 1997 that Clinton was supposedly having an affair with a former White House intern. By October, he had learned her name, Monica Lewinsky. In December, he found out that Lewinsky and her confidante Linda Tripp had received subpoenas to testify in Jones' sexual harassment lawsuit against the president. But even if Tripp were willing to go on the record about a Clinton-Lewinsky relationship, Isikoff knew it still wasn't a story if it was just about sex.

Some news organizations have files thick with allegations involving Clinton's extramarital love life, but few have been deemed worthy of printing, absent a lawsuit like Jones' or a very public disclosure like Gennifer Flowers'. The charges often are relegated discreetly to the "he said-she said, it's Clinton's private business" category.

This was different. Isikoff knew that Tripp, a source he had been cultivating since the winter of 1997, had gone to Starr and turned in her "friend" Lewinsky. He knew that Starr's office and FBI agents had set up a sting operation aimed at the 24-year-old former White House intern. "A sting of the president's girlfriend is pretty wild in and of itself," Isikoff says. "At that point I thought it was as much a story about Ken Starr as a Bill Clinton story."

On Thursday, January 15, Isikoff went to Starr's downtown

Washington, D.C., office. Starr's deputies, Isikoff says, asked him to wait until 4 p.m. the following day before calling Lewinsky or Vernon Jordan, presidential First Friend and Washington power broker nonpareil. Starr was investigating whether Jordan or the president had encouraged Lewinsky to lie about her relationship with Clinton.

Isikoff was willing to wait.

Friday, January 16 – early Saturday, January 17: Four p.m. came and went, but Starr's people weren't ready. They still wanted more time, Isikoff says, because they hoped to "flip" Lewinsky, to get her to cooperate with the investigation. Starr had tapes of conversations in which Lewinsky intimated that the president and Jordan encouraged her to lie in her sworn affidavit in the Jones case, as well as other evidence. But he wanted more.

"At that point the prosecutors had said to Mike: 'If you call anybody for a comment, it's going to blow our case. We haven't had a chance to interrogate Monica,' " says Mark Whitaker, Newsweek's managing editor.

It wasn't, say many at Newsweek, a case of working too closely with the special prosecutor. Initially, say Isikoff and Whitaker, Starr indicated there was a real possibility that Lewinsky could be brought on board by Newsweek's Saturday night deadline.

But while Isikoff was pushing Starr's office that Friday, he says, he was getting mixed messages from Newsweek editors, who were divided on how to handle the story. "The first signal I got that the story might not go was when I was told we need a backup story on Clinton's Paula Jones deposition [scheduled for Saturday, January 17] in case we don't go with the story," Isikoff says.

Shortly after midnight, Isikoff got access to a copy (he won't say how) of one of the 90-minute tapes that Linda Tripp had made of Lewinsky. At Newsweek's Washington bureau, Isikoff, Bureau Chief Ann McDaniel, Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas and correspondent Daniel Klaidman huddled around a tape recorder. They were stunned by what they heard.

"Everybody who heard the tape concluded that at the end that this was a real conversation between two people," Isikoff says. "That Monica was speaking spontaneously. That she was distraught, was emotional and genuinely concerned that what she clearly described as a sexual relationship with the president was going to be publicly disclosed through the Paula Jones lawsuit. No, we didn't have four converts, but everybody agreed that the tape was genuine."

Around 4 a.m., someone from Starr's office called. "They were freaking out, wanting to know if I was going to do a story," the reporter recalls.

Isikoff didn't know. Newsweek editors had yet to decide, and the deadline for doing so was little more than 12 hours away. Exhausted, the four left at about 4:30 a.m. and headed home.

Meanwhile, other members of the hypercompetitive Washington press corps were panicking. "On Friday we'd realized Newsweek had something big coming," says Michael Duffy, Time magazine's Washington bureau chief. "By Friday, I heard Newsweek had something that wasn't just about Paula Jones. We worked like mad to try to figure out what it was."

Duffy concedes that Newsweek virtually owned the story of Jones' allegations against the president. "Paula Jones was practically a subsidiary of Newsweek's," says Duffy, referring to Isikoff's unrelenting coverage. The veteran investigative reporter had been on the Jones case since she first surfaced in early 1994, when he still worked for the Washington Post. In fact, Isikoff jumped from the newspaper to Newsweek after he got into a shouting match with a Post editor when the paper refused to run a lengthy investigative piece he'd done on Jones' allegations.

ýt the Washington Post, reporter Susan Schmidt, a mainstay on the Whitewater beat, also had learned that Newsweek was on to a big story. On Friday Schmidt "heard Starr had something about Clinton and coaching a witness," she says. "So I started rushing around working all weekend trying to figure out what it was. I started hearing Vernon Jordan's name."

Saturday, January 17: Isikoff returned to the office at 7 a.m. after about two hours of sleep. He was pumped.

McDaniel came into the office around 9 a.m. Isikoff was pushing the magazine to publish. McDaniel had reservations, as did Managing Editor Whitaker and Editor in Chief Richard M. Smith in New York. At about 9:30 a.m., Isikoff says, he walked into McDaniel's office and said: "Look, we need to make a decision real fast. There's no way we can publish this story unless we make a real effort to contact Monica Lewinsky and Vernon Jordan. If we are going with the story, I need to start calling them now. If we're not going with the story, then I don't want to call them and disrupt a law enforcement investigation."

For the rest of the day, McDaniel says, speaker phones connecting D.C. and New York City were in constant use. There were tense discussions and raised voices, but no screaming matches, she says. The magazine was on to a great story, Smith says, but it knew so little about Lewinsky. And it would be thrusting her, a young private citizen, into the maelstrom. Was that fair?

Also, says Smith, while Newsweek knew that Starr was looking into obstruction of justice charges, "nothing we had heard or seen at that moment provided any basis for this charge." The tape editors had listened to, after all, was a secondhand conversation. And, as Isikoff points out, it is hardly definitive.

"There were references that Monica makes on the tape to conversations with the president and Vernon Jordan," Isikoff says. "But it is ambiguous. It neither confirmed nor undercut the most serious charge, that the president and Vernon Jordan instructed her to lie. That was the serious federal crime that Starr was investigating. The tape that we heard, which was only one tape, did not prove that."

McDaniel says she "was troubled by the ongoing nature of the Starr investigation and how little we knew about Monica."

Whitaker was bothered, too. "If Starr's people had come back in 24 hours and said, 'We confronted Lewinsky and she admitted everything,' we would then have known this is a very serious investigation that will go forward. And clearly Monica has a problem."

But what if it went the other way? "Let's say they came back and said, 'We talked to her, she denied everything. We believe her.' Or they said, 'We questioned her. She sounds like a flake. We are dropping the whole investigation.' Then we would have been irresponsible to write a wildfire story about sex in the White House."

Early on the editors agreed that they would not let their deadline dictate their behavior. But if they held off, they wouldn't be able to publish for seven more days. Newsweek editors can make changes in a story until late Saturday night. But if they were going to commit to a major piece on Lewinsky, they had to decide by 5 p.m. Saturday.

While the editors agonized, the reporters were still reporting. "During the day, Danny [Klaidman] finds out that Starr had actually gone to the Justice Department to expand his jurisdiction and the Justice Department had signed off on it, and Starr had gotten an expanded mandate on Friday specifically to conduct this investigation," Isikoff says. "That pushed Evan over the edge in support of publishing the story." (Ironically, Starr used the threat of a Newsweek story to get a speedy decision from Attorney General Janet Reno about expanding his probe. And Reno's decision made it clear to Isikoff, Klaidman and Thomas that they should publish.)

McDaniel says she felt they were 85 to 90 percent there but just didn't have 100 percent. While the process was collaborative, the final decision was Rick Smith's. He knew if Newsweek were a daily newspaper, there'd be no question: They would wait one more day.

At about 4:45 p.m., Smith made the call: The magazine would hold – not spike – the story, to buy time for additional reporting. He told McDaniel and others via speaker phone, but also asked to speak personally with Isikoff.

"I want to tell Mike myself," Smith said.

Sunday, January 18:| Time: 6:11 a.m. Across the country, reporters and editors who subscribe to the Drudge Report got an e-mail marked "World Exclusive. Must Credit the Drudge Report."

Matt Drudge, the newly ubiquitous Los Angeles-based online gossip columnist with no journalism credentials, had sent the following "blockbuster," as he called it: "Newsweek Kills Story on White House Intern."

"At the last minute, at 6 p.m., on Saturday evening," wrote Drudge, "Newsweek magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!

"The Drudge Report has learned that reporter Mike Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top Newsweek suits hours before publication. A young woman, 23, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President of the United States, since she was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office where she claims to have indulged the president's sexual preference. Reports of the relationship spread in White House quarters, and she was moved to a job at the Pentagon, where she worked until last week."

While the Internet report wasn't entirely accurate – the story hadn't been spiked, but held, and Isikoff hadn't completed a story – it was largely correct, and it played a pivotal role in putting the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal in play. But the story was about much more than sex, and Drudge had nothing about the Starr investigation.

"We didn't stop agonizing about the story Saturday," McDaniel says. "I got the first phone call at 8:30 Sunday morning about Drudge."

Later that morning, William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, appeared on ABC's "This Week" and gave the story another push. "The story in Washington this morning is that Newsweek magazine was going to go with a big story based on tape-recorded conversations, which a woman who was a summer intern at the White House, an intern of [former White House Chief of Staff] Leon Panetta's..."

That's all Kristol got out before ABC commentator and longtime Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos interrupted, questioning the credibility of the Drudge Report.

"No, no, no," Kristol replied. "They had screaming arguments in Newsweek magazine yesterday. They finally didn't go with the story. It's going to be a question of whether the media is now going to report what are pretty well-validated charges of presidential behavior in the White House."

Host Sam Donaldson interjected that he didn't think the talking heads should disseminate the Drudge Report bombshell without knowing why Newsweek had decided to "kill" its story.

(Drudge did not return eight phone messages and an e-mail message seeking comment on his role in the Lewinsky saga.)

Doyle McManus, the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau chief, saw the Drudge e-mail and blew it off. If it was about a public figure's sex life, he wasn't interested. "I looked at that and thought, 'If Isikoff wants to pursue that story, he's welcome to it.' "

Monday, January 19: At 11:52 p.m. Drudge made Monica Lewinsky's name public, posting a report that she had denied a "sexual relationship with President Clinton" in a sworn affidavit in the Paula Jones case.

"By Monday, we found out that Starr was negotiating with Monica Lewinsky and her lawyer all weekend long," Whitaker says. "We learned that Monica genuinely had a story. She wasn't a flake. That would have been enough to run a story, but we are not a daily."

By this time, Washington media circles were buzzing. Something was out there, but no one was quite sure what. At the Post, Whitewater sleuth Schmidt was madly trying to find out but getting nowhere. "I first heard about the Starr investigation on Sunday, the day after the Paula Jones deposition," says Post White House reporter Peter Baker. "But we were not getting very far, and I was spending more time writing followups on Jones."

Jackie Judd of ABC was working the story too, and Time reporters were also trying to nail it down.

Isikoff was still reporting, although he was completely frustrated by his magazine's decision and irritated by the Drudge Report. It marked the second time Drudge had scooped Isikoff on his own story. Last July, Drudge revealed that Newsweek was about to report that Kathleen Willey, at the time a White House volunteer, had come out of the Oval Office disheveled, with her lipstick smeared, and said Clinton had made a pass at her.

Tuesday, January 20: Around 5 p.m., Schmidt, by now on her fifth day of chasing the elusive development, approached National Editor Bill Hamilton and other editors. "I have this," she told them. "I need to get some confirmation and stuff, but I think I can get it." She knew then that Starr had obtained authorization to expand his investigation. "That's when it was clear we'd have a story for the next day's paper," says Leonard Downie Jr., the Post's executive editor. Schmidt, Baker and U.S. District Court reporter Toni Locy were fully mobilized. "Sue came up with the obstruction of justice stuff," Baker says. "She's an amazing reporter. We spent the rest of the evening until one or two in the morning chasing it down, running it by everyone we could."

The triple-bylined story didn't make the first edition, which goes to press at 9:45 p.m. But it was ready by the time the presses started rolling on the second edition around midnight. "It just took a while to reach everybody," Downie says. "What I was pleased with was our on-the-record responses from lawyers, particularly Monica Lewinsky's lawyer, which clearly confirmed the story."

As it does with all stories, the Post kept its account off the Washington Post-Los Angeles Times News Service and the Post's Web site until it went to press. About three minutes after midnight, the story appeared online, according to Douglas Feaver, the Post's Webmaster. That, says Baker, is where many at the White House first saw it.

At 12:19 a.m., the news service issued an advisory, and the story itself moved five minutes later.

"I didn't feel a bit nervous," Schmidt recalls. "I knew it was going to be huge... But I wasn't nervous about the story being wrong."

(A few days later, Schmidt, whose first job at the Post was as a copy editor, got a high-five and a hug from former Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, who came into the newsroom to congratulate her. "That," Schmidt says, "means more to me than almost anything else.")

Only a few blocks away from the Post, things were also hopping at the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau. Neither paper knew that the other was working on the Lewinsky story, but the Times was moving ahead on it as well. Late Tuesday afternoon, Times investigative reporter David Willman showed up with the essence of the scandal, McManus says. Willman and reporter Ron Ostrow pushed their sources. "I had reason to suspect that something very important was up," says Willman, who has broken several Whitewater-related stories. "Based on those suspicions, I kept trying to develop information to get the story."

McManus decided to see how much the reporters could confirm before determining whether they had enough for a story. "Within 45 minutes, Willman and Ostrow have multiple sources confirming it, and we have the name of the young woman," McManus says. "I decided we have to go with the story about Starr's broadening mandate and suborning perjury, and we have to explain the sexual relationship."

Who had the story first? The Post's version went out on the wire at 12:24 a.m., the Times' at 2 a.m. "We had the story the same day they had the story," McManus says. "We had it independently, without any help from them. To be fair, their story had some details that ours didn't."

McManus had some trouble selling the story to editors in Los Angeles, he says. "I got on the phone that night and had to walk them through the story," he says. "I said, 'I think this is an atom bomb.' It was striking to me how that was something self-evident to us here and not out there."

ABC News' Judd, a general assignment reporter who has covered Whitewater, was also in hot pursuit. By 12:45 a.m., Judd and a number of investigative producers had gathered enough information to report on ABC radio and on ABC's online service that Starr had expanded his investigation to include the possible perjury and obstruction of justice charges. The story made its TV debut at 2 a.m. on the overnight news program "World News Now." Judd had hoped to air her report on "Nightline" late Tuesday, but it wasn't quite ready. "Our primary goal was to absolutely have confirmation," says ABC spokesperson Eileen Murphy, who was taking calls for Judd. "Honestly, it was more important to get it right than get it first."

Meanwhile, editor Bill Reed, trolling the wires at the Philadelphia Inquirer, saw the Post story. He alerted Sandra Wood, associate managing editor for production and the person in charge at the time, just as she was about to go home for the night at around 1:30 a.m. They read the story closely and decided not to run such an explosive piece based on another news organization's unnamed sources containing allegations the Inquirer couldn't substantiate.

"If another news organization has sources that we do not know and cannot evaluate, it makes sense that we not publish such a story, especially when it deals with possible criminal behavior by the president of the United States," said Inquirer Deputy Editor Gene Foreman.

Newsweek knew the Post was going to print a story. It toyed with the notion of putting something online. "Since we didn't know what people had and what they were going to run with," says Whitaker, "we decided to wait and see." McDaniel went to sleep around 11:30 p.m. At about 1:30 a.m., a colleague from the Post called McDaniel at home to tell her the bad news.

McDaniel stayed up the rest of the night planning Newsweek's strategy. She didn't bother to call any of her colleagues; she wanted them to get a good night's sleep.

Wednesday, January 21: Washington Post subscribers woke up to a front page story in the upper right-hand corner: "Starr Investigates Whether Clinton Told Intern to Deny Affair." The Los Angeles Times was more subdued; it ran its account below the fold.

The frenzy had officially begun. Journalists began what would become a 10-day period of reporting at levels of unimaginable intensity. Reporters became instant celebrities, and any pundit with five free minutes could take his or her pick of television venues.

The Post's Peter Baker got his first page at 3:30 a.m. from a TV network trying to book an appearance. He'd walked in the door an hour and a half earlier. "Actually I did not go to sleep right away," Baker says. "It was a weird evening. Obviously the gravity of what we were writing about hadn't hit me. We'd been so busy just trying to fill in all the holes."

It hit him when he got home: This was a story that might bring down the president of the United States. Baker declined the television request. He and Schmidt chose to stay off TV and concentrate on their reporting. (In fact, several at the Post were delighted to see Newsweek reporters on television. It meant they weren't working the story.)

On Wednesday morning, ABC's "Good Morning America," thanks to Judd, owned the television story. Five of its 11 segments were devoted to the latest Clinton scandal, according to Andrew Tyndall of The Tyndall Report. NBC's "Today" had to settle for news updates. All across Washington, the troops were being marshaled to catch up to one of the biggest stories of the decade.

Michael Oreskes, the New York Times' Washington bureau chief, had seen the Post's Lewinsky-free first edition. "If it had been in there, we would have found a way to match it," Oreskes says. His deputy, Adam Clymer, called him at home Wednesday morning to tell him about what the Post had. Oreskes began lining up reporters.

The Times hadn't known about the story before it broke. But it quickly got into the game, breaking stories about Lewinsky visiting the White House three dozen times after moving to the Pentagon in April 1996 and about what Clinton's personal secretary was said to be telling investigators.

Oreskes saw the story in two parts. First, there was Starr's investigation and the White House reaction; the political story. But he also needed a team to find out what had transpired at the White House while Lewinsky was there. He immediately assigned his premier investigative reporters: Jill Abramson, Jeff Gerth, Don Van Natta Jr., Stephen Labaton.

He had one crucial rule for all his reporters, he says: If they didn't know something as a result of their own reporting, they couldn't use it. He knew as soon as the story broke there would be a torrent of gossip, rumor, innuendo and misinformation. "The hardest and most important thing about this story was not putting rumor or hearsay or secondhand reporting into the newspaper," he says. "We certainly left a lot more out of the newspaper than we put in."

At the Wall Street Journal Bureau Chief Alan Murray saw his paper beaten once again on a story involving sex. That didn't trouble him unduly. "We decided some time ago that we weren't going to devote our limited investigative resources to the sex story," Murray says. "You look at all the big sex-related stories in the last six years and we were slow. We were slow on Anita Hill. Slow on Gennifer Flowers. We didn't write about Paula Jones until she actually took legal action. That's a fairly consistent reaction and one I'm proud of."

The Journal, instead, had decided to put its resources into aggressively pursuing campaign finance abuses.

Nonetheless, when he read that Starr was investigating the president and had wired Linda Tripp to tape Lewinsky, he knew this was hardly something the Journal could ignore. "We jumped on it and confirmed it with our own sources," Murray says. "It was pretty easy to find out it was true." But where to go next was another matter. "When you have other media outlets willing to print based on second and thirdhand sources, it's hard to compete. It's inevitable that the people with looser sourcing standards will get into print first. We decided to take a deep breath and realize that maybe we would not be first on this story."

(Less than a week later, the Journal would rush a story onto its Web site without comment from key principals. It subsequently had to retract the story.)

Time magazine's Duffy also had concentrated his bureau's investigative resources on campaign finance. But he gave the burgeoning sex scandal a full-court press after it broke. In its first issue after the story erupted on the Clinton scandal, the magazine was forced to credit rival Newsweek six times.

PBS' "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" had a long-scheduled interview with President Clinton the day the story broke. Lehrer had intended to ask the president about the Pope's visit to Cuba, Iraq, the Asian financial crisis and the upcoming State of the Union address.

Initially set for noon, the interview kept being pushed later in the day as the White House absorbed the punishing news. By 3:30, Lehrer and Clinton were talking, and the first 10 minutes were devoted to Lehrer's questions about the Lewinsky allegations.ý"NewsHour" had run an ad in the Washington Post that morning promoting the Clinton interview and had sent out faxes to television columnists the day before. By early Tuesday afternoon, says director of communications Bruce Lott, "NewsHour" had notified most of the major news organizations and had made tentative arrangements to feed taped video to the TV networks. All, of course, before the scandal had taken off.

The initial arrangement was that no one could air more than a minute of the interview before 7 p.m., when it would appear on PBS. But ABC broke into its regular programming at 3:35 p.m. to go live with the Clinton interview for longer than a minute. Backýat "NewsHour" headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, at public television station WETA, a court reporter was transcribing the interview via a live feed. "NewsHour" put it on its Web site and began faxing transcripts to media organizations around the country. The Associated Press had moved a story before the 45-minute interview had ended. The "NewsHour" Web site had a record day, attracting three times as many visitors as usual.

"It was very hectic, very intense," Lott says, "as you can imagine it would be in any newsroom when you have an entire day of knowing the biggest story in the country, if not the world, has basically just fallen in your lap."

The story that had fallen into Lehrer's lap that Wednesday was the same one that had slipped out of Newsweek's hands. "Initially, I felt like shit," says Managing Editor Whitaker. "We all felt that way, in a way as much for Mike as for Newsweek. We all felt we'd acted responsibly on Saturday and it was just a question of our deadline. But Mike deserved to get credit for breaking the story since he'd been on to it." Whitaker says he was annoyed on Isikoff's behalf that ABC was doing a promo bragging about breaking the story.

To recover, top Newsweek editors weighed whether to put the story online. Only once before – when the magazine obtained an exclusive interview with a Chinese dissident – had it published something in cyberspace first. Yet the saga of the president and the intern would move with blinding velocity. Others had the outline; Newsweek had the details. "We concluded, 'Look, it's a huge story and we have something exclusive to add, and it's not going to hold,' " Whitaker recalls. " 'Let's do it.' "

Isikoff and Thomas began furiously cobbling together a narrative, taking advantage of months of reporting. "I had drafted a piece the previous week," Isikoff says. "But that's all it was, a draft. But the essentials were there."

The essentials came from Isikoff's tireless pursuit of allegations of sexual misconduct by Clinton. Isikoff had long believed there was more to the Paula Jones story and that it shouldn't be dropped. Newsweek let him keep going. "I just knew that very few people in this town who are not part of the organized right-wing obsessives were going to pursue this," Isikoff says. "Reporters were not going to touch this story. They're all queasy about it."

In March of 1997, Isikoff went unannounced to Linda Tripp's office at the Pentagon, where she was a public affairs spokesperson working closely with Lewinsky. (Isikoff won't say what led him to Tripp.) Tripp, he says, took him out to a courtyard, where she smoked a cigarette. "She was extremely reluctant to talk, but I got enough body signals to know she knew something. But she wasn't going to cough it up right away." He saw her again. Tripp told him that White House volunteer Kathleen Willey had told her that Clinton had made a pass at her.

"Remember, at this time, there had been no credible account of any misbehavior of the president in the White House," Isikoff says. "Here was Linda Tripp, the Pentagon public affairs officer, a career civil servant, by name, on the record saying, 'Here's an account of something I witnessed involving the president.' I thought it would be a big story. But it wasn't. It got no bounce whatsoever."

ýfter Tripp's account was published in Newsweek in August, it was inevitable that she would be subpoenaed to testify in Jones' suit. She also was upset that Clinton lawyer Robert Bennett had raised doubts about her credibility. In the fall she decided to secretly tape-record her conversations with Lewinsky.

Òn October, Isikoff met with Tripp and book agent and Clinton antagonist Lucianne Goldberg to discuss the tapes in which Lewinsky alleges she's having an affair with the president. But Isikoff refused to listen to the tapes.

"I declined to listen because it was clear to me that this was an ongoing process," Isikoff says. "What I say might influence what happens on the next tape, and I become part of the taping process. I wanted the story. I thought it was fascinating. But Idknew one way to blow it up would be to be seen as involved in surreptitiously taping the subject."

Isikoff did check out Tripp's allegation that packages and messages had gone back and forth between Lewinsky and Clinton. Isikoff tracked down the records through a Washington courier service. But he didn't have enough for a story until Starr got involved.

And so, as he and Thomas frantically prepared a story for cyberspace, Isikoff had notebooks full of information to sift through. As they wrote, McDaniel watched closely, looking for holes, adding new reporting and keeping New York informed. "It was as hard work as I've ever done," McDaniel says. "There was so much flooding in... And the phone was ringing off the hook. Every reporter, editor, librarian and assistant was in some way working on the story." (Newsweek would later send a bottle of Moët & Chandon champagne to everyone in the bureau who'd worked on the story and give Isikoff a handsome bonus.)

By 8 p.m., after the lawyers had vetted it, Isikoff's story was live on the Internet. It was 4,000 words, far more than would have appeared in the magazine, Whitaker says. "The ironic thing is by Wednesday, because things had advanced and because the story was breaking," says Whitaker, "we were able to be much more authoritative on Wednesday than we would have been on Saturday."

There was only one problem with breaking the story online: Newsweek doesn't have its own Web site. Instead, the newsweekly puts its copy on a proprietary site, America Online, which means only paying AOL customers can access it. Jennifer Bensko, senior editor for Newsweek Interactive, and others quickly realized that many Americans would be frustrated if they couldn't read Newsweek's story, especially after it was prominently mentioned elsewhere in the media. So Newsweek decided to put the story up on the Washington Post's site, Washingtonpost. com . (The Post and Newsweek have common ownership, although they compete fiercely for news.)

Meanwhile, Newsweek's public relations team shifted into high gear, faxing press releases announcing publication of the story and calling shows to offer Isikoff, McDaniel, Klaidman and Thomas to television programs that night. It was hardly necessary. Once the Newsweek details were posted on the Internet, producers were begging for magazine staffers to appear on their programs.

Thomas was dispatched to "Larry King Live," and Isikoff, who has a contractual arrangement with MSNBC, appeared on the news channel's "The News with Brian Williams." Although exhausted after only two hours sleep and one of the most intense news days of her life, at 9:15 p.m. McDaniel went to ABC to discuss Isikoff's story on "PrimeTime Live." "I needed makeup badly," she says.

What ensued in the next week and a half for the major media players in the Clinton drama was a whirlwind of relentless reporting, pontificating and promoting that meant 18-hour days, sleepless nights, adrenaline rushes and cold pizza.

"All through the last 10 days, the sort of ethical and source issues we might have spent two days discussing, we've been having to decide in 20 minutes," says the Los Angeles Times' McManus.

Each night editors and reporters throughout the nation had to decide whether someone else's story or the latest tip checked out sufficiently to be published or aired, with very mixed results.

At the Washington Post, the energy level was incredibly high, the hierarchical chain of command flattened a bit, report those in the newsroom. Special "Clinton coverage" meetings were convened each day at 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Post reporter and Clinton biographer David Maraniss, off on a book project, was summoned to active duty.

And the story was good for business. Newsweek upped its press run by 50 percent for the February 2 issue and by 25 percent for the February 9 issue. Time published an extra 100,000 copies of its first week of Clinton stories. USA Today printed an extra 500,000 copies of its weekend edition after the story first broke, although that was partly due to the Super Bowl. Web sites offering news set records for hits.

At the networks, anchors rushed back from Havana, where they thought they already were covering a big story, the Pope's groundbreaking visit to Cuba. ABC's Ted Koppel returned on Wednesday morning, January 21, and for a week focused each "Nightline" on the Clinton scandal. By January 22, ABC's Peter Jennings, CBS' Dan Rather and NBC's Tom Brokaw were on U.S. soil for that night's newscasts.

There are 19 minutes of news on each of the three major network nightly newscasts – a possible total of 57 minutes combined. On Wednesday, January 21, 28.5 minutes were devoted to Clinton, 22 minutes to Cuba. By Friday, the ratio was 46 minutes for Clinton, five for Cuba. "Any time you get over 30 minutes a day combined on the nightly newscast on one story, it's a great story," says Tyndall, who closely monitors network coverage. "In the last 10 years, only one inside Washington story got more coverage than this did during the first week: Clarence Thomas."

At Newsweek, on the Thursday after the story broke, Klaidman, Isikoff, McDaniel, Thomas, chief political correspondent Howard Fineman and columnist Eleanor Clift fanned out, appearing on television or radio 40 times between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. Isikoff's phone was ringing so much Newsweek hired a temporary secretary to screen calls. "It's been wild," says Isikoff. "I can't even get any work done."

Because of his relationship with MSNBC, Isikoff was limited as to where he could appear. But he did decide to do the David Letterman show on January 26.

"I had qualms about going on," he admits. "You shouldn't be yucking it up about this stuff with the president in public. But at the end of the day, I'm only going to get one chance to be on Letterman."