Hillary Clinton has been forthcoming about these painful early times. She told Talk Magazine in 1998 that the couple confronted his cheating in the late 1980s. “I thought he understood it, but he didn’t go deep enough or work hard enough,” she said.

Blair said Hillary Clinton realized that the infidelities threatened more than their marriage. “Her idea, I think, was, if he’s going to be politically successful they have to become more conventional people who are more in tune with values of generations other than theirs,” Blair said.

When Bill Clinton launched a presidential run in 1991, his wife and senior staff considered how to deal with what came to be known as “bimbo eruptions.”

“I think, by then, Hillary had a very good notion of Bill’s behavior,” said her longtime friend Nancy Pietrafesa. “Maybe she endured it, but I don’t think she condoned it.”

Nevertheless, Hillary Clinton dismissed an accusation made by Gennifer Flowers, the singer who sold her story to a supermarket tabloid after having previously denied an affair. In an ABC News interview, she called Flowers “some failed cabaret singer who doesn’t even have much of a résumé to fall back on.” She told Esquire magazine in 1992 that if she had the chance to cross-examine Flowers, “I mean, I would crucify her.”

A chill fell over the White House as the truth about Lewinsky emerged, former staffers and friends said.

“She had to do what she had always done before: swallow her doubts, stand by her man and savage his enemies,” Stephanopoulos wrote, describing Hillary Clinton’s reaction.

“I think it was obvious she was more than mad, more than upset,” said Mary Mel French, a White House aide during the Clinton years. “She wasn’t speaking to him. . . . It took a long time for that to settle down.”

Hillary Clinton did not speak publicly about Lewinsky and confided in few people. Matthews, her Little Rock pastor, said he offered to listen, but she warned him that he might be subpoenaed.

“She’s not the type of person who calls friends and cries about it,” Henry said.

Hillary Clinton opened up to Blair’s wife, Diane, a few weeks later, according to a diary kept by the now-deceased friend. “She thinks she was not smart enough, not sensitive enough, not free enough of her own concerns and struggles,” Diane Blair wrote. “It was a lapse, but she says to his credit he tried to break it off, tried to pull away, tried to manage someone who was clearly a ‘narcissistic loony toon;’ but it was beyond control.”

Lewinsky wrote in Vanity Fair in 2014 that she found Hillary Clinton’s “impulse to blame the Woman — not only me, but herself — troubling.” She declined an interview request.

Accuser Juanita Broaddrick, whose claim of a 1978 sexual assault has been denied by the Clintons, thinks Hillary Clinton was too passive. “I always felt if she’d been a stronger person . . . she could have done something about his behavior,” she said.