Clinton: Mandela saved my marriage

On the eve of publication of his longawaited autobiography, former US president Bill Clinton reveals how Nelson Mandela counselled him through the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Mr Clinton told how the former South African president helped him to survive the battle that nearly saw him removed from office.

At times defiant, at others close to tears, Mr Clinton talked about everything from the hardships of his childhood in Arkansas to the infidelity that nearly destroyed his marriage and his presidency.

And in the series of interviews with American television and The Guardian newspaper, he even admitted he had not been fully telling the truth over his notorious claim never to have inhaled when smoking marijuana as an Oxford student in the 1960s.

Monica Lewinsky

In his book, My Life, Clinton describes the fall-out of the Lewinsky scandal as "the darkest part of my inner life".

"What I had done with Monica Lewinsky was immoral and foolish," he said. "I was deeply ashamed of it and I didn't want it to come out... I was trying to protect my family and myself from my selfish stupidity."

He admitted that not confessing was a "terrible mistake" - yet was determined not to let his chief persecutor, Kenneth Starr, drive him out of office over his sexual misbehaviour.

"I was misleading everyone about my personal failings," he said. "I was embarrassed and wanted to keep it from my wife and daughter. I didn't want to help Ken Starr criminalise my personal life, and I didn't want the American people to know how I'd let them down. It was like living a nightmare... Seeing Hillary defend me made me even more ashamed about what I had done."

He finally told her the truth after a "miserable, sleepless night" on 15 August, 1998.

"I had a sleepless night and woke her up and sat down on the side of the bed and just told her," he said. "And it was awful. But I had to do it. She looked at me as if I had punched her in the gut." Mr Clinton was then relegatedto sleeping on a couch in a living-room adjacent to the marital bedroom - and his wife and daughter barely spoke to him for weeks.

Nelson Mandela

President Mandela helped him get through the crisis during a visit to South Africa.

"He told me he forgave his oppressors because if he didn't they would have destroyed him. He said: 'You know, they nearly took everything. They took the best years of my life, I didn't get to see my children grow up. They destroyed my marriage. They abused me physically and mentally. They could take everything except my mind and heart. Those things I would have to give away and I decided not to give them away.'

"And then he said: 'Neither should you'."

Al Qaeda and Iraq

Mr Clinton told how, during his handover meeting with George Bush, the incoming President insisted national missile defence and Iraq were his biggest security issues.

He says: "I told him [Bush] that, based on the last eight years, I thought his biggest security problems, in order, would be Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda; the absence of peace in the Middle East; the stand-off between India and Pakistan, and the ties of the Pakistanis to the Taliban and al Qaeda; North Korea, and then Iraq."

Tony Blair

On the war in Iraq and the search for WMD, he said: "If I had been a senator I would have voted... to give [the president] the authority to attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein in the past had never done anything that he wasn't forced to do. And we were in this post-9/11 era and I thought it was imperative that we find out whether he had this stuff."

However Mr Clinton got in a dig at President Bush on TV saying that he made "made an error" in not allowing the UN to finish inspections before going to war.

The Middle East

The struggle for peace between Israel and the Palestinians was a defining feature of the Clinton presidency - from the groundbreaking 1993 handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, to the illfated talks at Camp David in 2000 that led to the ongoing intifada.

Mr Clinton blamed Arafat for the Camp David debacle, insisting that while Israel's Ehud Barak was prepared to make huge concessions Arafat was not able to "make the final jump from revolutionary to statesman... he just couldn't bring himself to say yes".

Mr Clinton also told how, just as he was about to leave office, Arafat told him he was a great man.

He replied: "Mr Chairman, I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one."

Speaking warmly of their "special relationship", Mr Clinton defended Tony Blair over Iraq. "He had a

very bad Hobson's choice," he told the Guardian. "If he says, 'Well, the UN didn't ratify this' and he walks away, it makes Europe happy but it imperils the transatlantic alliance and it still doesn't do anything to strengthen the UN.

"If he stays with President Bush, at a minimum he's gonna have to do something about whatever is there on the WMD side, and it gives him the chance to be the person who put the transatlantic alliance back together - and he hasn't hurt the UN any more than it's going to be hurt anyway.

"I think he thought 'In for a dime, in for a dollar. There's no good answer, this is the less bad alternative'.

I think some of the criticisms he got in Britain didn't appreciate how hard he had tried to get that other UN resolution through."

Did he inhale?

Before becoming president, Mr Clinton was asked if he had used drugs and replied that he had smoked marijuana as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1968, but had "never inhaled".

But in his interview last night, he admitted he regretted making the remark and had not been completely honest. "I tried it and I really tried to inhale," he laughed. "I was incapable of inhaling. It was just one of those dumb things you say and then you have to live with for years afterward."