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This was toxic for the Republicans, and not altogether true. Gingrich has not been micromanaging Hyde; for example, the Speaker and his lieutenants saw Clinton's videotaped testimony for the first time on Monday, along with the rest of America, G.O.P. leadership sources told TIME. (Had the leaders previewed it, they could have toned down predictions that the tape would be a disaster for Clinton.) Hyde has 23 years of experience on the committee, a reputation for gravitas and fairness, and a Capitol Hill power base of his own; Gingrich has consulted with him but not tried to control him. Yet Gingrich's performance allowed the Democrats to win the war of perceptions. In G.O.P. leadership meetings, members began grousing that the party was being out-spun by the other team. While they were complaining, Clinton moved the battle to a new level, attacking the Republican Congress for neglecting their legislative duties because they are obsessed with scandal. "The Republican majority in Congress has its priorities wrong--partisanship over progress, politics over people," he said Friday. G.O.P. leaders howled at the unfairness of it--Clinton plunged us into this mess, they cried--but there seemed little doubt that his new tactic would strike a chord with the public.
Which may explain why, at week's end, Republicans had decided to say yes to the Democrats for a change. In a closed-door session of the Judiciary committee on Friday, the G.O.P. changed tactics and gave in to some Democrats' demands, particularly those related to the Tripp tapes. Though Hyde had been extremely reluctant to release the actual tapes--they are said to be devastating to Tripp--the chairman acquiesced, allowing edited versions to go out. The gambit worked; Democrats were forced to admit a bipartisan spirit had prevailed. Both sides agreed to redact passages in which Tripp and Lewinsky make racial and ethnic jokes, obsess about their weight and gossip about other women.
Both sides also agreed to withhold an FBI interview with a woman who was known as "Jane Doe No. 5" in the Paula Jones case. Jones' investigators tracked her down because they had heard rumors in Arkansas that in 1978, Clinton, then the state attorney general, had sexually assaulted her in a Little Rock hotel room. But in a January 1998 deposition in the Jones case, the woman denied Clinton had made "unwelcome sexual advances." Yet in last week's document dump, Starr reported that in April the woman "stated to investigators from the Office of the Independent Counsel that this affidavit was false." Washington was buzzing last week about this sentence--if the woman said Clinton had attacked her, would that do the President in?--but the Judiciary committee deemed the interview inconclusive, sources on both sides told TIME, and decided not to release it.