In that interview, as well as in conversations around that time with a friend, Diane Blair, she explained her husband’s straying: It was rooted in his childhood, when he felt pressure to please two women — a mother and a grandmother — who battled over him; he was under great stress; she herself had not attended to his emotional needs.

“She thinks she was not smart enough, not sensitive enough, not free enough of her own concerns and struggles to realize the price he was paying,” Ms. Blair wrote in her notes of their talks.

And, in Mrs. Clinton’s eyes, her husband’s encounters with Ms. Lewinsky were “not sex within any real meaning,” she told Ms. Blair.

But in 1992, that unbending devotion to Mr. Clinton had an important effect. It had made a lasting impression on everyone around the couple, and helped keep the campaign from listing.

She did not falter, even when her aide, Richard Mintz, told her she would have to call Ms. Wynette, who had taken offense to the “60 Minutes” reference.