Hillary Clinton Besotted With Bill

June 6, 2003 — -- President Bill Clinton told the world that he cheated on his wife during his grand jury testimony four years ago. So how could she possibly forgive him?

"You know, a friend, who's something of a theologian, said to me during this period that there were two kinds of sins — sins of weakness and sins of malice," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told ABCNEWS' Barbara Walters in an exclusive 20/20 interview scheduled to air Sunday night.

"And I think that, you know, my husband is such a fundamentally good person … this particular wrongdoing or sin was something that we could work through together," she said.

For Love or Power?

After years of speculation over whether the couple stayed together so they could retain their super political powers, or because they were really still in love, Clinton told Walters that her decision to stay married came down to her intense love for husband, a love that bloomed after she met him at Yale.

"He [Bill Clinton] has these beautiful hands … very long fingers and I used to just love watching him, you know turn the pages of a book, play his saxophone," Clinton told Walters.

"Yeah, besotted is a good word. It's an old fashioned word that I plead guilty to," she said.

The New York senator told Walters that she struggled with whether or not she wanted to continue the marriage after the then-president told her the true nature of his relationship with former intern Monica Lewinsky.

"The jury was really out about whether the marriage would survive, whether I wanted it to survive," she told Walters.

First Couple Had Marriage Counseling

Walters, who interviewed Lewinsky in March 1999, said the former first lady revealed it took months of work to save her relationship after her husband's confession.

"They went to marriage counseling. They had prayer meetings. It wasn't just 'Let's talk about it honey,' " Walters said on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "It was a long, long time."

The former first lady describes her strained relationship with the former president after he revealed he had been unfaithful in her new book, Living History.

Clinton's 562-page memoir has been highly anticipated. Simon & Schuster, billed the book as a complete, candid accounting of her years in the White House.