Monica Lewinksy and President Clinton embrace - a picture no one could forget - try as they may. (AP Photo)

WASHINGTON - He atoned on three continents and delivered a speech viewed as so inappropriate for the occasion that one biographer rushed into print a book subtitled "A Four-and-a-Half-Minute-Speech Reveals This President's Entire Life.''

She couldn't keep a secret or a lawyer, and displayed terrible judgment in selecting a girlfriend with a tape recorder. She dared to daydream that he would one day leave his missus.

Together they made the word "cigar'' a subject of smirks and discussion about what to tell the children.

He was Bill Clinton, the president. And she, of course, was the half-his-age, young-enough-to-be-his-daughter Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern whose lingerie became the subject of official business.

"In the course of flirting with him, she raised her jacket in the back and showed him the straps of her thong underwear, which extended above her pants,'' said the "Referral to the United States House of Representatives pursuant to Title 28, United States Code, 595(c),'' otherwise known as the Starr report.

The first kiss followed, reported its author, prosecutor Kenneth Starr.

In the course of the 98th year of the 20th century, Americans had themselves a scandal few wanted and no one could avoid.

It was ubiquitous-gate. It cost the speaker of the House his job and the president his dignity. It provided his epitaph, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman - Miss Lewinsky.''

It generated 50,000 pages of testimony to a grand jury and 445 pages of conclusions from independent counsel Starr, who found 11 reasons to impeach the president.

Ms. Lewinsky had kissed and told. In love, she could not keep a secret. Starr's lawyers counted up 12 listeners: six friends, a former boyfriend, two therapists, her mother, an aunt and the ever-attentive Linda Tripp.

Ms. Lewinsky told one of her friends that maybe when the president's White House days were over, she would become the second Mrs. Clinton. The girlfriend told Starr's grand jury. Starr told Congress. Congress told the world on the Internet.

He called her "Sweetie'' or "Baby.'' She called him "Handsome.'' They held hands. And talked dirty on the telephone. Once she asked if he ever expected more from her than sex. He said he did.

As scandals go, this one went in weird directions. The first lady blamed it on a vast, right-wing conspiracy. Her husband invoked a Hebrew psalm to say he was sorry and summoned clergy to receive his regret. And Mrs. Tripp told the American people: "I'm you. I'm just like you. I'm an average American.''

The Supreme Court made a supreme miscalculation. The court said, 9-0, that Paula Jones could go forward with her lawsuit because "if properly managed by the District Court, it appears to us highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of petitioner's time.''

As it turned out, the case occupied a substantial amount of petitioner Clinton's time. The country's, too.

Twice the president swore to tell the truth, all of it, nothing but. In January, he swore to Mrs. Jones' lawyers that he had not engaged in sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky. In August, questioned before the grand jury about Ms. Lewinsky's recollections to the contrary, he said it all depended on what one meant by "sex.''

Whereupon he went to the country in that 4-minute speech and said his behavior had been "not appropriate'' but his testimony had been "legally accurate.'' He had "misled'' people, he said. And spent the rest of his speech skewering not himself but Starr. Absolutely typical of Clinton, concluded biographer David Maraniss in his new book, "The Clinton Enigma.''

The speech laid an egg - too short on contrition, said the consensus, and not just Republicans. The Republicans saw perjury, mendacity and impeachment.

And so Clinton, he of the narrow escapes, hit the atonement trail. He begged forgiveness at every turn. "It gets a little easier the more you do it,'' he said.

Around election time, the country seemed to reach a conclusion: Clinton's behavior was shameful, but times were good. Democrats took five House seats from the Republicans, and Newt Gingrich walked the plank.

And as Republicans in Congress whetted their impeachment axes, he atoned again, showing up in the Rose Garden to say, "I would give anything to go back and undo what I did.''

To make the point, having tried just about everything else, he recited a verse from to "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam'':