There was also a Lady Macbeth storyline to her controversy-filled White House years. She found herself at the center of a host of scandals and pseudo-scandals, from the intrigue around the Clintons’ failed Whitewater real estate deal to the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of her law firm records to her suspiciously lucrative trades in cattle futures.

In 1996, because of Whitewater, Hillary Clinton earned the dubious distinction of being the only first lady in history ever compelled to testify before a federal grand jury.

Not until Bill Clinton’s political career was ending had she been free to consider doing something that no first lady had ever done: put her name on a ballot for federal office.

As it happened, her popularity in late 1998 and early 1999 was as high as it had ever been. The adulation, however, had not come for any achievement of her own — save the one of having endured the public humiliation of her husband’s affair with a White House intern.

Top Democrats had begun urging her to run almost from the moment that Moynihan announced he was retiring. They would clear the field for her, leveraging her fame as their best hope of hanging on to a seat they had held for more than two decades. But it was expected to be an uphill race against the likely Republican nominee, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

“In a sense, I was a desperation choice — a well-known public figure who might be able to offset Giuliani’s national profile and his party’s deep pockets,” Clinton wrote in her memoir “Living History.”

This was not a popular decision in the tight-knit East Wing circle known as Hillaryland. Clinton talked it over with her close friend and adviser Maggie Williams during a long walk in the spring of 1999.

“I think it’s kooky,” Williams told her. “And anyone who cares about you will tell you the same thing.”

Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton’s scheduler who would later manage her 2008 presidential campaign, flatly predicted that she would lose.

That possibility also worried her longtime friend Vernon Jordan, who suggested that she consider making a bid for governor of Illinois instead. She had grown up there, and would not be considered a presumptuous carpetbagger, he argued — leaving unsaid his belief that a statehouse would be a better springboard to something bigger someday.

“I told her I didn’t think it was a good idea,” Jordan recalls.

But Clinton wouldn’t budge. “I’m going to run,” she told him.