Candidate’s Wife Stoutly Reaffirms Clinton Marriage

The wife of Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton offered a strong and emotional affirmation of her marriage on Saturday, the day after he denied unsubstantiated charges that he committed adultery.

Asked at a gathering of voters at the Bedford Town Hall whether she thought that marital fidelity was an appropriate concern for voters, Hillary Rodham Clinton said that she and her husband, the governor of Arkansas, had expected the matter to surface in the campaign.

“From my perspective, our marriage is a strong marriage. We love each other,” she said, her voice breaking slightly. “We support each other and we have had a lot of strong and important experiences together that have meant a lot to us.

“In any marriage, there are issues that come up between two people who are married that I think are their business,” she said.

With her husband beside her, Hillary Clinton also said that the couple and their 11-year-old daughter, Chelsea, had the right to a measure of privacy even in the glare of a presidential campaign.

“It is very important to me that what I care about most in this world--which is my family, what we mean to each other and what we’ve done together--have some realm of protection from public life,” she said.

She also noted that the couple’s marriage has survived for 16 years, 11 of which were spent in the “fishbowl” of the governor’s office.

The adultery accusations date back several years and have been checked out by several news organizations, including The Times. None of the news organizations has found any substantiation of the allegations.

The allegations are reported in an upcoming issue of the Star, a supermarket tabloid. The Star story stems from an Arkansas man’s charge that Clinton engaged in affairs with several women.

After his wife spoke Saturday, Clinton embraced her, then took the microphone and said that the man leveling the charges, Larry Nichols, was a disgruntled state employee who had been fired for making 700 unauthorized telephone calls from his office phone.