Devil Of A Blue Dress:

By MICHAEL DUFFY AND MICHAEL WEISSKOPF/WASHINGTON

Now what about that dress? Does the long-sleeved, belted, blue shirtwaist from the Gap still matter? Or is it like all those McGuffins in Hitchcock movies, just another evidentiary dead end stuck into the script to fool us for a while?

For starters, the dress had nothing to do with Monica's getting immunity. When Ken Starr's lawyers first asked Lewinsky about the dress last month, her lawyers refused to let her answer. Don't even go there, they warned Starr's deputies. The prosecutors dropped the matter, and contrary to other published hints, Lewinsky got full immunity for herself and her parents without any mention of the dress that day or the next, when the immunity deal was inked. So much for that rumor.

But the dress sure seemed to help refresh Bill Clinton's memory of his relationship with Lewinsky. When she showed up at the courthouse on July 29, she had a surprise in her duffel bag. Suddenly, prosecutors had probable physical evidence of the affair. But did they? The main reason Lewinsky's lawyers did not offer the dress to Starr earlier is that no one really knew what was on it. It might be semen, they told TIME last week, but even they have never been sure. Before turning the dress over, they declined to test it, and they didn't want to oversell it in negotiations. So once Lewinsky had her get-out-of-jail card, she gave the dress away free.

Lewinsky had several other good reasons to do that. First, if Clinton's semen was on the dress, it might be useful at a later time in case he and his operatives called her a liar, deluded or crazy, as they were planning to do. But the real power of the dress was not to punish Clinton but to smoke him out of his denial. Her privacy destroyed and her dignity under siege, the last thing Lewinsky wants to do is spend the fall and next spring answering prurient questions from Congressmen about her private life. The sheer possibility of semen on the dress would be like truth serum in Clinton's orange juice: Nothing like a DNA test to bring out the best in a man. Sure enough, no sooner had the dress made its way to the FBI lab than Clinton's aides began to hint that he might admit to the affair after all.

But the dress could do only so much for Monica. Clinton's testimony left the Lewinsky camp pondering its next moves. It wasn't that he called the affair "wrong" and "not appropriate." It was that he kept splitting legal hairs and insisting that his earlier denial of "sexual relations" as defined by Paula Jones' lawyers was "legally accurate." That was probably the hardest part for Lewinsky, for it implied that all the affection was one way and not mutual. "That is contrary to Monica's testimony," said a lawyer familiar with her case. Which may help explain why Monica Lewinsky was scheduled to be back before the grand jury. And why she is likely to be facing a lot of Congressmen this fall.

--By Michael Duffy and Michael Weisskopf/Washington