Strong and silent, Craig’s wife stood by him

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Scandalous summer
This is not the summer's first political sex scandal. In July, Sen. Vitter held his own press conference and admitted that yes, in the business sense, he knew a staff member of "D.C. Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey.

Wendy Vitter found herself eating her own words from 2000, when she criticized Hillary Clinton for not divorcing Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. "I'm a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary," she said. "If he does something like that, I'm walking away with one thing, and it's not alimony, trust me."

Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband's penis and later threw it from the window of her moving car.

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But at Vitter's press conference, his wife stood at his side.

"Look," said political scientist Larry Sabato, a professor at the University of Virginia, "politicians love to have their spouses there because it makes reporters hesitate to hurl the really hard questions. It's a natural inhibition. It was critical for Bill Clinton that Hillary stand by her man, and it turned out well for her, didn't it?"

Eventually it did. But in January 1998, when the besieged couple stood in the White House's Roosevelt Room, neither looked well.

It was supposed to be a news conference to unveil a $1 billion child care program. But it was packed with journalists eager for details of a sexual dalliance between an awe-struck former intern named Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton.

Hillary Clinton as a model
Angrily wagging his finger, Clinton declared: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Hillary, radiant in pearls and an impeccable yellow suit, shot the frenzied reporters and photographers a smile that could freeze water. "I'm pleased to see so many people in attendance who care about child care," she said.

And for months, she endured as the public learned that Clinton did indeed have sexual relations with Lewinsky and that her semen-stained blue dress was in the custody of a special prosecutor.

In the coming years, with her husband retired from political office, she would become a popular senator from New York and the current front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

But her stoicism during her husband's scandal has become a model for political wives, the latest being Suzanne Craig.

"She did stand by her man," Sabato said. "She didn't say anything, and she had sunglasses on, and it does makes one wonder what she was thinking."