As the White House issued its second rebuttal in two days of the charges against President Clinton in the Starr report, foreign leaders spoke out to support him. Presidential aides said there was "absolutely" no possibility of Mr Clinton resigning.
The president's legal team, in a 42-page document, described the Starr report as a "hit-and-run smear campaign" wrapped in "pornographic specificity".
Leading members of the team did the rounds of the Sunday morning television shows yesterday to insist that while the president had done wrong there was nothing to justify the impeachment for which Mr Starr was pressing.
But as Americans spent the weekend digesting the 445-page report with its graphic descriptions of sexual encounters off the Oval Office between the president and the former White House intern, Ms Monica Lewinsky, some opinion polls indicated strong public disapproval.
A CBS news poll showed an increase in those who believed that the president should face some kind of censure. It was the first time a majority said he should be censured.
Some 62 per cent were against impeachment, while 32 per cent favoured it. An ABC News poll showed that 57 per cent would be willing to see the president impeached if he had encouraged Ms Lewinsky to lie under oath about their relationship.
Some senior Democrats have begun to urge Mr Clinton to abandon the tactics of his lawyers, who are insisting that he did not perjure himself when he swore twice that he did not have "sexual relations" with Ms Lewinsky. She has testified to 10 sexual encounters, including details that Mr Starr says amount to "sexual relations" as spelled out before Mr Clinton gave his testimony.
The Democrats, who include Mr Clinton's former chief of staff Mr Leon Panetta and Senator Bob Kerrey, say that the president should be seeking to co-operate with the Republican-controlled Congress, encouraging it to drop the impeachment process and to pass a censure motion instead.
The president has received strong support from black members in Congress. The president "would not be rail-roaded" into impeachment if the Black Caucus had anything to do with it, Representative Maxine Waters said yesterday.
There were meanwhile many calls for Mr Clinton's resignation from newspapers across the US, to spare the country a long-drawn-out impeachment process extending into the coming year.
Republican leaders have been less outspoken than expected in criticising Mr Clinton as part of their tactics to let the Starr report wreak its own damage. But they have also defended the independent counsel Mr Starr for putting such explicit material into his report, arguing that he was forced to do this because the president continued to deny that he had sexual relations while admitting that what he had done was wrong.
The president has been heartened to receive some encouragement from foreign leaders. President Chirac spoke with him for 30 minutes yesterday to express his friendship and support, according to a French spokeswoman. Mr Chirac emphasised his esteem for Mr Clinton in the personal ordeal he was going through.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, has also wished Mr Clinton well and has predicted a swift end to the crisis. The British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, spoke to Mr Clinton last Friday and urged him to continue his work for the Northern Ireland peace process.
As if to show the US and the world that he was not letting the current crisis distract him from the conduct of foreign policy, Mr Clinton summoned a meeting of his national security team at the White House during the weekend.
But Mr Anthony Lake, the president's former national security adviser, said that he expected the most difficult autumn since 1993 because of the economic crisis in Russia, the fighting in Kosovo and Iraq's refusal to allow UN weapons' inspections. These "extremely difficult problems will become all the more dangerous" if people assumed that the president was weakened by the problems caused by his affair with Ms Lewinsky, Mr Lake said.
AFP adds:
Friends of Mrs Hillary Clinton say she has kept private her feelings about the scandal engulfing her husband, resisting pressure to comment on it publicly, Newsweek reports. Mrs Clinton has not ruled out publicly forgiving her husband at some point in the future, however, according to her friends cited in the Newsweek story.