The Trials of Hillary

By NANCY GIBBS

Hillary Rodham Clinton has never had much use for the national press corps, but by late last week, when the pressure for her to tell what she knew about Whitewater was rattling the very walls of the White House, she finally agreed to let select reporters through the door. It was her first news interview in weeks, and her first ever devoted to Whitewater, but this was no charm offensive: she met her guests from TIME not in the customary spots -- the solarium or the family quarters -- but in a combat zone, the Map Room where Franklin Roosevelt plotted troop movements throughout the Second World War.

The First Lawyer came well prepared; to even the softest questions she had a hard-boiled answer. "We made lots of mistakes; I'd be the first to admit that," she said, though just about everyone else in the White House already has. If it turns out that she and her husband underpaid their taxes on Whitewater land deals, she said, they will make up the difference. "We never should have made the investment. But, you know, those are things you look at in retrospect. We didn't do anything wrong. We never intended to do anything wrong."

It was great theater and good politics, but it was also rather late. Even as the Clintons continued to insist that Whitewater wasn't really a story, that they wanted everything out on the table so they could prove their innocence, the White House was grinding to a halt so that aides could go out and find lawyers to help sort through their garbage and assemble all the documents that will float past the grand jury and inevitable congressional committees for months to come. A high-ranking Clinton official, distraught at seeing his name smeared, found himself reassuring his children that he is not going to jail. "Don't worry, Daddy," said one child. "We still love you."

The polls, however, were especially unloving last week. Only 35% of Americans surveyed in a TIME/CNN poll think they can trust Bill Clinton, down from 40% in January. More than half of those polled think the Clintons are hiding something about Whitewater, and a third think they broke the law. Even the financial markets decided they didn't like what they saw: on Thursday the bond market shuddered with rumors about new Whitewater bombshells, prompting investors around the world to dump their U.S. Treasury bonds and buy gold.

The sudden inflation of Whitewater from a nuisance into a crisis, Administration officials insisted, was due more to their colleagues' stupidity than to any new evidence of misdeeds. The President said it was all a problem of perception. Desperate to move on, they could even joke about it; adviser Bruce Lindsey cracked that Whitewater was the site of the future Clinton presidential library. But the greatest perceptual change had implications far beyond Whitewater and its tributaries: the President's wife, the most unaccountable member of any Administration, was being called to account for her actions.

From the start, Whitewater has been more about Hillary than her husband. She was the one who handled the family finances on the botched land deal; who represented clients in front of a regulator her husband had appointed; for whom White House counsels Vince Foster and later Bernie Nussbaum acted as personal lawyers rather than public officials; whose good friend, Nussbaum, retrieved files from Foster's office after his suicide; who fought to the end the idea of appointing a special prosecutor. Chief of staff Williams (of whom one White House official said, "It's hard to tell where Maggie ends and Hillary begins") and Hillary's press secretary, Lisa Caputo, sat in front of a grand jury last Thursday to explain whether, by meeting at least five times with Treasury regulators, White House officials tried to interfere with the criminal investigation into Whitewater and its ties to the bankrupt Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan.

In the archaeology of scandals, nothing dug up so far has been ruinous, but all of it is corrosive in a White House struggling to shield not one but two embattled leaders. After months of slippery evasions, the Administration abruptly changed strategies. As Republicans shouted for congressional hearings, officials from Vice President Al Gore on down fanned out to television shows to express their measured contrition. "Whitewater isn't about cover-ups," said counselor David Gergen on Nightline. "It's about screw-ups." Said policy adviser George Stephanopoulos: "Did the damage- control team create a lot more damage than it controlled? I think that's probably right."

As for the First Lady, she struggled gamely through White House dinners and the endless health-care meetings, "but I'm not sure anything is happening," an official admitted. "She's not running them. She's not talking, and she just sort of sits there." Friends privately acknowledged that the attacks were taking a toll. "She is too proud to call for support," said Senator Jay Rockefeller, who has worked at her side on health care for the past year. "And you will not catch a muscle of her jaw moving, but if I were her I would be seething over Whitewater." Hillary is careful to keep her anger private, but it is impossible to hide. "People can lie about you on a regular basis, and you have to take it," she said. "That's very hurtful. To see the things that are said without any refutation or correction most of the time is very painful to your friends and your family. I worry a lot about them."

The whole thing, the First Lady insisted, was a Republican plot to discredit her. That easy defense will not provide much comfort for long. Several polls last week showed that most people agreed with Hillary that the Republicans were playing partisan games. But the public also didn't like what little it knew about Whitewater, and was not prepared to grant Hillary the automatic benefit of the doubt she seemed to expect. "She's still in the mode of saying, 'I didn't do anything wrong,' " said a White House source. "So why should she do a mea culpa?" Said the First Lady last week: "I have to admit, for the last two years I was bewildered by people's interest in this. It happened many years ago."

For all her disdain for the national press, Hillary Rodham Clinton had a long honeymoon. By and large, reporters have gently chronicled her reinvention of the First Lady's office as she added a major policy role to the traditional portfolio of hostess and cheerleader. The glowing press accounts of her crusade for health-care reform, full of charmed lawmkers and cheering crowds, helped boost her popularity higher than her husband's at times. Profiles charted the spiritual journey that inspired her social activism, the theologians she read, the ministers she admired. The New York Times Magazine dressed her in white silk and pearls and captioned her St. Hillary. Her staff loved the picture.

This was risky territory for a public figure: if pride is bad, then one doesn't dare seem proud of being good. Both Bill and Hillary came to Washington promising an end to politics as usual, a rebirth of responsibility, a Politics of Meaning derived from the Golden Rule. Such a specific claim to moral authority can hardly withstand charges of tax chiseling and corner cutting by Hillary and those closest to her. "Can a President credibly advance an ethic of national service," asked Clinton's nemesis on the Hill, Congressman Jim Leach, "if his own model is one of self-service?"

Even the President's friends came to realize the dangers of moral hubris, particularly as revealed by a generation of '60s reformers who campaigned against the '80s as the Decade of Greed. "They think of themselves as the most ethical people in the world," says an Administration insider. "They think everything they do or say is aboveboard and for the good of the country. Therefore they can't understand why someone would doubt their integrity. That is a big part of the problem."

It is a problem for the President's bushy-tailed staffers, who last week were being called upon to explain why 15 top officials had been working for more than a year without proper security clearance. White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers admitted that she and others have been working on temporary passes since the Inauguration because, Myers says, she has been too busy to do the paperwork. "There are no excuses," she said. "I should have done it, and I just kept putting it off."

Despite Clinton's evocation during the campaign of a country that "works hard and plays by the rules," the rules don't always apply in the Clinton White House. Critics recall the infamous haircut on the runway, the summary firing of the travel staff, the use of the FBI to investigate the travel operation. "The Clinton message is 'I'm pure,' " said a veteran of the Reagan White House, " 'I'm above the law.' It's almost Nixonian. And it's a tragic flaw."

Whitewater has introduced all sorts of ironies into the most interesting marriage in America. The official word coming from the White House was that "this has brought them closer together. There is more phone calling during the day, more talking back and forth, a need to reach out to each other more," an official observed. "It is probably a natural reaction to stress and adversity coming from outside." The stress cannot have been helped by the President's having to fire Nussbaum, his wife's early mentor, or invite a special prosecutor to interrogate her closest allies.

The Clintons' partnership has inspired unending speculation ever since they peeled back the bedclothes a bit on 60 Minutes to respond to charges of his adultery. Even friends who have known them for many years have trouble explaining the dynamic between them; but Whitewater confirms some eternal verities about why they are so different, and so dependent on each other.

There is an old saying that Methodists are always looking for a mission, while Baptists think they are the mission. Bill the Baptist was single-minded in his pursuit of power; Hillary the Methodist made his success into her preoccupation. Their friends observe that he needs her brains, her logic, her focus; she needs his charisma, his humor, his ability to strike the deal that gets things done. "There's a poll saying that 40% of the American people think Hillary's smarter than I am," Bill likes to observe. "What I don't understand," he then deadpans, "is how the other 60% missed it."

But there is the twist: in Whitewater the smart one goofed -- or presumably did. The other one didn't. Like something out of Faulkner, the saint may have sinned. Two years ago, Hillary stood steadfastly by her husband through allegations, and considerable evidence, of adultery, draft dodging and drug use. Together they went through the grinder again at Christmas with new charges, by Arkansas state troopers, of philandering. Now, for once, it is he who must stand by his woman if he is to keep his presidency afloat. He is returning her favor, in many ways, though it might be fair to suggest that he more than owes her.

Maybe it is because he grew up poor and she did not that Hillary came to be worried about their financial security. Bill had already known poverty, so it held no terror for him; he used to say he didn't "care a lick" about money. Hillary did not have that luxury. She had turned her back on the lure of gold- plated Washington law firms in order to follow Bill to Arkansas and help steer him to the Governor's mansion, where he earned $23,000 a year. It fell to Hillary to make ends meet, which made investments like Whitewater all the more beguiling. Friends in Little Rock acknowledge that "money was a real issue." In 1983 she and her law partners Vince Foster and Webb Hubbell opened a joint stock-trading company called Midlife Investors. "She would call me all the time to see how her stocks were doing," recalls broker Roy Drew. "Some investors I never hear from. Some call every day, even when nothing has changed. She was closer to the latter."

The Clintons' Whitewater partner, James McDougal, claims that when Bill Clinton told him they were having money troubles, McDougal decided that his Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan would put Hillary on a $2,000 monthly retainer. MacDougal, who in Arkansas' incestuous politics was also a Clinton fund raiser, got his money's worth in 1985 when Hillary argued before the state on behalf of measures to keep Madison afloat. The thrift finally went under in 1989 at a cost to taxpayers of $47 million. Whitewater special prosecutor Robert Fiske has also subpoenaed documents of a second failed real estate deal financed by Whitewater, this one the 810-acre Lorance Heights project outside Little Rock, which ended with lawsuits by angry landowners, foreclosure and a $510,000 judgment against Whitewater.

It is no single charge, but the steady accumulation of them, that has the White House reeling. Most damaging of all is the atmosphere of lawyerly evasion that suffuses an Administration so plump with law degrees. The Whitewater "screw-ups," for all the efforts to spin them as one-time blunders, arose directly out of a White House power structure unlike any in history. Never before has the White House contained two such powerful figures, with rival staffs, interlocking loyalties and a wall of protection surrounding the whole enterprise.

Hillary functions in the White House rather like the queen on a chessboard. Her power comes from her unrestricted movement; but the risk of capture is great, and a player without a queen is at a fatal disadvantage. Clinton's presidency would be severely disabled by a direct hit to his wife. So, as the Whitewater story has wound tighter around her, opponents, supporters and observers of the Clinton Administration alike have been faced with the simultaneously giddy and unnerving prospect of seeing the capture of such a powerful figure.

Though her public profile has waxed and waned, Hillary's access within the privacy of the White House is virtually unlimited. Staffers refer to the Clintons with a sort of revolutionary equality as "the principals" and chart her moods and interests with as much care as his. Few were hired without an audience with her; when the President has a question about almost any sensitive issue that arises, the refrain is the same: "Run this past Hillary."

The First Lady and her chief of staff Williams have walk-in rights to most White House meetings, from the Oval Office on down to the war rooms and tiny impromptu gatherings. Williams' official title is assistant to the President, which means she reports to the President's chief of staff, Mack McLarty. But early on, Williams told friends that she considered herself McLarty's counterpart, and she bristled when she was not included in many of the same meetings he attended. "She told people that they had equal rank," said an Administration insider. "The only person who could have given her that impression was Hillary herself."

Washington conventional wisdom holds that Hillary Clinton, her staff and $ their mostly female allies constitute one camp in the White House, while "the white boys" around the President lead another camp. Many blamed the poor handling of Whitewater on a split between the two teams. But the Clinton White House is a far more complicated place than that, a hive of many camps, linked by bridges that make easy divisions not only impossible but misleading. There are age camps, ideological camps, long-standing friendships and clusters around key officials that defy simple categories.

The best breakdown isn't spousal but historical: there is a "campaign camp" and a "governing camp." The first, inhabited by Stephanopoulos, Harold Ickes, Paul Begala, Mandy Grunwald, James Carville and the swarm of communications minions, tend to be fighters, counterpunchers and by habit unconciliatory. The governing camp, by and large, came on board later, and is led by Gore, McLarty, Gergen and others who, to some extent by accident, are more moderate, more Washington, have closer ties to business, and have never associated with insurgent party politics.

A subset of the first group is Hillary's team, many of whom, like Williams, Susan Thomases, Ira Magaziner and, until last week, Nussbaum -- worked on the campaign. "People love working for her," says Anne Wexler, a senior officer in the Carter White House who keeps in close touch with the Clintons. "Her operation is the most organized, the most focused, the most coordinated and the most disciplined in the White House." And all the focus and discipline is directed toward a single goal: protect Hillary. As a White House veteran put it, "They are a force within a force within a force."

It is Hillary's camp, in alliance with the campaign group, that has buttressed, rather than sought to break down, her instinct to stonewall her way through this mess. Theirs is a lawyerly culture: attorneys by training aren't forthcoming, they tell nothing, give away little and generally plead the alternatives, if just for fun. The First Lady has been surrounded by like- minded legal eagles for most of her adult life, and those who remain believe in denial as a first course of action. It is a legal outlook, not a political one.

Hillary's advisers share with the campaign veterans the notion that the best course is usually denial and counterattack -- hence the charge that the Republicans are blowing up Whitewater for their own advantage. But the two sects have not always agreed. It was Ickes, a longtime Hillary confidant, who forced the Clintons to accept a special counsel when Nussbaum and Susan Thomases argued vehemently against it.

The hallmark of Hillary's staff seems to be an intense loyalty that borders on paranoia, and a determination to guard her privacy at all costs. The very intensity of loyalty, in fact, may have done her harm. "A lot of people believed last December that they could do Mrs. Clinton a favor by volunteering to go on television and talk to reporters about Whitewater," a White House veteran observes. "The idea was, do a little dirty work and get a merit badge." But Whitewater turned out to be full of quicksand. "They get on TV and discover it is not that easy. Rather than pleasing Hillary, they are going to piss her off. And so what starts as a big opportunity to score some big brownie points with the boss, or his wife, ends up backfiring."

Top Administration officials are now outspokenly critical of the White House staff for creating a fiasco that threatens to derail the President's legislative agenda. "They have never had a strong staff, either one of them," contends a longtime ally of Hillary's. "They didn't have to have a first-rate staff in Arkansas. They didn't need one there. They just had to be first-rate themselves. When they got to Washington, they didn't go through the process of a nationwide search to hire people for the White House as they did for the Cabinet. They looked only at the campaign."

Although there was a long list of experienced Democrats ready to help, the Clintons did not appoint a single old Washington hand to the new staff. "They didn't want any strong wills around them," observed a prominent Democrat who has known both Clintons since college days. "They don't want anyone in the White House who knows where the skeletons are buried." Only when disaster struck did they reach out to the grownups: first David Gergen and last week Lloyd Cutler, a seasoned veteran of Washington's political warfare.

The arm's-length strategy toward the press reflects her staff's careful management of the First Lady's image -- or rather, images, as she veers between the high-profile policymaker and the casual sports fan chatting with David Letterman's mom, live from Lillehammer. At times, in fact, her staff seems to be trying to make her appear less influential than she is. A year into the heavy health-care work, her staff still takes conspicuous pains to showcase her traditional First Lady doings, visiting schools and hospitals and entertaining, while keeping the details of her private work schedule from public view.

Such behavior inspires the conservatives' charge that she is trying to have it both ways, hiding her power and her liberal agenda behind a traditional role. In a way, Hillary Clinton, the feminist champion, has had a hard time living out that old feminist slogan "The personal is political." Politics is more personal for her than for any First Lady in modern memory. Some of her defenders attribute the attacks on her as the predictable assault on a strong, outspoken feminist. "It's a small but pathetic gang of right-wingers who hate Hillary not because of what she's done but because their mammas didn't breast- feed them," said adviser Paul Begala last week.

Some of Hillary's aides see her frustration and exhaustion growing, especially as the health-care marathon drags on and on, with ever diminishing chances of Congress's passing a program that even resembles the one she worked so hard to develop. "There have been days when we would tumble onto a plane at the end of a day," a staff member recalls, "and she would say, 'I hurt from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet.' "

Most upsetting is the fact that her husband's agenda, for which she too has fought so hard, is embattled by a mess arising mostly from her own misjudgments. With midterm elections looming, the effect of Whitewater on Congress will be to loosen the President's already fleeting grip on party discipline and make it harder for him to flex his legislative muscles. And it hands the defenseless G.O.P. a badly needed stick. "We don't want to be distracted from the big issues that we're working on," said Stephanopoulos. "That's not going to stop the Republicans from trying. They can't run on the economy. They can't run on health care. They can't run on welfare. They can't run on crime. So they're trying to exploit this issue. We shouldn't make mistakes to allow them to do that."

A politician who brought to the White House a reputation for slickness may have particular trouble getting some moral traction -- especially if those around him are afraid to confront his demons. A top Administration source said there is only one group capable of changing Clinton's mind about the way his White House runs: "What it will take is for the Wise Owls -- Vernon Jordan, Warren Christopher and Lloyd Cutler -- to walk into the Oval Office and say, 'Get the amateurs out, or we're going to lose the presidency.' " The ^ official sighed deeply and continued, "I can't believe we're at this point. It breaks your heart."

With reporting by Ann Blackman, Nina Burleigh and Michael Duffy/Washington