Behind the Furor Over First Lady

WASHINGTON —  In her new book about children and the obligations of the state, Hillary Rodham Clinton relates a favorite nursery rhyme--an obscure little ditty of unknown origin:

As I was standing in the street

As quiet as could be,

A great big ugly man came up

And tied his horse to me.

It is a dark and revealing choice. Those sing-songy lines bespeak a larger tale of innocence and pure intentions thwarted by deliberate evil. Mrs. Clinton says in the book that the rhyme encapsulates “the absolute unpredictability and frequent unfairness of life.”

In numerous interviews coinciding with the release of her book she manages to maintain her lawyerly composure and her mirthless smile, but Mrs. Clinton, is obviously a woman in distress.

Like the child in the rhyme, she describes herself as someone who has quietly gone about the business of being what she should be: loyal wife, devoted mother, accomplished professional, champion of the less fortunate, voice for good. And like the child, she feels bitterly misunderstood and set upon.

In her view, petty, partisan politics is shattering her dream of spreading virtue and good works through government action. Whitewater, Travelgate, her legal billing records--all are distractions aimed at impeding her and President Clinton’s mission.

“There is a reason why these issues are promoted so heavily, attacking both my husband and me,” Mrs. Clinton said in an interview with The Times. “Part of that reason is because we do have a different idea of how our society should function and how we should take responsibility for each other.”

That’s the easy and ready reply: all this is politically motivated. But the furor has mushroomed into something larger than a ploy to get at the president through his wife.

Mrs. Clinton, with her supreme conviction that she has been given to see the right, has become a much more inviting target than her more personable and flexible husband, the president.

Whatever the eventual legal or ethical conclusions, the controversy surrounding Mrs. Clinton has been vastly intensified by the style and personality of the First Lady, who will appear on Friday before a grand jury investigating the real estate deal known as Whitewater.

Certainly, her manner has inflamed her opponents. Increasingly, the furor is silencing her friends.

To begin with, her unbending insistence that she has been completely open and forthcoming with investigators does not fit well with what the evolution of White House explanations for Mrs. Clinton’s actions in the various scandals. Neither does the continual discovery of new documents.

Even sympathetic observers have begun to wonder why, if she is not trying to obstruct legitimate inquiries into her political and financial activities, Mrs. Clinton so often appears to be resisting the duly constituted inquiries. And as polls increasingly indicate, a growing segment of the public has also begun to question her conduct.

Compounding the doubts about her is the attitude--often seeming to border on contempt--toward investigators that contrasts so markedly with the high-minded concern she expresses in her book and her speeches for children and other vulnerable members of society.

Grist for Her Foes

Together they fuel what appears at times to be her critics’ obsessive desire to break her will and force her to abandon her lofty stance.

“There is something about the Clintons that raises Republican hackles, some of it legitimate--mistakes of language, evasions, inconsistencies. But there is something cultural, personal, visceral at work, too, when it comes to an assertive, intelligent, arrogant woman who lets people know that she’s smarter than most of them,” says University of Texas historian Lewis L. Gould.

Marlin Fitzwater, who served as spokesman for former presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, has been one of those critics. He senses the undercurrent of anger that many of Mrs. Clinton’s opponents have toward her.

“What’s driving this is the whole co-presidency idea. People have always resented the fact that they elected him and got her,” Fitzwater said. “She has defined a role for herself that many, many Americans resent.

“But there is another issue. There is a moral arrogance about the Clinton administration that makes people want to challenge them. There’s a sense that too many people in the administration think they’re better than anyone else. . . . “

Mrs. Clinton’s preference for the moral high ground has been much on display recently in interviews to publicize her book, “It Takes a Village,” and in her responses to official investigations.

She was frustrated at being forced to deal with questions about a shady trailer park development in Arkansas or the mysteriously disappearing and reappearing law firm records while she is trying to deliver an important lesson on the plight of the nation’s children.

She limits herself to narrow legalistic responses to questions about her representation of the bankrupt thrift at the heart of the Whitewater affair, even while promising full cooperation with the independent counsel and congressional investigative panels.

She professes failed memory on matters relating to the firing of seven White House travel office workers early in the administration.

She says she has no idea how billing records from the Rose Law Firm migrated from Little Rock, Ark., to a room in the residential quarters of the White House, then vanished for five months.

Tone Infuriates Some

But what makes her answers infuriating to her questioners is that they are accompanied by scorn for those asking the questions.

She set the tone early in the 1992 campaign with her response to the very first question posed to her about her legal work on behalf of Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan.

Asked by a reporter whether she had intervened on behalf of the failing thrift with a state regulator appointed by her husband, she waved off the question with the famous line: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies.”

Later, in the 1994 White House news conference designed to put to rest continuing questions about Whitewater and related matters, she was asked whether she and her husband should have been aware that something was amiss in the land deal.

She dismissed the question--and the questioner--with the sarcastic retort: “Well, shoulda, coulda, woulda, we didn’t.”

And last week, asked in a radio interview whether she would consider testifying before the Senate Whitewater Committee, she replied: “I’m considering everything, including going to the South Pole.”

Mrs. Clinton at times refers contemptuously to members of the Senate as “these people” and questions the legitimacy of their enterprise. “This is not about finding out the truth,” she declared in The Times interview. On the “Today” show, she said that appearing before the Senate committee “would be like having your teeth drilled.”

“I mean, if I knew they were going to ask me about ‘x’ and ‘y,’ that would be fine,” Mrs. Clinton said. “But these people think they can come out of left field--or, more likely, right field--and ask me anything.”

Clearly, says Professor Gould, some of the attacks on Mrs. Clinton arise from a sense among Republicans that she and her husband came to office by illegitimate means, elected with only 43% of the vote and, in the eyes of their opponents, having “lied, cheated and stolen” to get that.

Deeper Reasons

Mrs. Clinton’s defenders assert that the attacks clearly have a partisan component and are designed to weaken the president. But they agree that there are deeper-seated reasons why the first lady, in particular, is such a lightning rod.

“The short answer is politics. The second and third answers are politics,” said senior White House advisor George Stephanopoulos. “But beyond that, they [Republicans and other critics] have convinced themselves that they can stir up all kinds of deep feelings in the culture by focusing their fire on her.”

Thus it is not only her enemies who see her as the personification of a set of values and ideals at the center of an ongoing culture war in 1990s America. Her friends, too, see her on the battlefield, but as a modern Joan of Arc who must be martyred before professional women and all who subscribe to the politics of virtue can prevail.

“There is something more than the usual partisan games going on,” said Diane Blair, a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas and one of Mrs. Clinton’s most intimate friends.

“There is a massive attempt to undermine her life, her beliefs, her whole being. . . . It is politics, but it is a peculiar kind of politics, a particularly nasty kind of politics,” she added.

Blair is one of a very few of Mrs. Clinton’s close friends willing to be interviewed for this story. The job of defending the first lady has fallen chiefly to Ann Lewis, the deputy director of the Clinton-Gore reelection committee, who draws a paycheck from the Clintons.

In a reversal of fortune tinged with more than a little irony, the president is in the position now of having to defend his wife against charges of personal and political corruption. It was exactly four years ago that she stood by his side in New Hampshire as allegations of marital infidelity, pot smoking and draft dodging almost sank his presidential campaign.

Asked at his most recent news conference why his wife was one of the most controversial modern first ladies, Clinton compared her to Eleanor Roosevelt, who came under attack “for many of the same reasons, from many of the same sources. And that’s just part of what we’re living through. The American people can make up their own mind about the facts of it.”

Where Are Loyalists?

But where are the voices of the renowned Friends of Bill and Friends of Hillary, many now with jobs in and around Washington, the 40-something crowd, the Baby Boom Elite whom the media so eagerly chronicled during the 1992 campaign? Where are the ringing words of defense? Where are the loyal words of sympathy for what she is going through?

It was a question Mrs. Clinton herself posed at a small, private White House dinner party almost two years ago, according to a participant. “Where are our friends? Why isn’t anyone defending us?” she asked.

Silence.

Said one Democratic operative in New York who worked in the 1992 Clinton campaign and still admires the first lady: “Her friends are scared to death to defend her. . . . A lot of us are in hiding.

“I think people are a little afraid to associate with her because the level of venom against her is so great,” said this source, who insisted on anonymity. “To the extent I have a public reputation to protect, I don’t want to be a public defender of the Clintons. I guess it speaks poorly of me, but that is the way I feel.”

One person active for decades in Democratic politics said that Bill Clinton alienated the Democratic establishment by running away from the party during the 1992 campaign and afterward, triangulating a new course independent of what Clinton called the “brain-dead politics of both parties.”

Clinton, at least initially, filled his White House with friends, fellow Rhodes scholars and Arkansas cronies whose chief qualification was blind loyalty to the Clintons, the Washington establishment indictment goes. And Hillary Clinton compounded the crime by failing to seek the support and counsel of those with years of experience in the capital because she was certain her way was the only way.

Beyond the personal animosity it engenders, the self-assurance, at times approaching absolutism, with which Mrs. Clinton holds her views has profound policy implications.

The failure of the administration’s health care initiative in 1993-94 arose in part from the all-encompassing complexity of the plan and the secrecy under which it was drafted. The bill Mrs. Clinton’s task force produced was a sweeping 1,364-page blueprint that dictated in the minutest terms a complete reorganization of medical care delivery in America.

From the beginning, Mrs. Clinton presented the bill to Congress and the public as an all-or-nothing proposition. She branded those who opposed the plan as greedy tribunes of the status quo.

In one speech, for example, she lashed out at insurance companies as the “real enemy” of reform, saying that without the legislation she was backing they would continue “raking that money off at everybody else’s expense.”

Her resistance to compromise not only helped to doom her own plan, but killed any significant health care legislation in 1994.

Crafts New Image

That fall also brought Republicans to power on Capitol Hill and yet another new role for the first lady. As she had done after her husband’s defeat after his first term as governor of Arkansas, she made a conscious effort to retool her image.

Her hairdos became softer, her wardrobe more pastel, her rhetoric less fiery. In 1995 she traveled to Asia and South America to explore the plight of poor women and children and to research her book.

Yet the criticism came unabated, especially since the continuing Whitewater investigations uncovered new inconsistencies, newly “found” documents and fresh recollections from participants.

The drumbeat of revelations has been reflected in plummeting poll numbers for Mrs. Clinton, even as approval of her husband’s performance has steadily grown.

In a nationwide survey this week by the Pew Research Center, Mrs. Clinton was viewed unfavorably by 54% of the public--a number higher than her husband has ever registered and the highest for a first lady.

Mrs. Clinton dismisses these dismal numbers--driven largely by concerns over her integrity--as the result of distortions of her actions and her image by her critics in Congress and the media.

Every first lady has wielded power, she insists in interview after interview, they were just less forthright about it.

Why, she pleads, can’t the people see her as the multifaceted person she really is, mom, sister, daughter, wife, friend and not just the steely litigator in the unforgiving glare of TV lights?

“Why can’t I be all of that?” she asked plaintively. “Why can’t I be a whole person.”

Gould, the Texas historian, answers that Mrs. Clinton can never escape being a repository of ambivalent feelings from most Americans and unquenchable wrath from some. “She makes people eager not just to defeat her and her priorities, but to somehow destroy her, master her, put her in her place.”

Gould said he has not yet written a conclusion to his chapter on Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“She is without a doubt one of the most controversial first ladies of the 20th century,” said Gould, editor of the forthcoming book, “American First Ladies: Their Lives and Their Legacies.”

“Her legacy will either be that she was the forerunner of national health insurance--or she contributed to the demise of her husband’s political career.”