To see the First Lady, a reporter enters the White House through the pressroom, which is littered with supine bodies lounging in the languid but slyly watchful repose of zoo animals who know it’s not feeding time yet. Walk down a short corridor alongside the Rose Garden, with its peekaboo view of the Oval Office, turn a corner, and you are in the residence. “It’s really not that big a house,” remarks the White House staffer who parks me in the Map Room to await the First Lady. A white-jacketed butler brings a glass of water, positions it on a tiny table beside the throne-like rose silk wing chair where she will be sitting, smiles silently, and vanishes.

Yesterday’s Washington Post offered up the White House usher recently fired by Mrs. Clinton; although aggrieved, he volunteered helpfully that the First Lady never did throw a lamp at her husband, as was widely rumored last year. In this house, a public museum under constant occupation by often hostile forces, the walls not only have ears, they seem almost porous. A reception is going on in the next room, and my entire conversation with Mrs. Clinton is punctuated by the muffled chatter and bursts of applause we hear through the wall. The sense of being surrounded is overwhelming.

A Clinton friend told me that after the inauguration, Hillary and Chelsea set out to explore the White House. The armed guards on the roof brought them up short; that was when it really dawned on them that they had just moved into a fortress. “Hillary’s reaction was awe; it was like some 18th-century castle,” the friend told me. “On so many levels, we transform our presidents and First Ladies into royalty, and then we attack them for acting like royalty. But when you’re in a fortress, you develop a fortress mentality.”

And that’s even without Whitewater. When Mrs. Clinton arrives to see me, she is accompanied by her press secretary, who positions her chair in between ours and interjects warnings like “You need to do that off the record,” along with reminders that a group of senators is waiting and the First Lady has to get on up to the Hill. The atmosphere is about as intimate as Grand Central station.

Notwithstanding all the distractions, at first Mrs. Clinton seems her usual preternaturally poised self. This is the face she shows the world: coolly self-possessed no matter how acute the stress, her composure never faltering for an instant. This is the Hillary who will finally hold an extraordinary press conference several weeks hence, smoothly explaining away all the errors and contradictions in the White House accounts of her financial history, her expression so calm she might be making small talk about the weather instead of submitting to detailed questions about commodities trading and tax returns. This is Hillary the consummate politician, a woman who can calibrate the requisite tone for any occasion with exquisite precision, whether turning in a flawless performance under unprecedented interrogation in Washington or hitting the road in a determined effort to promote her health-care program and divert headlines from Whitewater. Barnstorming from Denver to St. Louis a few days ago, she had dark circles under her eyes and looked as if she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks, but for every audience she was smiling and gracious, always ready with a light quip to put her listeners at ease.

Today she is calm and businesslike, but her blue eyes are somber; sometimes they look past me into the far distance, as if contemplating the ghosts that hover inescapably over any consideration of the last year. Later on, playing back the tape of our conversation, I am struck by how many times Mrs. Clinton uses the word “sad.” It comes up in different contexts, and she never applies it to herself, but she doesn’t need to; the aura of sadness hangs over her, as tangible as a haunting whiff of perfume. By any measure it has been a difficult year, with more than its share of personal losses, from the deaths of her father and the president’s mother to Vincent Foster’s suicide.

But the other emotion that simmers beneath her measured words is rage. Despite her efforts to contain herself, Mrs. Clinton is clearly furious. By the time she calls her press conference in late April, she will have worked through such untidy emotions with her usual machine-like efficiency, processing the messy raw material of human angst and converting it into a perfect public façade. But today, with me, she is still struggling. The process has not been completed yet—she is still agonizing over her failure to stem the onslaught, and privately she has admitted to friends that she is devastated by the attacks. Soon she will have figured out how to handle the situation and conceal her vulnerability, but what I am seeing today is Hillary in transition, a woman the public rarely glimpses—one whose eyes betray her grief and whose words, despite her steely self-control, all too often betray her anger.

Sometimes it comes out as mere testiness, as when I ask whether the White House is what she expected, after having achieved the goal her husband had worked toward ever since he was a teenager. To my amazement, she snaps: “That is just such a myth! If you think leaving Yale Law School and going to Arkansas to be in public life is the route to the presidency—I mean, people have this idea that somehow he sat around from the age of 16 thinking, ‘Oh, O.K., I’ll go home to Arkansas’—Arkansas, a state that most people had never heard of, let alone been to—’and I will teach law, and then I will run unsuccessfully for Congress, and then I will be elected governor, and then I will lose, and then I will have to fight my way back, and I will end up being president’—that is absurd!” Her tone is withering.

Taken aback, I refrain from pointing out that it was Clinton himself who said he wanted to be president ever since he shook hands with John F. Kennedy at the age of 16. I ask Mrs. Clinton again whether her current life is what she expected. “The public-life part of it is—the doing-the-work part of it is,” she says. “I was in public life separate from my husband, before I ever married my husband. I cared about issues affecting children and families since I was in high school.” She regards me fiercely. “I really believe in service,” she adds. “I think it’s the way you fully round out a life and learn about yourself and enter fully into the human condition. It comes from my religious beliefs and from my own personal experience. Being able to help people in small ways, as well as trying to make changes you believe will help large numbers of people, is very important to me. Being involved in health-care reform, which I believe in passionately, is one of the most important things I could dream of having any role in. So that part has been very gratifying.”

Mrs. Clinton sighs resignedly. “And I’m now appreciative that at each point in our nation’s history there comes a certain level of criticism and questioning that you have to accept,” she says, selecting her words carefully, “that you cannot blow off, which has been my inclination in the past, and I admit that, because I find it hard to take seriously. Maybe coming from the private sector, with one foot in the public sector, gives me a somewhat different take on all of this. The idea of it is hard to accept, but I now accept it. So what I’m trying to do is to figure out how to perform effectively in the role my husband has asked me to fulfill, particularly with respect to health care—and that means I have to better appreciate what the environment expects, and I’m trying to do that.”

With impressive self-control, she allows no petulance in her tone as she continues evenly, “It is very hard, when people lie about you and attack you, not to feel anger. I have struggled with this, because there’s no human being who, if he were walking down the street and someone shouted an insult at him or got in his face and said terrible things about him, would not respond. Bill and I are in this position where it’s apparently fair for people to say anything they want about us, but we have to rise above it. If we act human, which is to say we resent it, we get angry about it—that somehow diminishes us. I find that very difficult to understand. So I am trying very hard to come to grips with that. . . . I don’t like people impugning my motives and saying bad things about me.”

But characteristically, she approaches personal attacks as if they were simply policy questions to be analyzed and solved like any other problem. “What I’ve tried to do, as I’ve realized this is not going to go away, as absurd as it is, is to put myself in other people’s positions and sort of break down my own personal reactions so that I can say to myself, Why are they saying this? How does it look from the outside? What do I have to do to be more effective and helpful to these people, so I can correct their misimpressions?”

Her tone is resolutely reasonable; she peers solicitously at me, as if I were a particularly obtuse student and she were wondering how to help me overcome my regrettable ignorance. “I don’t want people having the wrong impressions of me. If some right-wing operative wants to dislike me for their own reasons, there’s nothing I can do about that, but I want other people to reach their judgments about me based on the best available information, and not be influenced by the sort of sleight of hand that goes on, about what is being portrayed to them. So that’s what I’m trying to understand and work through on my own.”

Well, not exactly on her own. I have been summoned to the White House for what was initially advertised as some substantial one-on-one time with the First Lady, although it turned out to be neither substantial nor strictly one-on-one. The arrangements were accomplished through a protracted series of negotiations via several intermediaries, with Mrs. Clinton’s press staff working overtime to try to control the content of our conversation and of the ensuing article. I have also been offered interviews with a number of Mrs. Clinton’s friends, but given the uniformity of their testimony, they appear to have been carefully briefed about the current party line; one person after another makes the same points in virtually the same words and then reports back to the White House, which seizes upon snippets of conversation taken out of context and sends out more queries to ascertain my intentions once again, as if in an endless game of telephone.

My invitation is but one small part of an all-out White House campaign to resuscitate Mrs. Clinton’s badly tarnished image. A politically savvy group of friends and associates—the “Committee to Reinvent Hillary,” as one sardonic observer describes it—has been holding secret meetings in Washington to devise an emergency strategy to reverse the devastating tone of recent press coverage. Despite Mrs. Clinton’s well-known aversion to the press (an attitude one Washington media figure describes as “Fuck you, we hate the press, we don’t have to do it their way!”), interviews with the First Lady are soon popping up faster than crocuses, each conducted under strictly controlled conditions, each delivering Mrs. Clinton’s well-packaged message, each accompanied by its own benevolently smiling photograph.

In these interviews, Mrs. Clinton admits she’s made mistakes, but that acknowledgment is generally overshadowed by her more characteristic stance of sanctimonious rectitude, which is often framed in religious terms. By the time she does her press conference, she will have worked up an utterly convincing tone of humility, but right now she hasn’t mastered it yet; for Hillary Clinton, humble is very hard. Her sense of humor falters when she’s under attack as well. Her friends speak glowingly of Mrs. Clinton’s wit, and I frequently saw it in action during a long day on the road, when she used humor very effectively to charm her public audiences. But when I finally sat down to talk to her in person, she seemed defensive and grim, with no hint of the self-deprecating humor that made Barbara Bush so likable. Mrs. Clinton’s pious self-righteousness is one of the reasons her emerging imperfections have driven her detractors into such a frenzy, but for a long time the White House response only reinforced the impressions that led to outraged howls of hypocrisy in the first place. Is it mere coincidence that the Clintons, besieged by accusations of venality, started calling attention to their Christian bona fides, as the president did in a two part ABC News report on his religious beliefs? His wife ups the ante by implying that their detractors will ultimately face an even harsher judge than the one in the White House.

“You read some of the attack pieces about me and it is just amazing,” she says, shaking her head. “I find it impossible to believe that people who call themselves Christians could engage in such behavior. And as my husband has said on several occasions, we take bearing false witness against people very seriously. It’s one of the commandments, and we try consciously not to pass on stories or say things we can’t prove. I’m not saying we always meet that; the reason it’s one of the commandments is that we all fall short. But that people would say and do things that they have to know are untrue, or if they took the time to inquire would know are untrue, is very sad to me.”

Like many of the Clintons’ pronouncements, this is a wee bit disingenuous; until her press conference, Mrs. Clinton was not in the habit of subjecting herself to substantive inquiry, and even this conversation was granted on the understanding that I would not ask specific questions about Whitewater. During my allotted half-hour, Mrs. Clinton’s press secretary hovers anxiously, ready to extricate her with breathtaking suddenness if the going gets tough, which is precisely what happens. This caution may be understandable, given the rabid media climate. However, such restrictions have done little to alter the widespread perception that Mrs. Clinton’s role confers great power without much accountability.

Indeed, for much of the spring, similar criticisms were heard in remarkably disparate quarters. “If you go into the big leagues, you’ve got to play by the rules of the game, but she’s trying to have it both ways,” charged Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist president of the Eagle Forum. “Now that the going’s got tough, she’s retreated behind the First Lady shield, and it’s like ‘You can’t attack me!’” The comments from the opposite end of the political spectrum were eerily similar: “If you’re going to play with the big boys, you’ve got to play by the rules the power players play by, and one of them is accountability,” said a liberal Washington feminist. “You can’t take a dive.”

While Mrs. Clinton will reluctantly reach the same conclusion in the coming weeks, even that will not resolve some larger questions. On this very day, the morning papers reflect the prevailing confusion over the proper role for a president’s spouse. While the news pages carry grim stories about the toll of Whitewater, The Washington Post’s “Home” section features a cover story about the new Hillary Clinton tulip, a lovely blush-pink blossom that conjures up visions of afternoon teas and white gloves—as does the very title “First Lady,” which increasingly seems like a ludicrous anachronism.

On any given day inside the Beltway, criticisms of Mrs. Clinton range from her conduct as a Little Rock lawyer in private practice as far back as the 1970s to gossip that the First Lady hasn’t made enough effort to entertain the Senate wives since arriving in Washington. Feminists laud Mrs. Clinton for her accomplishments, then privately turn around and bemoan her route to power. “It’s innately not feminist to derive your power from the person you sleep with,” says one. “We all want to believe Hillary can climb mountains and be this new kind of partner, but nepotism always breeds this kind of difficulty.”

Although Mrs. Clinton is only the second First Lady ever to establish her own separate executive offices in the West Wing, she rejects both the idea that she has assumed unprecedented power and the suggestion that she has often avoided the kind of accountability routinely endured by other public officials. She prefers to place her situation in a historical perspective, pointing out that First Ladies have always contended with such criticisms. “I think it has a lot to do with the ambivalence that people have about women, period,” she says. “That seems to be cross-generational. It may take different historical forms, depending upon whether we’re in the early 19th century or the late 20th century, but the bottom line on a lot of this criticism is: Who is this woman and why is she there? Well, everyone who is in the White House is there because the president chose that person, starting with the vice president and going all the way down to the person who Xeroxes things. I think the fair question is: What does this person believe that might influence the president or public policy? And unlike a lot of my predecessors, I am very up-front about what I believe in. I don’t think you could argue that I’m more or less influential with my husband than many of the women who have been here. I might even suggest that I am less influential, because my husband is someone who seeks opinions from a very broad range of sources.”

This is patently ridiculous; no First Lady has ever been handed responsibility for a major policy question like health care before. But Mrs. Clinton’s expression is bland and unblinking. “Much of the influence that First Ladies have exercised in the past has been extremely private and totally unaccountable. Nobody had any idea what she was saying to him about anything. My belief is that each woman has to fashion this undefined role for herself—and maybe at some point a man will have to do the same. I have always been an up-front person. I have always felt that public policy was important, and that we could make a difference, whether my husband was governor or president, and this is how I have conducted myself.

“I think it’s humorous that people would say I need to do press conferences,” she adds mirthlessly. “I have probably been more accessible to the press than any of my predecessors, with the exception of Eleanor Roosevelt.”

Clintonites love to invoke Eleanor Roosevelt, who has been enshrined as an icon in our national history but who, in her own time, was widely reviled. “Although E.R. gave virtually all her money away to needful people and helpful causes, she was endlessly attacked by Republicans as a thief, a cheat, a tax-dodger, a misuser of office and influence,” reports Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume I, 1884—1933. Both Mrs. Clinton and her friends bring up Mrs. Roosevelt so often that it’s clear they’re hoping for a similar evolution in popular consciousness about the current First Lady. Mrs. Clinton finally capitulated to the Roosevelt precedent in holding a press conference, but in the weeks leading up to it she was still very defensive about the perception that she had not responded to many important questions.

“We’ve been answering those questions for two years,” she tells me impatiently. “They are the same questions, with the same answers. I think a lot of this is a little disingenuous. People keep asking questions that we keep answering; they just don’t like the answers. If they don’t want to believe we lost money in Whitewater, that’s their choice, but that doesn’t change the truth: we lost money in Whitewater. You know, if they don’t want to believe that we paid back all our loans, and we never did business with an S&L, fine, they don’t have to believe it—but that doesn’t change the truth. . . . They can ask me from now to doomsday—they’re going to get the same answer, because it’s the truth.”

Catching herself, she pauses and takes a deep breath. “I think it is regrettable that there seem to be both commercial reasons and political reasons why people want to undermine the presidency and the people associated with him, basically making up stories or spreading rumors and innuendo for which there is no basis. I don’t mind a fair, honest give-and-take. If somebody in Congress disagrees with our approach to health care on ideological reasons, let’s just try to have a good, healthy debate about it. But if somebody in Congress wants to twist and distort the truth for political purposes, I think that is very sad.”

Mrs. Clinton also rejects the idea that she could be accused of arrogance, a word that arises regularly in discussions about her, whether on policy issues such as her closed-door approach to the health-care task force or on public-relations gaffes such as the firing of the usher. “I’ve never been called arrogant in my life before!” she exclaims. “I find that the most astonishing charge, and I think it’s very sad. Again, I think it’s being promoted for political and ideological reasons, and I regret that anybody would take it seriously. . . . I mean, I’ve never heard that before. I know that I am fair game; I understand that. I have read enough history to know that no matter what I do I will be fair game. If I had chosen not to do anything with respect to public policy, then people would have been hammering the doors down trying to figure out what I was really saying to somebody or what issues I was really concerned about, instead of focusing on health care. . . . I understand completely that there is a no-win kind of zero-sum game when it comes to being ‘First Lady.’ ” She pronounces this with exaggerated emphasis, as if it were such a curious locution it should have quotes around it.

Mrs. Clinton is particularly exercised about criticism of the way her health-care proposal was developed. “There has never been a piece of legislation written in public,” she says indignantly. “I don’t know what these people are talking about. I mean, there is no secret here. There is no decision that has been made. What we tried to do was respond to the president’s directive to work as quickly as possible to come up with a health-care proposal. It wasn’t as though we were going to come up with a health-care proposal and then impose it on the country. The whole thing is a public process. If you go back and look, the people who made that claim were right-wing operatives. The press never wants to talk about who faxes them all this stuff, who calls them up, who invites them to come to their secret headquarters devoted to destroying Bill and Hillary Clinton. I don’t understand why that isn’t as much fair game as what we do. . . . But this is a no-win situation. Because no matter what the prevailing stereotype of womanhood is at any historical moment, there are going to be people on all sides of it, and you can’t please them.”

She leans forward earnestly. “I think it is such an important lesson for girls, and women—to be true to yourself. Do what is right for you. Too many girls and too many women are pushed into saying and doing things because other people want them to. I was raised by two parents with unconditional love, who instilled in me a very strong belief in myself. Now, that may be scary to some people—I can’t help that—but this is the way I was raised, and I am grateful for it. So I can’t be something other than what I am, and what I am is someone who wants to be part of helping to change this country. That is what I have done for the 25 years I have been involved in social action.”

There is no question that Mrs. Clinton has been targeted for fierce and often vicious attacks by right-wing activists who portray her as a radical harridan bent on destroying the American way of life. Just as Eleanor Roosevelt was demonized by Republicans as “Lenin in skirts,” Mrs. Clinton has been denounced as “the czarina of health care” and a closet socialist. Moreover, her critics have skillfully exploited such caricatures as a potent fundraising tool for conservative causes. “There is a tremendous fear of her out there,” according to Richard Norman, a Republican direct-mail fund-raiser whose clients include Oliver North. Conservatives believe that “Hillary is dangerous,” Norman says, “committed to an agenda, and she is ruthless.”

But Mrs. Clinton knows who her real constituency is. Among more moderate segments of the political spectrum, Mrs. Clinton often elicits passionate enthusiasm. “I think she’s an outstanding role model,” said Kristi Meyers-Gallup, a 30-year-old St. Louis woman whose comments were typical of those I heard from female admirers ranging from senior citizens to college students. “She’s today’s woman. She’s so savvy, and she’s her own person. I think she’s as sharp and manipulative as anybody else, but I don’t think that’s bad. I feel the Clintons are more real than any presidential candidates I’ve seen.”

It may be their very realness that causes them so much trouble. By early spring, hostility toward the Clintons had reached savage proportions among the Washington press corps, many of whose members are of the same baby-boom generation as the president and his wife. Some commentators have suggested recently that the depth of the media’s animus toward the president is related to the fact that “his character holds up a mirror to their own,” as Frank Rich put it in The New York Times. The subtext of a good deal of Clinton analysis seems to be “This guy isn’t any better than I am—how come he’s president!”

Responses to Mrs. Clinton are even more complicated. “Hillary Clinton is a national Rorschach test of how people feel about the changing roles of women and men,” says Ann Lewis, a former political director of the Democratic National Committee who is now a Washington consultant. “She gets tremendously deep personal support, especially from working women who are trying to juggle responsibilities and live lives for which there is no blueprint. At the other extreme, there’s a set of men whose self-image has been that of political insiders, who are almost enraged at the way politics is changing and women are challenging the rules, which they think they wrote. I’ve been taken by surprise by the depth and bitterness of the resentment. This flood of bile has come out. In the guise of insider political commentary, what you get is a kind of 50s sitcom: the lovable, bumbling husband, Dagwood Clinton, who takes naps and rummages for snacks, and his competent wife, Blondie Rodham, who’s making all the important decisions, and the poor schnook doesn’t even notice. That is the oldest stereotype, that if a woman has power it has to be at the expense of a man. But it’s a set of people who live between New York and Washington that are having a hard time. Their self-image is being sophisticated and knowing everything that’s going on, but they have been surprised by Hillary Clinton. Their assumption has always been that she had to be a political liability, that for a spouse to go beyond a rigid stereotype has to be a problem. The fact is that it’s not a problem for the voters. It’s the future of American politics.”

It may also be the future of the American home. However, Mrs. Clinton—much to her own detriment—has managed to ensure that the domestic parts of her life are not nearly as visible as the public parts. You almost never see at-home pictures of Mrs. Clinton with her daughter or even her husband; their domestic life is largely off-limits to the prying eyes of the press, but the consequence is that many people refuse to believe Mrs. Clinton even has a domestic life. “She is a very private person, and she protects herself and her family fiercely,” says Tipper Gore, the vice president’s wife. “Perhaps the flip side of maintaining that privacy is that you don’t show yourself the way you really are, and that allows others to fill the void with a stereotypical image. Clearly, she feels you should be judged on the public record, and the rest of your life is yours.”

In fact, when you talk to any of Mrs. Clinton’s longtime intimates, the Hillary that emerges is so different from her public persona that the exercise assumes the surreal quality of a Rashomon experience. Those who know her best describe an intensely loyal friend who is always there in times of trouble and who remains thoughtful and caring no matter what the outside pressures on her. They describe a mother who has always made her child her priority, a devoted daughter who is constantly on the telephone with her own mother. Mrs. Clinton’s friends also make a point of refuting the widespread assumption that the Clintons’ marriage is some kind of cynical political arrangement rather than a “real” marriage, whatever that is.

“They’re fun together, and they are sexy together,” attests the actress Mary Steenburgen, an Arkansas native. “I’ve sat next to them on airplanes when the whole time we were talking he was rubbing her feet. It’s very much a marriage of two whole people. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. I have no idea whether he was ever unfaithful to Hillary; I’ve never heard anything about it from either of them, and I am a close friend. But whatever it is, they worked it out together, and they continue to work on it. They’re having a ball together, but the culture penalizes them for the fact that they haven’t lied and pretended to be Ozzie and Harriet. I think they’ve tried to be inordinately honest, without airing every facet of their lives.”

The Clintons’ friends see Hillary as someone with whom they’ve shared family barbecues and bike rides, Easter-egg hunts and children’s baseball games, Halloween parties and bowling parties. The all-American mom-in-sweatpants such friends describe scarcely resembles the yuppie-from-hell-in-a-power-suit who figures so prominently in right-wing nightmares.

Somewhere in the middle are the not unsympathetic onlookers who perceive Mrs. Clinton largely in terms of her professional identity as a smart, tough lawyer—and of her take-no-prisoners political image. Both of those impressions are amply documented. While Republicans may quarrel with her conclusions on health care, Mrs. Clinton gets high marks for her performance from both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill. “She has a remarkable grasp of the complexities of very difficult issues,” says Sheila Burke, Senator Bob Dole’s chief of staff and resident health-care expert. “I think she’s terrific, and extraordinarily effective.”

Nor do those who have seen Mrs. Clinton in action question the role accorded her by her husband. “I’ve seen them both make presentations, with dozens of senators at the table, and she’s better than he is,” says one insider. “And these guys know it. They’ve sat in rooms with her, and they’ve sat in rooms with him. He’s good—he’s very good. She’s just fucking perfect.”

But perfection elicits mixed reactions. “Her powers of communication are so awesome that men are intimidated around her,” says Senator David Pryor, an Arkansas Democrat. “Powerful leaders are awed.”

Even those who love Mrs. Clinton acknowledge that they find her formidable. “She’s tough,” attests Nancy Snyderman, a San Francisco surgeon who became close friends with Mrs. Clinton while both were living in Little Rock. “I would not like to be on the other side from her. She handled my divorce . . . and she just sort of laid down the law. With my divorce, a friend of mine asked Hillary, ‘Who’s the best attorney in town to handle this?’ and she said, ‘I am.’ For me, it was like a combination of going to a friend, going to your mother, and going to the principal. Whenever she told me to do something, I would always be worried that I hadn’t done what I was supposed to do. I felt like, ‘Oh shit, is she going to yell at me?’ But I felt so confident with her as my attorney. She’s like a bulldog. She’s so tough she’s invincible. She said, ‘Jump,’ I said, ‘How high?’ I would never cross her.”

Those who do often come to regret it. “She has a reputation for vindictiveness,” says one observer who privately refers to the First Lady as Evita Rodham Clinton. “If you disagreed with her, your life was hell. She would cut off your access; you became a nobody.”

Such ruthlessness was vividly revealed during the catastrophically mismanaged nomination of Lani Guinier as assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Guinier had been a longtime friend of the Clintons, who even attended her wedding in 1986. But after her nomination drew bitter fire from conservatives who attacked her as the “Quota Queen,” Guinier was astonished to find Mrs. Clinton beating a hasty retreat. At one event, Guinier approached her in a receiving line to compliment her on a recent speech. “Hillary sort of flinched and withdrew, as if she didn’t want to be seen with her in public,” reports one observer. Then Guinier went to the White House for a last-ditch attempt to salvage her nomination, and ran into Mrs. Clinton in the West Wing.

“She breezed by me with a casual ‘Hi, kiddo,’” Guinier later wrote in her book, The Tyranny of the Majority. “When somebody tried to tell her that we were in the White House to strategize on my nomination, she turned slightly and said, ‘Oh.’ She turned, full circle this time, and, to no one in particular, announced, ‘I’m 30 minutes late to a lunch.’ ”

That was the last Lani Guinier saw of Hillary Clinton; neither the president nor his wife has contacted their former friend since Clinton succumbed to the flak and withdrew her nomination. Guinier has maintained a discreet silence about her feelings, but friends say she was deeply pained at the way Mrs. Clinton gave her the brush-off. “She was sending a very clear message—not just that she didn’t want to be seen in public with Lani Guinier, but that Lani Guinier was an untouchable,” reports someone who witnessed the White House encounter.

That capacity for cold-bloodedness comes as no surprise to some of those who have worked for the Clintons. During the presidential campaign, sources say, even the highest-ranking Clintonites used to talk privately about “what a shrew Hillary is, how difficult she is to get along with, how people hated her,” as someone privy to such discussions put it.

Mrs. Clinton’s friends implicitly acknowledge such seeming contradictions. “Hillary is so multifaceted, it’s hard to get one picture,” Snyderman explains. “She’s a complicated person, and she’s putting her complexities out in public. It’s like sensory overload. People want her in a package, and you can’t package Hillary Clinton.”

The same might be said of many other women who are shouldering new responsibilities. But that process continues to produce enormous social upheaval and discomfort, and one joke making the rounds this spring served as a pointed reminder of how threatened some people are by forceful women of any description:

Question: Who’s the most feared and hated woman in America?

Answer: Tonya Rodham Bobbitt.

Some analysts suspect that Mrs. Clinton seemed particularly scary in the aftermath of the Anita Hill affair and the so-called “year of the woman” in politics. “She represented all the hopes and wishes of many women who woke up and got angry in that campaign year,” says Susan Faludi, the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. “Hillary Clinton is frightening to men who fear the ultimate consequences of women’s anger over inequality. You look at all the cartoons where Clinton is in diapers or in a dress or in a baby carriage, and she’s wearing the pants, and you see the anxiety. Because masculinity is so dependent on women being dependent on men, for women to challenge that role is to emasculate the man in their life. Promoting stories about Clinton’s philandering is another way of attacking Hillary, because if she had been a more feminine and devoted wife he wouldn’t be running around, so that’s the price you pay, girls—if you have any professional or public aspirations, your man is going to stray, and you’ll have only yourself to blame.”

Faludi acknowledges that some women find Mrs. Clinton threatening as well. “I think it’s because they saw her calling their bluff,” she says. “If you re-create her as a demon, you can say, ‘It’s a good thing I didn’t go out there and get that law degree, because look what it does to women—it turns them into monsters!’ She makes some women uncomfortable because she makes them question themselves and look at things they may not want to look at.”

Nevertheless, while Mrs. Clinton is a groundbreaker, she is far from unique, even in her longtime role as the major family breadwinner. A growing number of women earn more money than their husbands do, and many empathize with the economic pressures on her as she supported her husband’s political career. Mrs. Clinton is quite aggrieved by public criticism of moneymaking ventures such as the killing she made in commodities-futures trading. She has always understood that she was the one who had to make the money, but she also understood that she had to fulfill that responsibility while constantly looking over her shoulder.

“It was something we knew was inevitable if he were going to be in public life in Arkansas, because salaries were the lowest in the country,” she says. “It does weigh heavily. I think from time to time it was a pretty substantial burden on me personally. But in the balance of our marriage, it was something I was glad to do. . . . And because I tried very hard not to be compensated at all through my law firm for any representation my firm did that could in any way be related to the state, I voluntarily suppressed my income for years and years.”

This is a classically Clintonesque defense: true in most respects, but deliberately misleading in certain particulars. While Mrs. Clinton did forgo her share of the revenues her law firm earned by representing state agencies, she collected her portion of the profits when the Rose Law Firm handled state bond issuances. After that became a political issue for her husband, she returned the money and later, during the presidential campaign, claimed that she had “never, ever” profited from state business. When her staff discovered a six-year-old memo covering her decision to relinquish the bond profits, they were aghast, but succeeded in keeping the memo’s existence secret until after the election.

Such machinations notwithstanding, Mrs. Clinton clearly did make considerable financial sacrifices, both to accommodate her husband’s political career and in pursuit of her own agenda as self-appointed do-gooder. She feels those sacrifices keenly, and they exacerbate her ire at the tenor of some of the questions directed at her. When the Clintons first bought a house in Arkansas, they were asked where they had gotten the money, and Mrs. Clinton said it was from savings and a gift from her parents. Last March, after The New York Times revealed that she had made nearly $100,000 in her brief commodities-trading career in the late 1970s and used some of that money as a down payment on the house, some observers accused her of having been less than forthright in describing those profits as savings. Such interpretations set Mrs. Clinton off like a rocket.

“Where do they think my savings came from?” she exclaims in exasperation. “They came from money I made! I find this absolutely amazing, that these people are moving to the level of exegesis! When I made money, I put it in my savings account. . . . By the time I bought that house, I had closed my commodities-trading accounts, and that money was in my savings account. I personally do not believe that this level of paranoiac, conspiracy-driven investigation is appropriate—of anybody in public life, not just me. This is a matter that goes way beyond me. It is just absurd. If you take historical precedent, no president has ever had any of his activities before he became president investigated like this. And a lot of people came into office having made a lot of money, and with people knowing they made money through friends. We came in having lost money. We came in with very little in the way of resources. We are subjected to a whole new set of standards. We don’t have a vacation house in Maine, we don’t have a ranch in California, we don’t have a cottage on the shore of Maryland—we don’t have any of those things.

“So how many times do we have to say, over and over again, Look—we spent our lives primarily in public service. Even my law practice was subordinated to our public service. I took leaves of absence to work in my husband’s campaign, to head our education-reform efforts. I did huge pro bono projects. I’m not asking for any credit for that. I’m just asking for, if you’re going to go after whether, when I said savings, I was thinking ahead to what some 25-year-old reporter behind a computer could spit out in his lexicon of questions—no, I wasn’t! I was doing the best I could to live my life—and I think we’ve done a pretty darn good job of it. So I don’t think half of what’s going on is appropriate or necessary or relevant. I have reluctantly concluded that, given the mind-set and given the business pressures at work on the media, this is a new world we are living in, with new standards that nobody understands. I have no reason to fear people knowing the truth. I get infuriated when people print lies and uncorroborated accusations against either me or my husband. We deserve better than that.”

It has become popular to cast the Clintons’ problems in terms of the small-town environment that spawned their political careers; in the last few months, a common refrain inside the Beltway has been the charge that the incestuous interweaving of business and politics that has emerged as standard operating procedure in Little Rock just doesn’t make it in the big leagues. “They tried to bring Dog-patch to Washington, and it doesn’t play,” says one insider derisively.

Mrs. Clinton finds such characterizations facile and dishonest. “I don’t believe Little Rock is some unique situation,” she declares. “I think if you go anywhere in this country . . . people do business with people they know. I don’t understand why this has come as a revelation. I’m not about to get into the same sort of name-calling and finger-pointing that people have enjoyed at our expense. But I could go chapter and verse talking about lawyers I know in New York City or Washington, D.C., and their intricate interconnections with people in business and the press and politics. I can guarantee you that those kinds of relationships carry with them a certain informality that arises when you know people. You don’t do business with strangers; you do business with people you know. We did absolutely nothing out of the ordinary or wrong in those years in Arkansas.”

Many observers would quarrel with that perception, but some of the Clintons’ problems undoubtedly derive from the expectations they themselves raised when they came into office vowing to hold their administration to higher ethical standards than their predecessors. As the discrepancies in their accounts of Whitewater and other financial dealings piled up and the White House resorted to ignominious locutions like the Nixonesque assertion that a previous explanation of Hillary’s commodities trading was “no longer operative,” the Clintons’ unyielding insistence on their own absolute purity seemed ever more egregious. Nevertheless, Mrs. Clinton’s view of herself as a moral and social crusader is no mere political affectation; it has deep roots in the Methodist tradition in which she was raised. “Historically, Methodists combined personal piety and social piety, meaning assuming a sense of social responsibility for reforming the world, rather than simply emphasizing personal redemption,” explains Don Jones, Hillary’s youth minister back in Park Ridge, Illinois, 30 years ago.

But Jones, now a professor of social ethics at Drew University in New Jersey, also cautions against over-simplification. “I don’t think of Hillary as being a purist,” he says. “This paragon of moral rectitude—that’s not the whole Hillary. Hillary is a paradox. She’s also a lawyer who sometimes looks at the world as a lawyer. There’s a tension between Hillary the human being of moral rectitude and the Hillary who knows the rough-and-tumble of political life. I admire her integrity, but she is also quite pragmatic and interested in getting things done. She knows that politics is the art of the possible, and I don’t think any of us can say we have clean hands while doing our work. We live in a world of ambiguity, and we all draw lines.”

Mrs. Clinton’s usual stance doesn’t acknowledge a lot of ambiguity; as far as she’s concerned, her hands are clean and anybody who thinks otherwise is being willfully malicious. “I’ve bent over backwards to be as free of any hint of wrongdoing in my law practice as I could be,” she says with asperity. “I practiced law and taught law in Arkansas for 18 years, and so far as I can tell, there’s very little they can come up with. But in hindsight, you can make anything look different than it looked at the time. I don’t think I have any reason to apologize for anything I did. In retrospect, do I wish I had never invested in Whitewater? Do I wish that I had never had even a minor and insignificant role in representing Madison Savings and Loan? Sure, because I wouldn’t have to answer questions about me then. But I think if you take the law practice of anyone who practiced law for more than 10 years, a person of ill will, a person of a conspiratorial mind-set, could come up with a list of suspicious questions. . . .

“It is sad that some people are given free rein to conduct witch-hunts for their own purposes, but I can only tell you what I did and what I tried to do. If I had known that in the climate of 1994 people would be making judgments that I think are wholly unfounded, I would have said, Gee, you’d better not do that, Hillary. But then, as a friend of mine from New York said, ‘Well, now I’ve got it—you’re not supposed to make money, you’re not supposed to lose money!’ I mean, I don’t know how you live in the world these people want to impose upon you.”

If such dilemmas reveal conflicted expectations about women and money, the sexual innuendo that has swirled around Mrs. Clinton reveals even more striking conflicts about women and sex. Ever since she arrived at the White House, the rumors have been as widespread as they are contradictory: some of her detractors can’t even decide whether she’s a promiscuous lesbian or a promiscuous heterosexual. Mrs. Clinton’s close friends find some of the stories hilarious. “There was one rumor that she was having an affair with Mary Steenburgen and the Secret Service had to step over their bodies on the floor,” says Nancy Snyderman, who is close to both women. “We had a good laugh over that one.”

But even with her intimates, Mrs. Clinton maintains a zone of privacy whose boundaries they sense and observe. “In some ways, she’s a better listener than talker,” muses Snyderman. “She keeps things very close to the vest. She’s a great sounding board, and she’s great at getting you to talk, but I’ve never heard her volunteer a lot of stuff. I’ve never talked to Hillary about her husband. I’ve never been invited to.”

It is curious but true that certain friends who have laughed with Mrs. Clinton over the rumors that she is a lesbian have never broached the subject of the other leading sexual scenario about her, which is that she and Vincent Foster were lovers. When I finally ask Mrs. Clinton about it, the mini-drama that ensues is like a paradigm of her defiant public stance, her refusal to engage in matters she sees as irrelevant and politically motivated, and the problems that kind of resistance has caused her.

For a moment, she seems stunned by the question, and she hesitates. When she speaks, her voice is small and desolate. “That’s one of the sad lies,” she begins, and trails off, as if lost in thought. “I find it so regrettable that anybody would try to hurt”—she pauses— “his memory or his family for political purposes against me. That is so wrong.” She pauses again, her eyes reddening as if she’s holding back tears.

“And it is a lie?” I ask.

“It is,” she says, but so faintly her words are almost inaudible. “And it’s so unfair . . .”

I ask why she thinks all this keeps coming up.

“I don’t know, but I don’t want to comment on this stuff. I mean, you know, and I’d like that to be off the record. . . . I don’t want to say anything about it. I don’t want to answer it. I don’t want to dignify it. That’s the other position they put us in.”

Her press secretary, who has momentarily left the room, returns and is clearly horrified by what she is hearing. “You need to do that off the record,” she says hastily. Mrs. Clinton says it is off the record, and a discussion ensues about her response to my question about Vincent Foster. I explain later to the press secretary that I have a problem with putting quotes off the record retroactively just because someone subsequently reconsiders something she has said—particularly when the speaker is experienced in public life and knows perfectly well from the outset what the rules of the game are. I also point out to Mrs. Clinton that unless such rumors are refuted they tend to persist, as this one has for many months, taking on some truly baroque permutations.

“I understand the dilemma I’m in, but I can’t answer every one of these terrible crackpot vicious rotten stories, and I don’t think I should have to,” Mrs. Clinton says angrily. “I think we have so severely undermined the capacity of the country to make decisions, because we tear everybody down. . . . I sure think we’re headed toward disaster. I just think that everybody who is doing this stuff has to understand that if you make money off of or gain political advantage out of deliberate malicious falsehoods you are building on very shaky foundations, and I think our country deserves better than that. . . . If the press becomes the handmaiden of the political right, which it is becoming—from the so-called liberal press all the way to the attack dogs of the right wing—then you can’t expect people to have any trust in what they read or see, and if they can’t trust what they read or see, how can they make the decisions that are essential to keeping our democracy going? There’s a lot at stake here, far beyond what happens to Bill and me. If we’ve proved nothing else, we’ve proved we are resilient. We know how to fight; we can take these people on. I’m not worried about that. I just don’t want to have to compete in that arena. This stuff means nothing in the life of the country. What we ought to be hearing about is what kind of health-care system we’re going to have. We are challenging established interests.”

The subject of established interests comes up frequently in conversations with Mrs. Clinton’s defenders, who charge that not nearly enough attention has been paid to the role of the powerful interest groups she has threatened. “You look at the different things she’s taken on—the hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance companies, the pension funds, the physicians, the health-care people. To take on any one of those, you’d have a backlash, and to take on all of them, you have a tremendous force that’s rolling back up and threatening to engulf her,” says Ann Henry, an old friend and an attorney who teaches at the University of Arkansas business school. “She’s been willing to take the lead on health-care reform, and when you see what’s happening to her you understand why no one else has been willing to.”

Critics have made much of Mrs. Clinton’s hostility toward releasing information and subjecting her affairs to the scrutiny of a special prosecutor, and many commentators decided that her resistance to disclosure indicates that she has something significant to hide. Her intimates see it differently, suggesting that this reveals more about Mrs. Clinton’s stubbornness and stiff-necked sense of her own righteousness than it does about any potential wrongdoing.

Back in 1988, Nancy Snyderman split up with her first husband and moved to the West Coast. She was pregnant at the time, and whispers soon began circulating through Little Rock that Bill Clinton was the baby’s father. During Clinton’s presidential campaign, written accounts of that rumor were anonymously sent to various news media, including the National Enquirer, which jumped on the story. “I called Hillary and said, ‘This is coming down the pike and I’ve got to do something to save my reputation,’” Snyderman reports. “Hillary was very much the attorney. She said, ‘We know it’s not true; don’t give them the courtesy of responding to it. Don’t dignify it.’”

But Snyderman was torn, particularly when she received contradictory advice from other media-wise sources. “I had my Hollywood P.R.-type flack friends saying, ‘Do a full-court press! You’ve got to do damage control,’” says Snyderman, who is also the medical correspondent for Good Morning America.

She ended up heeding that advice rather than Mrs. Clinton’s; she submitted to an interview with the National Enquirer, complete with her baby’s birth certificate and DNA tests proving that Clinton was not the child’s father, and the tabloid printed her refutation of the story. “I never had an affair with Bill Clinton, nor did he ever ask,” Snyderman says.

However, she views the whole saga as providing an illuminating parallel to Mrs. Clinton’s later approach toward Whitewater and related issues. “To Hillary, it was like ‘We know this is ridiculous, so we’re going to take the high road,’” Snyderman explains. “When Hillary knows something is ridiculous and shouldn’t be allowed to take up a lot of space, she sort of stonewalls and says, ‘This is not important; let’s move on to things we know are of significance.’ The problem is that those things can come back around to bite you in the rear end. To her, these are private matters; this is not for public consumption. I think she feels like ‘We don’t owe anybody that kind of information when we know the truth.’ These are people who have fought for years to keep their private life private and their public life separate. Hillary sees the junk as temporary pain. She knows she only has so much time, and she knows she has to keep forging ahead.”

Whatever facts eventually emerge on the Whitewater affair, its handling has revealed a key aspect of Hillary Clinton and some of her associates. “They have this view that this is the smart people’s administration, and they’re so smart they’re not practical,” says one Washington politico who knows the Clinton inner circle. “They think that anybody who has a different view is stupid, so they don’t take them seriously, and I think that’s what’s gotten them in so much trouble. It sets a tone of arrogance, elitism, and disdain for people of opposing views.”

Mrs. Clinton is certainly disdainful of her critics; no matter how troubling the questions that arose, for months she acted as if a political vendetta were the only possible motive for raising them. One consequence was a growing consensus on the Washington dinner-party circuit that Mrs. Clinton wasn’t as smart as everyone had presumed; despite her much-vaunted political skills, she hadn’t been clever enough to finesse Whitewater.

Then came the press conference. Announced suddenly only a few hours before Richard Nixon died (an event the Clintons had known was imminent for two days), its timing was masterful. The First Lady staged her performance on a Friday afternoon, thereby consigning the news to the relative oblivion of Saturday. On a weekend fraught with turmoil and bloodshed abroad, the press conference was immediately eclipsed, virtually disappearing in an avalanche of foreign news and Nixon eulogies. Mrs. Clinton’s demeanor was brilliantly calculated as well; by this time she had contrition down pat. Hillary the Warrior had metamorphosed into Hillary the Submissive, pretty in pink, just as the proud Hillary Rodham had once been transformed into Mrs. Hillary Clinton when the price of defiance got too high. This is a woman who will, in the end, do whatever is necessary to achieve her goal, no matter how bitter the pill she must swallow. She will even smile for her enemies. “This is really a result of our inexperience in Washington,” she said apologetically, as modest as a country bumpkin still getting used to the big time. “I really did not fully understand everything that I wish now I had known.”

While that spin neatly mirrored the conventional wisdom, those of a more Machiavellian mind-set toyed with other explanations for Mrs. Clinton’s long delay in capitulating to the inevitable. “The Clintons are the most successful scandal managers in the history of American politics,” noted one savvy observer on Capitol Hill. “People like David Gergen have been advocating this press conference since January. Why would the Clintons have let these hundred days go by before having it? Either you had a hundred days of rank and newfound stupidity, or a hundred days of fear of how much guilt could be uncovered. It’s a huge hit this administration has taken, at a time when they needed their greatest strength. It’s terribly inconsistent to conclude that Hillary was just naïve; it doesn’t go with anything else you know about her.”

Perhaps not, but it would be embarrassing for anyone to display the failings revealed by the Clintons of late—errors on tax returns, “forgotten” profits, sloppy business practices, stunning lapses in professional judgment and ethical sensitivity. For a woman who has always taken such pains to appear perfect, who only a year ago was sanctified as Saint Hillary by no less august a presence than The New York Times, such humiliating exposure must have been excruciating. Few public figures have had as much experience as Mrs. Clinton in toughing it out, but admitting she is fallible may well have been even more painful.

Nevertheless, whatever tears are shed by Hillary Clinton, they will not be seen in public. “She’s got this monumental tolerance for adversity, and that makes people mad, too,” observes Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the television producer and member of the Clinton inner circle. “People want to see her cry, and they won’t get to. That doesn’t mean she won’t cry, but she’s very private, and she won’t cry for any of her detractors.”

Mrs. Clinton’s pride is matched by her immense discipline, a strength that allows her to put aside her troubles as if by sheer effort of will. The same week Webster Hubbell, her former law partner, resigned from the Justice Department to deal with charges of financial malfeasance back in Little Rock, White House dinner guests were surprised by how lighthearted the First Lady appeared. “She was in a good mood all night,” said Carl Sferrazza Anthony, the author of a two-volume history called First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents’ Wives and Their Power. “With the president, there was more gravity; I’m not sure whether that’s just the implicit burden of the presidency, but there was a wistful quality. But she seemed positively jovial.”

For public consumption, Mrs. Clinton takes pains to put her situation in perspective. “You know, you have a choice, whatever your circumstances are,” she says. “You either become overwhelmed by life or you continue to try to challenge yourself to grow and enjoy the days that you’re given—and that has always been the way I’ve lived. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying there are not days when you wish for it all to go away and you can have some peace and quiet for maybe a week. But this is my life, and I’m very proud of my life.”

She stares me right in the eyes, her head held high. “I like my life,” she says defiantly. “I am just grateful for all the opportunities I’ve had, and along with the good comes a lot of hard parts. . . . I think there are points in each person’s life when you face a turning point. Do you become overwhelmed by whatever life has dealt you? Do you let the bad times outweigh all the good? Do you give in to anger or bitterness or insecurity, or do you fight against that? I mean, we all have that choice every day. Each one of us has those challenges.”

Watching Mrs. Clinton confront hers, America seems to be puzzled more than anything else, unable to assimilate so much contradictory information and unsure of how to compute the bottom line—not only on the complexities of Whitewater but of the First Lady herself. “The remarkable thing about the whole affair is that Americans may end up knowing less about Hillary Clinton than they thought they knew beforehand,” The Economist observed recently. “The conventional wisdom has been that while Bill was the chameleon with slippery views, Hillary was the one with firm principles. But she is an enigma to many Americans. . . . In her own way, she is as much a chameleon as her husband. Certainly she is clever, focused and a role model to millions, but for which role? She has as many of them as she has hairstyles: First Lady, political strategist, lawyer, wife, mother, cookiebaker, health-care reformer, Vogue picture-poser, intimidator, charmer.”

Which role, indeed? Calling someone a chameleon implies that there is something false about each appearance he or she takes on, as if such different identities must be motivated by an impulse toward subterfuge. Few people seem to consider the possibility that all the facets of the prism might produce an equally true picture, and that the real person they are trying so hard to discern cannot be understood except as the sum total of everything they see, and much they are not privy to as well.

“She’s still new to all of us,” says Buffy Cafritz, co-chair of the Kennedy Center Honors Gala and a noted Republican hostess in Washington. “It’s like an onion; we’re still peeling off the skin here. Nobody can rush to judge. We’re watching it all unfold.”

“What she’s really showing people is that all of us have multidimensional lives,” says Susie May, a Little Rock friend. “She is living one right in front of us.”