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.