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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."