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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.