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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 40

ELECTION `92

A Different Kind of First Lady


BY MARGARET CARLSON/WASHINGTON -- With reporting by Melissa
August and Ann Blackman/Washington


      For America, Wednesday was the first day after the
election of a new President. For Hillary Clinton, it was the
first day to define the most ill-defined job in America. After
a decade of getting up early, popping into her blue Oldsmobile
and driving her daughter Chelsea to school before heading to
work at Little Rock's leading law firm, and after a year of
nonstop, around-the-clock campaigning, she now has time for a
second cup of coffee. Of course, her new position has its
privileges: she gets to live in the country's most famous house,
jet on Air Force One to visit heads of state and throw parties
with the most impressive guest lists in the world. Someone else
sees to the details.

     But if it's a fairy-tale existence in some ways -- the
closest a democracy comes to having a queen -- the position is
not without its frustrations for a woman who could be king.
There have been accomplished women in the East Wing, but there
has never been one who would qualify to be White House counsel,
if only her husband were not President.

     The question is whether being First Lady will change
Hillary Clinton or whether she will change the role. Given the
credentials she has, there is speculation that Bill Clinton will
find a way to employ his wife without igniting a protest. After
all, a new generation of leaders brings with it new assumptions
about the roles that women -- even wives -- should play. Hillary
may eventually conclude that she can use the First Lady's bully
pulpit however she wishes, and then let her accomplishments
carry the day.

     On the other hand, the Clintons were schooled in caution
by the mixed reception Hillary received during the campaign,
and they may continue to move carefully. When the Governor
talked about "buy one, get one free" and possibly appointing
Hillary to the Cabinet, her popularity took a dive. "People have
changed their attitude about Hillary," says pollster Peter Hart,
"but if they see her reinforcing one of their earlier negative
feelings, they won't like her." Last week when leaders in the
field of family law sent her a thick proposal to bring all the
varied government programs on families and children under her
East Wing purview, Hillary responded only by saying that she
wanted to continue to be "a voice for children" -- which fits
within the choose-a-cause deportment of First Ladies past.

     Such careful hedging will be less necessary now that Bill
Clinton has won. It is telling that Hillary seems to have
mastered the lessons of accommodation just as meticulously as
any law school text. As the campaign unfolded, she was able to
lower her public profile even as her private influence grew. She
did not wield power for its own sake, but rather intervened as
needed, fixing speeches, poking holes in arguments, warning the
Governor of his foes and rewarding his friends. She was the
candidate's most pointed critic, arguing that he was too passive
in the first debate in New Hampshire (he has never been so laid
back again), and his most trusted ally. She was much more
likely to end a meeting than hold one, the one person who could
cut off debate and force a decision. Without diminishing other
First Ladies' intelligence, Hillary Clinton's is that of a
trained killer lawyer, and the Governor says proudly that he
wants her mind brought to bear on whatever he is doing,
including being President. In any event, her influence is so
pervasive that he has it with him whether or not she is in the
room.

     The presidential race was not Hillary's first experience
with expedient self-censorship. Bill Clinton lost his first
re-election bid as Governor in part because voters did not like
the way this attorney out of Yale and Wellesley kept her maiden
name. After she began answering to Clinton instead of Rodham and
acting more like an archetypal wife and mother, she gradually
expanded her role. Over the years she headed up an education
task force that instituted a competency test for teachers,
brought a neonatal-care unit and two fully equipped hospital
helicopters to the state and introduced a home-instruction
program for parents of preschoolers, all the while attending
teas in Batesville and Pea Ridge. Conservative columnist John
Robert Starr of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a rabid opponent
of Bill Clinton's, says that "the best thing that could happen
would be to let Hillary run the country. I know that sounds
ridiculous, but she has just never failed."

     Having successfully refurbished her image in Arkansas,
Hillary Clinton had to start all over again once she stepped
onto the national stage. "The Hillary problem," as some aides
called it, reflected the perception of some voters that she
combined the aura of the teacher's pet with the grimness of the
first generation of women lawyers, afraid to crack a joke about
a client for fear of being sent back to the typing pool. To
some, her marriage looked like a merger. Former candidate
Michael Dukakis only read about Swedish land-use planning in his
spare time; the Clintons talk about similarly dense topics with
friends over dinner in the huge kitchen in the statehouse.

     Throughout the months of scrutiny, Hillary took the
criticism seriously enough to change, but not personally enough
to wilt. Her critics contend that she underwent a personality
transplant, allowing handlers to substitute the heart of Martha
Stewart for her own. But she insists she just offered people a
more complete picture of herself as mother, wife and friend, as
well as attorney. Chelsea, whom she initially shielded from
publicity, was gradually incorporated into the family's public
picture postcard. The lifelong friends who swear she is the
first person they would call from the police station, and not
because she is a lawyer, became available for interviews. When
Carolyn Staley, Bill Clinton's childhood friend, had a
miscarriage, Hillary, who had had her own troubles with
pregnancy, was the one who gave her comfort. Says Parenthood
star Mary Steenburgen, a longtime friend: "She's utterly there
for you."

     The experience of 1992 argues for a careful, perhaps even
slow assumption of responsibility. Washington remains the heart
of tea-pouring country, where Senate wives still hold Red Cross
blood-bank drives and frustrated political wives have a long
tradition of giving up their high-powered careers to advance
their husbands'. Marilyn Quayle was not worried about
preserving her essential nature as a woman until the demands of
her husband's rising political career required her to give up
her law practice. She often complained about not being valued
in her own right, and about her treatment by reporters when she
took off the white gloves and came out policymaking.

     It is natural in a democracy for people to worry most
about the influence they cannot see -- which helps explain the
uproar when their worst suspicions are confirmed by what they
do see. Some commentators went off like a cheap car alarm when
Rosalynn Carter's fingers grazed the doorknob of the Cabinet
room. Columnists conjured up Lady Macbeth when Nancy Reagan
introduced policy-by-horoscope, or when she nudged her husband
at a press conference on the hostages and urgently whispered,
"Tell them you're doing the best you can."

     As she flies into Washington for the Inauguration, having
studied closely the biographies of past First Ladies for
guidance, Hillary Clinton may vow not to go to Cabinet meetings
and take notes, declare a tablecloth crisis or order up a set
of gold-rimmed china. She may carefully find a way to chart a
new course. But however circumspect, she will make her own
mistakes. And if history is any guide, for reasons as old as
Adam and Eve, some Americans will punish her for them out of
proportion to their significance.