Bill Clinton something other than Whitewater on his mind last week as he walked toward the East Room for his big press conference. The president told aides that his 14-year-old daughter, Chelsea, had just done well on an important test she had been worried about. The president saw it as a good omen. Then he walked jauntily into the den of reporters and aced his own high-stakes quiz on the single most damaging issue of his presidency.
Afterward, the president told aides he had done all he could to end the controversy and was eager to forget the issue for a while during a family vacation in California. "They really need to get out of town for some R&R," says a friend. "We hope they can put their problems aside for a while." But, as other presidents and first ladies have found, escape won't be easy.
Fuming. For one thing, Bill and Hillary Clinton are far more frazzled by the Fuming. For one thing, Bill and Hillary Clinton are far more frazzled by the Whitewater furor than they have let on. In private, they often fume at staff members who ask about their failed real-estate venture in Arkansas, even in an effort to marshal a defense. The Clintons insist that their good intentions as public figures over the years should outweigh any transgressions or mistakes in their private lives, such as overstating a loss from Whitewater by more than $22,000, which the president admitted last week.
But the strains go deeper. The last 14 months have been far more grueling than the Clintons ever imagined. The president's considerable legislative success on the budget, education and social policy initiatives has often been overshadowed by errors, ranging from botched personnel appointments to excessive secrecy on Whitewater.
"Think of the year they've had," says a senior White House official. There were the deaths of the president's mother, Virginia Kelley, and Mrs. Clinton's father, Hugh Rodham. And then there were the troubles of several close friends, including departing White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum and Justice Department official Webster Hubbell. The apparent suicide of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster, an old family friend, is a source of continuing grief. In the words of one senior aide, "There's still an element of sadness in the White House."
To this day, the president talks about how much he misses his mother. He likes to recall her experiences as a nurse and tells aides how much she believed the health care system should somehow improve care for the poor. "Most people who live through losses like that can be basket cases," a friend says. "But he's president. He can't afford to be."
Mrs. Clinton's personal challenge, friends say, is coming to terms with lack of privacy. She deeply resents the scrutiny of her family's finances in the Whitewater affair and was one of the last holdouts against full disclosure. She stubbornly refuses to be trapped by life in the White House, often slipping out free of reporters and with a minimal Secret Service detail. She goes shopping and has visited the zoo and other sites around Washington with Chelsea, sometimes wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap. On such occasions, she rarely draws a crowd. The self-imposed pressure to deliver a health care bill also takes its toll. "You see the weight on her shoulders," says a White House aide. "It's a physical thing. She's under tremendous strain."
While the Clintons are on vacation, the White House hopes to tighten some procedures to make the rest of the year go more smoothly for them. Partly in response to a story in U.S. News last week, White House Chief of Staff Mack McLarty moved to strengthen requirements for obtaining White House passes and will insist that procrastinating staffers fill out the paperwork needed for security clearances.
Impossible for Ickes. On a substantive level, administration aides predict that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes will lose some of his vast portfolio, which includes supervising health care strategy, helping to organize damage control on Whitewater and coordinating White House efforts to elect Democrats in this fall's campaign. Some party insiders say Ickes is being asked to do the impossible. They question whether the same person expected to work closely with Republicans on health care should also be the one to bash them in the fall election. Ickes's political duties could be shifted elsewhere in the White House, perhaps to senior adviser George Stephanopoulos.
But the White House's immediate hope is for the Clintons to rejuvenate themselves. The president recently reminisced with visitors about how much his life has changed. While he was in Little Rock, he said, he could follow sports, keep track of his favorite players and sometimes goof off. "That's when I used to have a life," he said ruefully. Those days, of course, are over.
