A Room at the Top

By Margaret Carlson/Washington

One week after her husband's Inauguration, Hillary Rodham Clinton is nibbling a salad in the Manhattan apartment of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. On the face of it, the two First Ladies could not seem more different. The times dictated that Mrs. Onassis, now a respected editor at Doubleday, would confine her interests to interior decorating and haute couture. While Mrs. Onassis spent all of her time in the East Wing with her social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, Mrs. Clinton has moved into the West Wing of the White House with all the men, and for the next 100 days will be in charge of figuring out the health-care crisis. Five of her staff have presidential-assistant rank, compared with one for other First Ladies. At the moment, other than the President, there is no more powerful person in the White House than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Yet only another First Lady can know what it is like to have one's every movement picked apart, and with such relish. One day during a rare public appearance at the dedication of the John F. Kennedy Park at Harvard in 1987, Mrs. Onassis was pulled aside by Kitty Dukakis, who was seeking some guidance. As the two chain-smoked in a private room, the only thing Mrs. Onassis could tell her for sure was that she would have to give up her beloved cigarettes.

Hillary Clinton did not seem to need much advice last week. A TIME/CNN poll of 1,800 adults found that 56% of respondents have a favorable view of the First Lady, up from 36% back in August. By now the public has had time to see Mrs. Clinton in action, and her reputation as a person who solves intractable problems precedes her.

In 1983 she staged a grueling series of hearings on public education in all 75 Arkansas counties. She spent long evenings drinking stale coffee in overheated cafeterias while participants trooped to the microphone to offer their views and occasional insults (she was once called "lower than a snake's belly"). Known to click a ball-point pen if someone was belaboring the obvious, she sometimes resorted to setting a timer at five minutes to keep the meetings moving. As the deadline approached, Mrs. Clinton drove the meetings from 6 p.m. Friday until late Sunday afternoon. When she presented the findings to a special session of the state legislature, speaking for more than an hour without notes, she received a standing ovation.

She has shown a similar get-the-job-done talent on many corporate and public-interest boards and other assignments. Her former law-firm partner William Kennedy remembers that she could wade into a complex case at the eleventh hour "and respond in a heartbeat."

So far, Mrs. Clinton has proved able to juggle the demands of the new assignment and the traditional role. After dropping her daughter off at school last Tuesday, she hopped on the 8:30 a.m. shuttle to New York City for a visit to a gritty inner-city school that would have given Barbara Bush a run for her photo op. Looking not at all powerful sitting at a child-size desk, she leaned her head on her hand like any middle schooler perplexed by long division and confided that math "was hard" for her too. She rewarded the winner of multiplication bingo with two stickers on his forehead and a kiss in between.

After racing to the Upper East Side to lunch, Mrs. Clinton moved on to the 50th-floor conference room of the Chemical Bank building, where she gulped Diet Dr Pepper and deposed health-care experts. Alternately, she continued calling key members of Congress to pay the kind of respects that will make the eventual arm twisting easier. Along the way she remembered that it would be possible to fit more people into the President's first official dinner on Sunday night and told an aide to send out more invitations. By then it was time to have a long chat with Chelsea about her second day of school, before being honored at a reception by the National Child Labor Committee for youth services. She gave a 15-minute speech about the importance of giving something back to the community and didn't get home to the White House until about 10:30 p.m.

The next day she had the first meeting of her new task force in a stifling conference room in the Old Executive Office Building. She characteristically dealt with the unspoken question on everyone's agenda first: "I don't want you to think because I'm the President's wife, it's not O.K. to tell me what you think. I want everything on the table." Senior adviser Ira Magaziner describes his own role as akin to that of a ceo, with Clinton chairing the board. At Mrs. Clinton's insistence, the operation will be tightly scripted, with wall-posted schedules of deadlines for each of the 25 subgroups.

Of course, Washington is not Little Rock, any more than it was Plains, Georgia, and the past may not be prologue. If Hillary Clinton is able to untangle the health-care mess, she will be seen as such a miracle worker that she may become the leading candidate for President in the year 2000. If not, at least the country will be able to criticize her for something more meaningful than using her maiden name and wearing a headband.

With reporting by Richard Woodbury/Little Rock