Hillary Clinton: A Different Kind of First Lady

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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.