Open and Unflappable

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Mrs. Clinton seemed to deliberately back away from her earlier description of the Whitewater controversy as a conspiracy fueled by Republicans and other political opponents. And the First Lady was at her most contrite when she admitted that much of the confusion about Whitewater is "really a result of our inexperience in Washington." For months, she had been trying to maintain a "zone of privacy" around her family because, she said, she had been reared by her parents to ignore the judgments of others because "you have to live with yourself." That has led her, the First Lady added, "to perhaps be less understanding than I needed to of both the press and the public's interest, as well as right, to know things about my husband and me." Then she added, "I feel, after resisting for a long time, I've been rezoned."

Yet her most disarming observation came near the end, when she suggested that she and her husband were merely "transition figures" in the White House. The attacks on her, she implied, were attacks on her influence in the White House. "We don't fit easily into a lot of our pre-existing categories . . . And I think that, having been independent, having made decisions, it's a little difficult for us as a country, maybe, to make the transition of having a woman like many of the women in this room, sitting in this house. So I think the standards and to some extent the expectations and the demands have changed, and I'm trying to find my way through it and trying to figure out how best to be true to myself and how to fulfill my responsibilities to my husband and my daughter and the country."

With lines like that, it's a wonder she waited so long to deliver them.