With Hillary Clinton, East Meets West in White House : Power: Tradition and a floor plan will test the unique partnership of the next President and First Lady.

From the east wing of the White House, the preserve of the First Lady, to the Oval Office and the President, it is a long--a very long--football field’s walk.

Between east and west, the his-and-hers flanks of the executive mansion, years of touchy egos and clumsy precedent lie like bare high-tension cables: mix-ups and frictions, snubs and hurt feelings.

Welcome home, Hillary Clinton.

For Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton, the first two-career couple about to move lock, stock and kitty litter into the White House, a 17-year full partnership in marriage and statecraft will be tested as never before by the bifurcated floor plan and almost equally divided operational mind-set of their new quarters.

“It’s absolutely true: Location, location, location does make a difference in any workplace. . . . I do think that the actual location of the east wing contributes to any isolation there might be between the two wings.” So says Mary Finch Hoyt, press secretary to Rosalynn Carter, who smacked up against the east-west status barricade a few times herself.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you can’t even get there from there.

To enter the power warrens of the west wing from the east wing requires one to actually go outdoors, along a stone-paved colonnade, past the thorns of the Rose Garden, and back inside.

It may not have mattered much to a Pat and Richard M. Nixon, content that their spheres be separate. But Hillary Clinton’s husband told Time magazine that she is his Robert F. Kennedy, the one person he wants in the room when he makes his biggest decisions, as J.F.K. wanted Bobby. L.B.J. would not have said that of Lady Bird, nor George Bush of Barbara.

Rosalynn Carter broke with precedent merely by using a ground-floor east wing office, instead of working out of the family quarters upstairs. For a First Lady to set up a branch office in the west wing, as Hillary Clinton is said to be contemplating, would be a bold step: pragmatic and sensible for a President who wants to consult her, but “a prescription for disaster” image-wise, believes Sheila Tate, for four years Nancy Reagan’s press secretary.

“The press is going to try to make mischief,” warns Liz Carpenter, who came here in 1942 as a young Texas reporter covering Congress and wound up as Lady Bird Johnson’s press secretary. “They’re gonna act like Hillary’s too strong, and this is yesterday’s leftover machismo, and a curse on them if they try to do that. She’s America’s daughter.”

“The (new) President is already setting the stage,” says Carpenter. “He wants his wife’s advice, and he wants her respected. He may have to keep reminding them . . . those brash young men--hah--who really think in terms of serving the President, and to them serving the First Lady is a step down. . . . Well, who better to count on than your own wife, particularly someone who has the brains she has?”

Anna Maria Perez, press secretary to Barbara Bush--”the easiest job in Washington,” she says--says a new chief executive should structure his organization to suit his needs. “Does this mean as with any mold-breaking endeavor that it will inspire flak on the horizon? You bet it will. But that is the nature of the beast.”

Clinton couldn’t have signaled his intention more clearly if he’d had a checkered flag.

Last week his chief of staff, Thomas (Mack) McLarty, announced Mrs. Clinton’s top staffers, whose double-barreled titles--”assistant to the President/chief of staff,” “deputy assistant to the President/deputy chief of staff,” “special assistant to the President/social secretary”--are a breakthrough: “commissioned officer” titles acknowledging that they, like Hillary Clinton, will have substantial standing in the west wing.

Former President Jimmy Carter, whose wife was forced by “a stupid set of criticisms” to retreat to the east wing after she sat among the silent secretaries and aides at Cabinet meetings, said last week that Hillary Clinton ought to keep abreast of matters, and “the best way is for her to sit in the back row or even the front row of Cabinet meetings.”

When a First Lady steps into policy-making, “the reaction is invariably negative,” says Tate. People sense “that the First Lady has a special relationship with her husband that makes her unaccountable to anyone else, and creates a potential for abuse that people are offended by. Every time a First Lady steps off that tightrope, you can see it snap back and hit her.”

Remember the “two-for-one” Clinton campaign special, the “vote-for-me-and-you-get-her” team? It was abandoned early, but like her headband, it’s come back, one campaign promise fulfilled.

Hillary Clinton, 45, was a linchpin in the campaign, cautious, cool and politically unsentimental. She knows--indeed, may have been a deciding vote on--many top-level appointees, from Al Gore down. Clinton’s new domestic policy chief, longtime Arkansas aide Carol Rasco, mentioned her working relationship “with both Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton.”

Mrs. Clinton is not likely to sign on to a “cause,” like literacy or drug abuse, as her predecessors did; rather, she is expected to couple the standard First Spousal chores with working her own track on the Administration’s top priorities.

Since the election, her frank presence at some deliberations has been--for the Clintons--routine and unremarkable, but still much remarked on. It seemed to confound old hands like Warren Christopher; the best he could do in an early TV interview was to say she was playing a traditional wifely role.

Yet after one working dinner with Democratic congressional leaders, a reporter asked whether Mrs. Clinton had attended. Yes, said the President-elect. Stayed the whole time? the reporter pressed. Stayed the whole time--knew more than we did about some things, Clinton said, smiling broadly, tickled by the question and knowing the impact of his answer.

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In Washington, where Hillary Clinton’s name and face are for sale this week--spelled out inch-high in a rhinestone brooch, smiling out from a plastic-coated button--the landing site was already being softened up.

A week, almost to the hour, before the swearing-in, the Clinton inaugural team had arranged a press briefing with two experts on “First Ladies: A Tradition of Activism,” to put H.R.C. in a historical framework, reassuring America on C-SPAN that she is an evolutionary step, not a revolutionary one.

“We always seem to think we’re reinventing the wheel every four years,” said Carl S. Anthony, a scholar of first ladies, “and we’re not.”

Americans have “a long tradition of ridicule and criticism . . . of first ladies who voiced political opinions,” said Edith Mayo, who conceived the “First Ladies, Political Role and Public Image” exhibit at the Smithsonian.

* So Hillary Clinton is a power-monger? Abigail Adams was so much a partner in her husband’s craft that his enemies jeered at her as “Mrs. President.”

* So Hillary Clinton is a politico of the first order? Writing about his own presidential transition, William Howard Taft noted that “since Mrs. Taft is the great politician of the family, she will see things through.”

* So Hillary Clinton is a yuppie social do-gooder? Ellen Wilson led slum-clearance measures in the capital before World War I.

New or just improved, Hillary Clinton’s political adroitness, says Camille Paglia, the iconoclast feminist, lies in “tacking,” the technique of sailing into the wind, then athwart it, correcting as you go. “When she would go too far, it was her ability to adjust.”

Hillary Clinton has plied a course between tradition and change since her school days. Always at the head of the class, she was more inclined to sports and study than domestics; “I’m doing this essay; I’ll be down when I’ve finished,” she would answer the call to help with dinner. That essay never did get done, the family joked.

As a high schooler in a Goldwater household, her social epiphany came when her Methodist youth minister took his class into Chicago’s slums to meet poor kids their own age.

They listened to Bob Dylan and read Reinhold Neibuhr and baby-sat the children of migrant workers, and by the time she was at Wellesley--”in knee socks and pleated skirts, nothing radical,” the Rev. Don Jones recalled--she was committed to governance as a tool for social change.

She tacked after law school. Instead of signing on for big bucks at a New York law firm or for a big bang in Washington, she “followed her heart,” her friends say, to Bill Clinton in Little Rock, Ark., helped him win the governor’s mansion, then changed course once more when some Arkansans said they didn’t want to vote for a man whose wife didn’t use his surname, couldn’t take the trouble to fix her hair or wear nice clothes.

A pattern had been set, one feminists have long complained of: While expectations for Clinton are graded against performance, hers are ranked against perception, a rubbery yardstick at best.

So intense are expectations for change that some asked what Hillary Clinton wanted to be called. Presidential partner? First Spouse? Could she live with First Lady--an honorific Jacqueline Kennedy once likened to a name for a racehorse?

(“First Lady,” with its historical resonance, will be just fine, Mrs. Clinton has now let it be known.)

“If she is too active she will be criticized by the ultra-traditionalists,” says Carl Anthony. “If she’s too passive she will be criticized by the ultra-feminists. So basically they’re always going to be criticized, these presidential spouses, so they might as well do what is best for them.”

Hillary Clinton’s abiding interest in children’s rights and welfare--look how traditional that is, her associates repeat--certainly fits the usual First Lady’s agenda, although no one expects just lollipops-and-hugs photo opportunities.

It takes an act of will for first ladies to say no to the invitations that can eat up 18 hours of every day: annual events like thanking the egg board for donating eggs for the Easter egg roll . . . the occasionals, what the Carter staff called BOEs, bottom-of-the-elevator, Mrs. Carter’s downstairs meetings in the Map Room for tea or coffee with some dignitary who insists on meeting the First Lady.

One more group lies in wait, too: Washington’s social lions.

Like the great political salon traditions of France, “the White House is a political place, and social events are political, with a small ‘P’ and a large one,” said Hoyt. Even the self-effacing Mamie Eisenhower made her husband’s feelings clear when one name was pointedly left off a guest list to an annual dinner for U.S. senators--Communist-hunting Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, soon to have his own mud come back at him.

“The conventions of Washington are peculiar to us, and only learned through trial and error,” declares Tate. Every name, every nuance is noted, and when one errs, the lions are “incredibly unforgiving.”

On the last day of May in 1969, graduating senior Hillary Rodham, by her classmates’ agreement, broke precedent, not for the first or last time, and spoke at Wellesley’s 91st commencement, in a moment of national social cataclysm.

A “tragic thing” had happened to her the day before: “I was talking to a woman who said that she wouldn’t want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn’t want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees, because she’s afraid.

“Fear is always with us, but we just don’t have time for it. Not now.”