Whitewater Paper Trail Is Proving Haunting to Some : Clinton Arkansas acquaintances complain they must provide detailed accounting of S&L; affair, while White House stays silent.

At 2:30 each afternoon, Beverly Bassett Schaffer leaves her downtown law offices to pick up her 6-year-old daughter, then the two of them go home to watch children’s shows on the Nickelodeon cable channel. For Schaffer, a figure in the political affair known simply as Whitewater, it’s a way to briefly shut out the world.

“It’s how I deal with the stress,” she says.

It hasn’t really worked. Schaffer moved to this college town in northwestern Arkansas in part to escape the pressures of her former life as a public official. But now she can’t hide from the flood of press calls, the camera crews, the constant questions about her actions nine years ago as a top securities regulator in Bill Clinton’s state government.

During that time, she approved a petition by Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan to sell preferred stock to raise enough money to satisfy the capital requirements of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. The lawyer retained by Madison owner James B. McDougal to submit the plan was Hillary Rodham Clinton, a partner in the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Ark. The Clintons were partners with McDougal in the Whitewater land development company.

Madison’s condition deteriorated so rapidly that it never took advantage of Schaffer’s ruling, and was closed in 1989 by federal regulators. Nevertheless, Schaffer is part of the widening circle of people from Bill Clinton’s past who find themselves increasingly on the spot as the White House public relations machinery moves to insulate the First Family from the controversy and shift attention to other issues.

With the Clintons deciding not to open their records on the affair to the public or provide a detailed public accounting of it, this group in Arkansas--bankers who loaned Clinton money, state officials who had banking oversight, contributors to Clinton’s campaigns--are being pressed to fill in the vacuum with what they know of what happened.

For some, like Schaffer, the frustration of this position is growing. “I don’t have any spin doctors,” she says.

In an effort to defend herself and her actions as commissioner of the Arkansas Securities Department, Schaffer is now preparing her own personal “white paper on Whitewater.” She says that she wants to lay out her side of the story and get the country off her back.

The central questions in the Whitewater affair include whether the Clintons, as half-owners of the land development venture, were aware that their partner may have been mingling funds from his savings and loan in the land business’ accounts. Also raised is whether political influence helped keep that high-rolling savings and loan open longer than it would otherwise have been, increasing the cost to the federal government of its eventual federal bailout. Robert B. Fiske Jr., the special counsel appointed by Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, will take over the federal investigation.

The Clinton acquaintances in Arkansas are increasingly complaining that their pieces of the puzzle are receiving exaggerated attention because the Clintons, at center stage, have not been forthcoming with theirs.

Schaffer insists that her place falls in the category of guilt by association--or, more precisely, guilt by false assumption. “People don’t understand Arkansas,” she said. “This is a small state, and everybody knows everybody else.”

For Schaffer, the connections in question were with the Clintons and with Madison Guaranty.

While working as a securities lawyer at a Little Rock law firm in the summer of 1984, Schaffer says, she was assigned by one of the firm’s partners to complete some paperwork for Madison Guaranty. The Arkansas Securities Commission, then run by Lee Thalheimer, had questions about Madison’s far-flung and heavily leveraged real estate ventures, so Schaffer said she wrote a cover letter accompanying Madison owner McDougal’s response. The Whitewater project was not included; most of the regulatory questions concerned McDougal’s plan to build an island resort complex off the coast of Nova Scotia.

Schaffer insists the assignment was so routine she didn’t think to mention it to Clinton or to anyone else in state government when Clinton appointed her to succeed Thalheimer a few months later.

But the assignment left behind a paper trail that would haunt Schaffer when Whitewater finally blew up. The questions only intensified when McDougal alleged in press interviews that Clinton appointed Schaffer as securities commissioner as a favor to him.

Schaffer, who held the securities post for six years, angrily denies the allegation, insisting that she had never met or talked with McDougal. “I still wouldn’t know the man if he was in the same room with me,” she said.

She says she judged the Madison proposal strictly on its merits and wonders why the Clintons have not come forward to help stand up for her, or why Mrs. Clinton herself has not been more forthcoming about her own role.

“I don’t know why she hasn’t been more open,” Schaffer says. In the end, she said, “the people left behind in Arkansas are bearing the brunt of this.”