NEWS ANALYSIS : First Lady Adds Fresh Details, Conflicts to Whitewater Story : Media: Mrs. Clinton describes a tangential legal role with Madison S&L.; But her account of her involvement differs sharply with McDougal’s.

In an unprecedented performance for a First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton spent more than an hour Friday offering her most detailed--and in some cases her first--answers to troubling questions that have arisen from her involvement in the Whitewater affair.

In some cases, her answers shed fresh light on the issues involved; in others, her responses conflicted sharply with the versions of events offered by other participants or previously reported in the media.

Here are some of the key issues she addressed, her answers, and how those answers correspond to what was previously known:

Was Hillary Clinton involved in a conflict of interest when she represented Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan before state regulators at a time when her husband was governor of Arkansas?

BACKGROUND: Among the most important questions about her personal involvement in Whitewater is the issue of how and why Hillary Clinton, then an attorney at the prestigious Rose Law Firm of Little Rock, represented Madison before a state regulator appointed by her husband. Madison was owned by James B. McDougal, the Clintons’ partner in Whitewater, a real estate venture in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas. The relationship between Madison and Whitewater is a key issue in the affair; special counsel Robert B. Fiske Jr. is probing whether funds from Madison were illegally siphoned off to Whitewater or to pay off the debts from Bill Clinton’s 1984 gubernatorial campaign.

In January, 1985, Mrs. Clinton and the Rose firm represented Madison before the Arkansas Securities Commission, then chaired by Clinton-appointee Beverly Bassett. Madison, already in deep financial trouble, sought approval to issue preferred stock in order to bolster its balance sheet.

MRS. CLINTON: On Friday, Mrs. Clinton said that she was only brought into the matter tangentially by another, much younger attorney at the Rose firm. Although she did not identify him, the attorney involved was Richard N. Massey, now a Rose partner.

“There was a very bright young associate in our law firm who had a relationship with one of the officers at Madison, a young man who he had known. They began talking. Those two young men thought that it would be legal under Arkansas law for a savings and loan to issue preferred stock, but there was absolutely no law on that, and so they couldn’t be sure.

“But they decided that what they wanted to do was to ask the person who regulated savings and loans whether it was legal . . . “

Mrs. Clinton said that, under the firm’s rules, the young attorney needed a partner to “backstop” his work, and “knew that I knew Jim McDougal and also knew that Jim had been a client of our firm in the past. So he came to me and asked me if I would talk with Jim to see whether or not Jim would let the lawyer and the bank officer go forward on this project.”

She did so, Mrs. Clinton said, arranging for the firm to be paid a $2,000 per month retainer. “That was arranged, and the young attorney, the young bank officer did all the work.” She added that her name was put on documents related to the case only because “I was what you call the billing attorney--I had to send the bill to get the payment made.”

OTHER VERSIONS: Mrs. Clinton’s account differs sharply from the version provided by McDougal. He says that Bill Clinton came to him and asked him to find some legal work for Hillary Clinton because the family needed money. McDougal says he then agreed to put Hillary on a $2,000 a month retainer, and told Madison officials to find legal work for her to handle.

In addition, McDougal says he does not believe Mrs. Clinton ever handled any other legal work for Madison besides the one instance of representing the thrift before state regulators, raising the question of whether Madison hired her for the specific purpose of going before a regulator appointed by her husband. Internal Madison documents released by the Resolution Trust Corp., the S&L; cleanup agency, show that virtually all of the thrift’s other legal work was handled by Madison general counsel John Selig, a partner in another Little Rock law firm.

Did Hillary Clinton receive undue favorable treatment in her highly profitable commodities trading in the late 1970s?

BACKGROUND: Mrs. Clinton netted almost $100,000 in a two-year period of trading in highly volatile commodities markets after being urged to get into such investments by a close friend and prominent Arkansas lawyer, James B. Blair, who represented the politically important Tyson’s Food Inc., a major Arkansas employer.

The White House has repeatedly portrayed her trading activity as a case of an ordinary small investor who took her chances and came up a winner; but experts and officials in the futures trading industry have said that it would have been highly unusual for an amateur to pull that off successfully; indeed, many brokerage firms would never have allowed a novice investor to try it.

The brokerage firm she worked through was later beset by lawsuits from angry investors who charged that the firm allocated winning trades to favored clients and losing trades to less fortunate investors. Mrs. Clinton’s trading activity has raised questions especially since she made a $5,300 profit on her initial $1,000 on her very first trade in October, 1978.

MRS. CLINTON: On Friday, Mrs. Clinton said she opened her first commodities account on Blair’s “very strong recommendation,” and acknowledged that she relied heavily on Blair’s advice for her trading activity. But she said she doesn’t believe that she was given favorable treatment by her broker.

“There’s really no evidence of that,” Mrs. Clinton said. “You know, not all my trades made money, some of them lost money.”

She noted that Leo Melamed, the former chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, has been asked to review her trading records by the White House and has found no evidence of favorable treatment.

OTHER COMMENT: Some market experts who have studied her trading activity find it hard to believe that she was able to turn in such a remarkably successful track record--with her winning trades far outnumbering her losing ones--without some preferential treatment by her broker.

One commodity trader with 30 years’ experience in the business who reviewed her records told The Times that her activity was highly unusual, both in the frequency and size of trades and in the small amount of capital behind them. Another trader described her trading as “unusual and fortuitous, and her timing was perfect.” Mrs. Clinton got out just before the market plunged.

Have Bill and Hillary Clinton fully revealed the extent of their profits or losses from Whitewater?

BACKGROUND: Both the President and Mrs. Clinton have argued from the beginning of the Whitewater controversy that they lost money on the real estate venture. Whitewater was a 50-50 joint venture between the Clintons and McDougal and his then-wife Susan--yet the Clintons apparently walked away from Whitewater while suffering only half to one-third the losses of those taken by the McDougals.

MRS. CLINTON: She declined to provide detailed answers Friday.

“I can’t answer that,” she said. “I mean, we gave whatever money we were requested to give by Jim McDougal. We did whatever he asked us. We saw no records. We saw no documents. He was someone who had been in real estate business with many people we knew, including Sen. (J. William) Fulbright, and we just assumed that whatever he needed he would ask for, and we didn’t have any information to the contrary.”

Mrs. Clinton denied that she tried to use losses from Whitewater to offset her tax liability from her large profits in commodities trading--contradicting earlier statements by McDougal. And she said she had “no memory” of making interest payments on Whitewater loans on the same day that she withdrew funds from her commodities brokerage account.

“In 78, 79, and 80 we were still hopeful that we were going to make money on our investment in north Arkansas,” she noted.