First Lady Sets Book Tour Strategy

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton had hoped to spend the coming month crisscrossing the nation talking about her new book on children--a mini-campaign that White House aides saw as a chance to improve her public image as both a mother and a high-minded advocate for families.

Instead, she will spend much of her nine-city book tour answering questions about the Whitewater controversy now that newly released documents have allowed Republicans to charge that she has been less than forthcoming about her role in real estate dealings while her husband was governor of Arkansas.

The coincidence of the two events has set off a flurry of strategy meetings in the White House and produced a damage-control operation that might be dubbed the “book-tour strategy.” Making a virtue of necessity, the first lady plans to go ahead with her schedule of interviews, a public test that political insiders are comparing to the gauntlet of personal charges that she and her husband, then-candidate Bill Clinton, faced in the 1992 presidential campaign.

“You take it as an opportunity,” said White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry, who has been among those consulted by Mrs. Clinton. “She realizes that she has to take some questions on these issues.”

But instead of appearing as a witness before a hostile Senate committee or submitting to the harassment of a press conference, the first lady will stick to her more dignified role as book author, doing only one-on-one interviews with reporters who asked to talk about children’s issues before the documents were released.

Indeed, instead of offering White House reporters a news conference, the first lady is inviting them to a fancy book party at a Washington hotel--less a social event than a test of journalists’ manners.

That way, aides hope, Mrs. Clinton can assert that she is making herself fully accessible to the press--without ever appearing in the unflattering glare of scandal coverage.

Her first major interview appeared in this week’s Newsweek, by virtue of the magazine’s decision to buy excerpts from her book, “It Takes a Village: and Other Lessons Children Teach Us.” In the exchange, Mrs. Clinton dismissed the Whitewater investigation, saying: “We’ve tried to cooperate in every way we can because nobody would like this matter over with more than I would. But the ground keeps shifting about what it supposedly is about.”

A Senate committee and an independent counsel are investigating the Clintons’ investment in Whitewater, a failed Arkansas real estate project, and whether funds were siphoned off through Whitewater to benefit Clinton’s 1984 gubernatorial campaign.

Investigators are also looking into the circumstances surrounding the suicide of Depute White House Counsel Vincent Foster and the handling of his papers after his death.

This afternoon, the first lady will talk with ABC’s Barbara Walters at the White House in an interview to be broadcast on Thursday. Aides said that Walters was granted the audience because of her long-expressed interest in Mrs. Clinton’s book, which they said would be the subject of much of the interview.

Mrs. Clinton has emerged a winner from difficult television interviews twice before: once in the 1992 campaign when she stood up for her husband on CBS’ “60 Minutes” after he had been accused of marital infidelity and again in 1994 when she replied to Whitewater charges in a session that became known--because of her deliberately feminine outfit that day--as the “pink press conference.”

Meanwhile, the White House has assigned harder-nosed surrogates like lawyer David E. Kendall and Clinton campaign aide Ann Lewis to handle specific questions on the GOP complaints against the first lady.

Kendall said Monday in a letter that allegations Mrs. Clinton gave a false account of her legal work for a corrupt savings and loan owned by her Whitewater investment partner, James B. McDougal, are “wholly unfounded and completely false.” Kendall, the Clintons’ private lawyer, predicted that Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.), who heads a Senate committee that is investigating Whitewater, would be unable to prove the charges.

The White House released long-missing billing records from Mrs. Clinton’s Arkansas law office last week and D’Amato said that they contradicted the first lady’s assertion that she did only minimal work for Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan just before it was brought down in the late 1980s by financial mismanagement.

The letter represented an effort by the White House to counter the embarrassment caused by the release last week of the billing records of her work for Madison.

“Surely in the real world the fact that these documents were found and made public immediately should be to the Clintons’ credit,” Lewis said. “The notion that we would have orchestrated a cover-up--only to reveal it last week--is through the looking-glass even for Washington.”

Victoria Meyer, a representative of Simon & Schuster, said that no change has been made in Mrs. Clinton’s itinerary, which begins with interviews with national media this week and moves into a road-show beginning in Arkansas on Jan. 16, followed by visits to Ann Arbor, Mich.; Chicago; New York; Boston; Los Angeles; Denver; San Francisco and Dallas.

“Let’s face it,” said a political consultant who has known the first lady for years. “Mrs. Clinton is being prepared by her lawyer for this book tour. She expects to be interviewed by reporters who are being prepared by Mother Teresa.”

McManus reported from Washington and Baum from New York. Times staff writer Sara Fritz contributed to this story from Washington.