Hanging In There With Hillary

It’s not really a secret society. But it’s something close.

There is a circle of “real friends” of Hillary Rodham Clinton who share a particularly loving portrait of the first lady and unique admission into her private world.

Not surprisingly these “real friends” are frustrated as new critics and persistent old ones line up to continue battering her image:

* Her reputation and that of her husband are being pummeled at a criminal trial of their former associates in Little Rock.

* The U.S. Senate has agreed to extend into mid-June its investigation into a 20-year-old Arkansas land deal called Whitewater and other Clinton activities.

* A best-selling book called “Blood Sport” claims a pattern of “half-truths and evasions” by both Clintons in the handling of stories about their old investments as well as more current issues.

And, of course, with each new charge comes yet another unflattering photograph of Hillary Clinton on the cover of some national news magazine and a further climb in her “unfavorable” ratings, which have gone from 25% in January 1994 to 35% a year later to 44% just last week, according to Los Angeles Times polls.

In the middle of such a barrage do “real friends” remain just good listeners? Or is it time to speak up?

You wouldn’t recognize the names of most of these people. They aren’t regulars on “Night-line” defending Clinton or on “Crossfire” barking back at Camille Paglia when she shouts such things as: “Hillary Clinton never loved her father!”

Who are they?

Dan Thomason, a Little Rock optometrist, is one. He nearly heaved his television out the window after hearing Paglia make that comment. Thomason knew better. He had been at the hospital when Clinton’s father was dying.

“There are things I could tell--good things I saw in that room with her father,” he says. But never would he breathe a word.

That’s because until now, keeping quiet has been the unspoken covenant of this secret society and why they remain friends of Clinton: To be discreet is to be true; to even hint at anything but devotion is to betray.

With Clinton’s image in crisis, some intimate friends have even decided to be more aggressive about getting their view out front.

After a Los Angeles Times story this winter that looked at what might be behind the furor over Clinton and questioned why her friends weren’t coming to her defense, Hollywood producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason called to denounce the story as more evidence that the media had no interest in Clinton’s “real friends.” Rather, she said, reporters only talk to “so-called friends” who surround the first couple in the White House and who talk off the record and out of school.

Bloodworth-Thomason and Clinton’s mother, Dorothy Rodham, came up with a circle of more than a dozen people who really know the Clintons but don’t get much attention--perhaps because their sympathetic anecdotes aren’t as juicy as the ones that allegedly catch the first couple in a row.

“I’ve seen Hillary run and jump in [Bill’s] lap and squeeze his cheeks,” says Bloodworth-Thomason. “Are they more valid than me, these people who say they’ve seen her scream at him?”

Bloodworth-Thomason, whose husband, Harry, figured in the Clintons’ early problems over the White House Travel Office, and a few others even devised a seven-question “real friends” test:

* Have you ever ridden in a car in which either the president or first lady is driving?

* Has either of them ever fixed you something to eat?

* Have you spent more than 30 minutes on the phone with them listening to your problems?

* Did you attend Hugh Rodham’s funeral?

* Have you ever been to the race track with Virginia Kelly (the president’s late mother) or taken Chelsea to buy a gift for her parents?

* Have you ever slept in the Anwar Sadat bed at Camp David?

* Does Hillary sit down on Thanksgiving Day and write you a note just to tell you how grateful she is to have you in her life?

Bloodworth-Thomason insists that people who can’t answer yes to at least two of those should “keep your mouth shut when it comes to analyzing the Clintons’ personal relationship and psyches.”

If that test is the secret society’s initiation rite, then its talisman is a gold bracelet given to the first lady by some of the group’s better-known members.

On her birthday in 1993, Clinton was presented with the bracelet and a private note from each of eight longtime pals: Bloodworth-Thomason, actress Mary Steenburgen, child advocate Marian Wright Edelman, New York attorney Susan Thomases, Arkansas friend Susan Fleming, childhood friend Betsy Johnson Ebeling, Wellesley classmate Jan Piercy and political scientist Diane Blair. The bracelet had each of their initials inscribed on a separate link as well as the first lady’s name on a ninth link.

Of that group only Thomases, who has been swept up in the Whitewater scandal, and Edelman, who has strongly objected to the administration’s approach to welfare reform, declined to be interviewed for this story.

Unlike other friends who became wounded by serving in the Clinton administration, none of these “real friends” gave up their lives in other cities to work in Washington. Perhaps by keeping a distance they remain closer to the Clintons than others and even see themselves as providing a respite for the Clintons from all the intrigue of their high-flying lives.

Certainly, they don’t prattle on with reporters about private moments or their private correspondence. Not even off the record. In fact, few of the Hillary-friendly stories they tell make headlines.

“Reporters don’t use my quotes because I don’t promote the right kind of anecdotes,” says Fleming, the mother of Chelsea’s best friend in Little Rock. And then she goes on to tell her kind of anecdote:

During a 1994 dinner at the White House, her 11-year-old son’s bottom lip started to quiver after he was served fancy salmon.

“With all that Hillary had to worry about--this was just after those disastrous November elections--Hillary looked across the table and said to Teddy, ‘I bet you’d like a sandwich, wouldn’t you?’ And she ordered a peanut butter sandwich prepared for this child. . . . That good side of her never gets portrayed.”

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Indeed, Clinton is widely characterized as a self-righteous and controlling woman who so often appears to be resisting, as if it’s beneath her, legitimate inquiry into her past activities.

The chasm between this public image--reshaped by almost daily media assessments and the vitriol of enemies like Sen. Alfonse D’Amato--and the perception of Clinton’s close friends--who say they know her to be a self-confident and moral woman--has become even more exaggerated of late.

To a person they are convinced the media have gotten her all wrong. For decades they’ve been impressed by her sincerity--whether advancing her husband’s career or advocating for children or taking care of her family. And so they seem genuinely puzzled by what they see as vicious Washington culture that has sabotaged their friend’s image.

Ebeling became so concerned after columnist William Safire attacked her friend as a “congenital liar” she called the White House.

“I said, ‘Hillary, I can’t believe they’re saying these things about you. Why do things have to be done this way?’ ” says Ebeling, a Chicagoan who met Clinton in the sixth grade and has been a confidante ever since.

“I don’t have a political or business relationship with Hillary and I don’t have access to the documents that would support or deny her position,” continues Ebeling. “But we have a friendship that is based on things moral, on our upbringing, on the same feelings for our families and children, and that is what I use to judge her by. To some that is blind faith. To me, it is the way of friendship.”

Patty Criner, who has known Clinton through 22 years of Arkansas politics, says she is surprised by the “personal nature” of the things said about her.

“Rumors in general get my dander up,” says Criner, a frequent guest at the White House. “But every day it’s some new outrageous lie.”

Bloodworth-Thomason is one of the “real friends” who has never been shy about talking to reporters. In fact, she has just about made a second career out of calling them to plant, protest or spin stories.

She is convinced that Clinton’s detractors are desperate to break her--to make her cry in public according to some code of behavior for women under pressure. “They’ll never make her cry in public,” she says. “Never.”

Clinton apparently has referred to Bloodworth-Thomason as the “minister of romance” for floating lines like: “The Clintons, like the Kennedys, have a marriage that is misunderstood. If history ever tells the personal side of their marriage, theirs will be a true love story.”

But is that just spin? Such a rosy picture doesn’t square with evidence from troopers who worked for Bill Clinton when he was governor and from women who say they knew him intimately.

Other than Bloodworth-Thomason, who acknowledges she’s seen the Clintons “run the gamut of marital relations but for most of the time all I’ve ever seen is great love,” most of these friends clam up at the notion that Clinton might harbor uneasiness about her marriage.

And most of these friends, because they don’t have firsthand knowledge, also shy away from discussing the messy scandals, like Whitewater.

But Michael Conway, a Yale law school friend who now practices in Chicago, resents that even Clinton’s finest qualities get distorted, such as when her lawyerly mannerisms are portrayed as coldness.

“She is going to have a bearing of a lawyer the same way someone who graduated from West Point is going to have the bearing of a soldier,” Conway says. And though he is not familiar with the details of Whitewater, he finds unfathomable the charge that Clinton would have seized a chance to make easy money by accepting special treatment from people doing business with then-Gov. Clinton’s administration.

“It’s ludicrous,” he says. “It flies in the face of not just her personality but also her moral compass. . . . My instinct is that it is inconsistent with the Hillary I know.”

Fleming, who spent a lot of time over the years with Clinton and their daughters, always assumed that she was well conditioned to be first lady. After all, she’d lived in a “fish bowl” since before she was 30 years old and moved into a governor’s mansion, Fleming points out.

“But little did any of us understand the level of scrutiny in Washington,” Fleming says.

Fleming was one of the many members of the secret society who had a hard time coming up with a response when asked if Hillary Clinton had any flaws. The worst thing her friends were willing to concede is that the first lady doesn’t pay enough attention to her own needs.

Criner, who could answer yes to five of the “real friends” test’s seven questions, was one who finds no faults.

“I think more and more people are beginning to stop and take a look at Hillary. She has a great family; she’s a good lawyer; she’s an articulate and attractive first lady. What is it we want? So what’s the problem? I just don’t get it.”

* Times staff writer John Broder contributed to this story.