Same Place, People, but so Different

What a difference a year makes.

Just 12 months ago this week, President Clinton was visibly enjoying himself on picturesque Martha’s Vineyard island--with a seemingly endless diet of golfing, jogging, going to parties and even sailing. He and his wife, Hillary, were everywhere, smiling broadly, obviously having fun.

This year, the setting is the same, but the mood and the Clintons’ visibility are dramatically altered. Apart from his sudden one-day return Thursday to Washington after the U.S. missile strikes against alleged terrorist bases in Afghanistan and Sudan, the president has been essentially staying at home. (The Clintons are staying at the same private home on the island they used last year.)

Except for a small, private dinner that the Clintons attended Saturday night, they have been nowhere to be seen. Earlier plans for presidential day trips were canceled abruptly. The first family even skipped church Sunday morning.

And by midday Sunday, the White House essentially drew the curtains to ensure that the Clintons had some privacy. The usual weekend “pools” of reporters who track the president to the golf course or wherever were canceled. And the press office put a lid on: no briefings until this morning.

It is not difficult to envision the stress, and pain, that the first family must be feeling in the wake of Clinton’s speech concerning his relationship with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry had made clear from the beginning that one of the things the president hoped to accomplish during his two-week stay here--shortened from the three weeks he spent last year--was to bring about some “healing” in his marriage and his family relations.

That effort was derailed Thursday and Friday by the missile strikes, but McCurry said this weekend that the president was once again back to “working on” it. “They are doing that in private. I’m not going to give you a play-by-play account.”

No one can tell what is going on behind closed doors at the Clintons’ compound. That unquestionably should be personal. But James Carville, Clinton’s longtime and doggedly loyal confidant, suggested that over the weekend, the president was receiving the full force of his wife’s wrath.

“Believe me, right now . . . he’s getting an earful from the missus,” Carville said, sitting next to his own wife, GOP strategist Mary Matalin, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “He is a wonderful father and a good man who did something wrong.”

Mandy Grunwald, the media advisor who was among the guests at the private dinner the Clintons attended Saturday, suggested that the first lady, who has seemed frosty during brief glimpses that reporters have been permitted, is privately visiting her anger upon the president.

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Asked on CNN’s “Late Edition” whether a wife ordinarily would set out on a vacation with her husband so soon after he had admitted to having had an extramarital affair, she replied: “We don’t know what’s tougher for the president . . . being together or not being together.”

But the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has become a sort of personal minister to the first lady and her daughter during the string of revelations about the president in recent months, insisted that he, for one, saw no sign of anger from Hillary Clinton toward her husband.

“While the press and the political foes were positioning themselves, she was offering him love when he needed it the most, and perhaps deserved it the least,” Jackson said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “I saw a family frankly standing together in a very tough and violent storm.”

The mood is different outside the president’s compound as well.

In the two previous summers that Clinton and his family have spent here, Vineyard residents and tourists appeared willing enough not to crowd them, but they almost invariably seemed happy when the Clintons showed up in public.

This year, the family clearly wants to be alone, and both the locals and the vacationers seem just as content--and perhaps a bit relieved--to let them.

McCurry told reporters that, although the president was working on his family relationship, “my guess is that they’ve still got work to do. . . . There is a healing process that needs to occur, and as far as I can tell . . . it’s not done yet.”

Like everything else about the Clintons’ vacation this year, that may have been an understatement.

Times staff writer David Willman in Washington contributed to this story.