First Lady Uses Familiar Tactics to Fight Back

For Hillary Rodham Clinton, the pattern of crisis response has become almost predictable: first the silence while she struggles to guard her options and her vaunted “zone of privacy,” next a tentative step to the edge of the spotlight.

And for this most controversial and contradictory first lady, the culminating moment is always the appearance: a gush of words, alternately combative and charming, fulsome and lawyerly, arcane and homey.

It comes with flawless delivery, command of detail. It is meant to disarm, and manages to succeed. It momentarily silences her harshest critics. It pumps up flagging Democratic partisans. It wins, for a moment at least, the admiration of many Americans.

On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton, in a long-planned television interview, made the appearance. By turns confidential and reticent, philosophical and peeved, she calmly charged that a cabal of political enemies was behind the allegations that President Clinton carried on an 18-month sexual affair with a young White House intern.

“Bill and I have been accused of everything, including murder, by some of the very same people who are behind these allegations,” she said on NBC-TV’s “Today” program. “So from my perspective, this is part of a continuing political campaign against my husband. A lot of this is deliberately designed to sensationalize charges . . . because everything else they’ve tried has failed.”

A week earlier, as the latest allegations of misdeeds by President Clinton broke into the open, the first lady simply declared them “absolutely” false. Then on Monday she made two public appearances in New York--without referring to the subject on everyone’s mind.

On Tuesday, by contrast, she calmly observed that “this is a battle.” And then she lobbed a verbal Molotov cocktail into the camp of her husband’s most immediate adversary, independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.

“We get a politically motivated prosecutor who is allied with the right-wing opponents of my husband who has literally spent four years looking at every telephone call . . . we’ve made, every check we’ve ever written, scratching for dirt, intimidating witnesses, doing everything possible to try to make some accusation against my husband,” she said.

Her words were incendiary. But her demeanor--lounging in an armchair looking reflective and sounding calm as she fielded an interviewer’s questions--was anything but. She smiled. She nodded encouragingly. She was taking the long view, she insisted.

A day after President Clinton thumped the podium and jabbed the air as he angrily denied the charges, his wife betrayed no hurt, no anger and little urgency to defuse the crisis that has rocked her husband’s presidency.

“I have learned over the last many years, being involved in politics, and especially since my husband first started running for president, that the best thing to do in these cases is just to be patient, take a deep breath, and the truth will come out,” she said.

The president, she added placidly, owes her no apologies.

“You know, we’ve been married for 22 years, . . . and I have learned a long time ago that the only people who count in any marriage are the two that are in it. We know everything there is to know about each other and we understand and accept and love each other.”

In the White House, where beleaguered aides have withstood withering fire and had virtually no ammunition to return, the first lady’s appearance was, quite simply, the cavalry.

On Monday, said Clinton ally Paul Begala, many White House staffers were walking wounded. But Hillary Clinton’s confident defense, he added, worked magic rallying the troops.

“She walks in looking like a million bucks,” he said. “And to show that much grace under pressure is extraordinary.”

Begala, who worked with the Clintons throughout the 1992 presidential campaign, has also seen it before. When President Clinton’s campaign that year was nearly sunk by charges of an adulterous affair with Gennifer Flowers, Hillary Clinton’s memorable television appearance--calm, confident and warm--had the same effect on his troops.

But the tension Tuesday was still evident between the lawyer and the wife. At one moment, she let viewers into the first couple’s bedroom on the morning the story broke, saying the president woke her and said, “You’re not going to believe this.” Nowhere in the lengthy interview did she volunteer that she believed her husband innocent of the allegations against him.

Her wit and composure in mounting past defenses of the administration have drawn reluctant praise from critics no less ardent than Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) and House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas). But Starr was having none of it.

He dismissed the first lady’s comments as “nonsense.” Using the kind of bland, lawyerly language the first lady abandoned on Tuesday, Starr characterized his investigative team as pursuing the case “through a deliberative process.”

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said: “I don’t want to get into an argument with the wife of the president. But that kind of allegation is really unfair, though, and it’s a continuation of a pattern we’ve seen over the years any time something like this comes up. Who’s she talking about?”

In some other quarters, Hillary Clinton’s performance drew rave reviews.

“She is President Clinton’s most powerful weapon,” said Stephen Hess, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “People are terribly interested in what she must think or feel. We look for a smile, a grimace, is she showing pain? And she isn’t. She was terrific.”

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.