Career, Personal Decisions Loom

In the White House, one of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s favorite paintings depicts an enigmatic beauty gazing through a gauzy veil. As art historian Johanna Branson--Hillary Clinton’s college roommate--recently observed, the woman in John Singer Sargent’s “The Mosquito Net” and the first lady have much in common.

Like the first lady, Branson explained, the woman in the painting can see the world clearly. But the veil makes it harder for the world to see in.

These days, the very private Hillary Clinton is gazing head-on at the future. Her friends and political allies see grand and endless possibilities. But what they do not know is what she sees for her life after the White House. She will be 53, young by some standards but no doubt aged by hard years in Washington.

Will she emerge for this next chapter in her life as the candidate herself, rather than the woman at the candidate’s side? Or will she blaze a new trail as the former first lady who transforms that role too in the course of pursuing her agenda for women and children?

“I don’t think she knows yet what she’ll do,” says a close friend. “But I know how she works, and I bet she’s making a long, long list.”

“The world is her oyster,” says Rahm Emanuel, a former White House aide. “Hillary’s great problem is to figure out what to do. She can run a prestigious university, lead a great foundation, create her own foundation, write a book or many books, make money. . . . “

Pros and Cons of Senate Bid

In fact, she has more options than her husband, who faces limits unique to former presidents.

Apparently, Hillary Clinton has warmed to her most talked about option: running for senator from New York in 2000. She recently told a political ally there that she would decide about running after her husband’s impeachment trial is over. “Much to my surprise, she’s thinking about it, seriously thinking about it,” says this ally, who predicts she’ll make a decision in the next few weeks.

Her friends are the first to list why she shouldn’t run. She’s too thin-skinned and intensely private to endure the scrutiny of the New York media, particularly when the campaign gets mean, says one. Why should she campaign in Buffalo when she could be traveling the world and earning enormous lecture fees, suggests another. And worst of all, an election defeat might be seen as a final repudiation by her enemies, yet another adds.

But those same friends are quick to enumerate the “whys.” “Getting out of the White House to do something divorced from Washington, divorced from her husband’s destiny might be a relief,” says an old friend. And although a loss might be seen as a repudiation, a victory would be validation of her views, says a fellow liberal Democrat.

No one less than the president is stirring the pot. “It looks . . . highly likely that I will increasingly be known as the person who comes with Hillary to New York,” the president told an audience recently.

One friend hints that Hillary Clinton just might be luxuriating in the chatter. Certainly, it moves the perception away from her as victim of a cheating husband and back to a woman of substance. And it must be gratifying that at the same time there is an active campaign to throw her ever-popular husband out of office, there is another to get her in.

But all her friends think that, in the end, Hillary won’t run in 2000.

“We’re all a little torn about this,” says Mandy Grunwald, a former campaign aide. “Part of me says, ‘Hey, sign me up!’ Another part of me thinks, ‘Boy, what a comedown to be the junior senator.’ I’m not sure the prize is as meaningful as all the others she might pursue.”

When former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, one of Hillary Clinton’s role models, left the White House at age 60, she assumed that her public life was over, according to historians. But she went on for 17 years to serve in the United Nations as a delegate and as an advocate for liberal reform.

Grunwald, Emanuel and others suggest that Hillary Clinton’s future will include a combination of careers that evolves over a period of years.

Questions on Marriage

One of her first challenges will be to figure out where to make a home, perhaps in New York or Connecticut with some sort of base near the Clinton library in Little Rock, Ark. She’ll also need to build financial security, as she did with mixed results in the past, for her family, friends agree. She could earn high fees lecturing and sitting on corporate boards to help get her family out of debt from legal bills. At the same time, her friends see her campaigning for Vice President Al Gore and perhaps earning a seat in his Cabinet--should he be elected president--or a post at the United Nations.

“There’s nobody better in terms of stump speeches and electrifying a crowd,” says Tony Podesta, a Clinton advisor who ran the presidential campaign in California in 1996. “She has a magic quality.”

All these suggestions raise the question of what becomes of her marriage.

It has been the subject of endless speculation, and only the Clintons know what has kept it together and whether that same quality will keep it together in the future. Grunwald says Hillary Clinton is very traditional in her belief in her wedding vows. “She said, ‘For better or for worse,’ and she meant it and she’s gotten it in both ways.”

But others suggest that the Clintons’ busy schedules and the scars of the Lewinsky scandal may lead them to separate lives.

“I would assume they will stay married but sort of go their separate ways,” says biographer Joyce Milton, whose book “The First Partner: Hillary Rodham Clinton” is scheduled to be published in May.

Wellesley professor Alan Schechter, who was the senior thesis advisor to young Hillary Rodham 30 years ago, took a group of students just a few weeks ago to the White House to see the first lady. He says that when she was asked by a student what her future held, Hillary Clinton answered: “I haven’t given it any thought whatsoever.”

Schechter says he would love to see her run for office in New York or Illinois “because her voice is so important and I’d hate to see it drop off the face of the Earth.”