At The Center Of POWER

By MARGARET CARLSON WASHINGTON

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON KNEW life had changed forever when her daughter Chelsea got sick one night in February and asked her mother to fix one of her favorite dishes. No sooner did the First Lady pad down the hall to the kitchen on the second floor of the family quarters, open the refrigerator and begin cracking eggs than a steward appeared magically at her elbow. He wanted to help by whipping up an omelet. At the risk of hurting his feelings, the most influential woman in America explained that the eggs had to be scrambled and that she had to scramble them.

Such are the days and nights of Hillary Rodham Clinton. In exchange for taking on the burdens of the world, including the most ambitious and powerful role a First Lady has ever assumed, all the practical considerations of daily living have been removed -- whether she wants them to be or not. As she sits in the Library on the first floor of the residence after holding a reception for community volunteers on the South Lawn, a butler brings her iced tea on a silver tray, and with him the unmistakable formality of this old house with 132 rooms. She finally eats lunch that day at 3:30, looking almost too exhausted to chew, and admits it's been a "pretty stressful three months."

Exhausting, yes, but also remarkable and historic. In her first 100 days, she has redefined the role of First Lady in America more than anyone would have imagined a year ago. By the end of this month, she plans to deliver a proposal for the largest piece of legislation since Social Security, a health- care plan that will affect one-seventh of the American economy. Her tackling of a nearly $1 trillion-a-year problem is accompanied by the sound of glass ceilings breaking as women empowered by the Clinton Administration rise to new positions of influence and opportunity. The new Attorney General, Janet Reno, last week demonstrated more courage and strength than any of her recent predecessors. At the same time, women in the armed forces celebrated a Pentagon decision to allow female pilots and sailors to go into combat. Topping it all off, the President boasted last week that women account for one-third of his nominees to top Administration jobs.

Hillary is the first First Lady to have a major assignment by which she can -- and will -- be judged. As leader of a task force with a staff in excess of 500, she has traveled across nine states, held 50 congressional meetings and met with everyone from nurses to Native American spiritual healers. In a TIME/ CNN poll, her popularity nearly matched her husband's: 55% viewed her favorably, vs. 61% for the President. In the survey 91% describe her as intelligent and 63% as a good influence on her husband on matters of national policy.

To millions of women, Hillary Clinton's career-and-family balancing act is a symbolic struggle. Never mind that she has plenty of help, including more top officials on her staff than Al Gore has. Hillary still has something in common with women everywhere: a day that contains only 24 hours, and responsibilities that extend way beyond what happens in the office. Family duties fall primarily to her -- from attending soccer games and helping Chelsea with her homework to shopping and organizing birthday parties. She's also looking after her mother, who is staying at the White House while recovering from the death of Hillary's 82-year-old father, Hugh Rodham. The First Lady's plea is familiar to any working woman. "We are trying to work it out that we have some more time just for ourselves. The job eats up every spare minute."

The next few months will offer little respite. In the midst of the final marathon sessions to complete the task force's recommendations, the once rosy picture for pushing health-care reform through the Congress has turned bleak. House Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski went so far as to ridicule her nascent plan as the "domestic equivalent of Star Wars." (She still had him over for dinner that night.) A growing cabal of Administration officials has urged the Clintons to delay their health-care plan, arguing that the President can't risk overloading the system by sending both his economic and his health packages to Capitol Hill. But she is undaunted. The past two weeks have been a blur of 16-hour days, meetings for two and three hours at a clip with the health-care task force, interrupted by congressional briefings. She insists, "There is no delay in what we're doing."

At the same time, the First Lady plays an up-front, active part in the presidency, from domestic affairs to political strategy to speech writing, bringing to the table two decades of experience and no apologies. In all but foreign affairs, she has emerged as First Adviser, being called in on the spur of the moment to a meeting of 15 senior staff members in late April, for example, to assess the problems of the first 100 days and the defeat of the President's stimulus package.

While the whole world is watching to see how she pulls off her expanded ( role, she is also responsible for the traditional duties of a First Lady. Ceremonial events, like dinner for the country's Governors or tea with the King and Queen of Spain, don't stop because there is a deadline on managed competition. Paint chips and fabric swatches also fall under her jurisdiction. She is redecorating the private quarters to suit her informal style, which favors quilts and rocking chairs. She has already moved a table and white wicker chairs into the kitchen upstairs so that the family can eat breakfast and dinner in a cozier manner than the imposing dining room would permit. And she has had bedside phones installed that do not require going through a switchboard. "He sleeps here and has his phone," she says, indicating one side of the queen-size bed. "And I sleep there and have mine." She furnished her husband's private study next to the Oval Office with a stand-up desk, a CD player, framed campaign buttons and a large portrait of herself.

In an interview with TIME the First Lady is not the mechanical or rigid woman of her 60 Minutes appearance or of the early campaign. In the space of half an hour, she laughs heartily one minute, recalling a raucous lunch with her staff; then her face goes all to putty, and she has to apologize for choking up as she recalls someone's kindness in the aftermath of her father's death. She is happiest when she remembers time alone with the President: just the two of them on Valentine's Day going down to the movie theater to see The Bodyguard, and then off to the Red Sage restaurant for dinner, where the manager, Don Senich, estimates they touched more in two hours than the Bushes did in four years.

Hillary's performance on her health-care road show is reminiscent of the campaign. She seems to be everywhere: at round, oval and U-shaped tables, with black briefing books, white papers and discussion points. At symposiums morning, noon and night, she presides with brow furrowed, lips pursed -- sometimes speaking, sometimes listening, always taking notes. At hearings when 1,000 seats are available, gymnasiums have to be set up with closed- circuit TV to accommodate the overflow. In a field where there is little drama, she has interjected some, picking fights with her designated bullies of the system, the doctors and drug companies that have been making huge profits. Every witness has his or her own horror story about getting sick, and Hillary listens as if hearing such woe for the first time. When a woman named Kathy at hearings in Iowa talks about how she is frightened that she will never lead a normal life or pay for her care, Hillary exhorts the audience, "Let's give Kathy here a big hand for that speech." An hour later, the First Lady lambastes a private practitioner who is complaining about government regulation, and asks, Why can't you be part of the solution instead of part of the problem?

Ever the best girl in class, there seems to be no fact she hasn't memorized. The minutiae of the Veterans hospital regulations? She can cite section and subsection. The incidence of diabetes among Indians in Montana? Forty percent, and there isn't a dialysis machine for hundreds of miles.

While the public outside the Beltway has been included, the First Lady ran into controversy by trying to keep the task force's meetings behind closed doors. For a time, even the staff's names were secret. A running battle over the issue began when a group of doctors and industry insiders sued the White House to open the meetings, arguing that Hillary's presence as a nongovernment employee entitled them to attend as well. A federal judge ruled that some of the meetings had to be open. The Administration appealed, contending that it was only trying to keep lobbyists at bay.

The First Lady has earned grudging respect on Capitol Hill, in part because she makes house calls. During her first visit, 30 Democratic Senators listened carefully, although most of them would rather have been having gum surgery. Her every misstep was discussed, from an overly familiar manner to her middle name, but she won points for her preparation and willingness to meet endlessly. Minority leader Bob Dole disputes press reports that Hillary blundered when she called him Bob. "Last time I checked," he said, "that was my name." And he calls her Hillary.

By the time she went to brief the Senate Finance Committee at the end of April, she had learned the ropes. There is a rule on the Hill that if you can't explain it, you can't pass it. When she briefed the committee, the clarity of her pitch opened a few eyes. Says committee chief of staff Lawrence O'Donnell, a confirmed skeptic on Hillary's efforts: "I haven't been in the company of anyone that made me suspend my disbelief on health care until today. I'll come to my senses, but for the moment she was in the room, I believed she could do it."

Outside her health-care mission, there is probably no title that could + convey the scope of her role, although Counsellor to the President was batted around for a long time. As always, she is her husband's most trusted confidant, best friend, toughest critic and most ardent cheerleader. She is open but vague about how much they share. "We'll say, What do you think about this? or Give me an opinion about that. It's kind of give-and-take, pretty informal." And then there is complete access. "During the day I can see him anytime I want to. I can look out the window and see him," she says, smiling as she turns her head toward his office. "He's right there."

When the presidential door closes, Hillary is behind it if she wants to be. "The President sits in the middle of the table, the Vice President right across from him, and Hillary wherever she wants," says an aide. "And the refrain we have all gotten used to is, 'What do you think, Hillary?' " When the President's economic address to Congress was scraps of paper on the conference table in the Roosevelt Room, she stepped in and pasted it back together again. Aides are gradually becoming more open about Hillary's breadth. One says it goes like this: "A speech that needs a rewrite, get Hillary. A speech that needs to be given, get Hillary. The President has a problem he wants to chew over, get Hillary. The point is you never go wrong getting Hillary."

The corridors of power are populated with many of Hillary's old friends, from White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, who used to give his young law clerk Hillary a ride home when she first worked in Washington; to Deputy Attorney General Webb Hubbell, who was the managing partner of her law firm and the former mayor of Little Rock. Hillary had a strong say in the appointment of pal Donna Shalala as Health and Human Services Secretary, although the friendship grew complicated after Hillary grabbed the health out of the Secretary's title and Shalala blurted out that a value-added tax was being considered.

With the power to make appointments comes the blame when many have gone unmade. The most visible unfilled post, chief of protocol, has already brought public embarrassment. While the Clintons have dithered over whether the job should go to a man or a woman, someone with Washington diplomatic experience or a Little Rock loyalist, events that should have garnered goodwill for the pair have sparked only resentment and enmity. The most disastrous incident occurred at the most important affair so far, a White House reception in honor of the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Scheduled to be there at 4 p.m., the President arrived 2 1/2 hours late. By that time, Polish President Lech Walesa, entertainer Mandy Patinkin, House Speaker Tom Foley and others had long run out of anything to say to one another and were squishing in the mud under a tent in a driving rain. Many of the older guests, Holocaust survivors, had left in disgust.

When Hillary is going about her day, she acts like any other professional with a demanding, brain-crushing job. Her office in the West Wing is one of the least imposing, furnished with a blue-beige-and-red-striped sofa, a table submerged in paper, a small desk and a window looking out on a red tile roof. Hillary writes her own notes, has a cellular phone glued to her ear and makes many of her own calls. She goes through paperwork like butter, scribbling in the margins of the mail, trying not to touch the same piece twice. Says her deputy, Melanne Verveer: "I'm efficient, and she makes me look like a daydreamer."

In the office Hillary presses coffee and bagels on the staff and frequently sends them home to bed and for holidays. White House political consultant Paul Begala says she is the one staff members go to when they have a problem. "I've never seen her lose her temper, and you can tell her anything." She approaches the outlandishly dressed youngsters on the White House staff to find out what the latest is from twentysomething land. One young man in a black, unstructured jacket mistakenly thought she was telling him to dress up when she said to him, "So this is the style now."

In general, she stays away from irony, since humor has to watch its step in politics, avoiding off-the-cuff repartee that can look bad when repeated. Her whimsy runs more to lip-synching Baby, I Need Your Loving and giving a tour of the White House the way Alistair Cooke might guide visitors around Windsor Castle. Her style with her personal staff is collegial, and she doesn't stand on ceremony. Says her chief of staff, Maggie Williams: "If the top person isn't around when Hillary has something to go over, she is ready to do business with a deputy. A schedule change? She says, 'Tell me who's coming and what I need to do.' " When nothing is going right and it's gray outside, and it will be another late workday, she's the one who says, "Let's go eat," and everyone troops down to the mess for taco salad and Oreo yogurt.

Even so, some people are scared to death of her. One aide says the problem comes in mixing up "formidable" with "frightening." He says, "She has all the protective, wifely instincts of, say, Nancy Reagan, but then on top of that she is very smart, and so nothing gets by her, nothing." Hillary even took a hand in making office assignments for the West Wing. "We were looking at this floor plan and, presto, she had a layout it would have taken an industrial engineer weeks to figure. Not everybody was happy, but she got it right." Hillary does not take kindly to detours off the main road when a discussion is under way. Says close friend and former campaign scheduler Susan Thomases: "Hillary is a closer. She does not let things drag on." Another observes that "when Hillary leans forward, puts her elbows on the table in front of her and hunches her shoulders ever so slightly, this is international sign language for, 'Be quiet.' "

Last week the Clintons reversed their usual roles. Both were trapped for hours at a time in the Roosevelt Room for the final presentations of the task- force leaders, when one of the briefers droned on about five minutes too long. Hillary started reading her notes, obviously impatient, but she left it to her husband to circle his arm in the air to get the guy to move it along.

Hillary's open involvement in policymaking disturbs some Republicans and others who feel duped by the Hillary Lite that emerged in the latter stages of the campaign after polling found that voters were fearful of what pollsters termed an "empowered Nancy Reagan." If she had her fingers crossed when she was nodding sweetly, baking chocolate-chip cookies and calling herself Hillary Clinton, how many other things might be fudged for political expediency? Republican fund raisers such as Floyd Brown see a bait-and-switch tactic that they hope to capitalize on by portraying her as massively influencing everything from the appointment of the deputy assistant undersecretary for technology transfer to a decision on whether the U.S. should bomb Serbian artillery lines. In his newsletter, Clinton Watch, Brown calls the President "a captive of the radical left, of which his boss, Hillary, is a member in good standing."

A Republican consultant told a network newscaster that his job was to make sure Hillary Clinton is discredited before the 1996 campaign. Each day anti- Hillary talking points go out to talk-show hosts. The rumor machine is cranking out bogus stories about her face (lifted), her sex life (either nonexistent or all too active) and her marriage (a sham). Many of the stories are attributed to the Secret Service in an attempt to give the tales credibility. She denies the yarn about her throwing a lamp (or Bible or vase), then wonders about the sources. "Why are they telling lies about me? What is it about me? It's strange. Obviously something has to be going on. People are out there trying to promote this."

Part of what allows the rumors to grow is that they arrive in a vacuum. She is relatively closed next to her husband's wide-eyed openness. The public has an encyclopedic knowledge of the President's habits, from his favorite teams to how long he jogs, his weakness for junk food and the eggs with jalapeno peppers he fixes for Hillary. He will answer the most personal questions if they are put directly to him. When the story gets around that a steward inadvertently walked into the presidential bedroom while the Clintons were still asleep, Clinton said it was true but "not as lusty as it sounds."

Hillary has yet to adjust to the notion that every waking moment of a First Lady -- and some of the sleeping ones -- is public property. Friends say Hillary fenced off a park of privacy right after the notorious broadcast of 60 Minutes, when almost every frame of tape showing her at her best was left on the cutting-room floor. After that, friends say, she adopted the attitude that the less of her that is known, the less there is for the press to pick apart. She is jealous of her husband's privacy as well, complaining that he can't go watch Chelsea's softball games because he would be dogged by the press. "They leave Al and Tipper alone. I mean, Al and Tipper go to all their kids' games. And I think Bill deserves to have some of that same space and have some normal family life."

Her reticence is a departure, given the open life she lived for a decade in the Governor's mansion in Little Rock. She drove her own Oldsmobile, waited in line at the movies, entertained in the kitchen and had the church choir over for picnics in the backyard. She purposely sent the household staff off on weekends so she could go to the grocery store on Saturday mornings. In a state where Gloria Steinem was considered by some a communist, Hillary started out being regarded as a stuck-up feminist from Wellesley and Yale who wouldn't change her name and ended up a popular and admired First Lady.

Now, Hillary wants to preserve some part of the prosaic quality of life so Chelsea doesn't grow up believing food just magically materializes on her plate. They went to the grocery store together, one day after Hillary picked up Chelsea from school, to get peanut butter and cereal, only to find that they had insufficient cash and no checkbook. Lately the First Mom has been helping her daughter make the perilous journey from age 12 to 13 in a new city without the close-knit extended family and friends of Little Rock. The elder Rodhams had stayed in the Governor's mansion with Chelsea when her parents were away, and the death of her grandfather added to the trauma of the move. Most days Hillary ends her work in time to be upstairs when Chelsea gets home from school. During the blizzard in March, Hillary stayed in the family quarters with Chelsea on her day off. They organized her room, made lunch, watched a movie and played Chelsea's Game Boy, to which Hillary promptly became addicted.

While Hillary generally shrugs off criticism about herself, the treatment of Chelsea is another matter. Hillary took out after Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels and his writers for "having nothing better to do than be mean and cruel to a young girl," after they ran a skit making fun of her daughter.

Hillary had her own perilous journey as she sat for over two weeks watching her father -- the gruff, authoritarian and inspiring Hugh Rodham -- slowly slip away. She comes from a family so bizarrely intact that the whole group went on the Clintons' honeymoon to Acapulco. The extended family had dinner together most weekends and played marathon games of Trivial Pursuit and Hungarian rummy, a card game so byzantine in its bylaws that only close friends or relatives can participate.

Hillary was at lunch in the White House mess in March when Carolyn Huber, the former administrator of the Governor's mansion, walked in. When Huber bent over and whispered in her ear, Hillary's face turned white. That afternoon she and Chelsea left for St. Vincent Infirmary in Little Rock, and the President arrived two days later. Hillary made it to her father's bedside in time to say goodbye. "When we got there, for the first couple of days," she recalls, "he knew we were there, and it was wonderful." She returned to Washington after 16 days, just as her husband returned from the Yeltsin summit. The next day she was scheduled to throw out the first ball of the Chicago Cubs opener with her father, who had taken her to games at Wrigley Field as a girl and stuffed her with hot dogs and statistics. She canceled.

She did not cancel a commitment to address the University of Texas at Austin, speaking for half an hour without notes and with uncharacteristic emotion. She cited the observations of Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater as he lay dying from a brain tumor at age 40: "My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me -- a little heart, a lot of brotherhood . . . And to see that we must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul." She posed the questions of her own vigil: "When does life start? When does life end? Who makes those decisions, and how do we dare impinge upon these areas of such delicate, difficult questions?" Her father died the next day.

Back at the White House, the Clintons have tried to re-create a down-home atmosphere. The solarium sometimes substitutes for the huge kitchen in Little Rock where most of their entertaining was done. It is where overnight guests gather for breakfast. Arkansas-born actress Mary Steenburgen, who spent the night in the Lincoln Bedroom on her birthday, is the only guest so far to jump into the outdoor pool. When Norman Lear came for dinner, the President wore sneakers and dinner was chicken enchiladas. One night when Arkansas Senator David Pryor was over, he insisted the President go to bed, only to have Clinton try to drag him downstairs to see Steve Martin's Leap of Faith. The Clintons went out with the Gores one evening in leather jackets and jeans to a Virginia bar to hear Jerry Jeff Walker and drink Molsons.

Not that Hillary lacks regard for White House tradition. She has taken to her role like a student, reading 43 White House biographies and numerous histories (she impressed the White House Historical Association over tea with all her facts). She has debriefed other First Ladies, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis during lunch in her Fifth Avenue apartment.

Yet Hillary is in a position no First Lady has ever experienced. As the icon of American womanhood, she is the medium through which the remaining anxieties over feminism are being played out. She is on a cultural seesaw held to a schizophrenic standard: everything she does that is soft is a calculated coverup of the careerist inside; everything that isn't is a put-down of women who stay home and bake cookies. As she sits in the White House on a spring day, she seems to be bending with the burden, more relaxed and philosophical < about what life is throwing at her than anyone would have predicted from her press clips. She is less the killer lawyer than a version of the modern mother, daughter, wife and professional trying to fill all roles at once, and perfectly, but resigned to imperfection. "I'm not one of these Energizer Bunnies," she says.

In her Texas speech, her voice halted as she quoted the admission by Atwater that he had acquired all the wealth and prestige he had wanted and still felt empty. "What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends." Last Thursday evening as the sun was going down, the President emerged from a meeting on Bosnia to join his wife. They hadn't seen each other for a few hours, and in the shadows behind the door of the diplomatic entrance, he touched the side of her face and took her hand before they came out to say goodbye to the 500 members of the health-care task force gathered on the South Lawn. He thanked them, and then turned and said, "I'm indebted once again to my wonderful wife." It's a line uttered by politicians since the Republic was formed, but he may just mean it.

Perhaps in addition to the other items on her agenda, Hillary Rodham Clinton will define for women that magical spot where the important work of the world and love and children and an inner life all come together. Like Ginger Rogers, she will do everything her partner does, only backward and in high heels, and with what was missing in Atwater -- a lot of heart.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 1,000 adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on April 28-29 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 3%.

CAPTION: Do you have a favorable impression of

Bill Clinton?

Hillary Rodham Clinton?

Is Hillary Clinton's prominent role in national policy appropriate?

Is it important for the Federal Government to reform the health-care system this year?

Which of the following apply to Hillary Clinton?