Never before has a First Lady inspired as much avid curiosity as Hillary Rodham Clinton, and never has it gone so unsatisfied. Though Americans were moved by Eleanor Roosevelt’s purposeful humanity and enchanted by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s youthful glamour, nothing has approached the fascination people feel toward the current First Lady, who is carving out for herself a role that attempts to blend the work ethic of Roosevelt, the style of Kennedy, and her own unprecedented political ambitions. As the first working mother in the White House, the first unapologetic feminist, and arguably the most important woman in the world, she wants not just to have it all, but to do it all.

Soon after the inauguration, the president declared that his wife would be the Bobby Kennedy of his administration, and assigned her the vital job of heading the National Task Force on Health Care Reform—to amazingly few objections. But since then Hillary has burrowed deep underground. Her health-care task force began operations in such secrecy that she was sued in federal court and ordered to open the fact-finding meetings. White House aides have been more forthcoming about sensitive relations with Boris Yeltsin or Saddam Hussein than they have about where Hillary Rodham Clinton is and what she’s up to.

The absence of real information has created the perfect breeding ground for gossip. Washingtonians have come to regard the White House as a version of Clue, in which the latest rumor is always a variation of Colonel Hillary in the Library with a Knife. The First Lady has thrown (a) a vase, (b) a lamp, or (c) a Bible; at (a) her husband, (b) a Secret Service agent, or (c) a steward; (a) in the private quarters, (b) at Blair House, or (c) in a limo. When the president comes downstairs one morning with scratches on his face, reporters at the next two press briefings are obsessed with wild, salacious speculation.

As always in the case of wild rumors, there is no evidence to support them and no way to disprove them. But in the absence of good stories to push out the bad, they persist. As Hillary concentrates on the fine print of policy, she seems to be ignoring the fact that politics is as much a function of perception as it is of merit. She embraces those demands that engage her brain, and seems wary of those that might take a chunk of her soul. But for the next four years, the country will be grabbing for everything it can get, and she will have to strike a balance between how much she must give and how much she can hold back. Despite her attempts to keep herself under wraps, the public will slowly find out who she really is. In fact, in her first hundred days in the White House, Hillary has already revealed more than she knows.

WEEK ONE

Inauguration Day. It’s the wee hours when the Clintons return to Blair House from the Michael Jackson-Barbra Streisand gala at the Capital Centre. Less than 12 hours from now, Bill Clinton will become the 42nd president of the United States. In the upstairs library, where a replica of the swearing-in platform is set up, complete with TelePrompTers, a small group of writers is working through the night so that the Clintons can have a new draft of the inauguration address when they get up in the morning. As always, Hillary will have more influence over the text than any of the speechwriters—spokesman George Stephanopoulos, David Kusnet, Al Gore, media coach Michael Sheehan, and Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and longtime Clinton friend. “We don’t want to throw around words like ‘love,’ ” she warns, always on patrol against flakiness. Hillary likes precision in language—“Call a sacrifice a sacrifice, a tax a tax,” she is always insisting—and she particularly dislikes self-actualizing jargon that debases emotions: no hugging, no “sharing,” no confessing around her. If Hillary catches on, the air kiss could be doomed. The vice president-elect is in on the drafting of the inaugural address, but demonstrates how it is possible to doze off while sitting up straight in a hard, wooden chair.

“The Clintons inspire loyalty because they give it. I would throw myself in front of a truck for them.”

At 6:30 in the morning, Hillary gets up and edits the speech with her husband as he prepares to go downstairs to take delivery of the box of nuclear codes from National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. She puts on the round blue hat with the turned-up brim, an afterthought that will get almost as much attention as Jacqueline Kennedy’s pillbox. There remains after three decades greater fascination with what goes on top of a woman’s head than what is in it; Hillary’s headband, the shade of her blond hair, now the brimmed topper, dubbed “the chipmunk hat,” have already eaten up hundreds of column inches.