You might say it takes a village to demonize a First Lady. Illustration by Philip Burke

We’re sitting together at one end of a long mahogany table in the Map Room, on the ground level of the White House. A little awkwardly, the table is set up for twelve, with a White House notepad by each chair; it seems that nobody has been around to pick up since the President held a meeting here just before Christmas. Half a century ago, the American conduct of the Second World War was largely overseen from this room; here President Roosevelt could send messages to commanders around the world and receive up-to-the-minute reports from the battlefields. More recently, the once top secret room had fallen into disuse; Hillary Rodham Clinton tells me that its restoration was one of her pet projects when she first arrived. A red damask sofa stands off to one side, and there are half a dozen pleasant, undemanding oils and engravings on the walls. But what draws your eye is a map of Europe, hand-labelled “Estimated German Situation,” which was prepared and posted on April 3, 1945. Areas under Nazi occupation were outlined in red, with blue arrows to indicate invading enemy troops. It was the last situation map seen by President Roosevelt, who died nine days later.

All these years after, the map still lends an aura of the war room—of tactical maneuvers against desperate odds, of moves and countermoves. In the light of the First Lady’s embattled position, it may also lend the comfort of control, the assurance that V-E Day is around the corner. You’re almost tempted to stick different-colored pins in the thing, the way generals in old war movies mark enemy battalions: over here, a Senate panel and an independent counsel clustered together; over there, a Times columnist; and, in scattershot formation, a Fifth Column of disaffected ex-supporters. Maybe it isn’t war, but it is hell. “I wouldn’t wish this on anybody,” she says. This morning’s William Safire column happens to be the one that pronounces her a “congenital liar.” She has just been out taking a long walk by herself—which, given the recent blizzard, shows real determination, or maybe need.

Actually, the strain isn’t visible. With nearly flawless skin, she defies all logic by looking younger than she does in photographs. She’s in what you might call her civvies: she’s wearing a purple turtleneck and a blue St. John’s knit suit (“It’s great to travel in, you can crumple it, and it doesn’t show wrinkles,” she offers, in a hints-from-Heloïse spirit), and her hair is pulled back with a black velvet headband. I’m impressed by her equipoise. She explains that she’s been trying to practice something called “the discipline of gratitude,” and refers me to a book by a Jesuit priest, Henri Nouwen. “The discipline of gratitude,” Father Nouwen wrote, “is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.” She points to a bowl of pink roses on the table and says, “I mean, you look at those flowers and you think, My gosh, if my life were to end tomorrow, how lucky I’ve been that nearly all my life I’ve been surrounded by flowers.” If you are Hillary Clinton, the discipline of gratitude means reminding yourself that you are not a Bangladeshi peasant foraging for grains of rice—you are the First Lady and there are fresh-cut flowers in every room of your house. As with any mental discipline, however, concentration sometimes wavers and the press of daily life intrudes. These days, what with one thing and another, Bangladesh may not be entirely without its attractions.

Earlier, I had asked Maggie Williams, who has spent the past three years as the First Lady’s chief of staff, whether she would do it all over again, knowing what she knows now. It wasn’t something she had to stop and think about. “Absolutely not,” she replied, lolling her head. “Are you kidding?” I put the same question to Hillary Clinton, whose daily schedule now has to accommodate things like depositions with Kenneth Starr, the Independent counsel for the Whitewater investigation. “Absolutely,” she says, and she speaks of the sense of adventure. “I wake up every day just wondering about what’s going to happen next.” She’s not the only one.

Like horse-racing, Hillary-hating has become one of those national pastimes which unite the élite and the lumpen. Serious accusations have, of course, been levelled against the President’s wife, but it’s usually what people think of her that determines the credence and the weight they give to the accusations, rather than the reverse. At times, she herself sounds at a loss to explain the level of animosity toward her. “I apparently remind some people of their mother-in-law or their boss, or something,” she says. She laughs, but she isn’t joking, exactly.

The remark chimes with something I’ve been told by the redoubtable Sally Quinn, who—in part because she’s a frequent contributor to the Washington Post, in part because she’s the wife of the Post’s legendary editor Ben Bradlee—must herself count as a figure in the so-called Washington establishment. “There’s this old joke about the farmer whose crops fail,” she says. “One year, he’s wiped out by a blizzard, and the next year there’s a rainstorm, and the next year there’s a drought, and so on every year. Finally, he’s completely bankrupt—he’s lost everything. He says, ‘Why, Lord? Why, why me?’ And the Lord says, ‘I don’t know. There’s just something about you that pisses me off.’ ” She pauses, then says, “That’s the problem—there’ s just something about her that pisses people off. This is the reaction that she elicits from people.”

Well, from many people, anyway. “A lot of Americans are uncomfortable with her self-righteousness,” Arianna Huffington says. “I think gratitude is great if you can communicate it, but if you have to keep telling people how grateful you are . . .” William Kristol, a Republican strategist and, since September, the editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard, puts it this way: “She strikes me as a sort of moralistic liberal who has a blind spot for actions that are in her own interest. These are exempt from that cold gaze that she casts over everyone else’s less than perfect actions.” On the whole, though, he’s one of the more dispassionate voices you’re likely to hear on the subject. Peggy Noonan, who came to prominence as a speechwriter for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, speaks of “an air of apple-cheeked certitude” that is “political in its nature and grating in its effects,” of “an implicit insistence throughout her career that hers were the politics of moral decency and therefore those who opposed her politics were obviously of a lower moral order.” She adds, “Now, with Whitewater going on, nonliberals are taking a certain satisfaction in thinking, Uh-huh, you were not my moral superior, Madam.”

Some of this glee relates to a discomfort with Hillary’s political identity. In the 1992 campaign, her husband presented himself as a different kind of Democrat. Many people who wanted a different kind of Democrat to be President fear that the President’s wife is not a different kind of Democrat. (In Ben J. Wattenberg’s “Values Matter Most” —the book that prompted Bill Clinton’s infamous midnight-of-the-soul telephone call to the author—Hillary is identified as “a lady of the left” and compared with Mikhail Suslov, who was for years the Kremlin’s chief ideologist.) Of course, if you ask why they fear she is not a different kind of Democrat, the answers are less than entirely satisfying. It’s true that she served on the board of a liberal advocacy group, the Children’s Defense Fund, but then many C.D.F. members regard the First Lady with heartfelt disappointment. It’s also true that the Clinton health plan, which she spearheaded, involved significant government oversight, but then congressional conservatives routinely pass complicated bills in which government has a complicated role. (Consider, even, the tort-reform movement, which Vice-President Dan Quayle spearheaded, and which sought to vest the federal government with new powers to regulate product liability and other civil litigation.) But if you want to understand how conservatives perceive Mrs. Clinton these matters are ultimately a distraction. For they recognize her, almost on a gut level; in a phrase I’ve heard countless times, they “know the type.” In a word, they look at Hillary Clinton and they see Mrs. Jellyby.