(Ed: adv weekend July 3-4 or thereafter)

Backstairs at the White House

By HELEN THOMAS

UPI White House Reporter



WASHINGTON Hillary Rodham Clinton is known for her secrecy. Even the president claims he does not know whether she will seek a Senate seat from New York although when she announces formation of an ''exploratory committee'' on July 7 at outgoing Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's farm in Oneonta, N.Y., it will be considered a fait accompli.

To top it all off, the first lady will visit several upstate New York sites.

Meantime, she is expected to fly on military planes during her campaign and reimburse the Air Force. After leaving the White House she will continue to have Secret Service protection for the rest of her life.

Once she establishes residency in the state, she will be able to better shed her ''carpet bagger'' image.

On a recent presidential trip to New York, the first lady went house hunting with her daughter. But she was apparently not too pleased that the press was clued in. She and her daughter waited on Air Force One on arrival in New York until the helicopters carrying the president and the press into Manhattan got off the ground before they alighted from the plane.

She skipped a fund-raiser to keep looking for a future abode and later gave reporters a withering look when someone shouted to her and asked if she had found anything.

Aides paraphrased the president's marching orders to her, ''You find a place where we can live while I find us some money.''

Meantime, the first lady has tapped into many former Clinton political aides to help her run a high powered campaign, first among them former deputy White House chief of staff Harold Ickes. That may be leaving Vice President Al Gore out in the cold since he too wanted to use the pros of the l992 and l996 presidential contests to pave the way for him, particularly the advance teams who have been there, done that.

The first lady may hold off formal announcement of her run until the fall but she has already hired Howard Wolfson, a pro on New York politics, for her exploratory committee.



The question of where the Clintons will spend their summer vacations is still up in the air, or at least not formally announced. President Clinton told reporters recently he didn't know; he previously has said it is up to the first lady.

Aides are now betting, however, on a return to Martha's Vineyard. It had been speculated that to enhance their New York image, the Clintons might want to go to the Adirondacks or nearby Shelter Island. The Hamptons are considered too chi-chi and too rich for the first lady who will be politicking.



Why does Hillary Rodham Clinton want to become a senator? She has said it is because you get ideas in the White House but on Capitol Hill you can make laws.

Actually, recent first lady history argues against that. Lady Bird Johnson won the day with a National Beautification Act that was aimed at wiping out the mammoth billboards distorting the view on the nation's highways. Rosalynn Carter worked diligently and got a law on the books for better treatment of the mentally afflicted.

Betty Ford lobbied for the Equal Rights Amendment with the nation's feminists and certainly raised the issue to a higher threshold.

The point is that first ladies are not helpless and can achieve a lot. Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, when the Constitution was being drafted to ''remember the ladies.''

Nancy Reagan helped diminish the view of the Soviet Union as the ''evil empire'' in President Reagan's eyes and agreed with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that he could ''do business'' with then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.



President Clinton talked turkey to Russian and Chinese officials during the Kosovo crisis and its aftermath. In telephone calls with translators at hand, he is said to have admonished Russian President Boris Yeltsin for the pre-emptive Russian movement of his troops into Kosovo before NATO peacekeepers could get there, telling Yeltsin he had not done anything to save the ethnic Albanians. And he reportedly told the Chinese officials that he would have been stupid to order the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, which the United States said was mistakenly hit during a bombing raid.



Among the many press releases handed out this past month by the White House was a three-page announcement filled from top to bottom with a bunch of stray characters. In place after place where the text should have had apostrophes and quotation marks, the computer used to write the document instead created big square blocks. Also marring the appearance was the failure of the computer to align several indented paragraphs of text.

Its subject? Vice President Al Gore announcing a new Commerce Department report detailing the nation's commanding strength in computer-based technology.



The president has fond memories of his recent European swing. In

Cologne, Germany, crowds of giddy tourists jostled for a chance to shake his hand or take his picture during a few unscheduled encounters.

Also in Germany, Clinton worked his way through crowds that chanted ''Willy! Willy!''

In Slovenia, he was welcomed like a touring rock star. Thousands of soggy, happy Slovenes waited for hours in a driving downpour to hear him speak, entertained during their wait by live bands and singers. The band's rendition of ''New York, New York,'' with Slovene lyrics, was a huge hit.

Clinton was the first U.S. president to visit the picturesque country at the crossroads that links Italy and Western Europe to the Balkans since it broke away from Yugoslavia eight years ago.



Copyright 1999 by United Press International.

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