Williams Is Assistant to Both the Clintons

Williams, at McLarty's direction, was the principal author earlier this summer of a major memorandum on White House reorganization. McLarty said he and his successor as chief of staff, Leon E. Panetta, have asked Williams to prepare periodic reviews of the 30-, 60- and 90-day outlooks for the White House.

"The best way to describe her is her title," said communications director Mark Gearan. "She is both assistant to the president and chief of staff to the First Lady."

Williams, who was communications director for the Children's Defense Fund when Hillary Clinton headed it, has avoided the spotlight during 18 months at the White House. The Whitewater hearings have forced her reluctantly into public view.

"The First Family and specifically Hillary were really getting the brunt of a lot of these allegations," McLarty said. "It was natural for the First Lady's chief of staff to be involved in these meetings."

At the Feb. 2 meeting at which White House officials discussed with Altman whether he should recuse himself from the investigation of Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, the Arkansas thrift owned by the Clintons' business partner in Whitewater, Williams was firm that Altman should remain on the case.

Her view, she said, was that because Altman had said he would simply follow the recommendations of the Resolution Trust Corp. staff, there was no reason for him to step down.

In a request that concerned some RTC officials when it was relayed to them, Williams also asked whether the Clintons' personal lawyer could be given the same briefing the White House had received on the impending expiration of the statute of limitations in the case. Williams described that request as part of her effort to get Whitewater questions out of the White House and onto the turf of the private lawyers.

As her mother sat behind her in the committee hearing room yesterday, Williams denied telling Altman, as he related in a diary entry Jan. 4, that the First Lady was "paralyzed" over Whitewater. But the picture Williams drew of a White House on the verge of giving in to the congressional clamor for an independent counsel was vivid.

"It would be unusual for a person who, every day in the press, was getting beaten up about a specific subject, and a person who had to spend part of her time engaged in discussion with a private lawyer about things that happened 17 years ago, for this person not to be concerned," she said.

"Mrs. Clinton did not express that to me, but I would have to be a blind person not to look at what was going on in the media and not to look at the time that she was spending with her personal lawyer not to know that this matter held some real interest for her."