AIDE'S NOTES DESCRIBE CONCERNS CLINTONS HAD OVER WHITEWATER CASE.

Byline: Stephen Labaton The New York Times

Hillary Rodham Clinton was so adamant against the appointment of an independent counsel on Whitewater that senior Clinton aides believed that not even the president could change her mind, according to notes released Thursday by Republicans on the Senate Whitewater committee.

Ultimately, the aides decided to have a group of prominent lawyers, including Secretary of State Warren Christopher, approach the first lady to attempt to persuade her to reverse her objection, according to the notes, taken in a series of damage-control meetings in early 1994 by Mark Gearan, then the White House communications director. Gearan testified before the Whitewater panel Thursday.

The Republicans released the notes as part of their continued political assault on Hillary Clinton, and suggested that the White House had sought to control the Justice Department investigation that preceded the appointment of an independent counsel.

The first lady's supporters on the committee pointedly observed that shortly after the meetings in early January, President Clinton did in fact ask Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint such a counsel. Shortly thereafter, she named Robert B. Fiske Jr., who was replaced by an appellate panel later that year with the current counsel, Kenneth W. Starr.

But the notes taken by Gearan provide a rare insight into how senior officials tried to manage a growing public relations crisis as the Clinton administration approached its first anniversary.

At the time, the administration was resisting growing pressure from some members of Congress and the editorial pages of newspapers, which were calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor to study the relationship between the Clintons and James B. McDougal, their business partner in the Whitewater land venture and the owner of a troubled savings association.

In one of the meetings, Jan. 4, 1994, a senior aide, George Stephanopoulos, expressed concern about the political toll that the Whitewater affair had been taking on the president's political fortunes.

"Forty days of stories and we'll be at 39 percent," Gearan recorded Stephanopoulos as saying. "Like 1993 and gays and the military."

Moments later, Hillary Clinton walked into the meeting, in the chief of staff's office at the White House, saying it "looked like a meeting I might be interested" in, Gearan's notes show. She then began discussing her experience as a junior lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach President Nixon.

While Republicans found signs of impropriety recorded in the notes, the Democrats said the first lady's reluctance to agree to the appointment of an independent counsel was understandable.

During more than seven hours of questioning, Gearan initially suggested that the disagreement between the president and his wife over the appointment of a Whitewater independent counsel was merely a routine disagreement of a married couple.

"It is not the first time in the history of this planet that a husband and wife have disagreed on something," Gearan said.

But he backed down when his response was ridiculed by Michael Chertoff, the chief Republican counsel.

"You're not suggesting this was a garden variety dispute between a husband and wife, are you?" Chertoff asked.

"No," Gearan replied.

"This was not about a disagreement between a husband and a wife about whether you like the drapes?" Chertoff continued.

"No," Gearan said.