FIRST LADY SAYS CHARGES ARE FAR-OUT : CLINTON SHRUGS OFF WHITEWATER QUERIES.

Byline: James Bennet The New York Times

With a note of weary exasperation, Hillary Rodham Clinton dismissed Whitewater on Thursday as a ``never-ending fictional conspiracy that honest-to-goodness reminds me of some people's obsession with UFO's and the Hale-Bopp comet some days.''

The first lady denied that White House aides had solicited jobs for her old friend and law partner Webster Hubbell, a central figure in the Whitewater investigation, to keep him quiet.

``There isn't anything to be hushed up about that,'' Clinton said Thursday in the first of two broadcast interviews in which she sounded tired but philosophical - even resigned - whenever the conversation turned to the charges that have piled up against her and President Clinton over the past four years.

President Clinton said Thursday that he accepted the apology Hubbell made Sunday on the CBS News program ``60 Minutes'' for having deceived him and his wife about overbilling his old law firm in Little Rock, Ark.

Speaking to reporters at the start of the first Cabinet meeting of his second term, the president said: ``Let me remind you that everybody pays in life. Somehow we all wind up paying for whatever we do, and he paid a very high price. And he's apologized, and I accept his apology.''

But Hillary Clinton sounded less forgiving. She expressed astonishment that her friend of 20 years would mislead her, and pointed out that he had, in effect, stolen from her when he overbilled the firm where they were both partners.

``The money he went to prison for having misused was partly my money,'' she said, in the first interview, on Thursday morning on WAMU, a public radio station here. ``I feel particularly bad about this because I believed him absolutely - you know, I had known him for 20 years, I had a lot of confidence and trust in him. I felt he would not look me in the eye and mislead me.''

She said she did not have ``any personal bad feelings about this.'' She would like to meet with Hubbell, the first lady said, but cannot do so now ``because if I see him the conspiracy buffs would go wild.''

Hubbell, who resigned as associate attorney general in March 1994 to fight charges that he had overbilled his law firm, has said he deceived the Clintons about his legal troubles. He pleaded guilty to tax and fraud charges in December 1994.

When told later of his wife's remark comparing the Whitewater case to a fascination with extraterrestrial objects, Clinton threw back his head and roared with laughter. ``Did she say that?'' he asked. ``That's pretty good.''

Asked whether he agreed with her, the president said, ``Well, if I didn't, I wouldn't disagree with her in public.''

Thirty-nine members of the ``Heaven's Gate'' cult killed themselves in California last month in hopes of hitching a ride on a spaceship they believed was trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.

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PHOTO Hillary Clinton

Calls scandal an alien concept