NEWLY DISCOVERED MEMO, BILLS OVERSHADOW FIRST LADY'S BOOK.

Byline: Alison Mitchell The New York Times

After eight months toiling on a book, Hillary Rodham Clinton was supposed to emerge this week as a provocative thinker and passionate advocate for children in a media blitz arranged by her publisher.

But on the eve of Hillary Clinton's book tour, a newly discovered White House memo and copies of long-missing billing records from her Arkansas law firm have once again raised questions about her role in the 1993 dismissals in the White House travel office and her legal work for a failing savings and loan association run by the Clintons' business partner in the Whitewater real-estate venture.

As a result Simon & Schuster's stage-managed media appearances for the first lady, at the very beginning of the presidential election year, are likely to focus as much on the first lady's role in these controversies as on her views about children or her support for dress codes and sexual abstinence until age 21.

Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, R-N.Y., who is chairman of the Senate Whitewater committee, has described the belated release of a wide range of material his committee had demanded as part of a White House pattern of "conduct that borders on contempt, obstruction and making false statements."

The copies of the records were released Friday night after the evening news and showed that Hillary Clinton had billed Madison Guaranty, the troubled savings and loan, for a wide array of legal work despite her earlier assertions of a more limited role.

At the White House, aides seemed resigned for the moment to a continuing barrage of criticism from the Republican Congress and its intense focus on Hillary Clinton, the lawyer who sought to transform the role of first lady into a policy position befitting the modern career woman.

"Clearly she is the target of all this," said Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., who serves on the Whitewater committee and is general chairman of the Democratic National Committee. "This is who they're after, to make her the issue."

Facing new questions about the first lady Friday, the White House press secretary, Michael McCurry, said, "Look, there are people around here who think Hillary Clinton is responsible for the weather outside."

Hillary Clinton impressed the nation in 1992 when she stood determinedly by her husband while his character came under question because of Gennifer Flowers' charges that he had been an unfaithful husband.

Now it is Hillary Clinton who is under assault, as Republicans poke away at financial dealings that have far more to do with her than with him.

The newly discovered draft memo written by a former presidential aide, David Watkins, depicts her as the central figure in the politically damaging travel office dismissals, an account at variance with the White House description of her as simply a concerned observer.

It has been her aides and her friends who have pleaded memory lapses before congressional committees, creating an air of evasion that has occasionally left even the Democrats mum. And this time it is the president who must stand by his woman.

In her first interview, being published in the Jan. 15 issue of Newsweek as part of a deal in which the magazine purchased the serial rights to the book, Hillary Clinton disputed the account of her role in the travel office firings given in the memo of Watkins, the former presidential aide.

In the memo, apparently intended for Thomas McLarty, then the White House chief of staff, Watkins wrote that "we both knew there would be hell to pay" if "we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the first lady's wishes."

"I just don't have any memory of that," she told her interviewers. She said she had simply told Watkins to go ahead with using an accounting firm to look into the financial management of the White House travel office.

She also said she had not reviewed documents taken from the office of Vincent Foster Jr., the deputy White House counsel who had been her colleague at the Rose law firm and who committed suicide in 1993.

"It wasn't important to us," she said. "Maybe if we had been here for a couple of years, maybe if we knew a little bit more about what the possible conspiracies that could be spun might look like, everybody would have tried to be more thoughtful or dispassionate in the heat of the moment."