IT has been a rough week for Hillary Clinton in the fiery furnace of Washington politics. This week she gets welcome relief as she accompanies the President to Lyons for the G7 summit and then embarks by herself on an 11 day tour of eastern European countries visiting children's clinics and showing her compassionate side.

The image in Washington after the Senate Whitewater report is darker. The Washington Post's liberal columnist, Mary McGrory, wrote that the Republicans "put a pointed hat on Hillary Clinton and a broomstick in her hands and all but called her, in their Senate Whitewater Committee report, the wicked witch of the White House".

USA Today had the banner headline "At the centre of the storm, Hillary Clinton". The Washington Times carried a column by Suzanne Fields entitled "The rising tide of `Wifewater'".

The wags in Washington are saying the reason Hillary is spending July 4th in Prague is that she's looking for a country that does not have an extradition treaty with the United States.

Yes, Washington is a cruel town. And the Clintons are a seemingly unending target as the ill fated Whitewater investment so many years ago refuses to lie down and die.

Hillary Clinton is seen as having played a much more active role in that venture than her husband, who was preoccupied then holding on to the governorship of Arkansas while she tried to build up family capital through her legal work and in vestments in commodities and property.

The main charges against her are that she took "ethical risks" as a lawyer married to the governor and then tried to cover this up by destroying documents and bringing others to the White House. Here she told her close friend Vincent Foster, newly appointed legal counsel to the President to handle the files and the fall out from the dismissal of the travel office staff for which she was said to be responsible. She denies this.

But he committed suicide, allegedly under the strain of such work, and Hillary is accused of ordering the illicit removal of files from his office before the police investigation.

AFTER 14 months of hearings, the Republican controlled Senate committee could not find a smoking gun and had to resort to "suggesting" that the First Lady "probably" ordered her staff to hide files and cover up potentially embarrassing evidence.

The Democratic minority took the diametrically opposite view while the White House tried to rubbish the Republican chairman, Senator Alfonse D'Amato, who has some dubious transactions in his own background. Mary McGrory describes him as "a clubhouse pol from Long Island who never brought off his impersonation of an arbiter of ethics".

The major newspapers saw both sides cancelling each other out in what is seen as a warm up for what will be a dirty presidential campaign. The New York Times which first broke the Whitewater story during the 1992 presidential primaries, concluded that this time "neither side delivered a knockout legal punch".

But the Republicans "scored more debating points and they have laid down at least a paper trail of suspicious behaviour that the Democrats have been unable to explain away," the editorial said.

Hillary Clinton continues to fascinate the media which she normally tries to keep at a distance with the help of a fiercely protective press staff. She has, incidentally, just lost her press secretary, Lisa Caputo, who has Irish connections. She is going to a senior post in CBS.

The White House has gone horribly wrong for the woman who told her friends that as First Lady she wanted to do good and at the same time fulfil her ambitions to be a role model for all women and prove that gender need not be a crippling limitation.

Since the first heady days, she has seen her attempt to reform the creaking health care system collapse was called before a grand jury investigation into Whitewater suffered the tragic suicide of her friend Vincent Foster and now faces further probing into her past by the Special Prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, armed with the voluminous Senate report.

She stuck loyally by her husband while the Gennifer Flowers "bimbo eruption" threatened to sink his presidential hopes. Now she has to endure the publicity given to the charges by Paula Corbin Jones that she was sexually importuned by Mr Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas and she was an employee.

And all this even before the presidential election campaign has formally begun.

To the public, Hillary can seem a clever, manipulative lawyer who will fight like a tigress to protect her husband and her daughter, Chelsea, from largely suspicious if not openly hostile media. But there is a compassionate side which can be seen in her work for disadvantaged children and her longing for another child, adopted if needs be.

WHICH is the real Hillary Clinton? The hard boiled career lawyer who shouts at her husband and ordered the dismissal of staff who displeased her? Or the Methodist raised, dedicated wife and mother who wants to do good in the world and is concerned about the welfare of her personal staff?

The syndicated columnist Suzanne Fields writes: "Hillary Rodham Clinton has done more for educating the public in the principles of modern feminism than Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan . . . She climbed to the nexus of power using everything it takes. Like many male wheeler dealers before her, she took ethical risks which, now that they have come to light, are like curses - chickens coming home to roost."

A harsh judgment from an anti Clinton newspaper. But there has been lots more of that kind of stuff than pieces defending Hillary Clinton. She could do with more friends.