Two weeks after Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination for president, I flew to Little Rock, Ark., to visit a woman named Gay White. White is the widow of Frank White, a conservative Little Rock banker who in the spring, summer and fall of 1980 toured all 75 counties in Arkansas in a quixotic attempt to unseat the incumbent governor, Bill Clinton. Frank had no previous experience campaigning, but he proved to be an enthusiastic retail politician. Gay, then 32, accompanied him on his statewide tour of cattle auctions, courthouse squares, Walmart parking lots and chicken-processing plants. "Hi, I'm Gay White," she would tell the people they met. "My husband's running for governor, and I'd sure appreciate your vote."

Though that entire year was a momentous one for the Whites, one detail had stuck with White 36 years later. "I cannot tell you the number of times they would say to me, 'If your husband wins, are you going to keep his last name?' " she told me. "I heard it over and over and over."

It had not occurred to the Whites or their campaign advisers that attitudes toward the governor's wife, Hillary Rodham, might be what Gay White would later term an "undercurrent" in the 1980 election. They knew, of course, that Arkansas had seen no first lady like Rodham, a Wellesley graduate who wore bookworm spectacles and a hairdo that was not blown out in the Southern manner. At 32, she was a full partner at one of the nation's oldest law firms. She had never changed her name, and Rodham was how her clients knew her.

While Gay White dutifully barnstormed alongside her husband, Clinton's wife had her own pursuits, as well as an infant daughter whom she was determined not to use as a political prop. "Frank and I went to every festival in Arkansas," White told me. "I had lots of people say, 'Hillary's never been here -- and she's the first lady.' I think the fact that she did not go to these little county fairs and that she was seen as not embracing that role caused people to resent her, right or wrong."

The White campaign focused on Bill Clinton's tax hikes, his willingness to accept Cuban refugees and -- as White's former campaign chairman, Curtis Finch Jr., told me -- "the perception among people older than he was that he was just young and arrogant and brought in all these people who had beards and long hair." If Hillary Rodham's feminism was part of this picture, Frank White didn't feel the need to campaign on it overtly. Still, the Republican candidate knew that voters would get the joke when, after criticizing Clinton for allowing married couples to hold state-government positions, he could not resist adding: "How many husband-and-wife teams has he hired? It's hard to find out, because they don't have the same last names."

Six weeks before the election, Clinton enjoyed a 41-point lead over the challenger, who entered the race with only 2 percent of the public knowing who he was. But on Nov. 4, Frank White beat Bill Clinton, 52 percent to 48 percent. At an election post-mortem a few weeks later in Little Rock, Rodham spoke on behalf of her husband, who was still devastated by the stunning upset and did not attend. Explaining the election results, the governor's wife observed somberly, "It's more easy to enthuse people if they think there's going to be a change, instead of more of the same."

Rodham may not have been on the ballot, but Gay White remains convinced that "how they perceived her was very much a factor." Two years later, when Clinton ran again against White, he ran a television ad apologizing for his mistakes. And, Gay remembers, Rodham "changed everything: her whole appearance, her wardrobe. She started wearing makeup. She took Bill's last name. They did the things they needed to do."

Bill Clinton won the rematch in a landslide. The Clintons returned to the Governor's Mansion in 1983. Neither of them has lost a general election since.

"I get that some people just don't know what to make of me," Hillary Clinton said in her speech accepting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July. It was a rare acknowledgment by the candidate herself of what has been the defining paradox of her career: She has been a presence in American public life for more than a third of a century, and yet for all her ubiquity she remains a curiously unknown quantity to many voters.

It's possible to glimpse the origins of this paradox in the time between Bill Clinton's 1980 loss and his 1982 victory. Upon facing the electoral judgment of her persona for the first time, Hillary Rodham Clinton began what has gradually evolved into a precarious shadow game with the American public -- a ritualized series of reveals, retreats and resets, each iteration seemingly more freighted with recrimination and self-doubt than the one preceding it. It was the moment when Hillary became "Hillary" -- a collaborative creation by herself and her political enemies, both a reflection and a source of the uncertainty and mistrust with which the public has so often regarded her.