White herself won't talk to reporters about her motives -- or anything else. At a recent public appearance to discuss the relationship between the press and the legal community, White admitted to having called the press only twice in her eight years in office. In each case, she was trying to get a New York newspaper to hold a story in order not to jeopardize an investigation or a witness. She was, she said, successful both times. "My batting average would be much less if I called more often," she added.

The U.S. attorney's office has always required a high comfort level with the boys in law enforcement, but White has stood out as a prosecutor's prosecutor, happiest socializing with FBI agents and cops. "She is a woman in a man's world, and she is in a world of very significant men, by and large, like Morgenthau and the police commissioners and the mayor," says Bill Bratton. "She is a tough cookie. It's understood that you don't mess with her. She is somebody who I don't think holds grudges, but she will certainly fight for her share of the pie. She is more than willing to get in the ring and slug it out, but she won't hit you with a low blow."

White is willing to use her size to charm the tough guys. "She's small, with a big smile, very friendly and charming," says defense attorney Gerald Lefcourt, who has known her for twenty years. "But she is no liberal. She's pretty tough." One of her closest friends describes her look as "all-American 10-year-old," and she's been known to boast about having some Cherokee blood. White has an easy, nonthreatening sense of humor. At one law-firm meeting run by her former partner George Lindsay (the brother of the late New York mayor), Lindsay was having trouble understanding her. "Mary Jo, I can't hear you -- will you please stand up?" he said. Her reply: "I already am."

The U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan is a magnet for the nation's most ambitious young lawyers, because they get high-profile trial experience. "The cases are big, interesting, and exciting," says Gary Naftalis, a former assistant prosecutor and longtime friend of White's. "And," he adds, "you get FBI agents!"

Most federal prosecutors move on to lucrative private practice after five years or so in the federal building, but some never get the thrill of the hunt out of their blood. White is one of those. It is unclear what she will do if and when the Bush administration cuts her loose. She has reportedly turned down a federal judgeship, a job-for-life that most of her peers would be thrilled to accept. And she is unlikely to follow Giuliani into politics (though her righteousness and bellicosity are very Rudylike).

White may be one of the boys, but she is also a member in good standing of an old girls' network made up of women who entered New York's legal community at around the same time in the seventies, people like sex-crimes prosecutor Linda Fairstein, State Supreme Court judge Leslie Crocker Snyder, and New York's chief judge, Judith Kaye. Of that set, White is indisputably the least public. But her grim public manner belies her inner drive. She has a wild competitive streak that makes her the ideal captain of a team loaded with testosterone-pumped prosecutors and buzz-cut agents. She has a reputation as a woman who can take a joke but who knows when to come out swinging. "I would ordinarily say she is full of hell, if that description didn't fit with being U.S. Attorney," says former law partner Jim Goodale.

White is also a notoriously aggressive jock who jogs daily, has a tennis court at her country house, and is an obsessive baseball fan. Trying big cases, of course, is the ultimate team sport, one in which even a five-foot female can be Michael Jordan. "I think she genuinely loves being U.S. Attorney," Naftalis says. "She wants to be where the action is. She is not afraid to take tough cases. She's not timid and she's not counting the days before her term ends." And White's gung ho, win-at-all-costs style is one reason some people think Clinton may be in trouble. Many current and former Southern District prosecutors regard the pardons of tax cheat Marc Rich and his partner as a flat-out dis to the U.S. Attorney's office -- which had indicted Rich originally.

In her scant public appearances, White has restrained the vital personality known to her family, colleagues, and friends. Her husband, John White, is head of the corporate-practice section at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. His ample salary is what enables White to stay in public office. White's best friends are career women she met back in her days as a young prosecutor. This summer, White, her husband, and her son will join the families of two of these women, attorney Sara Moss and federal judge Barbara S. Jones, to do a Grand Canyon whitewater-rafting trip. This fall, she and a group of pals plan to do a women's-only Outward Bound trip somewhere in the North Carolina woods.

White, Jones, and Moss became good friends in the federal prosecutor's office in the late seventies. They bonded as a trio of hardball female prosecutors in the criminal division who all also happened to be short. White eventually gave the trio a nickname, "the Sids," after Sid Vicious. "We thought it was hysterical that we were these tough prosecutors when we were this small," Moss recalls. "We still have our Sids T-shirts. And everybody now thinks we're just middle-aged ladies." The three Sids still pal around, and last summer they went to a Tina Turner concert together.

White and her husband share an apartment in the city along with a weekend house. When dining out, she orders meat and potatoes, and will choose a beer no matter what expensive wine is offered. She does not, friends note, cook or make an effort to socialize with the city's power set.

She is such a devoted Yankees fan that when John checked into the hospital for an emergency blood transfusion because of stomach ulcers, White made sure he was all right, then asked him for his ticket to that night's Yankees game. She then called a pal, Southern District judge John Koeltl, and ran off to the stadium, leaving her husband to recuperate alone. Friends describe her as the dynamo of the couple. "He is the straight man, she is the cutup," says Goodale. "He is very accomplished in his own right," says Moss, "but he is also her great supporter and her closest confidant." (John White says it is his practice not to be interviewed about his wife.) They have one teenage son, who seems to take after his parents. "They do ball games together," says a friend. "You can ask him who played center field for the Red Sox in 1931 and he can answer it. He's been able to answer it since he was 10. I have a sense that baseball is all that's talked about around the family dinner table."

For years, White buzzed around Manhattan on a motorcycle. She once even arrived for a tennis match against a male colleague on her motorcycle with "I Am Woman" blaring from a boom box. And despite her height, she was a fierce member of the women's basketball team as a young prosecutor. "People checked their knees for teeth marks," says one defense lawyer.

Born in Kansas City as Mary Jo Monk, White was raised in the lily-white Washington, D.C., suburb of McLean, Virginia. In the fifties, McLean was equal parts Virginia redneck and government spook. The sleepy town was suddenly filling up with families of Pentagon bureaucrats and employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, which broke ground for its headquarters in nearby Langley in the late fifties. White's father was an attorney and her mother a homemaker. White met her future husband in eighth grade and married him in 1970, just after she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

After getting a master's in psychology at the New School, she went to law school and graduated at the top of her class at Columbia in 1974. Her first job was clerking for a federal judge, Marvin Frankel, a notoriously difficult boss. (White immediately distinguished herself by having the guts to tell him whenever she disagreed with him.) In 1978, she was hired by U.S. Attorney Robert Fiske as a line assistant in the Southern District. (White later had a hand in Reno's appointment of Fiske, a moderate Republican, as the first independent counsel to investigate Clinton; he was subsequently replaced by Ken Starr.) White handled her first terrorism case at that time, prosecuting a group of violent anti-Castro radicals called the Omega 7. "We absolutely knew she was a star," recalls Moss. "She did twice as many cases as anybody else; she was smart and fast. She had real brainpower and judgment. But she was down to earth."