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On Thanksgiving Day in 1996, when Hillary Clinton was in the White House, she had a long conversation with her best friend, soulmate and confidante, Diane Blair. The two women had forged a relationship in the 1970s when they were both teaching in Fayetteville in Arkansas Bills home state and would remain close until Blairs death from cancer in 2000.

With the blunt honesty of a trusted friend, Blair raised with Clinton one of the most vexed problems that has bedevilled her years of public service: her toxic dealings with the press. Couldnt she avoid a lot of grief, Blair suggested, by developing friendlier relations even fake ones with media figures? And shouldnt she stop changing her hair so often?

Blair clearly touched a nerve, provoking a defiant riposte from the first lady. In todays context, at the end of a week in which Hillary Clinton has yet again found herself face-to-face with a sceptical press demanding answers about her use of a private email address while working as Americas top diplomat, her robust words almost two decades ago sound uncannily prescient.

Im a proud woman, Clinton began. Im not stupid; I know I should do more to suck up to the press. I know it confuses people when I change my hairdos. I know I have to compromise.

But then Clintons tone suddenly shifted. But Im just not going to, she said. Im a complex person and theyre just going to have to live with that. Im used to winning, and I intend to win on my own terms.

Win on my own terms the phrase would make a great title to a chronicle of the battles Clinton has fought under the public spotlight. It runs through her White House struggles to introduce healthcare reform and her war with what she famously dubbed the vast right-wing conspiracy. It was evident in her bruising clash with Barack Obama in her first unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2008. And judging from this weeks events at the UN, where she treated reporters asking about her use of a private email server while secretary of state with a dismissiveness that verged on contempt, it looks like its becoming a storyline in the 2016 presidential campaign that she is expected to launch within weeks.

Clintons attitude towards the press is not the only insight that can be gleaned from the friendships that she made during her early years in Arkansas. Through Diane Blairs confidences, contained in private papers that were recently opened at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and interviews with several other close friends in Fayetteville and Little Rock, seeds of many of her later achievements and troubles, strengths and flaws, can be seen to have been planted in the rich soil of Arkansas.

Saint or sinner? Feminist pioneer or self-interested careerist? Which is Hillary Clinton? Diane Blair herself pondered deeply that question, asking herself in one of her private notes why her great friend was so polarizing, why to her Hillary Clinton was funny, wicked and wacky yet to others she came across as a malevolent, power-mad, self-aggrandizing shrew.

That unanswered question, so pertinent today, can to some extent be answered from Clintons Arkansas days. Some of her most controversial qualities her fierce guarding of her privacy, the belief in doing things her own way, her fraught relationship with money are all visible in nascent form during the period 1974 when she moved to Fayetteville and then Little Rock, to 1993 when she entered the White House. So too are positive attributes that in the cut-and-thrust of the news cycle rarely enjoy an airing, such as her passionate embrace of womens and childrens rights, and her undiminished and unbreakable loyalty to those she loves.

Hillary Rodham was 27 when she came to Fayetteville, a progressive college town tucked in the north-west corner of the state. Fateville, she called it, poking fun at the local southern drawl. It wasnt fate that drew her here, though, so much as the relentless charm offensive Bill Clinton waged to attract her here, drawing her away from a potentially stellar legal career on the east coast.

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Hillary Clinton: running to win - but on her own terms

This was the week when Hillary Clintons highest aspiration, being president, collided with her deepest fear actually running for president.

Its not that Clinton craves a coronation, people close to her say, its just that she wants to forestall her leap into the sulfurous political lava as long as possible. The chaotic indignity of Tuesdays press conference on her use of a private email server as Secretary of State did nothing to change that opinion, or convince her to push up the campaign start date.

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The firestorm over the emails and earlier stories about the solicitation of foreign donations at the Clinton family charitable foundation have rattled the expanding crew of new operatives signing up for 2016 who havent experienced the maelstrom of a Clinton presidential campaign before. But the only two opinions that really count come from Hillary and Bill Clinton, and despite the carping of Democrats inside and outside their own circle they harbor few regrets about the way things have gone down so far.

Eighteen months ago who would imagined Hillary Clinton would have zero competition in the primaries? Thats pretty good, right? said one longtime Clinton insider, reflecting the prevailing view in the no-rush camp, which includes the Clintons and their longtime consigliore Cheryl Mills.

Everybody has an incentive to start this campaign the staff, the consultants who are working for nothing and want to get paid, you guys in the media everybody except Hillary Clinton, the person added. The goal here is to make this the shortest campaign possible. The emails thing didnt change that.

The danger, of course, is that the 20th Century political victors are ignoring 21st Century political reality and inviting the American body politic play by their idiosyncratic set of rules as they did by deciding to use Bill Clintons private server as a conduit for Hillary Clintons government correspondence. Moreover, as the press conference proved, its put her in the familiar and bizarre position of entering the 2016 campaign as both the strongest non-incumbent ever to seek the office and a wounded, vulnerable frontrunner.

Shell get past these sort of little dust-ups, but we really have to start having a conversation, says Iowa Democratic operative Tavis Hall, expressing the growing anxiousness of battleground Democrats eager for Clinton to hoist a flag to rally around.

The response to the emails controversy was hampered by the lack of a campaign team and the candidates reluctance to share details of her personal email server with the people who could defend her; Clintons people were rebuffed by surrogates who refused to appear on TV because they werent given details about the system, according to two potential surrogates interviewed by POLITICO. Moreover, it took eight days for Clinton to reluctantly agree to appear before the media and only then at the urging of her young campaign manager Robbie Mook and eminence-grise campaign chairman John Podesta.

Its clear they lack an apparatus. Shes a candidate without a campaign. Robert Gibbs, a former White House press secretary under President Obama told The Washington Post. And former Obama strategist David Axelrod told MSNBC he thought the campaigns sluggish response on the emails story was the result of a lack of answers from the Clinton campaign, or the nascent campaign.

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Hillary Clinton's fear of the trail

On March 2, the story broke that Hillary Clinton had possibly violated e-mail regulations while secretary of state.

You could almost hear the collective gasp in Washington: Oh, no, here we go again.

But the next evening, Clinton was feted at the Emilys List 30th-anniversary gala dinner as though nothing had happened. Only the trumpets were missing from what felt like her coronation as the Democratic presidential nominee and, possibly, the next president of the United States.

Fast-forward a dozen days and Clintons position in the presidential sweepstakes seems less assured, her inevitability not so inevitable.

The most perplexing question isnt about the e-mails themselves but why she put everything at risk over such a small detail, declining to segregate her personal and business e-mail.

There can only be one answer, and it isnt convenience, as Clinton claims. Think of another word that begins with the letter C: control.

Clinton claims she opted for the convenience of one cellphone and a personal server rather than use a government-issued phone for business and another device for personal matters. Too much stuff to lug around?

So the whole question of her conduct as secretary of state boils down to a few ounces of electronic equipment. Hate to say it, but only a woman could come up with such an excuse. Its all about the purse.

Plainly, Clinton didnt want anyone snooping around her virtual file cabinet. Who does? But this isnt the point. When you are secretary of state and are mulling a run for president, you steer clear of anything and anyone remotely questionable. No one should know this better.

Questions that merit serious consideration include whether the Clinton server was secure. Clinton insists that it was because her New York home, where the server lives, is protected by the Secret Service. Given the optional sobriety of agents these days, this is less than reassuring. Then, too, hacking doesnt require on-site handling.

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Parker: Hillary Clintons secret mess

Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images Hillary Clinton attends the Step It Up For Gender Equality event celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fourth World Conference On Women in Beijing at Hammerstein Ballroom on March 10, 2015 in New York City.

Back in April of 2007, when she was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination for the first time, then-Senator Hillary Clinton lashed out at the secrecy of the George W. Bush administration.

She told a New Hampshire audience that if elected she would implement a "plan to enhance accountability and transparency" and "to replace secrecy and mystery with openness." One part of her plan: "It's time our government went fully online as well."

She lost her White House bid. But 20 months later, before Barack Obama took that job and she became secretary of state, she set up a private computer server registered to her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., to handle all her official, as well as private, emails for the next four years. Her decision a secret until earlier this month impeded efforts by the press and others to review State Department actions.

Today it is Hillary Clinton's record of transparency that has come under fire. At a press conference Tuesday, she acknowledged that in retrospect "it would've been better for me to use two separate phones and two email accounts." She has asked the State Department to release her official emails, a process that could take months.

Few public figures have been as scrutinized as Hillary Clinton. Sometimes her disclosures go beyond what is required, but she's also racked up a reputation for secrecy that at times has returned to haunt her.

Here are five examples covering the last two decades. Some are drawn from a 2007 book I did, with Don Van Natta Jr., entitled "Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Little Brown & Co.) Clinton's office didn't respond to a request for comment.

1) 1992: The Commodity Trades

During Bill Clinton's first run for the White House, his campaign declined to release all of the couple's tax returns. Later it emerged that the campaign had weighed requests from the press and decided not to do so, because a few of the returns showed Hillary Clinton's spectacular success in commodities trading, in which she made almost $100,000 from an initial investment of $1,000 in a matter of months for a return of almost 10,000 percent. Hillary Clinton threatened a campaign lawyer who had access to the material with retribution if she released the data: "You'll never work in Democratic politics again," the lawyer, Loretta Lynch, says Clinton told her. It wasn't until 1994, as the New York Times prepared to publish an article detailing the trades, that the Clintons made public the returns.

2) 1993: The Health Care Task Force

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Hillary Clintons Top 5 Clashes Over Secrecy

Mrs Clinton said she had used a private email address for the sake of convenience, and had deleted some 31,830 emails which she deemed personal, an explanation which only served to further rile her critics.

The inquisition clearly infuriated Mrs Clinton: not just the impudence of those who dared question her integrity but also as she would see it the relentless, trivialising force of the modern media that always prefers froth to facts; nit-picking to policy.

But therein lies one of Mrs Clintons biggest problems if as everyone expects she announces a run for president in 2016.

More than ever, she seems incapable of hiding her hostility towards those who would challenge her. After years in the tank filled exclusively with presidents and prime-ministers, shes become the political equivalent of a puffer-fish: the slightest provocation elicits a prickly response.

Thats what undid her when questioned by Congress in 2012 over her handling of the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi that left a US ambassador dead on her watch - what difference does it make? she demanded.

And again during her book tour last year when questions were raised about her personal wealth and $250,000-a-pop speaking engagements You have no reason to remember, but we came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt, she said, to gales of laughter.

Though she tried to fight the impulse, she did it again this week at her press conference. She started trying to make nice, but when confronted with perfectly legitimate questions about why she deleted all those "personal" emails before anyone could review them, it was not long before the tone became defensive, scratchy.

As so often with Mrs Clinton, who has suffered as much criticism over the years as anyone could reasonably endure, the bristle reflex was partly understandable.

In using a personal email, she had done nothing that former secretaries Albright, Powell and Rice had not done before her, and no-one had accused them of cover-ups, she complained. So trust me, she asked, as you once trusted them.

But therein lies a second problem; clearly not enough people do trust Mrs Clinton; many are Republicans, but the doubters also include much of the so-called liberal media that Republicans accuse of giving Mr Obama a free pass these last six years.

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Hillary Clinton's prickly reaction to email row could be fatal to 2016 hopes