Nancy Benac didn't aim to cover the White House for the world's largest news agency. She just caught a lucky wave that took her right inside.

The Brigham Young University graduate from Illinois covered the Clinton White House for 2 1/2 years for The Associated Press - leaving recently to coordinate the AP's presidential coverage.Those are jobs most journalists dream of - but Benac says she never really aimed for them. She landed them simply by taking advantage of opportunities that arose. In fact, a journalism career itself was an accident for her.

She chose it when BYU sent her a letter telling her she had to declare a major. "I scanned the catalog and found a major that didn't have a math requirement."

Another lucky break later came when as a senior at BYU, Benac was chosen to intern for the AP in New York City. It led to a full-time job with the news agency in Detroit and then in Lansing, Mich. - sometimes working graveyard and swing shifts.

She was transferred to Washington to cover Michigan-related issues in the Capitol, then switched to covering national news. Later, she landed in the White House - where she followed the Clintons around the world - and followed some stories that hit, literally, a little too close to home.

"It was a sleepy Saturday afternoon when Francisco Martin Duran unloaded his rifle at the White House," Benac recalled. "The press room was empty and I was getting ready to to go home. . . . I stepped into the press room and was told to get down."

With a bullet hole in the window of the press room and a slug right above her head, Benac returned to her desk and began dictating the story.

"It was pretty amazing, I was the only member of the print media there and we got the story," Benac said.

She also went to Russia to cover the Clinton/Boris Yeltsin summit.

"It was kind of fun. It was the signing ceremony where the U.S., Ukraine and Russia were agreeing not to target each other with nuclear missiles. Normally the sound is piped into the area where all the press is. This wasn't. Instead a very small press corp was taken in," she said.

"I was the only person in the room with a cell phone. In Russia the cell phones are really big," Benac said holding up her hands to show the size.

"I was the only one who could get the story out immediately. It was kind of a neat feeling," she said.

When asked what she thought of Russia, Benac replied, "When doing something like this, you are so focused, you don't want to forget anything. . . . It is easy to forget where you are. It is amazing to look around and say, `Wow this place is incredible.'

"It has the big onion domes. It looks like Disney World or something - it's amazing. It's really ornate."

She also went on an extended trip through Asia with first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"That was really the first time we had a lot of contact with Mrs. Clinton. They declared (conversation on) the plane off the record. So she wasn't afraid to come back and talk," Benac said.

"Since the plane was off the record, she would come back in her sweat pants with her Coke-bottle glasses on, no make-up, her hair up in a ponytail and just visit," Benac said.

"It really was nice and much more relaxed than it would have been if it was on the record.

"It was more day-to-day chit chat. We'd compare notes on shopping, and who got the best buys from various merchants. We talked about how tired we were, what we ate and how we were afraid to drink the water," Benac said.

The airplane was a small, older craft, used in the past by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

"It wasn't totally extravagant. There were no microwaves. The food was cooked on burners. You could hear the crew put the chicken in and you could hear it cook and would know that in an hour you could eat," she said.

Benac, speaking of Hillary Clinton and Chelsea, added, "It took a while to warm up. Things were a bit more formal and restrained at the beginning, but by the end we were all on a first-name basis. Well, we weren't calling her Hillary, but she was calling us by our first names.

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"We had negotiations over ground rules before the trip started and there were a couple of flair-ups when they thought we had gone too far with Chelsea, a few shouting matches but nothing too bad. They relaxed over time, this was a new experience for all of us," Benac said.

New experiences are something she has become accustomed to by now. Benac's present position is political supervisor for the 1996 campaign.

"Everyone in the field calls into me about the particular candidate they are covering. I am the strategical planner. It is my job to recognize the central themes and see where the story is going. I did the same job in 1992. It is easier the second time around. I am not as nervous about decisions I make now as I was in '92," Benac said.

When asked what she would like to do in the future, she said, "I'm not sure. I've been pleased so far so I guess I'll just play it by ear."

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