Questioners Put Heat to Clinton on Whitewater : Town meeting: In a forum where he usually excels, President is taken aback by challenges to his trustworthiness. He testily defends himself.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. —  President Clinton, responding in a televised town meeting to a woman who said that the Whitewater controversy has sapped the nation’s trust in him, insisted that he and the First Lady had done nothing wrong and asked that he be allowed to do his job without distracting questions.

The President was clearly taken aback by the challenge from a woman in the live audience here, who not only asked him how he could win back the nation’s trust but wondered aloud whether he and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton are middle-class Americans or just another pair of “villainous, money-grubbing Republicans.”

Clinton said he is from a middle-class background and had never skirted the law in his investments or taxes. He heatedly declared that no one has credibly accused him of abuse of power in office “and never will.”

The town hall meeting, a format that Clinton usually dominates, was unusually tough for the President. Participants from Charlotte; Austin, Tex.; Bristol, Tenn., and Roanoke, Va., challenged Clinton with their questions.

A man from Austin asked whether Clinton could be trusted after numerous flip-flops on policy and the continuing stream of revelations about the Clintons’ role in Whitewater Development Corp., a failed Ozark real estate firm. The Clintons’ partner in Whitewater owned a savings and loan that failed, costing taxpayers at least $47 million.

The President, angrily jabbing his finger at the man’s image on a television monitor, said that he had been falsely accused of wrongdoing.

“I have been the subject, sir, of false charges,” the President said testily, without specifying who had made the allegations. The charges “make their credibility an issue, not mine,” he said.

He then said: “You all are free to disagree with me but disagreement is different from trust. Let’s not mix apples and oranges.”

Responding to the question about Mrs. Clinton’s investments, Clinton said that his wife did not receive preferential treatment in trading in cattle futures in the late 1970s that made her nearly $100,000.

He said that she “got cold feet” and withdrew from the cattle futures market just weeks before a major crash that wiped out scores of investors. Clinton said that his wife got out of the risky commodities market after receiving a margin call on her trading account shortly before their daughter, Chelsea, was born.

Documents released by the White House show that Mrs. Clinton cashed out her commodities account seven months before Chelsea was born and did not resume substantial trading thereafter. The documents do not indicate that she was ever subject to a margin call, in which a brokerage house demands that an investor put up more money to cover potential trading losses.