Obstacle Course

By MICHAEL DUFFY WASHINGTON

THE WHITE HOUSE STAFF FILED INTO THE EAST Room last Friday at 5 p.m. for what had been regarded internally as a badly needed "pep rally." Chief of staff Mack McLarty opened with some keep-your-chin-up remarks. Then came some encouraging words from Tipper Gore and a circumspect comment from Hillary Rodham Clinton. "It's just the first week," she said. Al Gore spoke next, making a joke about his dancing ability. The mood grew lighthearted, reminding several in the audience of what one called "the whole campaign bus-tour thing."

But when President Clinton began to speak, the atmosphere changed. Clinton laid into his aides for leaking information to the press and lamented his Administration's maladroit handling of the gays-in-the-militar y crisis. He warned his team to stop dumping on each other in print, to "rise above the Washington culture" and "live by your values, not theirs." The clear message, said a staffer, was that Clinton still believes he can change the way things work in the nation's capital.

If only it were so. Just when he wanted to focus "like a laser beam" on the economy, Clinton was sidetracked for five days by a once obscure campaign promise to lift the nearly 50-year-old ban on gays in the military. No sooner had Clinton emerged from the embarrassing miscalculation about Zoe Baird than he found himself in an even stickier political quagmire. After promising in his Inaugural Address to end an era of "deadlock and drift," Clinton was suddenly at war with the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as members of his own party in Congress. Worse yet, the spectacle of Clinton clinging so resolutely to his gay-rights pledge after breaking broader promises on taxes, the deficit and spending projects raised questions about his judgment. "The most disturbing thing isn't that he fought for gays," said a Clinton adviser. "It's that he dumped the middle-class tax cut, signaled that he would raise taxes on most Americans, and then stuck by the gays. That's the way the Republicans will play this."

Clinton temporarily quelled the crisis by reaching an agreement with his principal antagonist on the issue, Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, to halt the practice of asking military recruits about their sexual orientation, while postponing an official lifting of the ban until July 15. With Nunn's support, Clinton had enough swing votes in the Senate to block a Republican attempt -- expected this week -- to write the existing ban into law. And he earned six months to concentrate on more pressing matters while aides worked out the details of a permanent repeal. "I am looking forward to getting on with this issue," he said, "and with these other issues, which were so central to the campaign."

A top Clinton aide insisted last week that the crisis had been "completely unavoidable" ever since Clinton first promised to lift the ban in a speech in Boston in October 1991. But a close look at how Clinton and his team tried in recent weeks to defuse the issue shows that the Administration has much to learn about the Washington political game. The Clinton team was simply unprepared to handle the powerful legislators, military brass and internal leakers who turned the gays-in-the-military debate into a disaster.

The Clintonites did see trouble coming. Following the election, Clinton deputized Washington lawyer John Holum to consult with military officials during the transition about how best to lift the ban during the first 30 days of the term "with minimum disruption to combat effectiveness." Working through intermediaries was Clinton's first mistake, says Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, who opposes gays in the military. "A smarter scenario would have been to ask ((the Chiefs)) down to Little Rock during the transition, bring up the subject and say, 'Look, I made this commitment, help me work my way through this.' Instead, the Chiefs were just told to do this and do that."

Holum discovered during the transition that the Joint Chiefs were willing to end the practice of asking recruits about their sexual preferences, but strongly opposed an Executive Order that would immediately end the ban on gays in uniform. Holum floated several options to transition officials, including a two-stage approach to be carried out according to the Pentagon's own timetable. That idea angered gay activists, who leaked word of Clinton's apparent hedging to reporters at a time when the President-elect was breaking other promises.

At that point, Defense Secretary-designate Les Aspin stepped in to mediate, proposing a compromise in which Clinton would "instruct" Aspin to draft the Executive Order over a six-month period. Aspin sold the plan to Clinton at a Blair House meeting three days before the Inauguration, but that too was leaked before Aspin met with the Chiefs. When he did, he discovered that the Chiefs had grown much more resistant. Aspin's attempts to keep the Chiefs on board failed during a stormy two-hour session in the top-secret, soundproof "tank" at the Pentagon on Jan. 22. "It was not a fun meeting," said a military official. "It gave new meaning to the expression 'frank and cordial.' " On Jan. 24 Aspin appeared on television to warn that his plan was in trouble.

Clinton might yet have avoided the worst of the crisis had he sought the advice and support of Nunn, the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Nunn, who is a close confidant of General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, often seems to believe that all military matters are best disposed by him and that anything else is an attempt to railroad the Pentagon bureaucracy. But Clinton tapped Aspin to deal with Nunn in part because relations between the Senator and the President have never been great. The ( White House has not forgotten Nunn's lukewarm effort on behalf of Clinton during the Georgia primary last year, nor his sudden disappearance from a scheduled campaign swing with Hillary Clinton a few days after the Gennifer Flowers story broke.

By last Monday, Nunn sparked a free-for-all by expressing contempt for the White House's approach to lifting the ban. "If there's a strategy there, it hasn't been explained to me," he said. Smelling blood, Senate Republicans led by Robert Dole vowed on Tuesday to block Clinton's Executive Order at the first available opportunity. Meanwhile, the Joint Chiefs and their powerful squadrons of lobbyists on Capitol Hill went to work on lawmakers, raising fears about sexual misconduct and reportedly circulating a graphic video titled The Gay Agenda, which featured some of the more flamboyant entries in a gay parade. On Wednesday Nunn delivered a withering 25-minute speech on the Senate floor that posed 42 questions (example: "What restrictions should be placed on displays of affection while in uniform, such as dancing at a formal event?") that he would want to raise at hearings in March.

Nevertheless, during the next 48 hours Nunn met twice with Clinton and Senate majority leader George Mitchell at the White House to work out a compromise. The first two-hour session on Wednesday night proved inconclusive: unable to win concessions from Clinton on what to do about avowed gays during the six-month period, Nunn initially balked even at halting the questioning of incoming recruits.

On Thursday night the parley was interrupted by news of a federal court judge's ruling in California that the Navy's discharge of Keith Meinhold, a petty officer who is gay, was unconstitutional under the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The decision gave Clinton more ammunition, but by that point he was anxious, as an adviser put it, to "get the whole thing out of the way and get back to work." With Mitchell working hard to keep the talks going, Nunn caved in on the matter of questioning recruits and Clinton deferred to several Nunn proposals, including one providing that service members who declare their homosexuality before July 15 be separated from active duty and placed in the standby reserve.

Though gay-rights activists praised Clinton for catapulting their cause to the top of the political agenda, the victory came at a steep political price for the President. Clinton's poor reading of the congressional mood since his ^ Inauguration means that lawmakers will be ready to second-guess the White House on tough votes. Already, pivotal Southern Democrats have demonstrated how easy it is to abandon the new President. If Clinton is to move forward on his plans to kick-start the economy, lower the deficit and reform health care, he cannot afford to spend much more political capital on sideshows. "Clinton is one of the most gifted politicians I've ever seen," said Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich. "We all know he's very smart. We're not sure he's very wise."

Part of Clinton's genius during the campaign was his ability to convince liberals that he was one of them while posing as a new kind of Democrat who would take back the party from its special interests. But one Clinton adviser is worried that the President's first two weeks in office have sent an ominous message to the middle class: "We're not in touch with your moral values and we're not going to fight for you either."

Even so, 70% of those surveyed in a TIME/CNN poll were satisfied with the speed at which Clinton is getting down to business. And Clinton's start-up problems will be all but forgotten if he presents a credible economic plan in his State of the Union speech on Feb. 17. Last Saturday Clinton traveled to Camp David for a two-day retreat with staff and Cabinet officials. If a team benefits from adversity, then the new President and his colleagues have a wealth of experience from which to learn and recover.

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With reporting by David S. Jackson/San Francisco and Elaine Shannon and Nancy Traver/Washington