MEASURE OF A PRESIDENT

By JAMES CARNEY WASHINGTON

THE FIRST NEWS CAME IN a whisper. The President was sitting in the Oval Office, smiling for photographers with Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, when Mike McCurry, the White House press secretary, bent close to his ear. CNN, McCurry said, was reporting that an explosion had destroyed part of a federal building in Oklahoma City. Stay on top of it, Clinton replied. The President then escorted Ciller to a meeting in the Cabinet Room. It was there that Leon Panetta, Clinton's chief of staff, passed the President a yellow legal pad with notes scribbled across the page with Panetta's trademark blue felt-tip pen. "Half of federal building in O.K. City blown up--expect heavy casualties," the note read. "Called Janet Reno--she has dispatched FBI."

The magnitude of the crisis was becoming clear, but Clinton still hadn't seen a television. He listened as Ciller insisted that Turkey's attack on Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq was a retaliation against terrorism. Her words were eerily resonant. When the meeting ended, the President finally had a long look at what terrorism had wrought in the middle of America. The images of children being pulled from the rubble made him "beyond angry," as his communications director Mark Gearan put it. Clinton's first reaction, he later told a top aide, was a desire to "put my fist through the television."

Sometimes the measure of a President's entire term comes down to his handling of a single crisis. At such moments, says Fred Greenstein, a political science professor at Princeton University, "you're suddenly reminded that the presidency is an institution that people turn to in times of crisis and distress." Two years earlier to the day, Clinton had fumbled his handling of one of the first crises of his Administration, the fiery raid by federal agents of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas. On that day, Clinton all but disappeared from public view, leaving it to Reno, his new Attorney General, to take charge and accept blame. Last week there was no blame to accept, but the significance of the moment was not lost on anyone in the White House. As more information poured in throughout the day, Clinton and his aides debated when and how the President should respond.

Panetta organized an interagency task force that met for the first time at noon that day. They gathered again at 4 p.m. in the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing, where Panetta was briefed in person and over video-conference screens by all the relevant agencies. Then Clinton arrived. He had already decided to make a public statement, but now he had some questions of his own. The first betrayed his penchant for wading into the details of a problem. Was it possible, he asked, to ground all the flights from the region around Oklahoma City to prevent the culprits from fleeing by air? (The answer, which Panetta gave him later, was no. To do so would be too serious an infringement on civil liberties.) Then, getting well ahead of the investigation, Clinton wanted to know whether the death penalty could be sought against whoever was guilty. (The answer: yes, under at least six provisions of federal law.) But it was decided that Clinton would not be the one to bring up the death penalty--lest he seem politically opportunistic.

Clinton knew he would be judged on two levels: operationally and symbolically. On that first afternoon, and for the remainder of the week, it appeared that the federal response to the bombing was going as well as or better than could be expected; no one was criticizing the President on that front. But getting the dramaturgy right was in some ways harder, and less natural.

Clinton sat in the Situation Room at 5 p.m. and reworked the statement his speechwriters had prepared for him. He read it through a few times, then he asked everyone else to leave. Said an official who had participated in the meeting: "He just sat there by himself and collected his thoughts." A few minutes later, Clinton spoke with a mixture of anger and empathy. He labeled the bombers "evil cowards" and vowed they would be found and "treated like killers." He ended simply and with quiet power. "Meanwhile," he assured the nation, "we will be about our work."

No one at the White House would dare say so last week, but the tragedy gave the President something to talk about larger than his political problems. Clinton had been trying to recast his presidency after the new Republican Congress wrapped up its much heralded first 100 days. But he hampered that effort with two comments. First he revived one of the most controversial periods of his own past by saying he felt vindicated in his opposition to the Vietnam War, thanks to the penitent memoirs of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Then Clinton strained to assert his own relevance to events in Washington. He was relevant, he insisted in a press conference, because the U.S. Constitution said so. His aides winced.

Those moments seemed to fall away last week as Clinton leaned more willfully into the national picture. Often verbose, Clinton was conscious, said senior adviser George Stephanopoulos, that "his words carry tremendous weight." For the most part, he chose those words carefully and delivered thn em well. But when he spoke to the press late Friday to announce the arrest of Timothy McVeigh, he strayed from that discipline and turned the encounter into a self-referential exercise. This time, Clinton couldn't resist the temptation to state that federal prosecutors would seek the death penalty; that doing so might strike some listeners as gratuitous no longer seemed to worry him.

On Saturday, Hillary Clinton and her husband posed as parents to the nation, delivering his weekly radio address to 26 children assembled in the Oval Office. On Sunday they both were to attend a memorial service in Oklahoma City.

Clinton will have to continue measuring each move he makes. To overpoliticize the tragedy would cost him dearly in the eyes of an already skeptical public. With that in mind, Clinton might decide that one bit of information he received last week was a positive omen. As rescuers dug through the remains of the Murrah building, they found a wall that had originally stood in the lobby but had collapsed into the basement. Still hanging from the wall were two framed photographs, one of Vice President Al Gore, the other of Bill Clinton.

--With reporting by Michael Duffy and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington

With reporting by MICHAEL DUFFY AND J.F.O. MCALLISTER/ WASHINGTON