THE EDUCATION OF A PRESIDENT : After six months of quiet success and loud failure, Bill Clinton talks about the frustrating process of figuring out his job.

It is 6:30 on a Saturday morning and President Clinton has summoned half a dozen of his closest advisers to the West Wing office of White House Chief of Staff Thomas (Mack) McLarty. Sunlight filters in through the big corner windows, but the mood is somber. Vice President Al Gore sits hunched over a word processor as political consultant Paul Begala stands at his elbow, offering suggestions. The President’s eyes are rimmed with red. His aides’ faces are drawn with tension and lack of sleep. They worked late the night before and were back almost before dawn.

Tap, Tap, Tap. The word processor clicks away.

The date is May 29. The White House has reached what Clinton and his supporters hope is the nadir of his first year in power. Though he had come to Washington promising “the most productive 100-day period in modern history,” he has stumbled so often and so badly in his first months that the public has begun to question his basic competence. Republicans in the Senate have killed his economic stimulus package. Moderate Democrats complain that the President has veered too far to the left. Gays, feminists and blacks accuse him of procrastinating and temporizing. And Time magazine has put a tiny photograph of Clinton on its cover, under huge block letters: “The Incredible Shrinking President.”

No President since World War II has faced such relentless and vitriolic criticism in the beginning of his term; his May approval rating had plunged below 40%, a record low at such an early stage.

Now, Clinton is at a turning point, ready to acknowledge how grim things are and how much he has to learn. The former Arkansas governor finally understands that what he and his senior aides do not know about Washington is killing them, and he has decided to shake up his staff and bring in a new, more experienced hand. His choice: David Richmond Gergen, a longtime confidant--and a Republican--whose principal job will be to show them all how Washington works.

Gergen, tall as a professional basketball player, with thinning blond hair, stands expressionless near the President. As the vice president, who normally leaves such chores to others, pecks out the announcement statement, camera crews begin setting up in the Rose Garden. A press conference has been hastily arranged for 7:30, a most unusual hour, because news of the appointment has leaked, spreading anguish and uncertainty among an already demoralized White House staff.

The 51-year-old Gergen brings with him the cachet of advising three Presidents: Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Ronald Reagan. Yet among those gathered here, there is no impulse to cheer his appointment. For almost everyone present--McLarty and his two deputies, Mark Gearan and Roy Neel, communications director George Stephanopoulos and press secretary Dee Dee Myers, it is a clear reflection of how ineptly the inexperienced White House team had operated. Their problems had begun with a little-known but colossal blunder in the transition team: Though it had studied the operations of every other major government agency, it assigned no one to study the workings of the White House. And unable to shift from campaign mode, it made staffing decisions with an eye to rewarding loyal campaign workers instead of considering the broader task of governing.

Failing to develop White House strategies “was an insane decision,” says a senior Clinton aide. “We knew more about FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and the Tuna Commission than we did about the White House. We arrived not knowing what was here, had never worked together, had never worked in these positions.”

Gergen’s assessment of the operations to date is blunt. A public-television commentator and an editor of U.S. News & World Report, he’d recently said that the Clinton presidency had gone from troubled to “perilous.”

Tap, tap, tap. Not until the word counselor pops onto the word processor’s screen do some who are looking over the vice president’s shoulders even know the title the President has decided to bestow on Gergen. It had been rumored that he would be named communications director, a title he held in the Reagan White House. But suddenly it is clear that he will have a much broader mandate.

Stephanopoulos, who after today will concentrate full-time on advising Clinton and turn the communications department over to Gearan and Gergen, looks devastated. At 32, he is the youngest member of the President’s innermost circle, and no one had been a more trusted adviser. Countless photographs from the New Hampshire primary to the Oval Office show him at Clinton’s side like a younger brother, his dark head leaning close to whisper a suggestion or advice. Yet the President had held the idea of the Gergen appointment so close that Stephanopoulos knew nothing about it until the decision had been made.

When McLarty had called Gergen a week earlier, the chief of staff had said the subject was so sensitive they needed to have a “graveyard conversation.” Clinton, he had said, was looking for someone “to be the nexus of policy, politics and communication,” a clear invitation to sit at the center of public policy and power. Gergen would have direct access to Clinton and would be entitled to attend any and all White House meetings. A “roving mandate,” which he had made a condition of accepting the post, would make him a dominant figure in the White House, far more important than he had ever been under Republicans.

The tapping on the word processor ends.

Gore and Begala print out a copy of the statement and give it to the President. Teeth clenched and jaw thrust forward, he scans the document. Minutes later in the Rose Garden, he smiles and puts on his best face as he announces that he has decided to go “beyond partisanship” to appoint a “moderate, pro-change, patriotic American” to serve the White House in an hour of need.

Maybe the timing of the appointment was fortuitous. Perhaps the President was already starting to absorb some lessons on his own. Whatever the case, Clinton’s fortunes soon began to rise.

A MONTH LATER, ON A SUNNY AFTERNOON IN LATE JUNE, CLINTON SITS down with us at a wrought-iron table on a small, shaded patio just outside the Oval Office. He leans back in a metal chair, his legs crossed and his face relaxed. There is no hint that only an hour earlier on the same patio, he had ordered a cruise missile attack against Baghdad, retaliation for Iraq’s attempt to assassinate former President Bush. Instead, Clinton talks calmly, sometimes philosophically, about the problems he has encountered, the setbacks he has suffered, and the continuing learning process and limitations of power of the presidency.

Perhaps more than any sitting President in recent history, he is candid and forthcoming about the mistakes he has made and determined not to repeat them. Most encouraging of all from the Administration’s point of view, Clinton does not seem disheartened by the pounding he has taken. Instead, he expresses the same doggedness that has repeatedly characterized his career: He’ll keep at it until he prevails or goes down trying.

“The primary difference between this and the job I had when I was governor,” he says, leaning over the table, “is that sometimes in this job I feel that I get behind the eight ball and I can’t get out from under it as quickly as possible. It’s not as easy to reach out directly to the people and cut through the cacophony of noise and rhetoric. Sure, the President can give an address to the nation, but you can only do that every so often. You can’t just abuse the networks or the privilege. And sure you can do press conferences, but it’s not quite the same.

“So there have been times when I’ve been surprised by my inability to shape the agenda on a daily basis or to shape the message that’s going out to the folks. And the only thing that ever has frustrated me is not so much whether I’m up or down in popularity--if people honestly disagree with something I’m doing but I think I have to do it anyway, that’s the democratic process, and I either will prevail in the end, or I won’t--but it’s always frustrating to feel that you’re misunderstood. That people have an impression of who you are, what you believe, or what you’re trying to do that is not quite accurate, and you can’t quite get through.”

As he speaks, Clinton, clad in a black pin-stripe suit, white shirt and burgundy tie with white polka dots, sometimes clasps his hands, fingers interlocked. At other times, listening or considering what to say, he closes his eyes and rests his chin lightly on the palm of his left hand. He listens intently to questions and sometimes pauses before answering them.

He knows that he has tried to push too many things through Congress at once. To clarify his message he realizes he must focus on only one major change at a time--which means, among other things, that action on health-care reform must be delayed until fall or even next year so he can concentrate on his budget-deficit package. As recently as last spring, he had rebuffed critics who said he was trying to do too many things at once, replying starchily that the country’s problems are so interconnected that he had to take on many of them at the same time.

Now, he says, “I think you can do more than one thing at once, but you can only have one big thing ripe for a decision to announce. We’ve done a phenomenal amount of work on health care, probably the most work that the United States government has ever done on health care in such a short time, ever. We’ve had hundreds of people working. But you can’t really ask the Congress to make it ripe for decision while they’re also trying to change the whole budgetary direction of the last 12 years. So I have learned that.

“I have also learned that you have to be very careful not to step on your own story, to have some other issue get in the way of the message,” he says, reflecting the influence of old hands like Gergen. “It’s hard to get more than one message a day across on the evening news to the American people.”

Clinton found the interplay between the presidency and the media especially baffling. In his first few months he had little contact with the White House press corps. He chafed at news leaks and tried to pinpoint their sources. Relations were so strained that veteran correspondents compared them to the “poisonous” relations that existed at the Nixon White House during the Watergate scandal.

“Nothing, no job in the world,” Clinton says, “can prepare a President for the fact that all of a sudden you’re presiding over some vast government where every day there are all these stories attributed anonymously to some White House official, which may or may not reflect your position, which may alter what you have to do that day.”

Nevertheless, he says, he has “learned a great deal that I didn’t know when I got here about how to manage that process and at least respond to it.” For one thing, he recently has established closer relations with the press corps, and he says he has taken “the advice of people who say I shouldn’t be like past Presidents and be paranoid about news leaks and try to chase them down, so I don’t.”

The President also claims a new appreciation of the importance of what he calls “process”--the way a President must operate if he is to succeed in today’s highly partisan atmosphere and in a constitutional system of checks and balances that divides power.

“I think that, if I can use a business analogy, my product jumped ahead of my process. That is, I think a lot of the mistakes I made early on in this office, which led to some not very favorable press, were legitimate mistakes, but they were more mistakes of process than product. I think if you started any vast enterprise like this and you really tried to push the substance of what you were doing--your product to market, if you will, in a hurry--your processes wouldn’t be quite worked out. Particularly if you were new in town. And I never worked in this town until Jan. 20.”

Only four Presidents since 1921 have entered the Oval Office without any Washington experience--Calvin Coolidge, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Now he ponders how much of a difference such experience might have made. “I think it would have helped in the sense that I would have had a little bit better sense of the interplay of the power centers around town and how to get started a little smoother,” Clinton says, leaning back and recrossing his legs. “And I think not having had that, I should have started a little more slowly and spent more time just in kind of interpersonal relationships with people than I did. But I was in a hurry to get started.”

Reflecting on his decision to bring in Gergen, he acknowledges that the way he staffed his Administration contributed not only to the lack of Washington savvy at the top but also to the widely held perception that his presidency has turned out to be more liberal than many who voted for him expected: “A few weeks ago, when we were having some troubles here and I was trying to assess what they were, I looked out over the Administration, and I basically reached the conclusion that there were two problems.

“One is that I had put together a seasoned, diverse and experienced Cabinet--I think one of the best Cabinets to serve this country in a very long time--but that most of my Washington experience had gone into the Cabinet. That is, you have (Treasury Secretary) Lloyd Bentsen, (budget director) Leon Panetta--I could go on and on--people with a lot of experience.

“And secondly, a lot of the people with whom I had been involved in the Democratic Leadership Council, or in creating a different, what we loosely call our new Democratic approach to politics, were also in the Cabinet. People like (Interior Secretary) Bruce Babbitt and (Education Secretary) Dick Riley.

“And as a result of that, and the skillful heightening by the opposition of media-sensitive issues like the gays in the military, the White House staff substantively had very little Washington experience, and image-wise was being sort of pushed to the left, or in sort of old Democratic traditions.”

It was McLarty’s idea to bring in Gergen, says Clinton, but “when he mentioned it to me, I was elated. I instantaneously felt good about it because he and I had become friends over the last several years. I knew a lot about how he thought and how he felt and what kind of person he was and what his values were.” Gergen, the President says, “was, like me, a person who wanted to break out of this partisan gridlock debate that we have seen sort of polarizing the country over the last few years.”

If Clinton’s own staffing mistakes left him vulnerable, he nonetheless seemed stunned by the speed and vehemence of the Republican attack that killed his economic stimulus package and handed him a highly visible defeat almost at the outset of his presidency. Although he rarely becomes defensive or blames others for his problems, on this subject his words carry the injured tone of a righteous leader ill-used by selfish partisans.

“There was less of a honeymoon here than I had anticipated. I was genuinely surprised when the Republican senators attempted to filibuster--and did successfully filibuster--the emergency jobs bill. And it was so early in my term, and what I recommended was rather similar to what the Congress had done and President Reagan had done in ‘83, and the Democrats had gone along with it. I was surprised by that, and the sort of real partisan nature of the rhetoric.”

One other subject clearly gets under the presidential skin: the Time magazine cover of “The Incredible Shrinking President.” Clinton bristles at a reference to it, thrusting his jaw forward as he speaks.

“You want to know what I really thought?” he asks, leaning forward aggressively. “I thought the same thing I did when Time magazine ran that negative of me.” This is a reference to an April 20, 1992, Time cover headlined “Why Voters Don’t Trust Clinton” that used a negative instead of a regular photograph of Clinton, making him appear dark and ghostly. “Some people thought that was pretty outrageous. I thought they were being--if you want to know what I really thought--I thought they were being superficial and momentary and that it didn’t do the country much good for them to make that judgment when, if you totaled up what we had accomplished during the time I had been President, as opposed to how many bad news stories I had, what we’d actually accomplished--and you put that by what has been accomplished in the exact same time period by the previous five or six Presidents, it would look pretty good. So (a) I didn’t believe it, and (b) I didn’t think it was too good for the country.

“I remember when they had another one of those covers and tried to nail me down. Somehow that makes them feel good, but it’s not going to deter me. I’m just going to get up and go to work every day.”

In difficult times, the President says, he has sustained himself by thinking back on his life and “my observation of my mother’s life--she had a very tough time, being widowed three times--and my reading of history.

“If you read the life of Churchill, the life of Lincoln, if you’ve studied the life of the United States--this old house was burned in 1814,” he says in a kind of historical aside, pointing up at the wall of the White House, “the lesson is, the important thing is, to figure out what you believe and try to bring your actions into harmony with your convictions, and stay at it and be grateful for every day you have, and know that there are going to be some down days and up days, and know that you’re also going to make some mistakes. You just are. And the more you try to do, the more likely you are to err from time to time.

“But my feeling is always--I just sort of keep going. I mean, in that campaign, I just sort of kept going. I figured, you know, if the voters wanted to take me out, they had the perfect right to do it at any step along the way. And otherwise, I thought I had something to contribute and something to do, and I just kept on doing it. That’s the way I’m going to do this job.”

The voters, says Clinton, indicating he is already thinking ahead to the 1996 election, “gave me a contract, and I’m going to fulfill it to the best of my ability, and then they can make their judgments.”

Citing all the “outside pressure” exerted on the President by the press, the ever-changing polls, the special interest groups and the fissures in his own party, he adds, “If you define yourself from the outside in, instead of from the inside out, you’ll just be eaten alive in no time. And you can’t do anybody any good that way. You just have to get up every day and do the very best you can.”

NOT EVEN JOHN F. KENNEDY HAD ENTERED THE WHITE HOUSE ON SUCH A wave of hope. Clinton’s bus caravan to Washington for the Inauguration, with its evocative stops at Monticello and a small church in the Virginia countryside, had produced shimmering images on the nightly news. Both the Inaugural Address and his economic message to Congress had been clarion calls for change, well-received by a public profoundly concerned about the condition of the economy and the uncertainty of the future in a post-Cold War world.

Yet the aura of optimism that surrounded Clinton’s arrival, the sense of great deeds only waiting for bold leaders to do them, was largely an illusion. While the voters are concerned, they also are divided on exactly where the problems lie and even more on the solutions. And they remain skeptical of their government’s ability to make good on its promises. Moreover, unlike Reagan, with his politically palatable first-year program of cutting taxes and pumping up the economy with massive defense spending, Clinton has prescribed political castor oil: higher taxes, cutbacks in government services, a massive restructuring of the health-care system and long-term investment in future productivity--ideas that might win praise from experts but offer little immediate reward to voters.

To push all this through Congress, Clinton needed support from a Democratic Party that was itself divided and, in its heart, not unanimously enthusiastic about its new leader. The Republicans were momentarily stunned but far from dead, and they knew Clinton had at least two chinks in his armor: a fragile majority in the Senate and a satchel full of campaign promises, such as lifting the ban on gays in the military, that would antagonize many voters who had supported Clinton mainly because of the economy.

Then there is the problem no other President has faced: billionaire Ross Perot bouncing around the country bashing him at every opportunity and spending millions to build a grass-roots organization that largely opposes the President’s policies.

Further complicating the scenario is generational change--relished by some Americans as long overdue but looked upon by others with misgiving. At 46, Clinton is the first baby boomer to enter the White House, part of a generation molded not by the Great Depression and World War II but by the Great Society, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, the sexual revolution and feminism. Clinton’s boundless promises to voters were about what one might have expected of a highly educated, activist member of his generation. On the other side of the generational divide, however, were millions of older and less liberal Americans who wanted Clinton to fix the economy, solve the health- care crisis without disturbing their traditional relationships with their doctors and, for the rest, proceed with great circumspection, if at all.

Such deep divisions seem certain to slow and frustrate even the most powerful President, yet, all things considered, Clinton can boast of a number of accomplishments in the first six months of his tenure. By executive order, he lifted the abortion-counseling ban and ended the import restrictions on the French “morning-after pill,” RU-486. He also authorized resumption of fetal-tissue research, with its promise of dramatic help for those with diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and other afflictions.

In record time, Congress passed his budget-ceiling legislation, putting the federal government on the path of serious deficit reduction. He chalked up legislative victories on the family leave and “motor voter” bills, initiatives designed to help workers cope with serious illnesses in their families and to make it easier to register to vote--both of which previous Republican administrations had managed to stymie. In fact, despite all the complaints about White House incompetence, Congressional Quarterly’s “presidential success” study published Memorial Day weekend found that the President’s position had prevailed in the House 96% of the time and in the Senate 87%.

By the Fourth of July, both the House and Senate had approved versions of Clinton’s budget plan for cutting the deficit by about $500 billion over the next five years. Passed by the narrowest of margins in each chamber, it was substantially different from Clinton’s original blueprint. And bruising battles remained to be fought over the differences between the House and Senate bills. Nonetheless, Clinton had taken a significant step toward curbing the ruinous growth of the federal deficit, something none of his modern-day predecessors had done.

Moreover, it was clear the President had moved past earlier mistakes. Unlike his first two disastrous attorney general nominations, his nominee for Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was met with general acclaim. He began reaching out to Republicans, whom he had ignored only to watch in dismay as they unified behind Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole and filibustered his economic stimulus package to death.

Clinton turned to veteran Washington insiders he had previously avoided, seeking their help in building bridges to the opposition. To make peace with Dole, for example, he contacted the ubiquitous Texas powerbroker Robert S. Strauss, a Democrat who has served both Republican and Democratic Presidents--and one of the minority leader’s longtime friends. One evening last month the Clintons, the Strausses and Doles had a private dinner at Duke Zeibert’s, a legendary meeting place for Washington politicians. Strauss carefully orchestrated the affair for maximum media attention, making sure that veteran journalists and even a “60 Minutes” crew from CBS were on hand to witness Clinton’s rapprochement with his nemesis. There was an undercurrent of wariness in the meeting--Dole had given full rein to his waspish tongue in killing the economic stimulus package, and Clinton knew a dinner would hardly turn the GOP leader into an ally. But it served the purpose of demonstrating that the President was ready to deal with Republicans.

Indeed, when Clinton’s budget plan hung in the balance in June, he and his aides compromised in the blink of an eye to get the necessary Senate votes, concentrating on the essential commitment to deficit reduction instead of on details of how to achieve it. Whatever was given up in the Senate they could try to retrieve in the House-Senate conference committee, they reasoned, whereas nothing could compensate for an outright defeat on the Senate floor.

Clearly, they’d learned from their failed handling of the stimulus package in the Senate last winter, when Clinton rejected overtures from moderate Republicans and left the deal making in the hands of highly partisan Finance Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, who assured the White House there was no need to court Republicans at all.

White House aides also say they have improved their system of providing political intelligence to head off the kind of early miscues that led to the sacking of the White House travel office and Clinton’s ill-fated choice of Zoe Baird and then Kimba Wood to be attorney general, appointments Clinton abandoned after he learned they’d failed to make Social Security payments for domestic help.

Even thorough vetting, though, can’t eliminate confirmation problems. Hearings on Dr. Joycelyn Elders, Clinton’s choice for surgeon general, were delayed after questions were raised about her membership on the board of an Arkansas bank and her collection of both state and federal paychecks. Clinton says the process has become so onerous that “I’m amazed that some people would even allow their names to be put forward anymore.”

“The travel office thing was just dumb,” says one close adviser to the President, referring to the staff’s dismissal for alleged mismanagement and possible wrongdoing. The White House had to beat an embarrassed retreat when it was disclosed that a youthful Clinton relative was maneuvering to take over the operation, and that Arkansas crony and Hollywood producer Harry Thomason had complained that people he knew felt shut out because the office wasn’t giving them a share of its airline-charter contracts. “When you hear they sacked the travel office, and Little Rock and a 25-year-old cousin are involved, somebody’s going to get screwed,” says the Clinton adviser. “These were glaring alarm signals.”

Realizing that political intelligence and strategy require manpower, Clinton is reconsidering an early pledge to slash the White House staff by 25%, an effort that has left some White House offices seriously understaffed. Already there has been a 15% cut, and a senior aide says, “We now have to see how we can get to 25% by Oct. 1, but there’s a growing sense we can’t do it. We’re already having to rehire in some places.”

NOTHING BETTER REVEALED THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS CLINTON HAS been attending than the case of C. Lani Guinier, the prominent black lawyer and legal scholar he nominated to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division. The President had formally submitted her name to the Senate in April, but overwhelming opposition had developed as foes, combing through law-review articles she had written, charged that she was an extremist who wanted to set aside majority rule to give more political power to blacks. Clinton had two choices: He could withdraw the nomination, or he could let her go before the Senate Judiciary Committee and make a fight of it. Pressure from both sides was intense. The question was also agonizingly personal--he and his wife, Hillary, had been friends with Guinier since their days at Yale Law School in the 1970s.

In its origins, the Guinier episode seemed to embody all that was wrong with Clinton’s early White House operations. In its resolution, the case suggested that the remedies adopted in early summer were beginning to take effect.

On June 3, with the Senate Judiciary Committee preparing to begin hearings and Clinton still struggling with the question of what to do, Gore urged the President to read some of Guinier’s law review articles and make up his mind quickly. Clinton worked his way through a sheaf of the articles later that day, then called a meeting in the Oval Office. Gore, McLarty, Gearan, Gergen, congressional liaison Howard Pastor and deputy communications director Ricki Seidman attended, along with three blacks: Vernon Jordan, a Washington lawyer and longtime friend of the Clintons; Alexis Herman, White House director of public liaison, and Margaret A. Williams, the First Lady’s chief of staff.

Clinton indicated from the outset that he had pretty well made up his mind: “Let me tell you how I feel about this before you start giving me any advice,” several advisers recall him saying. “Had I read what she wrote earlier, I wouldn’t have nominated her myself.”

Still, there was a spirited discussion. Some advisers urged him to withdraw the nomination and argued that fighting a losing battle over Guinier would almost certainly hurt chances to win passage of the deficit-reduction package. Others argued that Guinier deserved a chance to explain her views before the Judiciary Committee. To abandon her without a fight, they said, would offend blacks, liberals, civil rights leaders and some women.

Finally, Jordan--described by a senior aide as “golden to Bill Clinton” in this instance because he could make the case for dropping the nomination without being accused of bias--decided it was time to move. “Mr. President,” he said, calling up an old figure of speech to underline the urgency of making a decision: “It’s two minutes to midnight. We can’t delay.”

Stephanopoulos and Gergen both agreed an immediate decision was necessary.

“Does anyone disagree?” Clinton asked.

No one did.

While the President prepared to meet Guinier in the Oval Office and explain his decision, the First Lady began greeting dinner guests for a 7:30 reception on the Truman balcony. Washington was rampant with rumors. The chatter among the three dozen guests--mostly journalists, business executives and government officials--was dominated by the Guinier matter and other problems that had plagued the President. As guests mingled and enjoyed cocktails on the balcony, Hillary Clinton, smiling and unruffled, remarked that “Washington has a very sharp learning curve.” But she reminded several visitors that the presidency “is a marathon, not a sprint.”

About 9:15, just before tuxedoed waiters began serving the beef Wellington in the Green Room, Clinton walked in, obviously dejected. For an hour and a half, Guinier had argued that she should at least be given the chance to argue her case before the Senate committee and said her views had been “scurrilously misrepresented by the press.”

Deciding not to back her, Clinton told his guests, “was the hardest thing I ever had to do. It broke my heart to do it.”

In the final analysis, though, Clinton had cut his political losses by quickly ending a seething controversy that had threatened to siphon energy from work on his budget package.

Reflecting on the matter later, Clinton said the White House should have had an “early warning operation” to review Guinier’s articles so he could have resolved the issue before it became a political embarrassment. “I think that was one of those things that could be a product of having relative lack of experience here. We had 1,000 things going, we had a lot of appointments up there, we had all this economic program going, and I think our office just missed that for too long.”

Actually, the controversial parts of Guinier’s writings had been flagged by a White House lawyer, but the President had not been alerted, which underscored another weakness: the reluctance of inexperienced staffers to present bad news, especially if it involved people close to the Clintons. “Some of his friends knew there was a problem,” says one adviser, “but didn’t want to tell him because Lani was friends with both Bill and Hillary.”

Aides who shy away from telling a President bad news are not unique to the Clinton White House, of course. But in his first six months, Clinton has also sorely missed getting regular advice from the one person who doesn’t mind bringing bad news and whom the President has counted on throughout his career, the adviser he has said he would rather depend on than anyone else in reaching a crucial decision--his wife. She has been preoccupied with running the President’s health-care task force, and while she continues to be a broad-based adviser whenever the opportunity arises, he seldom gets a chance to talk to her except when they are alone at night.

“We normally lay up in bed and read for about an hour,” he says, “but this health-care thing has become so consuming for her, she really hasn’t had a lot of time to help me on anything else.”

The President misses her political antennae, what he calls her “very good judgment, a very good sense of unease; I mean, she knows when there’s a little gap there in the decision; she’ll feel it.”

Without the First Lady’s steadying hand, the President has been notoriously late in keeping appointments, even for bipartisan congressional leadership meetings, and has often been slow to make policy decisions and appointments: More than half of the top 400 positions are still unstaffed. “She has always pushed him to make timely decisions,” says a senior Clinton adviser and longtime friend of both. “She would say, ‘Bill, we’ve discussed this long enough, we’ve got to act.’ ”

PRESIDENTIAL SCHOLARS who have watched Clinton’s roller-coaster ride with intense interest say that for all his early problems, they are not surprised that he seems to be absorbing the lessons of his first six months and getting his presidency back on track.

“Clinton is a results guy who really focuses on making things happen rather than on just his own immediate feelings, whether he’s loved or hated, whether he’s up or down,” says James David Barber, political science professor at Duke University and author of “The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House.” Barber, who has studied Clinton’s career, points to his “tough early life” and says, “He could have been a Richard Nixon and become angry at the world, but that didn’t happen because he’s interested in results. And when he gets troubled, he doesn’t give up; he knows that in the end, it’s results the people are interested in, too.”

Professor Fred I. Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton University, says that Clinton “already has changed the face of American politics in his determination to do more difficult and demanding things,” such as reducing the federal budget deficit and reforming health care. “The President is enormously intelligent, has an unusual grasp of at least the external aspects of policies and has a quite extraordinary grasp of trends and technical aspects,” Greenstein says.

But concern persists that the White House staff is still too inexperienced for the battles that lie ahead. Greenstein calls Gergen “a great choice” but says Clinton needs a still-stronger staff and a greater willingness to delegate. Richard P. Nathan, a Republican and onetime Nixon budget adviser but also a Clinton supporter, believes a better management system is “more and more critical to the success of this Administration.”

Shoring up his team can only help combat the feeling, widespread in Washington before Gergen’s appointment, that a blundering Clinton couldn’t wield power effectively because he couldn’t instill fear in his opponents.

The President himself, mixing unusual candor about the shortcomings in his early performance with the buoyant confidence about the future that has long sustained him, says, “My instinct is that I’ll learn all this; I’ll get better at all of this.”

His hopes for the future are that “we can give the American people the sense that their government is working for them again and that we can show some momentum in the economy and in dealing with some of the discrete problems that people have, like health care.”

Can Washington be effectively governed, given today’s complex problems and bitter partisanship? The President says his concern is that “the gridlock and the rigor of making change, which is always difficult, will slow down or maul” the process of government.

“The other concern I have,” he says, “is just that there are always events beyond your control which may divert the capacity of the government to succeed. I’m very concerned about the economic recession in Europe and how slow it is in Japan. I’m very concerned about rising elements of political instability in the world and what they could do to affect the energies and directions of this Administration.”

In early July, Clinton carried these concerns to the annual seven-nation Economic Summit in Tokyo. His only other appearance on the world stage had been a productive summit in Vancouver with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin. But supporters as well as critics had questioned whether he might be a weak leader who would stumble in dealing with more experienced heads of state in Tokyo.

Instead, Clinton pulled off one of the most sure-footed performances of any American President in the 18-year history of the summits. With Gergen as his chief adviser and the White House staff finally functioning relatively smoothly, the President dominated the summit in style and substance, including the discussions that led to a breakthrough in long-stalled international trade negotiations and a $3-billion aid package for Russia. While reaching a framework agreement for trade talks with Japan, he also managed to keep the summit’s attention focused on a domestic theme atop his political agenda: creating jobs. It was a classic example of how effective Gergen’s one-note style can be.

While it is too early for a definitive assessment of his foreign policy, Vancouver and Tokyo went a long way toward dispelling the notion, raised in his timorous dealings with the Bosnian conflict, that he will be weak in dealing with other countries. On the foreign scene, as on the domestic, he is emerging as a President intent on getting things done--and reconciling himself to the weight of his office.

At the same time, Clinton has appeared indecisive by agonizing for long periods before resolving especially difficult issues. Not until July 19 did he finally act on two issues that had been pending since his inauguration: liberalizing the rule on gays serving in the military and dismissing embattled FBI Director Williams S. Sessions.

“Many Presidents have observed that the easy decisions are made by somebody else,” says Clinton, spreading his hands wide and smiling ruefully. “It’s only the really difficult ones or the really big ones that kind of make their way to the Oval Office. And I do think sometimes about, well, you know, if Lincoln were here, what would he do? If Roosevelt were here, what would he do? The ones--how would Truman handle this?

“I also think about how I can put it down,” he says. “Truman was great at putting his decisions down. There are a lot of calls you make, some of them with very significant consequences, which are pretty close to 50/50. When I make a tough decision, I always have to think about--what do I think the right thing to do is? What’s the worst thing that can happen if I do this? What’s the best thing that can happen? What are the consequences of inaction or taking another course?

“And then you just have to make the call the best you can and put it down and leave it to others to evaluate it.”