COLUMN ONE : De Klerk’s Tightrope in S. Africa : He talks of a new political order. But blacks and whites alike wonder whether he has the skill and the will to end apartheid.

The orange and white South African Airways jetliner, door open and engines idling at Jan Smuts International Airport, was chockablock full, except for one front-row seat, when the loudspeaker crackled to life.

The captain announced a half-hour delay in departing for Cape Town. Passengers grimaced and looked at their watches. Thirty minutes passed and the captain was back at the mike, announcing another half-hour delay.

By now, most of the 260 passengers were in a thoroughly bad mood. And what they saw outside the plane a few minutes later did not make them any happier.

A Mercedes-Benz with government plates sped across the tarmac and screeched to a stop beside the plane. A balding man in a dark suit leaped out of the back seat and bounded up the gangway stairs, briefcase swinging.

The door closed behind him, and the jet eased back from the gate. The man, a Cabinet minister and one of the most powerful men in South Africa’s white government, dropped the briefcase on his seat and, still standing, faced the irate passengers.

“I’m sorry, folks,” said Frederik W. de Klerk, flashing a repentant smile. “This was all my fault.” Then he walked back to the coach section and repeated the apology loudly enough to reach the back row.

The tight lips of his antagonists melted into smiles of amazement.

That’s how De Klerk, now the president of South Africa, disarms his adversaries. By meeting them halfway. By admitting his mistakes. And by being a nice guy. After 11 years of Pieter W. Botha’s imperial presidency and finger-wagging diatribes, De Klerk’s fresh style has raised hopes worldwide that South Africa is on the verge of reconciliation.

But barriers to peace jut from the nation’s picturesque landscape. And many blacks as well as whites are wondering: Does Frederik Willem de Klerk have the skill--and the will--to bring an end to 41 years of apartheid and white minority rule?

Slightly more than 100 days into his term, the 53-year-old president already has begun what he calls “the irreversible process” of replacing apartheid with a new political order for South Africa’s 26 million blacks and 5 million whites, as well as Asians and others.

He has freed eight high-profile political prisoners, allowed dozens of protest marches through city streets, thrown open beaches to all races, declared the first legally integrated neighborhoods, chipped away at the monolithic power of the security police, cut the military budget and shared tea with some of his chief critics from the left and the right.

De Klerk says those moves are invitations to black leaders to join his white-led government in negotiating a new constitution that will have whites sharing power with blacks for the first time in South African history.

But many black leaders are skeptical of the peace offering. They like what De Klerk is saying and have even drawn up their own strategies for negotiations. But they remain unpersuaded of his sincerity, contending that his actions thus far have been superficial.

Even though De Klerk has stopped enforcing many of his government’s most repressive laws, those laws remain, just in case. He has refused to lift the 3 1/3-year-old emergency decree that gives police broad powers to suspend civil rights and crack down on political dissent.

Black activists suspect that De Klerk’s “new South Africa” would maintain a large degree of white control. The president says he will give blacks the vote, for example, but he opposes majority rule on the grounds that it could lead to “black domination” of the white minority.

Most black South Africans, from radical guerrillas to moderates on friendly terms with the government, refuse to begin talks with De Klerk until he frees Nelson R. Mandela, 71, a leader of the outlawed African National Congress who has served 27 years of a life prison term. De Klerk recently met Mandela, though, and further talks are expected this month.

Government sources say Mandela’s release is likely near the opening of Parliament on Feb. 1, when De Klerk plans a major speech outlining his reform plans.

Even after Mandela is released, De Klerk still will face obstacles to talks from both the left and the right. Black activists demand, as a non-negotiable first step, that the government formally repeal all laws restricting anti-apartheid activity. And right-wing whites, increasingly concerned that De Klerk is selling them out, are becoming more militant and alienated from the government.

Surprise for Tutu

What continues to baffle both right and left is the new president himself.

Shortly after his inauguration, De Klerk surprised Anglican Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu by readily agreeing to the black clergyman’s demand for an urgent meeting. Tutu and two other anti-apartheid church leaders were even more surprised when the scheduled half-hour encounter ran to 3 1/2 hours.

At the meeting, the pastors presented a list of pre-negotiation demands and De Klerk sketched his hopes for the future. The two sides didn’t agree on much. But Tutu, the 1984 Nobel peace laureate, came away impressed nevertheless.

“He’s certainly a totally different kettle of fish from his predecessor,” Tutu said in an interview, comparing De Klerk to Pieter W. Botha. “He smiles more, he listens and at least you can engage in a discussion with him. But he hasn’t convinced me yet that he’s got the kind of courage that he needs.”

A few weeks later, leaders of the far-right Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) and Boer Freedom Movement demanded and got their own meeting with De Klerk. The bombastic, khaki-clad AWB leader and his delegation sat around a horseshoe-shaped table for a philosophical debate with the president on the future of their shared heritage as Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch, German and French settlers in South Africa.

The rightists made their case for an exclusive white state, a plan that De Klerk said is unrealistic and unworkable. And the president risked the wrath of conservative whites as no leader before him by telling his visitors that he doubted that they “represent a substantial number of people.”

Robert van Tonder, leader of the Boer Freedom Movement, said he had to admit “we were well-received. The president listened to us. He listened.”

Despite 17 years in politics and 11 years in the Cabinet of two South African leaders, De Klerk was virtually unknown when he was selected by a National Party caucus to replace President Botha as party chief last February. The book on De Klerk was that he sat in the party’s conservative wing--”a good and solid little racist,” in the words of a college classmate. But the political bookmakers were stunned when De Klerk quickly promised dramatic reform as the only peaceful solution to South Africa’s future.

“He’s not a political philosopher but a pragmatist,” says the president’s older brother, Willem, 61, an adviser to the liberal Democratic Party. “So if the people are changing and the situation is changing, he’ll register that.”

Cradle of Privilege

Frederik W. de Klerk grew up in the cradle of white privilege on a farm a dozen miles west of Johannesburg, scion of an Afrikaner family that had first settled in South Africa in the 17th Century. Politics was more than dinner-table conversation in his parents’ household. It was part of the family album. De Klerk’s great-grandfather had been a senator, and grandfathers on both sides of the family had run for office.

De Klerk’s father, Jan, quit a career as a history teacher and school principal to take a job with the then-fledgling National Party in the 1940s. F. W., as he has been called all his life (pronounced EV-ee-ah in Afrikaans), eagerly joined his father on the hustings.

F. W. was 12 when the National Party came to power and he stayed up long past midnight to keep track of the returns.

“His love, even in his youngest days, was politics,” remembers brother Willem, now a journalism professor in Johannesburg. “Everyone always said: ‘Watch this little man. He’ll become a politician one day.’ ”

While F. W. was in high school, the National Party, citing Scripture as its moral support, set out to engineer a new society by pushing laws through the whites-only Parliament to legalize racial discrimination on the southern tip of Africa.

A Population Registration Act classified all South Africans by race--white, Colored (mixed-race), Indian and African. A Group Areas Act created segregated neighborhoods, and the homes of dark-skinned people were bulldozed from land coveted by whites. A Separate Amenities Act segregated everything from movie theaters and restaurants to buses and public restrooms. And a host of other laws created separate and usually unequal schools, hospitals and even prison wards.

A new South Africa had dawned, and the De Klerk family was helping guide it. F. W.’s uncle, J. G. (Hans) Strijdom, became the party’s second prime minister and F. W.’s father joined the Cabinet, beginning a 22-year career at the center of National Party rule.

The young De Klerk studied law at Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, a small, all-white campus on a prairie plateau about 90 miles southwest of Johannesburg. He was vice chairman of the Student Representative Council, editor of the campus newspaper and a co-founder of the campus chapter of the secret Afrikaner society, the Broederbond.

At the time, violent racial conflict was just beginning. Nelson Mandela was leading blacks in a “defiance campaign” to protest segregation and the hated pass laws, which restricted the movement of blacks.

De Klerk’s classmates remember him as a young man given to long discussions about the future of South Africa. In one late-night bull session, De Klerk and his student friends were discussing the importance of using apartheid, which the government of the day preferred to call “separate development,” to maintain their Afrikaner heritage.

Tjaart van der Walt, F. W.’s roommate, remembers suggesting that his fellow scholars were “looking at the future too much through the eyes of the Afrikaner. We shouldn’t take it for granted that the Zulus and the Xhosas (the two primary black tribes) would want separate development. They should be given the option.”

The young F. W. was impressed by Van der Walt’s argument.

“He thought about it for days afterward,” says Van der Walt, now chairman of the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria. “He kept saying that he couldn’t understand why he had been so preoccupied with our own Afrikaner people. He knew then that one could only receive God’s blessing if the system is just and accommodates everybody.”

F. W. de Klerk met business student Marike Willemse one night when he and four college friends held the bumper of her date’s run-down car, causing it to stall. In apology, the young men presented Marike with a box of chocolates. Later that night, De Klerk told his roommates: “I’ve met the woman I’m going to marry.”

“When he starts moving, he really moves fast,” says Ignatius Vorster, a longtime friend and now a law professor at Potchefstroom. “He’s never been someone who lingers on things.”

De Klerk recalled those days recently when asked why he has refused to offer a specific timetable for a new constitution for South Africa.

“When I first saw (Marike), I was convinced that I was going to marry her,” De Klerk told a foreign correspondents’ banquet. “I would have preferred to marry her in three months . . . but it took longer to convince her. That’s the way it is with negotiations.”

De Klerk prevailed in Marike’s case, and after he graduated cum laude the couple moved to Vereeniging, an industrial town 40 miles south of Johannesburg. De Klerk set up a law practice, specializing in commercial law, and Marike began raising their family.

Only a few months before the De Klerks arrived in Vereeniging, police had opened fire on a black crowd protesting the pass laws in the nearby township of Sharpeville. Sixty-nine people died, including eight women and 10 children, most shot in the back.

Like most Afrikaners in those days, De Klerk’s contact with blacks was limited to the household maid and gardener. However, his law firm was one of the few that accepted black clients, and former colleagues remember that De Klerk won praise from one black businessman who brought all his legal work to De Klerk.

“He never had an enemy in Vereeniging. Political opponents, yes. Enemies, no,” says Hennie Vermaak, who now runs the firm that bears De Klerk’s name.

De Klerk took his first leap into politics in 1972, winning the Vereeniging seat in the white Parliament. Six years later he was tapped to join the cabinet of Prime Minister B. J. Vorster.

“He was never that remarkable a guy,” says Emil Boshoff, De Klerk’s first law partner. “Sometimes a guy has a tremendous intellect and you can’t miss it. Or he’s a terrific speaker. But F. W. never had any tremendous quality. He was just well-rounded.”

De Klerk says his legal background “gave me an appreciation of open-mindedness and level-headedness, and taught me the value of considering all the options before coming to a decision.”

Friends often describe him as nutger-- “sober-minded” in Afrikaans, the first language of De Klerk and the other 3 million Afrikaners.

Homburgs Are Out

Soon after his election as president, De Klerk quietly did away with the ceremonial presidential guard and also, to the relief of most of his Cabinet, the homburg hats that for years had been de rigueur for the nation’s most powerful men.

“I find all the pomp and show of this job very cumbersome,” De Klerk said in answer to written questions from The Times.

As president, he has given more than 30 speeches, writing each in longhand, faced seven press conferences and traveled to three African countries to meet black heads of state. His press office fields more than a dozen calls from foreign correspondents every day.

The president relaxes by reading American Westerns--Louis L’Amour is a favorite--listening to classical music or jazz, and watching the weekly episodes of “L.A. Law” on state-run television. He also likes to hunt and play golf--he has a 19 handicap--and he loves cars, always buying the latest luxury model. While a Cabinet minister, he would sometimes order his chauffeur into the passenger seat and drive himself, pressing the accelerator to the floor and leaving his bodyguards behind.

Time and again, friends describe F. W. de Klerk as an “ordinary Afrikaner,” and they mean it as a compliment.

His favorite meal is a traditional braai, or barbecue. He likes to turn the grilling meat himself while sipping a White Horse whiskey and soda and talking sports and politics with friends. He’s the life of the party, happily telling stories until the early hours of the morning.

De Klerk often answers his own phone and surprises friends by remembering stories they told him years before. He’s slow to anger and jokes easily, often about himself.

Having failed many attempts to kick a cigarette habit, he goes through a pack and a half of filtered cigarettes a day and implores news photographers: “Not while I’m smoking.”

“He’s not too good to be true,” says friend Pieter Aucamp, chief librarian at Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg. “He’s only a human being. But a very solid one.”

The De Klerks take their summer vacations in a modest three-bedroom home on the Cape coast. Their eldest son, Jan, 26, is a farmer, while Willem, 22, and Susan, 20, are college students in the Cape.

Family and religion have always been important influences on De Klerk’s life.

De Klerk called his pastor, Pieter Bingle, one Friday afternoon in September to ask for advice on the timing of his Cabinet appointments.

“I’m planning to announce them this weekend,” De Klerk said. But, he asked, would it be wrong for the announcement to appear in newspapers on the holiest day of the week?

“I don’t think it will be a problem,” Bingle said. “It’s best to go quickly with it, to prevent speculation.”

De Klerk is the first president in South African history from the Gereformeerde Kerk, or Reformed Church, the smallest Afrikaner church in South Africa.

The Reformed Church, whose 200,000 members are called “Doppers,” once was part of the 3.5-million-member Dutch Reformed Church, the house of worship of so many presidents and Cabinet ministers that it is often called the National Party at prayer. The two churches split more than a century ago when the Doppers objected to singing secular hymns, arguing that only lyrics from the Scriptures were appropriate for the house of the Lord.

Doppers are theologically conservative but politically liberal. They formally declared that apartheid is a sin and has no basis in the Bible two decades before the larger Dutch Reformed Church first admitted that apartheid is a “mistake.”

President de Klerk sought his pastor’s advice again before Christmas, asking for a verse of Scripture for his greeting cards. Among De Klerk’s favorites was a verse from Proverbs: “For lack of guidance a nation falls, but many advisers make victory sure.”

In his work and his personal life, De Klerk makes no decisions without polling his advisers.

“When you talk to him, he listens and smiles,” says Willem De Klerk, who has sharp disagreements with his brother on matters of public policy. “He sometimes says, ‘I want to play devil’s advocate here. What about this?’ He’ll hear you out but he’s very reluctant to commit himself until he’s had time to play with the arguments.”

What amazes De Klerk’s Cabinet members, most of whom served under the autocratic President Botha, is the new president’s willingness to change his mind. Botha’s temper and iron-fisted rule were legendary. Often called the Great Crocodile, he had been known to reduce Cabinet ministers to tears with his vicious harangues.

While the Botha Cabinet was an instrument for carrying out the presidential will, De Klerk’s 17-member Cabinet helps determine the presidential will. The weekly secret sessions are free-ranging and relaxed, with De Klerk often addressing his ministers as “colleague.”

“We all get a fair hearing,” says Finance Minister Barend du Plessis.

Neat Labels Not Found

Political analysts have tried without success to place a neat label on the president’s ideology. As education minister, De Klerk threatened to close the country’s universities in 1987 for allowing anti-apartheid protests. He also tried to keep right-wing whites in the party during a split in 1982 by promising that the government would never abandon “own affairs,” the government’s phrase for racial segregation.

But De Klerk now says he is no longer bound to rigid, racially defined groups as a basis for a new constitution.

Why did De Klerk change his mind?

The answer seems to lie in the changing attitudes of his white electorate. Years of wearing isolation, damaging sanctions and a deteriorating standard of living have brought many whites to the conclusion that compromise is the only alternative to chaos and revolution.

“It’s a whole party that’s changed,” says Hennie Vermaak, De Klerk’s former law partner.

The number of whites opposed to integrated neighborhoods, for example, has fallen from 72% in 1982 to 55% this year, according to private surveys. Attitudes toward segregated hospitals and schools show similar trends.

De Klerk saw those changes as Botha took the first steps toward apartheid reform in the early 1980s. And when the National Party and the more liberal Democratic Party together polled 75% of the white vote last September, De Klerk saw it as a clear mandate for change.

Andre Brink, author of the anti-apartheid novel “A Dry White Season” and a college classmate of De Klerk, says the president “isn’t conditioned like other politicians to a certain ideology. That makes it easier to adapt. The basic thing is he wants to be popular. He wants people to like him.”

The perception of De Klerk as a conservative has helped him “to take actions that would be unthinkable, almost unacceptable from somebody with a slightly more liberal hue,” Tutu says.

But not everyone has followed the De Klerk lead gladly.

“If I could give in to my very basic instincts, I’d like whites to remain in charge forever,” admits one of De Klerk’s friends. “But it can’t work that way. F. W. will do what’s right, and if he has to step on a few toes, it will happen.”

More than a few toes may be crushed. Many of the 750,000 Conservative Party supporters and right-leaning members of his own party fear that De Klerk’s reforms will result in black majority rule and the death of Afrikaner culture.

“There will be those who will be frightened,” De Klerk conceded in an October speech in the conservative heartland town of Bloemfontein. “But you have to understand that there are no other alternatives that work.”

Radical black leaders believe any reforms that De Klerk initiates will be the result of outside pressure, and they have refused to call off the sanctions campaign or their guerrilla war until they see concrete change.

“He’s a politician, and the business of politics is to gain power and hold onto it as long as possible without making too many concessions,” Tutu says. “That’s why he will only go as far as is absolutely necessary.”

Yet De Klerk, whose skill has always been the art of persuading people to talk to each other, may be South Africa’s last hope for a peaceful future.

“I’m talking as a friend now,” Ignatius Vorster says, “but if F. W. can’t pull it through, nobody will.”