COLUMN ONE : Guiding Careers in the Capital : Washington’s mentor system has helped many young aides advance. But the Thomas-Hill episode may make powerful men more wary, especially of sponsoring women.

Margaret Tutwiler used to drive George Bush to work. Now she arguably is the second most powerful person at the U.S. State Department.

Prof. David W. Mullins Jr. helped write a complicated report on the 1987 stock market crash for Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady. He now sits on the Federal Reserve Board. Kenneth W. Starr spent nights and weekends grinding out legal memos as a clerk to an appeals court judge. He now holds an appeals court post himself.

They were young, bright and hard-working and they all had something else going for their careers: a powerful Washington mentor. Judge Clarence Thomas played this role for Anita Faye Hill--just as Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.) played it for Thomas when the country’s Supreme Court justice-to-be was an ambitious young lawyer.

Influential men have often helped younger ones start up the ladder, and increasingly they have helped young women, too. And such relationships have always been central to this city of ambition, where important people have a limitless appetite for young, self-sacrificing aides who will put the interests of their bosses before any other.

But now, because Thomas’ former protegee has alleged the most shocking secrets about him, this pattern may shift. Powerful--and ambitious--men may become more wary, some experts and Washington insiders fear.

“It could cause some people to think again,” said Terrence B. Adamson, a Washington lawyer who was a clerk to Judge Griffin B. Bell and became a top Justice Department aide when Bell was attorney general. Said Reba Keele, an organizational behavior expert at the University of Utah: “I’d be very surprised if men didn’t pull back.”

These relationships have been a Washington institution because they simultaneously have served so many needs. In a milieu where political enemies may lurk anywhere, the powerful need proteges who will fight for their interests, with lips tightly sealed and without (at least at that moment) competing ambitions of their own.

Also, more now than ever, senators, Cabinet secretaries and presidents face demands on their time that they cannot possibly meet. They need staffs who will answer letters, draft speeches, make appearances, prep them for events--in short, act to the greatest extent possible as extensions of the boss.

In return for their indentured servitude, the younger associates get jobs, experience and social connections that they can call on again and again when they begin their own ascents to the top. And mentor and protege seal their symbiosis in unspoken agreements that are written on no document. But this tie is as real and binding as a blood oath.

“The mentor exerts his influence for the protege and the protege does the scut work,” said Keele. “That’s the informal deal.”

As the proteges move on and up, they join growing and mutually supporting networks of former aides. Among Washington’s most influential are those of Secretary of State James A. Baker III, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, Treasury Secretary Brady, and former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett.

But few important politicians have made a successful Washington debut without at least one powerful mentor.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was an obscure staff officer until he was boosted by his associations with Gens. Douglas MacArthur and George C. Marshall. Jimmy Carter had Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the advocate of nuclear submarines. Lyndon B. Johnson attached himself to a series of surrogate fathers: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Georgia Sen. Richard B. Russell Jr.

Indeed, the phenomenon is not limited to Washington politics, but is important in business, academia, sports and other fields.

The late Yankees Manager Billy Martin’s career on and off the diamond was nurtured by Manager Casey Stengel. Prof. Milton Friedman, the free-market champion, furthered the rise of a vast network of young like-minded economists, including Beryl W. Sprinkel, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Groom Successors

Academics at top universities such as Harvard, Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have always shaped America’s power elite as they gave their brightest students connections that helped them rise through the suites of power in Washington and New York.

In the business world, the guiding role of mentors is considered so important to organizational development that it has nearly become an academic subspecialty.

Many of the captains of industry spend long years painstakingly choosing and grooming successors: Walter Wriston, former chairman of Citibank, picked John S. Reed, the big New York-based bank’s current chairman. After World War II, Henry Ford II picked a young military officer named Robert S. McNamara to help him reverse the auto maker’s fortunes. McNamara was promoted to the company’s presidency before becoming secretary of defense.

Ten years ago, the mentor’s role became a subject of hot controversy when William M. Agee, chairman of Bendix Corp., gave two quick promotions to Mary Cunningham, a vice president who was rumored to be his girlfriend. She resigned and the two were later married, always denying they had a romantic relationship while they worked together.

These relationships vary greatly, but have in common strong emotional bonds.

On Capitol Hill, in federal judges’ chambers and in the executive agencies, bosses and aides forge ties like those of front-line soldiers as they toil together, gulp meals on the run, share inside jokes and the exhilaration of important events.

Peter T. Madigan, formerly the second-ranking congressional affairs official at the State Department, recalled how Baker’s top aides worked each weekend during the first three months of Baker’s tenure at the State Department in 1989--even though the building’s heat was off.

“We’d go to work on weekends in ski jackets,” he recalled.

The aides did not want to make their secretaries work Saturdays and Sundays, so they took their gloves off and typed themselves--blowing on their fingers to warm them when they got cold.

William E. Simon, who was U.S. Treasury secretary and directed federal energy policy in the 1970s, was a blustery, demanding boss who insisted that his aides have major newspapers read and be present for a staff meeting at 7 o’clock each morning. He required that each return every important phone call before they left at night--a rule that tended to keep them at the office until well into the evening.

For some, the satisfaction of the job lies in being close to the boss. Some officials invite their inner circles into their lives, like Treasury Secretary Brady, who organizes poker games on flights abroad and sometimes takes his assistant on weekend hunting expeditions.

The excitement of working for the Kennedys rested partly in the proximity to the lives the world considered so glamorous. In their many memoirs, aides have recalled the sight of Robert F. Kennedy working in his stocking feet; the family touch-football games; John F. Kennedy’s easy humor.

Richard M. Nixon’s lieutenants shared a different secret life with their boss, who was decorous and tightly buttoned in public but liberal with profanity and threats behind the closed doors of the Oval Office.

Source of Identity

In many ways, the interests of the mentor and his young staff members become one. The proteges’ future depends on the mentor’s place in the world. And the young people are likely to be identified for the rest of their lives with their boss.

Some say that association is as good as gold. “When I told people on the Hill: ‘I work for Jim Baker,’ it was always instant attention,” said Madigan, the former Baker aide who is now a Washington lobbyist.

Timothy Ryan, who as director of the Office of Thrift Supervision is the nation’s top thrift regulator, in the mid-1970s became a protege of the late Dean Burch, the former Republican National Committee chairman and Federal Communications Commission chairman. In Burch’s circle, Ryan met such rising Republicans as Baker, former Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater and Edith E. Holiday, who is now secretary to President Bush’s Cabinet. Last year, it was Holiday who first approached him about the thrift job.

The proteges view their ties to their mentors as a career asset, like any college degree they list on their resumes. And typically they put a great deal of effort into keeping those ties strong.

The importance of these relationships may help explain some of the behavior of Hill, who was one of Thomas’ two legal counselors at the Department of Education and who followed him to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Her critics have questioned why, if she were sexually harassed by Thomas, she called him over the years, sought meetings with him and praised him in the company of his friends, as witnesses have testified.

But to an ambitious woman, a powerful and like-minded sponsor is just about the greatest career drawing card that she could have. And a woman might consider such a relationship even more precious than a man would, since mentorships are much rarer for them.

They are more unusual partly because powerful men tend to attach themselves to younger ones who remind them of themselves at an earlier age. “What sparks it is so often personal identification,” said Ann F. Lewis, a former Senate aide who is now a campaign consultant in Boston.

Powerful men are wary of taking women on, too, because they worry about the gossip factor: They know people will talk if they are seen frequently with young women--and particularly if the appearances are late at night and in distant cities, as they so often are.

Prof. Keele, the organizational behavior expert, said that her research on women who have had such relationships suggests that women tend to stay with the mentor longer than men--often too long for the good of their own careers. Women also put more effort into trying to maintain good relationships after they have parted, she said.

Keele said that she fears powerful men will now be leery of taking on young women protegees for several reasons.

The men, she said, may worry that they may not really grasp what kind of comments or actions constitute sexual harassment. Reflecting on Hill’s eight-year-old charges, they may worry about what they may already have done--intentionally or unwittingly--long ago.

Possible Setback

Such a change would be a setback for women in Washington, where there are now some conspicuous examples of the benefits of such relationships.

Tutwiler, who is assistant secretary of state for public affairs, has long been a protegee of Secretary of State Baker. She met him when she was the secretary to the Alabama Republican Party chairman and has followed him since to increasingly responsible posts.

One of the risks for women in such circles is that almost no matter what they do, there will always be gossip about romantic ties to their bosses, experts and Washington observers noted.

But many are willing to risk such comments for the professional and financial rewards that they know can come from such associations. They do not need to look far to see how great the benefits can be.

Lawrence S. Eagleburger was a career Foreign Service officer who became a protege of former Secretary of State Kissinger during the Nixon Administration, along with such luminaries as Brent Scowcroft, now President Bush’s national security adviser.

When Kissinger left to form his own international consulting firm, Eagleburger went along as the firm’s president. Kissinger Associates rapidly became a highly profitable venture.

Now Eagleburger is back at the State Department as deputy secretary of state.

While the mentor’s obligation is to help advance the protege’s career, the protege may come to the mentor’s rescue as well.

William L. Ball III and Frederick D. McClure both served as aides to the late Sen. John G. Tower (R-Tex.). But when the former senator was fighting his unsuccessful campaign to win confirmation as secretary of defense in 1989, they helped him out--Ball from his post as Secretary of the Navy and McClure as Bush’s assistant for legislative affairs.

“They were his eyes and ears,” said Adamson.

Mentors Betrayed

Washington lore also suggests the importance of training and promoting one’s own proteges. When Johnson became President after Kennedy’s assassination, he kept on a corps of Kennedy lieutenants, in part to demonstrate his commitment to the slain leader’s goals and ideals.

Later Johnson said that he regretted it, when such men as former Defense Secretary McNamara turned against him over the war in Vietnam.

Certainly, Clarence Thomas will not be remembered in history as the first Washington mentor to feel betrayed by a protege. Seventeen years ago, amid the unraveling of his presidency, Richard M. Nixon made the same charge about a young White House counsel named John W. Dean III.