Christopher, Jordan to Plan Clinton Transition : Aides: President-elect turns to L.A. lawyer, former civil rights leader to head panel that will guide shift of power. Move is seen as slight to campaign Chairman Mickey Kantor.

Reaching beyond his own inner circle, President-elect Bill Clinton on Friday named Los Angeles lawyer Warren Christopher and Washington attorney and former civil rights leader Vernon E. Jordan Jr. to take charge of the team planning his transition to power.

The key personnel decision came as a rebuff to Mickey Kantor, the Los Angeles lawyer who served as chairman of the Clinton campaign but whose bid for transition leadership had ignited angry protests within the Arkansas governor’s camp.

It also reflected the caution of a 46-year-old President-elect who has decided to seek the counsel of party elders as he weighs the choices that will shape his Administration.

Both Christopher, who is 67, and Jordan, 57, are among the group to whom Clinton turned for help in selecting his running mate. But neither served in a campaign post, and their selection flouted a tradition that has usually seen top transition jobs filled by successful political strategists.

Until Friday, Christopher, who served as deputy secretary of state in the Jimmy Carter Administration, had been regarded as a leading candidate for that department’s top job under Clinton. But Christopher told reporters here that to ensure “objectivity” in his new post, he had asked not to be considered for a major post in the new Administration.

Clinton, whose voice remains badly hoarse from the strains of months of stump speeches, remained closeted inside his governor’s mansion while a top aide announced the decision at a news conference at the former campaign headquarters.

In a written statement read aloud by communiciations director George Stephanopoulos, Clinton said that in Christopher and Jordan “the American people could have no better servants working on their behalf.”

In passing over Kantor, Clinton aides said the President-elect was attempting to put an end to the bitter internal feud begun by the campaign chairman’s attempts to consolidate his own power over the transition.

It nevertheless remained evident that his choice of the well-respected duo meant he has chosen to postpone what may be his most difficult personnel decision: the selection of a top deputy to serve as White House chief of staff.

As the transition’s Arkansas-based director, Christopher will bring new stability to a youthful Clinton team whose collegiality had begun to fray as aides began to jostle for post-election position.

Jordan will become chairman of a Washington-based transition board whose members are to include a wide array of Clinton advisers, including Kantor.

Christopher, chairman of the Los Angeles law firm of O’Melveny & Myers, was careful to specify that his own decision not to seek a top Administration job should not prohibit other members of the transition team from being considered, and Jordan separately would not rule out seeking a high post.

Speculation in Little Rock lists Jordan as a candidate to become Clinton’s attorney general.

It was unclear how appointment of the two would affect Kantor’s role in a Clinton Administration; his Little Rock office had been all but emptied, and he did not return telephone calls requesting comment.

But one senior aide said Clinton’s slighting of Kantor was intended to administer “a good, sharp jolt of reality” to a campaign chairman who had “burned every conceivable bridge” with other members of the staff.

Other Clinton deputies said Kantor had assembled a detailed plan for the transition that had included an order to shut down the campaign headquarters building here today, an abrupt move that would have left dozens of key staffers without work space.

The scheme was intended to hurry a shift from that crowded building to the smaller and more exclusive quarters of a transition office in a high-rise building a few blocks away. When Clinton learned of the scheme Wednesday afternoon, one source said, “he dropped a neutron bomb” on the proposal.

Among others whose future roles were said to be in question was Gerald Stern, an Occidental Petroleum executive whom Kantor had installed as executive director of the transition planning operation established before the election.

Clinton aides who had been fearful that Kantor would have frozen them out of the transition process expressed private relief Friday night that the jobs had gone to Christopher and Jordan instead.

“He thought he was holding the trump card,” one aide said of Kantor, adding: “It was sort of everyone against Mickey.”

At a noontime briefing for reporters, however, Stephanopoulos dismissed as ridiculous the reports that he had been involved in the feud. And in hurrying to announce the new appointments a few hours later, the Clinton camp sought to replace the impression of discord with that of deliberate and thoughtful action.

That image was reinforced Friday afternoon by Christopher, who told reporters that the transition team under his leadership would proceed in “a brisk but nevertheless, a conscientious and orderly way.”

“There is a government to be formed,” he said, pledging that he and his team would “render all the help we possibly can” in helping to coordinate the choices of Cabinet officers.

Jordan, who remained in Washington, emphasized separately that the transition operation would function under strict ethics guidelines designed to minimize conflicts of interest. He told a television interviewer that any transition staff member involved in decision-making related to a particular government agency would be barred from lobbying that agency for at least six months into the new Administration.

Even as the Clinton team sought to highlight its first steps toward governing, however, it was becoming apparent that its transition from politics remained less than smooth.

Although Clinton had assured reporters that his conversations with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and other world leaders Thursday were not substantive, his spokesman confirmed that Yeltsin had invited Clinton to travel to Moscow for a summit soon after his inauguration.

Stephanopoulos also acknowledged that the two leaders had discussed the status of the nations’ nuclear and chemical arsenals, and, in a separate conversation with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Clinton expressed his support for the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Stephanopoulos said of the proposed U.S.-Russian summit that “nothing was decided.” But he conceded that elements of the conversations had in fact been substantive and said they had been monitored by top foreign policy aides.

The appointment of Christopher to direct the transition team also came amid reports that senior Clinton aides had been told by officials of several American Jewish organizations that they opposed the Los Angeles lawyer’s nomination as secretary of state, largely because of his previous association with Carter.

The private statements reflected the kinds of pointed pressures to which the Clinton camp is now being subjected as it prepares to take office. But Clinton aides said their choice of Christopher had nothing to do with the complaints, and Christopher himself made it clear that his decision not to seek a major Administration post had been his alone.

“I’ve assumed, in undertaking this role, that I would not have a major responsibility in the future,” he said.

Indeed, even before Christopher’s effective withdrawal, the Jewish leaders backed off from their opposition and said they would be happy with anyone Clinton selects for the State Department post.

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, said that while some individuals may be unhappy, “the Jewish community has confidence in President Clinton’s stated policy toward the Middle East and Israel.”

Beyond Christopher, others mentioned as possible secretaries of state have included Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), incoming chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.); Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; and, as a Republican dark horse, Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.).

Times staff writers David Lauter, in Little Rock, and Doyle McManus, in Washington, contributed to this story.