Clinton Staffers in Transition of Their Own

The phone rang in the Arkansas governor’s mansion the day after victory. “It’s someone Kohl from Germany,” said a young aide who took the call.

“Someone” as in Helmut, also known as chancellor--a world leader calling to welcome a new member into the club. The brief confusion over identity led to no diplomatic incident--and in any case, Clinton was asleep when the call arrived--but to the longtime Clinton adviser who repeated the story, it came to symbolize two facts this week:

A new day really had dawned. And the Clinton team had better scramble fast to catch up with it.

“When a campaign is over, it is over,” says Clinton’s now-former chief campaign strategist, James Carville. Overnight, the legions of people whose job it is to collect newspaper clippings, monitor television news, draft issue papers, run errands, facilitate, coordinate and worry about details, melt away. For an incumbent President, who merely returns to the comforts and endless support systems of the White House, the disappearance of the campaign hardly matters. But for a challenger?

“We’re sort of in the twilight zone,” Vice President-elect Al Gore’s spokeswoman Marla Romash said Friday.

Twilight never lasts long, of course, and by Saturday, as once-harried Clinton staff members and droves of reporters headed for the airport and brief vacations, an unaccustomed quiet settled over this city.

For weeks, Little Rock has been at the center of national political attention, complete with all the indications of a media happening: Network correspondents striding purposefully toward live stand-ups, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson drinking beer at breakfast in the hotel dining room, scores of the famous and the merely hopeful mingling until late at night in crowded bars.

By Saturday, all that had been replaced by calm. But it was the calm after a storm, for the past several days have been a strange, and at times unpleasant, experience for the tired Clinton cadre.

The confusion of transition runs from etiquette--now that he has won, do you still call the boss “Governor” or “Mr. President”--to the more practical considerations of sorting out jobs and getting telephone calls handled. And it was deepened by a bitter backstage power struggle over the role that Clinton’s campaign chairman, Los Angeles attorney Mickey Kantor, would play in the transition.

The period between election and inauguration is a time for lessons.

Some are simple. Quickly after the election, Clinton foreign policy aide Nancy Soderberg devised a system to handle the calls from world leaders. Working through the pile of congratulatory telegrams and faxes, Soderberg set up a schedule, establishing a fixed time for a few foreign heads of government to call back.

Since Clinton’s staff does not yet have access to government interpreters, all but one of the foreign leaders in his initial round of calls had to speak English. The exception was Russia’s Boris N. Yeltsin, who supplied his own interpreter. Clinton stuck to generalities, aides say, a good thing as he does not yet have a government-supplied secure telephone line.

Other lessons took longer. Perhaps the most prominent from the past several days was that Clinton will not be a President willing to be pushed, even by longtime friends. Kantor, according to those close to the situation, tried to present Clinton with a transition plan calling for Kantor to run day-to-day operations but providing no clear role for many of Clinton’s closest campaign aides. Clinton said no and ordered up a new plan.

In rejecting Kantor’s plan, Clinton appears to have leaned heavily on two longtime Arkansas friends--his boyhood pal Thomas (Mack) McLarty, now the head of Arkla Inc., a natural gas holding company based here, and Bruce Lindsey, a lawyer here and a friend of Clinton’s for a generation who was his constant traveling companion over the last year. When the final decisions on the transition were made, officials say, those two were at Clinton’s side.

One lesson was for Clinton himself. Like George Bush before him, the President-elect learned once again just how much of his privacy the presidency is likely to take away.

Despite his now legendary gregariousness as a politician, Clinton also craves time alone. Some weeks ago, grumbling about the press pool that followed him everywhere as a candidate, he waxed Shakespearean. “Out, out, damned pool!” he said to reporters.

On Saturday, he took refuge in a governor’s mansion now surrounded by barricades and photographers with telephoto lenses, whose shutters clicked at high speed even when daughter Chelsea emerged from the house to ride her bicycle on the grounds.

And Clinton made little effort to hide his annoyance when, after meeting with campaign chief-of-staff Eli Segal, he headed for a golf game at the Chenal Valley Country Club with Webster Hubbell, a partner at his wife’s law firm, only to find photographers waiting for him near the first tee.

One photographer standing 35 feet away from Clinton said he overheard the governor swear and say: “I thought we had an agreement that they weren’t going to be up here.”

Segal was one of the few senior campaign aides still at work Saturday, overseeing the winding down of campaign operations. On Friday, he had briefed staff members on the proper procedures to apply for jobs in the new Administration, the first time anyone had assured the senior staff that such jobs were in the offing.

Until then, anxiety over the future among Clinton’s aides had been pervasive.

Flying into Little Rock on Thursday, the man who had run Clinton’s successful effort in one of the largest northeastern states discovered his flight might be overbooked. As an airline ticket agent called out an offer of $100 for anyone who would drop off the flight, he hesitated. “My future’s pretty uncertain,” he said, with an only-half-kidding sort of laugh. “Maybe I ought to take the $100.”

By late Friday, most of that anxiety had melted away. Amid piles of boxes and stacks of telephone bills--as much as a foot thick--for each day of the campaign’s last weeks, staff members could be seen carrying out the first rituals of a transition--packing their files into boxes and filling out forms asking “areas of interest” “preferred agency” and “type of job sought.”

Times staff writer Douglas Jehl contributed to this story.