Clinton Finds Sports, Seminar Can Be Fun Too

From the relative seclusion of a borrowed beach house, President-elect Bill Clinton is spending his final pre-inauguration vacation apparently determined to put one last weekend of distance between himself and the duties he will soon undertake.

As President Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Russia, the soon-to-be President Clinton jogged, golfed and played touch football, steadfastly refusing comment on the affairs of the world.

Among reporters who have grown used to Clinton’s ability to speak out with encyclopedic detail on any issue, his determined silence here has produced more than a little frustration. But Clinton’s delight has been obvious as he indulged, instead, in the rigor of private conversations with fellow “Renaissance Weekend” guests and the vigor of oceanfront exercise.

After spending nearly two months cooped up at work in his 2,000-square-foot governor’s mansion, Clinton has ensconced himself and his family here in a far larger, two-story, many-windowed home that dwarfs even those of his wealthy neighbors. And he has freed himself, at least temporarily, of the retinue of aides that dogs candidates and presidents, relying for the most part on a single 22-year-old assistant--Andrew Friendly, a recent graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont--to awaken him in the morning and field his telephone calls.

Having long used public oratory to make a case for generational change, Clinton at play found other ways to deliver the message.

Arising before dawn on New Year’s Day, he hit the sand as the sun was rising to begin 1993 with a three-mile jog. He returned to the beach before sunset in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt to join 30 of his closest friends in a Kennedy-esque touch football game.

On Saturday morning, he chose as his jogging partner Olympic hurdler Edwin Moses, and later walked alone on the beach with Strobe Talbott, a longtime friend and Time magazine editor who is expected to take a top Clinton Administration foreign policy post. In the final session of the five-day Renaissance policy seminar, Clinton and Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun even co-chaired a closed-door panel discussion on “The Changing of the Guard” that for the White House lies just 17 days ahead.

But nothing can be normal for a man so close to the presidency; and Clinton’s Hilton Head vacation, which ends today, also brought new reminders of the tensions between his own quest for privacy and his status as the world’s preeminent public figure.

As he paused on the beach one day last week to talk economics with a fellow guest, Clinton bristled to find a television crew’s boom microphone bobbing overhead to eavesdrop on what he thought was a private conversation.

In an initial fit of pique, he first sought to banish even a designated pool of reporters from keeping watch as he jogged. The extroverted President-elect nevertheless remained determined to use the public beach as his track and soon lifted the prohibition.

Clinton similarly has chosen to keep his distance from the kinds of crowds into which he so eagerly plunged, even on his Thanksgiving weekend foray to Southern California. But his daily jogs remain punctuated with shouts of good wishes from gathering crowds; and a New Year’s Day outing for a golf game on a roadside course proved to be a traffic-stopping sensation.

As Clinton played five holes within sight of the island’s main highway, some passers-by pulled their cars off the road onto a grassy shoulder, while others abandoned their automobiles on the road to ogle, photograph and videotape him.

Clinton twice went to the side of the course to shake hands and pose for pictures, and once waved his club to shout “Happy New Year.” In this golf-mad resort, however, the price of adulation was enduring scrutiny from a gallery of experts, although the 16-handicap golfer did win cheers and applause when he hit the ball reasonably well.

The President-elect also found himself obliged to share the wealth of his company among two foursomes during the five-hour, 18-hole outing, rather than remain with a single group. Among his partners were David Ifshin, a top official of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, and John Y. Brown, the former governor of Kentucky.

But within the two-story, rose-colored home loaned to him for the weekend, and even outside it, Clinton has also found rare sanctuary in Hilton Head. Accustomed at home to television crews lying in wait outside his mansion, he has insisted here that the cameras generally venture no closer than the gates of the vast Palmetto Dunes development, allowing him to travel unhindered from home to the resort Hyatt hotel that is the site of the five-day conference.

In daily seminars and meals there, Clinton has joined in discussions with scores of the more than 500 business leaders, politicians, athletes and journalists who are his fellow Renaissance guests. But the off-the-record rules that govern the daily sessions have made the gist of his contributions even more of a secret than if made in a formal Cabinet meeting.

Clinton’s daily three-mile runs along the hard-packed fine sand of the sea island beach have also remained off-limits to questioners who have simply been ignored. And even on the beach, Clinton has sometimes managed, as he did during his private stroll with Talbott on Saturday morning, to find himself as alone as he is likely to be in public for the next four years.

He is due to return to Little Rock, Ark., today to begin two last intensive weeks of preparation for his move to the White House, but he seemed determined this weekend to fill his days with distractions for which he will soon have little time.

As he does only rarely, he jogged for perhaps half a mile Saturday morning with his wife, Hillary, before leaving her behind to keep pace with Moses, the Olympic hurdler. (“You should watch Edwin Moses run,” Mrs. Clinton marveled later. “He’s a work of art.”)

Clinton also took his 12-year-old daughter, Chelsea, with him to the beach for the New Year’s Day touch football game, and while he never threw her the ball, he lovingly patted her hair during huddles.

The 46-year-old former Rhodes scholar, who has never shown a particular knack for throwing a football, was far from the best player. But the hourlong game with 15 players on a side gave the President-elect a taste of his new status: All players deferred to him as if he were the winner of college football’s coveted Heisman Trophy.

To be sure, when quarterback Clinton once spent an inordinately long time mapping pass routes for each of his receivers, some members of the opposing team began to chant, “Delay of game!”

But while Clinton completed just three passes (and threw two interceptions) during his three-series stint, his authority went unchallenged. Once, when the other side scored a touchdown, the President-elect complained that his team hadn’t been ready. The touchdown was taken back.