In Clinton Inner Circle, It’s Who You’ve Known : Power: Ties in this informal White House wind back across years of friendship. But some may lack access.

Two months into President Clinton’s tenure, the patterns of power for the White House have begun to crystallize, providing a picture of a system markedly different from the last several administrations--considerably less formal than the George Bush or Ronald Reagan presidencies, far more collegial than that of Jimmy Carter.

Much like his campaign organization, formal titles and customary organizational charts offer few clues about where power truly lies in Clinton’s realm. Far more telling, according to senior White House officials, Cabinet members and outside advisers, are a set of informal relationships based in many cases on longstanding personal ties among key Administration players.

Donna Shalala, the secretary of health and human services, describes the Clinton Cabinet, for instance, as one in which “most of the members have known each other most of their lives.”

“It’s not a Cabinet of strangers,” she said.

The same is true in the White House, where a cadre of young aides--mostly in their 30s--moved together from Clinton’s campaign to some of the government’s most influential posts.

Of course, long-term friendships among top Administration officials or the movement of campaign workers into government is not unique to the Clinton Administration. What sets Clinton’s team apart is the size and scope of the interlocking networks and the informal nature of the working arrangements among them.

As described by White House and outside advisers, Clinton’s system has some potential drawbacks. A lack of clear-cut turf boundaries means that more people get involved in most decisions, sometimes slowing the process. The relatively large number of people at the policy-making table also has made Clinton’s Administration extremely prone to leaks--infuriating the President on several occasions.

Also, while the system rewards those with close ties to the President or his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, it sometimes excludes those without such connections--leaving at least some Cabinet members feeling isolated from power.

So far, even Clinton’s opponents have had to concede that, by and large, his process works. With the Administration barely two months old, Clinton has produced a budget plan that won widespread popular support and has passed early congressional checkpoints with record speed. Officials are well on their way toward producing a sweeping health care reform proposal.

And even as those two mega-policies have proceeded, the Administration has launched a flotilla of smaller initiatives, ranging from Vice President Al Gore’s plan to “reinvent government” to a plan announced this past week by Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich and Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown to establish a commission to investigate labor-management relations.

Unlike former President Bush, who preferred to work primarily with a close circle of highly trusted aides, Clinton favors a process that can sometimes pull more than a dozen White House officials, Cabinet aides and others into meetings to hash out the details of a policy. And unlike Carter, whose Administration quickly developed factions centered around a few strong-willed Cabinet members, Clinton so far has succeeded in fostering a cooperative spirit.

The labor-management relations commission provides one glimpse at how Clinton’s informal system works.

The commission had its genesis in an informal conversation in late February between the President and Reich, whose friendship with Clinton dates back to the summer of 1968, when they traveled on the same ship to England as Rhodes scholars. After a White House meeting on another subject, Reich briefly pulled Clinton aside to discuss his idea.

Clinton asked for a memo outlining the concept, which Reich sent to the White House on March 2. The memo went to Robert E. Rubin, who, as head of Clinton’s National Economic Council, has assumed the role of coordinator for nearly all government policies affecting the economy, making him one of the Administration’s most influential officials.

Rubin called Reich to suggest that business officials be brought into the process and recommended that Reich work jointly with Brown on the plan. Just over a week later, the two Cabinet officers sent Clinton another memo. The President quickly signed off on the idea, noting his approval and a few suggestions across the top of the memo with a black felt-tip pen scrawl that is often so illegible top aides need Clinton’s longtime friend Bruce Lindsey to decipher it.

Reich and Brown announced the plan last Wednesday, completing the process from initial idea to public unveiling in just under one month--rapid pace for the often muscle-bound federal bureaucracy.

In another contrast with Bush, who allowed Chief of Staff John H. Sununu to control most aspects of domestic policy-making, Clinton has diffused power among several staff members--most notably Chief of Staff Thomas (Mack) McLarty, Personnel Director Lindsey, Communications Director George Stephanopoulos, Rubin and White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum.

As he did while governor of Arkansas, Clinton delights in late-night telephone calls to check in with aides on the progress of their projects.

The Sunday night before he announced the reinventing-government plan, for example, the phone rang at domestic policy aide Bruce Reed’s house. Clinton was on the line, wanting to check up on several options he had been thinking about.

“He likes to get involved early on and be kept aware of what’s going on,” Reed says. “That way, the bureaucracy doesn’t get out front.”

White House aides cite that sort of telephone call as an example of the sometimes startling informality that Clinton has introduced to the often-starchy precincts of the White House.

The night the potential nomination of Judge Kimba M. Wood to be attorney general collapsed, for example, Clinton, dressed in a sweat suit, wandered over from the White House residential quarters to Stephanopoulos’ West Wing office, greeting a startled custodian who told a Clinton aide later that in several years of working at the White House, she had never before actually met a President.

The changed atmosphere can be seen most readily among the young aides in offbeat ties and rumpled clothes, sometimes seen throwing footballs in the halls of the Old Executive Office Building, who replaced Bush Administration counterparts known for white shirts and well-pressed suits or tailored dresses, pearl necklaces and carefully coiffed hair.

The informality seems infectious. When German Chancellor Helmut Kohl arrived at the White House Friday, one of Clinton’s youngest aides, 19-year-old Chad Griffin, an Arkansan who took time off from school to work first in the campaign and now in the White House press office, approached the visiting dignitary and explained that he had spent a year in Germany while in high school. The two chatted for several minutes in German.

Later in the day, when Kohl and Clinton met, Kohl waved the young aide over and asked him to translate while they talked.

Clinton’s relatively open process rewards aggressive aides who have moved quickly to make the most of their opportunities. Rubin provides perhaps the best example of that.

Weeks before the inauguration, Rubin sought out the advice of an old Washington hand about how best to establish his office, according to a senior Administration official. “Get an executive order as early as possible” and then “get going early,” the adviser told him. “Once people get set in their ways, it is very difficult to change.”

Rubin took that advice to heart: Clinton issued the executive order formally establishing the National Economic Council that Rubin chairs on his fourth day in office.

Armed with that order giving him the task of coordinating economic policy, Rubin has emerged as one of the most powerful figures in the Administration, assuming much of the authority wielded in the Bush Administration by Office of Management and Budget chief Richard G. Darman.

Similarly, Stephanopoulos inherited a title--communications director--that had grown moribund during the Bush years, but he has transformed the job into one that places him at the center of nearly every decision the President makes.

Along with McLarty and his deputy, Mark D. Gearan, Stephanopoulos receives a copy of virtually every document that passes through the White House--a crucial fact in a system where knowledge and power are close cousins.

“There’s virtually no decision that doesn’t have a public affairs component,” said one senior White House aide. “In fact, you can make a good argument that if an issue doesn’t have some public component, the President probably shouldn’t be wasting time with it.”

“But more than that, George is an all-purpose adviser to the President. Clinton wants to know what George thinks,” the aide said. “He’s in the loop on virtually everything.”

The longstanding personal ties among top Administration officials provide a multiplicity of back channels that allow the White House to monitor developments in federal agencies and allow well-connected Cabinet members to float proposals informally early in the process.

At nearly every Cabinet department, for example, the top press spokesman, the congressional liaison officer and the chief of staff were drawn from the Clinton political apparatus, ensuring the White House a quick read on issues as they percolate through the media, Capitol Hill and the bureaucracy.

Further, while many of Clinton’s top appointees were not well-known in Washington when they were named, they were well- known to each other.

Shalala, for example, served with Mrs. Clinton on the board of the Children’s Defense Fund. She is also a close friend and hiking partner of Alice Rivlin, the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. Labor Secretary Reich and Laura D’Andrea Tyson, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, are longstanding friends who share a common interest in trade and economic development.

Reich is also an old friend of Ira Magaziner, the White House aide who heads the effort to draft a health care reform package. Gene Sperling, a top aide to Rubin, was Reich’s student at Harvard.

“When there are that many informal back channels, it’s very easy to get work done,” Reich said. “Every one of us is aware that we’re working in a system, and that system requires a lot of checking.”

The downside of that system is that while Cabinet officers like Reich and Shalala have ready access to propose their ideas, others without longtime ties to the Clintons have had trouble penetrating the system. Aides cite Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary and Transportation Secretary Federico Pena as two Cabinet officers who often seemed out of the loop in the Administration’s early weeks.

More recently, Rubin and Budget Director Leon E. Panetta have worked to improve communications with departments that had felt left out early on.

Nevertheless, said one official, “policy gets formed on the basis of who’s on the radar screen, who has the relationships with the President.”

A second pervasive problem involves leaks. Aides say Clinton was “enraged” on several occasions during the Administration’s first few weeks as details of pending policy decisions or personnel actions appeared in news reports.

“It was getting really bad,” said one White House official. “I was reading in the paper about memos sent to me before they even got to my desk.”

So far, Clinton and his top aides have resisted the tendency of other administrations to use leaks as a reason to restrict the number of people involved in the decision-making process.

Early on, White House counsel Nussbaum, who, two decades ago, headed part of the congressional inquiry into the Watergate scandal, pulled Clinton aside after one presidential outburst on the subject to remind him that Richard Nixon’s obsession over leaks led him into the Watergate scandal. Leaks were one problem where the cure was often worse than the disease, Nussbaum warned.

Clinton took the warning to heart. “I still think if we knew who did some of these things, we’d be one or two people fewer in the White House,” said Lindsey, who often serves as Clinton’s in-house enforcer when aides step out of line. But “we’ve calmed back down.”