President Sleeps Till 10 as Silence Falls Over U.S. : Recreation: In first real vacation in 4 years, Clinton keeps policy-wonk side quiet, stays out of sight, parties.

Listen carefully: The silence you hear from this Atlantic island is the sound of the President of the United States at play.

For more than two years, since he first started running for President, the one absolute constant in Bill Clinton’s life has been talk. Talk in public. Nonstop, sustained talk on every manner of issue facing the nation.

But now, for six days so far--and several more to come--he has given himself, and the country, a vacation. Here on Martha’s Vineyard, Clinton has golfed, read, walked on the beach, sung songs with Carly Simon and cruised Vineyard Sound with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, but he has made not one proposal, begun not a single public dialogue, uttered no comments.

Even his Saturday radio address on the economy and health care had been taped ahead of time, in Washington.

Vacations are, perhaps, the only part of a President’s over-scheduled life upon which he can exert any real control. Because of that, how he chooses to relax can tell us much about the man, whether it be Ronald Reagan’s retreats to the solitude of his ranch in the mountains above Santa Barbara or George Bush’s frenetic games of speed golf at his ancestral compound in Maine.

In Clinton’s case, until recently, he hardly relaxed at all, contenting himself with a day grabbed here and another grabbed there as he scrambled headlong in pursuit of his goals. Shortly before leaving Washington, Clinton told aides in a staff meeting that four years had passed since his family had taken a real vacation together. That was a mistake, he conceded, although aides admit that without the recent suicide of his friend and lawyer Vincent Foster, Clinton might well have ended up continuing the pattern.

Even so, many aides were skeptical that Clinton would actually settle down and stay at rest for more than a week. So far, however, he appears to have adjusted, forswearing even his usual morning national security briefings in favor of a quick paper summary of the day’s news.

Instead, Clinton has been sleeping until 10, partying until midnight and staying mostly out of sight.

Whole days have gone by with hardly a public glimpse, as the usually ubiquitous chief executive enjoys the solitude and salt air of the beachfront compound owned by former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who has absented himself to provide room for the First Family, their immediate staff and security guards.

More than 24 hours elapsed between Clinton’s arrival here and his first public words: “I didn’t do anything yesterday. It was great. Read a book. Slept. It’s been a long time.”

“I think,” says Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, “he’s trying to give his brain a rest.”

This is not to say Clinton has retired his policy-wonk side completely. But he has kept it quiet.

Clinton has divided his leisure activities roughly in thirds: golf; quiet hours spent with his wife and daughter, reading and walking on the secluded beach; and private dinner parties with the members of the East Coast public policy and literary elite who populate this island in the summer--from former Secretaries of State Henry A. Kissinger and Lawrence S. Eagleburger, with whom he discussed Bosnia while dining Friday at the home of Washington Post Chairwoman Katharine Graham, to authors William Styron and David Halberstam, who were among his dinner companions Monday.

The Friday dinner also served as the venue for Clinton’s duets with Carly Simon--another of Graham’s guests--whose 1971 hit, “Anticipation (Is Making Me Wait),” might serve well as an informal anthem for the Administration and its often-delayed policy goals. Together with other guests (even the somewhat bewildered Kissinger, according to a fellow diner), the two sang tunes from their mutual youth: The Beatles’ “Let It Be,” Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” and others for more than an hour as the President indulged in yet another baby boomer fantasy come true.

The choice of vacation spots and activities has drawn some jeers from critics, who point out the irony of Clinton, the Vietnam War protester, staying at the vacation home of McNamara, the Vietnam designer. Others have noted that the Vacationer on the Vineyard is a far cry from the Man From Hope, whom Clinton portrayed during his campaign.

The island is, undeniably, a stronghold of the sort of elite Democrats whom George Bush used so effectively as a foil in his campaign against Michael S. Dukakis five years ago--the sort of place where airplanes trail sky banners advertising not beer or stock car races, but glossy magazines (“This Week’s New Yorker: Malcolm on Plath,” read one, advertising a 72-page essay on the gloomy American poet Sylvia Plath).

Still more critics have pointed fingers at the islanders whom Clinton has shunned--C. Lani Guinier, for example, whose withdrawn nomination for assistant attorney general was the occasion for one of the worst debacles of Clinton’s spring. Some years ago, Clinton attended Guinier’s wedding here. But this time, while she and he are both here, he has not called.

But the criticism has been mild by the standards of the last few months or, for that matter, by the standards of some past presidents’ vacations. In any case, Clinton appears to have paid it little mind.

Late Monday afternoon, at a bookstore in Vineyard Haven, a town on the north side of the island some 12 miles from his temporary vacation retreat, Clinton, wearing teal slacks, a golf shirt and loafers, appeared somewhat sunburned but more relaxed than he has seemed in public for well more than a year and a half.

Inside, as Mrs. Clinton browsed the fiction section--picking up novels by Milan Kundera (“The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”), Anne Tyler (“Saint Maybe”) and Mary McGregor Morris (“A Dangerous Woman”), the President wandered from mysteries to history, commenting on books to store clerks and a reporter. He picked up a mystery (“Where Is Joe Merchant,” by Jimmy Buffett) while noting that he could not read any more mysteries for a while, then added the “Culture of Disbelief,” by Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter, and “Indian Country,” by sociologist Peter Matthiessen, to his pile.

“I’m always falling behind,” he said when asked if he could find time to read all he had taken.

Fifteen minutes later, armed with those volumes among others, plus a science fiction book (“Shape Changers” by Jennifer Roberson) and J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” both presumably for daughter Chelsea, the First Couple presented Hillary’s Visa card and headed back out into the sun.

Outside, the President indulged his passion for handshaking, greeting a crowd of several hundred that had begun gathering as soon as the presence of police suggested his imminent arrival. As he worked his way past a throng of several hundred, a voice shouted out from the crowd: “Don’t let ‘em wear you down!”

“I’m just getting warmed up,” Clinton responded, drawing cheers.