The Day That Every Door Opened to Arafat : Diplomacy: PLO chairman spends a whirlwind day in Washington. Clinton arranges unscheduled meeting.

For Yasser Arafat, the long-reviled leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, one exultant moment in a wondrous day played out beyond the reach of television cameras in a quiet, simple room heavy with history.

A few moments after the South Lawn ceremony, President Clinton led Arafat into the Map Room in the White House. The meeting had not been scheduled. To arrange it, the President had to ask Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to proceed to the Green Room upstairs and wait there with Vice President Al Gore. Secretary of State Warren Christopher joined Arafat and Clinton.

The Map Room takes its name from the days in World War II when President Franklin Roosevelt charted the progress of his armies there, poring over the maps from time to time with famous guests, such as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

The maps are long gone, and the now-nondescript utility conference room is high on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s list of historic White House sites in need of renovation.

Clinton congratulated the PLO chairman for reaching an agreement with Israel, and the two men began discussing the breathtaking significance of the signing ceremony.

“This event,” Arafat told Clinton, according to a senior Administration official, “will help a great deal in terms of giving my people the sense that this is something real and that there is real hope in this agreement.”

“It is absolutely essential,” said Clinton, speaking with force, “to move quickly now to seize the moment and to take advantage of the momentum created by this incredible event, to start getting things moving.”

After the session, which was less than 10 minutes long, the President led Arafat upstairs to the North Portico entrance and bade him farewell. The gesture ended an extraordinary White House visit in an extraordinary day for a nationalist leader who had been shunned for so long by American officialdom.

The day began with a momentous meeting between Arafat and Rabin in the Green Room of the White House just before the South Lawn ceremony. The witness was Clinton, who described the scene later for Israeli television.

“They looked at each other really clearly in the eye for the first time,” Clinton reported, “and the prime minister said: ‘You know, we are going to have to work very hard to make this work.’

“And Arafat said: ‘I know, and I am prepared to do my part.’

“They immediately exchanged about three sentences, right to business, no pleasantries, going right to business,” Clinton said. “But I thought they were quite serious.”

Arafat rushed through the day in a diplomatic and public relations whirlwind. He conferred with Christopher and his aides at the State Department, met with former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, lunched with former Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.), received a delegation of church and Jewish leaders and taped at least three television interviews, with the “McNeil-Lehrer Report” (PBS), “Nightline” (ABC) and “Larry King Live” (CNN).

Interviewer King opened his show by asking the question surely on the mind of many Americans: “How did you feel today, standing there?”

Arafat, who speaks English enthusiastically, without slowing to perfect his grammar, replied, “You see, I feel that the end of the pains, the oppression, the troubles for our masses, for our people.”

“You felt it ending?”

“Not ending--the start of ending.”

“The start of the end?”

“Yes.”

“Were you very moved? Were you surprised?” King asked.

“Not surprised,” Arafat said, “but no doubt I feel something in my heart. It’s a big difference.”

American officials clearly wanted to drive home to Arafat the heavy significance that the Clinton Administration, much like Israel itself, attaches to the pledges by the PLO to abandon violence and terrorism.

“It is important that they (these commitments) be carried out forthrightly and without ambiguity,” Christopher told Arafat in a 45-minute meeting at the State Department, according to a senior State Department official.

The official did not reveal Arafat’s reply but told journalists that Christopher was “deeply impressed by the seriousness of both Arafat and (his foreign policy adviser) Mahmoud Abbas.” Abbas, who accompanied Arafat to the State Department, had signed the agreements in the White House ceremony.

Arafat, smiling throughout the day, did not publicly express any displeasure over the speeches at the ceremony, but PLO aides said they were disappointed at the way Rabin dwelt on the Arab killings of Israelis over the years.

“Yasser Arafat talked about the future,” one PLO official said. “Rabin talked about the past. That’s why Rabin sounded like the wrong guest at the right party.

“Yasser Arafat is rolling up his sleeves and getting to work on implementing this agreement,” he went on. “Time is against this agreement. If we’re going to talk like Rabin talked today, we’re going to be back fighting again in two days.”

But hours later, when the largest group of Arab-Americans and American Jews in history gathered at a Washington hotel to celebrate the pact, the talk was not about fighting but about peace, and how to pay for it.

“When all the speechifying is done, it’s the money that’s going to count,” Robert Lifton, president of the American Jewish Congress, said in an unusual appeal for American Jews to help raise money to build Palestine.

Times staff writers Norman Kempster and Doyle McManus contributed to this article.