NEWS ANALYSIS : Christopher’s Bad Year Inspires New Approach : Diplomacy: Foreign policy nightmares spur secretary of state to overhaul his department--starting at the top.

This has not been the best of years for Warren Christopher.

Elevated at last to the job he long wanted, the Los Angeles lawyer found himself mired in policy nightmares from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Somalia, assailed by critics who called him indecisive, inarticulate and--the most painful cut--incompetent.

In private, the secretary of state railed to friends about unfair media coverage and unrestrained partisanship in Congress. “This is a cruel city,” he has said more than once. “It’s unforgiving. There’s very little . . . sense of balance.”

In public, Christopher struggled to convey a sense of purpose in foreign policy, but the conspicuous failure of his own diplomacy on Bosnia and the jumble of Administration voices on other issues made it an uphill fight.

Then, in October, came the year’s low point: the debacle in Somalia, where 18 U.S. troops were killed amid confusion over what policy they were fighting for--followed by an embarrassing setback in Haiti, where dockside thugs stopped the U.S. Navy from landing military personnel.

“I hope I never have to live through that again,” a Christopher aide said later.

But out of that crisis came a turning point--or so Christopher now hopes.

For the failure of foreign policy in October convinced both Christopher and President Clinton that the Administration’s foreign policy machinery needed a serious overhaul. And, Christopher now admits, it convinced him he had to rethink the way he handled his own job.

“I asked myself how I could be more effective,” he said in an interview. “I decided I needed to be more purposeful. . . . I find that the indirection which I frequently use in my life as a way of accomplishing things is not as effective in government. You have to reveal purposes and be purposeful in trying to lead.”

The result, Christopher and other officials said, is now under way: a deliberate attempt to remake the Administration’s foreign policy team. The planned replacement of Defense Secretary Les Aspin with retired Adm. Bobby Ray Inman is only the most visible part, they said.

Equally important and more elusive is a less visible part: the reinvention of Warren Christopher.

Ironically, just before the Somalia debacle, Christopher and Clinton thought they had tamed the foreign policy demons that dogged them earlier in the year.

Clinton had notched a public success at an economic summit in Tokyo in July. The troublesome issue of Bosnia, which Christopher tried to solve and then largely abandoned, was out of the spotlight. Best of all, Clinton had presided over the celebratory signature of a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in September.

“We thought we had turned the corner,” a senior official said. “We thought we were in control of the agenda, at last.”

They were wrong. On Oct. 3, Somali militiamen shot down two U.S. Army helicopters in Mogadishu and a fierce battle ensued, claiming the lives of 18 young Americans in a mission few of their compatriots understood.

Christopher and Aspin went to Capitol Hill and told members of Congress that the Administration was still working on a response to the events. Congress began to panic; the public began to ask whether Clinton and his aides knew what they were doing.

A week later, a ship carrying American peacekeepers to Haiti turned back in the face of threats from dockside thugs. Clinton, who had paid relatively little attention to his own foreign policies, demanded that his advisers fix the mess.

For Christopher and his lieutenants, the experience was “brutal,” one aide said: After 12 years in exile, the Democrats’ attempt at forging a post-Cold War foreign policy seemed on the point of foundering--over issues that they did not even consider important.

By his own account, the secretary of state and aides worked around the clock for three days as the Administration put together a new Somalia policy, reacted to events in Haiti and monitored Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s attack on his country’s anti-reformist Parliament.

Then, Christopher said, he began to examine his own performance--and that of the rest of the Administration, as well.

Two weeks later, on Oct. 19, he took a series of recommendations to Clinton. In a 90-minute meeting in the Oval Office, officials said, Christopher outlined a six-point plan to get the Administration’s foreign policy machinery back on track.

The points, they said, included getting Clinton more involved in foreign affairs, including a once-a-week meeting to discuss major issues; giving Vice President Al Gore a bigger role as well, partly as another way to engage the White House; and a closer link between Christopher’s top spokesman, Thomas E. Donilon, and White House image czar David Gergen, to ensure the Administration spoke with a single voice.

They agreed to create a new system to manage crises like Somalia, appointing special coordinators instead of relying on the “deputies’ committee” of mid-level officials. (The key flaw in Somalia, one official said, was that nobody had personal responsibility for the issue--and so when the United Nations stopped seeking a political solution in Mogadishu, nobody in Washington noticed.)

Christopher announced that he wanted to replace Deputy Secretary of State Clifton Wharton, a respected but miscast former university president. And he said he planned to give Congress a clear, concrete explanation of the Administration’s foreign policy priorities--something neither he nor Clinton had managed to do in their first nine months in office.

At the same time, Clinton began moving to replace Aspin as secretary of defense. State Department officials said Christopher considered Aspin a major part of the Administration’s problem in managing foreign policy and they presume that he told Clinton so; Christopher says only that the issue was handled between Clinton, Gore and Aspin.

If all those changes take hold, officials said, the Administration should be much more sure-footed the next time an international crisis occurs.

State Department officials said Christopher’s own self-examination produced a noticeable shift in his approach to his own job.

“There’s been a change in his style of operating, and it dates from the Somalia experience,” one senior official said. “He’s become much more directive, more managerial. He’s demanding more of his undersecretaries. He’s setting more deadlines.”

Christopher is deliberately traveling abroad more, too, as a way to “show some movement” and “take more of the initiative,” another official said.

The next steps, he said, may even include hiring a media coach to work on Christopher’s notoriously wooden television persona.

Christopher himself said the most useful part of the process was simply setting a clear list of priorities. The list, which he unveiled before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Nov. 4, included promoting economic security, supporting reform in Russia, maintaining healthy relationships with Europe and Asia, working for peace in the Middle East, and stopping nuclear proliferation and other global problems.

(It deliberately relegated regional conflicts like those in Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti to a lower rank.)

“Those priorities have always been there,” he said. “But describing them and telling people that I regarded those as the most important things, and that I was going to (pursue them) when I came to work every day . . . has helped me a great deal.”

Has the turnaround worked? The jury is still out.

Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is cautiously positive. “It’s not an easy time to be secretary of state,” he said. “But my general sense is that they are more on top of things than they were a few months ago.”

But critics are unconvinced. Christopher “has the problem of working for a President who is not particularly interested in foreign policy,” said Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to President George Bush. “To fill that gap from the Cabinet level takes strength--and as near as I can see, it’s not there.”

Christopher has tried to persuade Clinton to lend more of his time and political prowess to foreign policy. But the results have been sparse. Two months after Christopher asked the President to set aside an hour a week for an unhurried discussion of foreign issues, his aides privately admit that this fight is lost. Clinton holds quick crisis meetings on foreign policy and often drops in on deliberations of Cabinet members; calm deliberations don’t seem to be his style.

As a result, Christopher has sought to recruit others as foreign policy spokesmen--notably Vice President Gore, who made a highly publicized trip to the former Soviet Union this month. Christopher dismisses the idea that Gore’s increased visibility might detract from his own influence, adding that he asked the vice president to do more.

Christopher said he hopes the replacement of Aspin with Inman, an old friend, will beef up the foreign policy team further. Indeed, Christopher helped persuade a reluctant Inman to take the job, officials said.

Both State Department and White House officials had complained that Aspin’s reluctance to make decisions and his apparent inability to follow a policy line once it had been agreed upon had contributed to the confusion over foreign policy. Inman is expected to bring strength in both areas.