Myers Says She’s Leaving White House at End of Year : Presidency: Press secretary, 33, contends it’s time ‘to move on to do other things.’ Her departure comes amid a shake-up in the Clinton team.

White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, one of President Clinton’s longest serving and most loyal aides, confirmed Friday that she will leave the Administration at the end of the year.

Myers, 33, said that it is time to “move on to do other things” but did not specify what her next job will be.

Myers’ departure comes at a time of upheaval in the Clinton White House and Cabinet as the Administration heads into the last half of its four-year term in the aftermath of the Republican landslide in November.

In the last month, Clinton has lost Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, counselor David Gergen, Democratic Party Chairman David Wilhelm, White House political director Joan Baggett and a host of less-prominent officials. A week ago Friday, the President fired Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders for the latest in a series of controversial public statements.

Myers, the most visible woman in the White House after First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, is likely to be replaced by Michael D. McCurry, currently the chief State Department spokesman.

McCurry on Friday refused to confirm or deny that he would be appointed but offered praise for Myers.

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“I’m sorry to see her go,” McCurry said. “She’s been--she is a marvelous person and a good friend and has been a great colleague and has served this President very effectively and loyally.”

McCurry, 39, has had a peripatetic political career, working for Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the Democratic presidential campaigns of Ohio Sen. John Glenn, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey. He also served as communications director of the Democratic National Committee.

Myers, who grew up in Valencia, Calif., is the daughter of Steve Myers, a former Navy combat pilot and Lockheed Corp. test pilot and a professed Republican. She has bounced from campaign to campaign over the last decade, working for Michael S. Dukakis in 1988 and Dianne Feinstein in 1990 before joining the Clinton camp early in his run for the presidency in 1991.

She is generally liked by the White House press corps, who nevertheless felt that she was less than authoritative because of limits on her access to the President and constraints on the scope and power of her office.

She escaped being reorganized into irrelevance in a September White House staff shake-up engineered by Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta, appealing over his head to Clinton, who not only saved her job but gave her a raise and a better title.

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But Myers acknowledged in recent weeks that she had gotten “burned out” by the unrelenting pressure of the job.

Asked if she was forced from the job, Myers said: “I’m neither jumping nor being pushed. I’m walking away when I think it’s the best time.”

Marlin Fitzwater, who served as chief spokesman for former Presidents George Bush and Ronald Reagan, said that Myers was handicapped by Clinton’s hostility to the press, which “permeated the entire White House.”

He also said that she never had the access nor the support within the White House to become the authoritative voice of the Administration.

“So many times you felt Dee Dee was operating with her hands tied and she really didn’t know what was going on,” Fitzwater said. “Part of it is access. The other part was that she didn’t have staff to check things out to make sure that what she said publicly was accurate.”

Myers said she had to overcome the hurdles of age, gender and geography when she took over the prestigious post.

“I think coming into this job being young, being from Los Angeles--and let’s face it, in Washington being from California is a negative--and being female, those things created a challenge for me,” she said in an interview with The Times earlier this year.

“In some ways, I have had to work very hard and have to continue to work very hard to overcome that . . . Washington is still very much a male-oriented culture.”