Clinton Due Back at White House Today

Two days after undergoing emergency knee surgery, President Clinton is expected to return today to the White House, where physical therapists and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton have been making plans to tape down rugs and rearrange furniture to accommodate a chief executive on crutches.

The president spent Saturday--his second day in the hospital--sleeping intermittently, watching the NCAA basketball tournament on TV and doing crossword puzzles. His office assistant “smuggled in a bagel,” according to White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry, who said Clinton was generally in good spirits.

But the president also felt his first jabs of pain since the operation, as doctors weaned him from the anesthetic that had allowed him to rest comfortably after the surgery.

“He now knows he had surgery,” Hillary Clinton reportedly said after her husband experienced spasms in his right leg while trying to return to bed. McCurry, who recounted the incident in an afternoon briefing from the Bethesda National Naval Medical Center in Maryland, said Clinton’s doctors described the pain as “a normal reaction.”

The first lady postponed departure on a trip to Africa from Saturday to this afternoon to spend more time with her husband.

Get-well wishes for the 50-year-old president poured in from around the world. Among those sending their regards were German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, South Korean President Kim Young Sam and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, whom Clinton plans to meet in Helsinki, Finland, later this week.

It was left to Vice President Al Gore to take up the president’s usual Saturday duty--his weekly radio address. “The president’s doing great,” Gore said. “He’s resting comfortably and he’ll be back on his feet--both of them--very soon.”

Gore used the address to promote Clinton’s plan for $5 billion in school construction funds to alleviate “a landscape littered with peeling paint and broken glass. . . . With student populations at an all-time high, many of our schoolhouses are now at an all-time low.”

Clinton was supposed to have promoted the initiative himself at a Florida elementary school on Friday, but was forced to scrap the event after tearing a tendon in his right knee at the oceanside estate of professional golfer Greg Norman.

The accident occurred at 1:20 a.m. Friday, while Clinton and Norman were walking down a flight of steps. The president, mistakenly believing he had gotten to the bottom of the flight, caught his heel on the last step. He was injured when his leg twisted out from under him. McCurry said Norman sent Clinton “a nice expression of concern” on Saturday.

Now that the surgery is finished, the hard part begins: recuperation, including what doctors have described as “rigorous, aggressive physical therapy.” The first step on Saturday was to begin taking Clinton off the epidural--an injected anesthetic--that had been used to numb his lower body.

In place of the epidural, doctors gave Clinton two nonnarcotic, non-sedating painkillers--Toradol and Ultran--as well as Robaxin, a muscle relaxant. The doctors spent Saturday adjusting the dosages of the drugs, according to McCurry.

Dr. David Adkison, the orthopedic surgeon who led Friday’s operation at the naval medical center in suburban Washington, did not appear at the afternoon press conference and could not be reached. But the Associated Press quoted him as saying that while many knee-surgery patients are put on a machine that bends the knee to keep it from stiffening, Clinton’s knee would be in the gentle and more discriminating hands of doctors.

“We don’t trust this to a machine,” he said. Adkison has said the president should regain complete use of the knee, but that recovery could take six months to a year. The president will be fitted with a thigh-to-ankle leg brace and will be unable to jog or play golf for up to six months.

While Clinton will probably leave the hospital this afternoon, McCurry said, his departure time is still tentative and his doctors will have the final say. “They really want to hold that open until they see how he’s doing.”

McCurry said the White House had not made any final judgments on Clinton’s schedule, although he reiterated that the president would go to Helsinki as planned for the summit with Yeltsin, whose own health has been a matter of concern.

The President did skip Saturday night’s Gridiron Dinner--an annual rite in which Washington journalists roast politicians in song and dance. The first thing Clinton did upon awakening Saturday morning, according to McCurry, was to videotape a message to those attending the white-tie affair.