NELSON MANDELA & F.W. DE KLERK

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accommodate irreconcilable forces and had clearly seen that half measures were hardly going to bring domestic peace and renewed economic growth. De Klerk also had a natural interest in his own political future. In 1985 he had asked two consultants what he should do to succeed Botha; they both told him to soften his image on the necessity of preserving apartheid. This, cautiously, he began to do. Upon taking office, De Klerk announced, ''Our goal is a totally changed South Africa.'' In December 1989 he convened a historic bosberaad, or bush council, at which he won his Cabinet's authorization to lift the government's ban on the A.N.C. and to release Mandela in February of the following year. Then came the hard part. Shortly before Mandela was freed, he and De Klerk met for the first time, again at the presidential residence in Cape Town. Things went well, both men now recall. Like partners in a soured marriage looking back to the heady days of courtship, they remember how pleased and surprised they were by each other's responsiveness, courtesy and willingness to cooperate. ''We immediately started talking freely to each other,'' says De Klerk. ''He met me on a basis of equality and discussed issues objectively,'' Mandela notes. ''I was tremendously impressed.'' Once out of prison, Mandela commended De Klerk as ''a man of integrity.'' Months later, he retracted this judgment. As the intense bargaining between them began, Mandela was first startled and then outraged to discover that De Klerk was not a meek facilitator of historical inevitability but a tough, grudging opponent. De Klerk kept attempting to insert into any proposed power- sharing agreement checks and balances that would still give whites some guarantees of a voice in future governments. Mandela bridled and complained that the National Party ''keeps looking for ways to exercise power even if it loses a democratic election.'' Both men have tempers that are ordinarily tamed in public. In private, however, they grew increasingly angry with each other. De Klerk flew into rages at the charge that he did not care about township violence -- as if, Mandela suspected, he could not stand being scolded by a black man. And Mandela's stony reserve sometimes dissolved as well. A Mandela aide commented about some of these torrid sessions: ''I sometimes feel sorry for De Klerk after the old man bullies him.'' Their disagreements became so acrimonious that Mandela and De Klerk at one point broke off all personal contacts, communicating only through letters and public statements. But both had invested too much in the process to let it founder. Shrewdly, they delegated the day-to-day haggling to subordinates. And the leading understudies, government minister Roelof Meyer, 46, and A.N.C. secretary-general Cyril Ramaphosa, 41, eventually came through with the crucial compromise: an agreement to establish a government of national unity for five years after the first free elections in April. Full-scale majority- rule democracy would arrive, with some time allowed for all South Africans to get used to it. In perhaps their finest moment since their first meeting, De Klerk and Mandela recognized the wisdom of this plan and made critical concessions. De Klerk dropped his insistence on building in some form of white veto over majority rule. Mandela relinquished his demand for a strong centralized government and accepted a form of federalism that grants nine provinces some attributes of autonomy. And