BILL CLINTON: MEASURE OF A PRESIDENT

THE FIRST NEWS CAME IN a whisper. The President was sitting in the Oval Office, smiling for photographers with Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, when Mike McCurry, the White House press secretary, bent close to his ear. CNN, McCurry said, was reporting that an explosion had destroyed part of a federal building in Oklahoma City. Stay on top of it, Clinton replied. The President then escorted Ciller to a meeting in the Cabinet Room. It was there that Leon Panetta, Clinton's chief of staff, passed the President a yellow legal pad with notes scribbled across the page with Panetta's trademark blue felt-tip pen. "Half of federal building in O.K. City blown up--expect heavy casualties," the note read. "Called Janet Reno--she has dispatched FBI."

The magnitude of the crisis was becoming clear, but Clinton still hadn't seen a television. He listened as Ciller insisted that Turkey's attack on Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq was a retaliation against terrorism. Her words were eerily resonant. When the meeting ended, the President finally had a long look at what terrorism had wrought in the middle of America. The images of children being pulled from the rubble made him "beyond angry," as his communications director Mark Gearan put it. Clinton's first reaction, he later told a top aide, was a desire to "put my fist through the television."

Sometimes the measure of a President's entire term comes down to his handling of a single crisis. At such moments, says Fred Greenstein, a political science professor at Princeton University, "you're suddenly reminded that the presidency is an institution that people turn to in times of crisis and distress." Two years earlier to the day, Clinton had fumbled his handling of one of the first crises of his Administration, the fiery raid by federal agents of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas. On that day, Clinton all but disappeared from public view, leaving it to Reno, his new Attorney General, to take charge and accept blame. Last week there was no blame to accept, but the significance of the moment was not lost on anyone in the White House. As more information poured in throughout the day, Clinton and his aides debated when and how the President should respond.

Panetta organized an interagency task force that met for the first time at noon that day. They gathered again at 4 p.m. in the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing, where Panetta was briefed in person and over video-conference screens by all the relevant agencies. Then Clinton arrived. He had already decided to make a public statement, but now he had some questions of his own. The first betrayed his penchant for wading into the details of a problem. Was it possible, he asked, to ground all the flights from the region around Oklahoma City to prevent the culprits from fleeing by air? (The answer, which Panetta gave him later, was no. To do so would be too serious an infringement on civil liberties.) Then, getting well ahead of the investigation, Clinton wanted to know whether the death penalty could be sought against whoever was guilty. (The answer: yes, under at least six provisions of federal law.) But it was decided that Clinton would not be the one to bring up the death penalty--lest he seem politically opportunistic.