IN GOLF WE TRUST

As usual, Mack McLarty was all business when he arrived at the Oval Office for an appointment and was quickly waved inside by Bill Clinton's longtime doorkeeper, Nancy Hernreich. But the inner sanctum was empty. "Where's the President?" asked McLarty, a senior adviser. "What do you mean?" Hernreich responded with alarm. Before the two could panic, McLarty noticed the French door near Clinton's desk was ajar. Picking up the trail, he went outside. There on the South Lawn, about 30 yds. from the Oval Office, the President of the United States was standing in shirt-sleeves and tie, his hands gripping the shaft of a putter, his eyes fixed on a small white ball at his feet.

The President looked up. "He had this pained look on his face, like, 'I guess I've got to go back inside now,'" McLarty recalls of that late-spring afternoon. "And I said, 'Mr. President, it's O.K. I just have a checklist. Let's do it here.'" And so for 15 minutes, as the Commander in Chief practiced his chip shots and short strokes, McLarty tagged along, running down items of business. "We should do this more often," McLarty said when he was finished. Replied Clinton hopefully: "Yeah, it kinda works, doesn't it?"

It does, according to McLarty and most other senior White House staff members. The President has long been a fervent golfer, but not until June, when renovation of Dwight Eisenhower's old putting green on the South Lawn was completed, could he slip outside and practice his game without leaving the White House. The restored green, designed by renowned course architect Robert Trent Jones Jr., is 1,500 sq. ft. of Southshore Creeping Bentgrass, a putter's paradise. The addition has brightened Clinton's disposition and broken up his cluttered workday. In the months before he left for a golf-saturated vacation last week in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the President could be found outside almost daily, often for just a few minutes, lining up breaking putts-and working through some of the toughest issues he faces. "It's a think pad," George Stephanopoulos says of the green. "It's quiet, there are no phones, and he can use the game to distract part of his mind and let the other part do its work."