`ON-THE-JOB TRAINING' LED CLINTON WHITE HOUSE ASTRAY.

Byline: Angie Cannon Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

It was a startling admission, but one that revealed much about the early days of the Clinton White House.

House investigators recently asked Associate White House Counsel William H. Kennedy III about efforts in 1993 to train Craig Livingstone for his new post as director of personnel security - a position that would allow him to review confidential FBI background files.

``Craig had no experience in these matters. Neither did I, and so we engaged in OJT, on-the-job training . . .'' said Kennedy, who came to the White House from the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Ark.

It was that on-the-job training that characterized the early Clinton White House as it bumbled due to a toxic combination of inexperience, arrogance and even, some say, paranoia: There was Travelgate, Nannygate, the $200 haircut.

The White House steadily began to put its house in order, especially with the midterm hiring of Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, who brought focus and discipline.

But now, just when the Clinton White House seemed to have regained its footing, the FBI files episode has reopened a window into the mismanagement that plagued the administration in its early months.

The improper acquisition of hundreds of FBI files by Livingstone and another political operative - what FBI Director Louis Freeh called ``egregious violations of privacy'' - has embarrassed the White House and reminded the public of that chaotic time. And the White House's shifting explanations of the affair in recent weeks indicate that not all management problems have been solved.

``It was quite clear that they came in unprepared to govern,'' said Stephen Hess, a presidency scholar at the Brookings Institution, a liberal Washington think tank. ``They were the gang that couldn't shoot straight . . .

``The big question is: Have they gotten organized? Have they learned something? Or do they still operate by some chaos theory of government?''

Those are questions voters will have to weigh as they decide whether to re-elect Clinton in November. By and large, the White House appears to have gotten its act more together under Panetta's direction. Clinton, who is riding high in the polls, seems to have grown into the job.

It's hard to predict how a second Clinton White House would operate, of course. Presumably, a second term would be more sure-footed than the first, provided Clinton had competent, seasoned advisers around him.

But Clinton is who is he is: essentially an undisciplined, restless personality, if also a talented and articulate one, and his White House often reflects that.

That was evident during recent House and Senate hearings on Filegate.

Most damaging was the testimony of Craig Livingstone and Anthony B. Marceca, political advance guys who manned the White House's sensitive personnel security operation and obtained more than 700 confidential FBI files, many belonging to prominent Republicans, in late 1993 and 1994.

The hearings have not resolved the issue of whether the two men were deliberately trying to obtain those files to get dirt on the president's political rivals and holdover White House staff members.

But their testimony revealed a White House that awarded key jobs to inept political operatives with problems in their own background files. It showed an operation that permitted interns without security clearances to have easy access to the confidential files in a White House vault.

``The problem is not sin,'' said Ross Baker, a Rutgers University political scientist who has worked in the past with congressional Democrats. ``It is stupidity. In the beginning, they were trying to run a bare-bones operation to demonstrate they were frugal with taxpayers' money and ended up using a lot of amateur kids, by and large recruited from the campaign, with predictable results.''