CLINTON SHOWS WANING SUPPORT FOR RENO.

Byline: David Johnston and Todd S. Purdum The New York Times

Three years after Attorney General Janet Reno emerged as a surprise star of the Clinton Cabinet, she has skidded to a stop at an unexpected career crossroads. She has said she wants to stay on at the Justice Department, but President Clinton has pointedly passed up opportunities to say he would keep her.

While there is no indication that Clinton plans to dismiss Reno, his unwillingness to endorse quickly her stewardship reflects longstanding strains between the White House and the Justice Department that have eroded her standing within Clinton's inner circle even as she retains her luster outside Washington.

Some presidential aides expressed disappointment that Reno had failed to take political heat for Clinton and said they felt she had been too willing to refer cases involving the president's close associates to independent prosecutors. But they acknowledged that Clinton could face a blast of protest from Republicans if he tried to demand Reno's resignation now, while she is mulling their requests for an independent counsel to examine Democratic fund-raising.

Among White House aides, the gripes about Reno seem to be generalized and specific, clearly detectable but publicly untraceable to any particular senior official. In recent days, when several top Clinton advisers were asked to sum up objections to her, all did so only on condition of anonymity and only while insisting that they were repeating the complaints they had heard from others, not offering their own.

The complaints have not led to a decision to find a successor, said officials who predicted that Clinton would reluctantly extend her tenure. ``My personal conviction is that the president's not going to be in a position to do what he wants to do,'' which is replace her, one senior White House aide said last week.

Instead, the White House appears content to let Reno dangle embarrassingly without an immediate decision on her future. The White House chief of staff, Leon Panetta, has told colleagues that Reno's fate will be chronologically one of the last questions to be addressed in the transition of forming the new Cabinet, with no decision until at least December. Of course, that will only have the effect of increasing the attention on any decision the president might make, since Reno would not be among a batch of appointees resigning at once.

Reno's aides said they had heard nothing from the White House. They added that her publicly stated position on her tenure - that she likes the job and would stay if the president desired it - was meant as a candid expression of her thinking and was not intended to suggest that she was campaigning for the job. But to the chagrin of Reno's supporters, some White House aides have interpreted her comments as an effort to tie Clinton's hands.

Presidential aides do not see the strapping, idiosyncratic attorney general, who relishes her outsider image, as one of their own. Clinton, who might turn to Education Secretary Richard Riley to jawbone about politics or to Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin for a chat on economics, rarely, if ever, turns to Reno for serious discussions about the law or criminal justice matters.

Still, attorneys general have long since transcended their one-time role as presidential confidants. The rapid expansion of the Justice Department in the past two decades into a 90,000-employee agency increasingly focused on crime-fighting has made the job too managerially demanding for a mere crony. But within the Clinton White House, it is not Reno, but her deputy, Jamie Gorelick, who is perceived as the official who makes the trains run on time.

While the White House complaints over Reno's early emphasis on crime prevention and children have abated with her uncritical embrace of Clinton's emphatically centrist anti-crime agenda, irritations linger over specific judgment calls Reno has made to seek the appointment of independent counsels.

Some presidential aides say she has trivialized the role of an independent counsel by seeking them in relatively routine cases, like whether Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros was truthful in a background inquiry about the size of payments to a former mistress.

Others were infuriated last month when Reno authorized Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater independent prosecutor, to investigate the truthfulness of statements made at a congressional hearing by Bernard Nussbaum, the former White House counsel and ally of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Presidential aides contended that Reno could have legally defended a decision to keep the issue out of Starr's hands. But Justice Department officials said she had little choice under the law.

So far, Reno has sought the appointment of four independent counsels, and is considering complaints that could lead to a fifth to investigate whether Democrats illegally funneled overseas money into their campaign coffers. Her first appointment, in the Whitewater affair, came at the request of the White House. Later she sought counsels to investigate Cisneros, the late Commerce Secretary Ronald Brown and former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy.

Reno may not set a record. President Reagan's three attorneys general referred a total of eight cases to independent counsels during Reagan's two terms in office.

In recent days she has shown signs that she is willing to take a more steely posture, rejecting as too vague two requests for the immediate appointment of an independent prosecutor to investigate campaign financing. Reno's aides said her decision had nothing to do with her job status but were statutory judgments that she was obliged to make under the independent counsel act.

But Justice Department lawyers are still evaluating a more detailed request by Sen. John McCain and several other Republican lawmakers that she must decide by the end of the month.