COMPELLING CHARACTER; BILL CLINTON'S PERSONAL QUEST PLACES HIM UNDER THE GRINDSTONE OF HISTORY AND ATOP THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE.

Byline: David M. Shribman

THIS is a tale of two winter days at the Capitol, one six Januarys ago and one only Saturday. This is a tale of figures headed for history, one an idealistic president with great promise speaking of his vision on his Inauguration Day, one a battered president facing impeachment on the House floor. This is the political tale of our time, the story of dreams finally realized and the story of dreams in ruin.

But most of all, this is a tale of one man who has seen astonishing success and, as Saturday showed, has suffered defeat so devastating, so personally wounding, that it has been shared by only one person in history. He is a man who has inspired and retains remarkable public support and, as the impeachment vote demonstrated, even more startling opposition; a man who seems, as his supporters argue, to personify selflessness at its very best and, as his detractors countered in a historic House session, selfishness at its very worst; a man who raised himself from the obscurity of a wrecked family in an Arkansas spa town all the way to the White House, the American Dream made flesh, and now faces the cold banishment of history, the politician's loneliest, most dreaded nightmare.

Eighteen years ago, when Bill Clinton was an obscure young governor, the Washington political pollster Peter D. Hart told him over dinner at the governor's mansion in Little Rock: ``The people in Arkansas want you to win, but they want you to win by only one vote. They like you, but not everything about you.''

That's still true. Americans generally like Clinton, even as they despair of his character flaws. And now all Americans have seen their lives, their perceptions of government, even their personal views of honesty and political trust, affected and altered by the Clinton experience.

In that way, as much as any of the past half century, Clinton's is a landmark presidency, exposing deep cultural divides in the country. ``It has brought a lot of important issues to the surface,'' said Joseph Cooper, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist. ``He has brought us a lot of questions to which there aren't a lot of easy answers.''

The `and yet' president

Bill Clinton has added a modern twist to our politics, an ironic turn to our outlook, a morality tale to our folklore, and, most of all, a second thought to the way we view American public life. He is, more than anything, the ``and yet'' president.

He speaks for the best in all of us, and yet he stands as a symbol of the flaws in all of us.

He has jettisoned longtime friends and allies at a moment's notice to serve his political needs, and yet he retains the enduring loyalty of people he has never met.

He sometimes seems arrogant, and yet he oftentimes appears vulnerable.

He talks from the podium like the boy from Hope, and yet he speaks from the witness chair as the operator from Oxford.

His opponents cannot abide having him at the center of political life, and yet he would leave an enormous vacuum if he were gone.

His supporters find him endlessly beguiling, and yet his detractors find him unbearably repugnant.

``I felt like he was going to be one of the bright lights,'' Ray Smith, a 28-year veteran of the Arkansas Legislature who was its House speaker during Clinton's first year as governor, said in an interview. ``But I never knew why he had such a capacity to irritate people so much.''

Today, the nation and Bill Clinton confront those very paradoxes, the conflicts and complexities that make Clinton at once the most compelling figure of our time and the most contradictory figure of our age.

``You look at what makes him tick and it is clear that he loves this, this idea of serving,'' Carolyn Staley, who grew up next door to the Clintons in Hot Springs, Ark., and who remains a close friend of the president's. ``But he also has a competitive streak. It has served him well through all of this. He can go harder and with more fatigue than anyone else. He sees the two things as part of the same process. He cannot have one without the other.''

A prominent figure in Arkansas politics who has known Clinton since 1968, when the leading members of the political elite recognized him as the shiniest, most promising youth of his time, bound for the big city and for big things, added: ``He kind of enjoys these things. There's a bigger mountain always for him to climb. But he never reckoned on a mountain this high.''

`Little boxes'

The president and Hillary Rodham Clinton pride themselves on their ability to ``compartmentalize'' life, to keep their concerns in ``little boxes'' that they can stow at will. But it might be closer to the truth to say instead that these little boxes are the building blocks of an extraordinary person, so powerful in personality that he has come to dominate his time, so fragile in reality that the removal of one of the little boxes might send the whole structure tumbling to the floor.

One of those boxes came from his mother, Virginia, who taught Clinton, as one of his old friends said the other day, ``that every day is a new day and you shouldn't look back.'' One of those boxes came from his wife, who taught him the importance of battling back, even when the odds seem insurmountable.

``He's the best in these circumstances,'' said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat. ``He's competitive and combative when he's worked up.''

But many of the boxes came from Clinton's own experience as a young man growing up in Arkansas, viewing politics as a ladder of social mobility as much as a blunt instrument of social change; as a youthful activist, determined to bend politics to his own will even when, as he found as an operative in Texas for George McGovern's failed 1972 presidential campaign, the public resists; as a boy-wonder governor who was, former Arkansas state Rep. Shirley Meecham once said, far better at sales than at production; as a presidential candidate in 1992, when he discovered that a candidate who stresses personality inevitably has to answer for his own; and as a president whose every moment in the White House has been full of tension and tumult.

He has always been drawn to the tumult, and that, along with his marital unfaithfulness and his elastic view of the truth, is part of the Clinton character.

As a student government leader at all-white Hot Springs High School, he joined the superintendent of schools in a risky campaign for a bond issue to build a new high school for both races. He plunged into Sen. J. William Fulbright's 1968 re-election campaign, attracting the attention of political leaders in the state, prompting many of them to think, this is a kid, so idealistic, so sophisticated, who will do great things. As governor, he took on the teachers union. As president, he mounted an assault on the health care establishment.

And yet he also shies from conflict. In Arkansas, politicians noticed that he wouldn't rest until he had won over everyone in the room, often taking more care to court his opponents than to reassure his allies. ``He is a true politician,'' said state Representative John Dawson of Camden in south Arkansas, who dealt with Clinton as governor. ``In most instances he can find an audience and tell them what they want to hear.''

After the health care plan died a miserable death in 1994, Clinton retreated. He had bitten off too much, and from then on his proposals were bite-sized, sometimes merely suggestions (``Let's think about youth curfews''), sometimes ideas snatched straight from his opponents' platforms (the emphasis on deficit reduction, which had not been a prominent part of his 1992 campaign but was a matter of orthodoxy to some elements of the Republican Party).

More than any other politician on the American scene he has been picked apart, evaluated, analyzed, and always the focus returns to his character. He may express surprise, even resentment, at how intrusive the inquiries are, but in truth, Bill Clinton has spent as much time as his opponents thinking about his own character, exploring its contours, testing its suppleness, probing for its weakness.

``I believe that people ultimately have to live with the consequences of their lives and work through them and go on,'' he said in an extraordinarily revealing conversation in San Antonio only weeks before he won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992. ``Questions of private character also have private consequences that either make your life or break it. I've tried to learn from it and grow as a result of it.''

A man whose critics oftentimes accuse him of self-deception has an unusually deep knowledge of himself. Listen to Clinton on Clinton, reflections in a hotel suite eight years ago:

``I never thought I was as good as (my supporters) did - goodness is a function of what you feel and think as well as what you do - and I know darn well I wasn't as bad as I was being portrayed. I always thought I did a lot of good things and some bad things. . . . To me, life is a journey and character is a quest. It's an unfolding thing.''

Bill Clinton's journey isn't over, his quest for character continues. But as it does, America's quest to understand Clinton and to evaluate his character has come to dominate this nation's politics.

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PHOTO (Color) President Clinton prepares to give a speech at the White House following Saturday's impeachment vote in the House of Representatives.

J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press