THE NIGHTMARES BEFORE CHRISTMAS Cheer was hard to find at the White House after episodes from Bill Clinton's past came to haunt him

By Richard Lacayo

Bill Clinton is usually a great off-the-cuff speaker, able to answer complicated questions smoothly and with a sure command of detail. But at times last week he found himself struggling for words. The worst moment came when a radio reporter questioned the President on vivid new charges about a painful old subject: extramarital affairs. ''So none of this actually happened?'' the reporter asked. The President answered in the tones of a man stumbling through thickets of misgiving. ''I have nothing else to say,'' he declared. ''We . . . we did, if, the, the, I, I, the stories are just as they have been said.'' Finally he arrived at the assertion he might have begun with: ''They're outrageous, and they're not so.'' This was not the way the White House was planning to greet the holidays. After a turbulent but ultimately productive first year, polls were showing that the President's approval rating had jumped to a gratifying 58%. White House aides, looking forward to a long-overdue breather, had lined up a series of Yuletide photo ops and year-end interviews that would let the President and Mrs. Clinton focus on the budget victory, the come-from-behind NAFTA triumph and next year's campaign on health care. The week opened instead with two painful blasts from the past, one about sex, the other about money. The twin controversies prodded back to life old campaign questions about Clinton's judgment, character and trustworthiness. ''We've been having acid flashbacks,'' groaned one official. The most titillating charges, which came to light in the conservative monthly the American Spectator and in the Los Angeles Times, portrayed Clinton as a reckless, obsessive womanizer who used state troopers to arrange trysts even after the presidential election and then tried to bribe potential squealers with offers of federal jobs. The portrayal seemed perilously close to the old ''Slick Willie'' caricature, potentially the kind of story that could seriously damage Clinton's hard-won image as a steadfast, effective leader. Yet the sex stories were probably the lesser of Clinton's headaches last week, because the most credible of them took place before he began to run for President, a period during which he had already admitted that he had caused ''pain in my marriage.'' Far more swampy were new suspicions that the Clintons, as First Couple of Arkansas, had somehow acted improperly while a real estate partner ruined a savings and loan institution that eventually cost taxpayers $47 million to bail out. The Justice Department is investigating the now defunct S&L and the Clinton partnership to see whether money from the thrift was diverted to support faltering real estate schemes, including a development company called Whitewater in which the Clintons had invested, and to finance politicians -- Clinton among them. At week's end the President decided to give Justice all personal documents related to Whitewater, a move that may satisfy investigators for the moment. But the potential conflicts of interest in the case are sure to invite further scrutiny: Hillary Clinton did legal work for the failed thrift, and a Clinton friend served as chief thrift regulator. The shock and gravity of last week's potential scandals had a visible impact on the Clintons. The First Lady reacted defiantly, standing by her man and accusing their accusers of a political conspiracy. ''I find it not an accident,'' she said, ''that every time he is on the verge of fulfilling his commitment to the American people and they are responding, out comes yet a new round of these outrageous, terrible stories that people plant for political and financial reasons.'' Mrs. Clinton threw herself into her work with fresh vigor, but her husband seemed somber and distracted in private meetings. In public he was unusually careful in his words. ''I just don't want to do anything to prolong this,'' he said. The Spectator article, long on damaging detail but short on corroboration, was based largely on interviews with two Arkansas state troopers, Larry Patterson and Roger Perry, assigned to Clinton's security detail in the 1980s. They picture the Clintons as a pinstripe Jiggs and Maggie -- him often tiptoeing home past midnight, her sometimes greeting him on his return with a mouthful of four-letter words and a temper that Patterson says once resulted in a smashed cupboard door. Their relationship, author David Brock wrote, ''is more a business relationship than a marriage.'' As to the working methods of Clinton's alleged womanizing, Perry and Patterson claim he sometimes visited mistresses when he was supposed to be out jogging, then splashed himself with water to give the impression that he was sweating from a long run. Other women were supposedly dallied with in parked cars, where Patterson says he twice saw a woman perform oral sex on Clinton. The troopers were around to wipe makeup off his shirt collar or arrange hotel- room encounters or sneak women into the Governor's mansion while Mrs. Clinton slept. The affairs continued after the election, the article claims, citing a case in which a trooper stood guard while Clinton carried on with a woman in the basement recreation room of the Governor's mansion. Brock, the author of the best-selling The Real Anita Hill, claims the troopers came forward out of a public-spirited concern that Clinton's behavior, if he continued it as President, could endanger national security by making him vulnerable to blackmailers. His sources were also motivated, he admits, by ''an element of score settling and self-interest.'' Patterson claims Clinton promised him a job transfer but never delivered. ''We lied for him and helped him cheat on his wife, and he treated us like dogs,'' he complained in the story. The Spectator article gained some credibility by forcing the hand of the Los Angeles Times, which went to print with an article its reporters had been researching for several months. The Times reporters had found telephone records showing that as Governor, Clinton had been a prodigious caller of at least one of the women the troopers identified as his sexual partners. The records, reviewed last week by TIME, showed that Clinton had called the woman at least 59 times over two years, including one call from a hotel in Charlottesville, Virginia, that began at 1:23 in the morning and lasted 94 minutes. By far the most inflammatory charge in the Times, however, was Perry's claim that President Clinton called Danny Ferguson, one of two troopers who had originally tried to remain anonymous, and offered federal jobs to Ferguson and Perry in exchange for their silence. If true, the accusation could open Clinton to charges of bribery or other criminal misuses of office. The White House acknowledged that Clinton had called the troopers in September, but heatedly rejected the claim that any job offers were made. Last week Ferguson came forward to deny Perry's story. At the prompting of Clinton adviser Bruce Lindsey and former campaign aide Betsey Wright, he issued a signed affidavit in which he insisted that neither he, Perry nor Patterson was offered jobs by Clinton in return for silence. Ferguson and his attorney Robert Batton added an ambiguous wrinkle: in a September phone talk with Clinton, Ferguson asked if the President had ever received a memo from Perry requesting a position on one of the President's councils on drugs. Batton said Clinton was unaware of the request but offered to try to track it down. According to Batton, he asked Ferguson to get in touch with Perry to find out the content of Perry's memo and to get back in touch with Clinton. Batton said no further discussions took place. As the week went on, the troopers' stories, which were unsupported by notes or documents, proved almost impossible to verify. Every one of Clinton's alleged mistresses who could be identified and reached either denied the troopers' claims or refused to speak. In one allegation, Patterson claimed to have escorted a woman he identifies as a judge's wife to a send-off ceremony at the Little Rock airport before Clinton's Inaugural. At the airport, he said, Hillary Clinton recognized the woman as one of her husband's mistresses and furiously ordered the trooper to take her away. Reached last week by TIME, the woman insisted that the story was ''totally false . . . I have never had a relationship with Bill Clinton outside of a friendship and a professional relationship.'' Meanwhile, the woman who allegedly had the 94-minute, late-night conversation with Clinton came forward anonymously last week to tell the New York Daily News that ''there was no sex involved'' in their relationship. Clinton had been calling, she insisted, to ''help her through a personal crisis.'' Other doubts about the President's accusers sprang up. Both troopers acknowledged that they had been caught cheating on their own wives in the past. Patterson was once suspended from his trooper job for allegedly beating his wife. The pair is also being sued by an insurance company, which charges that Patterson lied about a one-car collision, in which he hit a tree while driving a state car; Perry and a female officer were passengers. Patterson and Perry both admit lying about the incident in depositions. One reason it was important for the White House to head off any erosion in public trust is that Clinton may well need it in weeks to come as he faces the questions surrounding former real estate partner James McDougal and the S&L he operated, Madison Guaranty. Clinton joined with McDougal and the two men's wives in a partnership to develop land along the White River. Though it was among the largest investments in their portfolio, the Clintons have described their involvement in Whitewater Development as mostly passive, with McDougal making all the decisions. Based on a campaign lawyer's report prepared in early 1992, the Clintons claim to have made no return on their investment of at least $68,900 in the partnership. Said Clinton last week: ''We were clearly losing money, and we never knew, until obviously the accountant closed the books out, exactly how much we had lost.'' Whether the Clintons actually lost their entire investment, however, remains in dispute. In recent weeks the Justice Department has been stepping up a three-month- old investigation into Madison Guaranty's collapse. One question that investigators want answered is whether the failed thrift received favorable treatment by Arkansas state regulators, including one, Beverly Basset Schaffer, who was appointed by Clinton. That line of pursuit could also produce questions for Hillary, who as an attorney represented Madison in its bid to launch an adventurous stock scheme at a time when Clinton was Governor. More trouble may come from Capitol Hill. For months Representative Henry Gonzalez, the Texas Democrat who is chairman of the House Banking Committee, has been resisting calls to step up a laggard investigation of Madison by his committee. But last week's disclosures provide ammunition for Jim Leach of Iowa, the committee's ranking Republican, who has been pushing for a more vigorous investigation. Says Newt Gingrich, House minority whip: ''If we had a Republican President, there would be full-blown committee hearings in January. What you're seeing here is Democrats banding together to cover up, ignore and minimize.'' In the Senate, Alfonse D'Amato of New York, ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, has called for hearings as well. But so far the committee's Democratic chairman, Donald Riegle of Michigan, has said he would rather let the Justice Department's investigation run its course. In the same vein, Attorney General Janet Reno rejected calls last week for her to appoint a special counsel to take over her department's investigations into Guaranty. She explained that since anyone appointed by her would still be seen as her operative, it would be better for experienced department investigators to carry on. With Reno's blessing, Justice officials picked a prosecutor with impeccable Republican credentials -- Donald Mackay, a fraud-section lawyer who was once a Nixon-appointed U.S. attorney -- to direct the criminal investigation of Madison and Whitewater. Which of these scandals will dog the President? Perhaps not the sexual imbroglio -- Americans knew Clinton had sinned but elected him anyway. Says William E. Leuchtenburg, professor of history at the University of North Carolina: ''It's one question if this sort of thing arises during a campaign, and we have to wonder what sort of President this person will be. It's another thing entirely now that he's President, and we know the job he's doing.'' However, the financial morass surrounding Madison Guaranty may be considered far more pertinent because it shows how Clinton runs a government. And in Little Rock in the roaring 1980s, the environment was apparently clubby and murky enough to keep investigators busy for some time to come.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: NO CREDIT CAPTION: THE DUBIOUS VENTURE During the 1980s, the Clintons were involved in an Arkansas real estate partnership with a crash-and-burn thrift-operator whose collapsed institution cost taxpayers $47 million. The Clintons deny any wrongdoing, but many mysteries endure, including how much they knew about their partner's activities and whether any of the S&L funds were diverted into the Governor's campaign coffers.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett and Michael Duffy/Washington and Jay Peterzell/ Little Rock