IN THE LONELIEST SPOT

By Elaine Shannon/Washington

Janet Reno's idea of a good old time is putting on an outfit she calls her "rough jollies" and hiking along the Chesapeake and Ohio canal path that links Washington's Georgetown neighborhood to Cumberland, Maryland. Since becoming Attorney General in 1993, she has trekked 84 of the canal's 180 miles, and she is determined--despite her recently diagnosed case of Parkinson's disease--to walk the rest of the way.

But it's not clear whether Reno will complete her journey while in office. Clinton has twice refused to say he wants to keep the 58-year-old Miami native in her job, and has made no effort to squelch newspaper headlines describing her as "twisting in the wind." With a thin smile Reno told reporters last week, "My father taught me never to believe everything I read in the paper." Others are apparently more credulous. Massachusetts Governor William Weld announced last week that he would gladly accept her job.

In the opportunistic, symbiotic world of Washington, the sometimes liberal Reno--she opposes the death penalty--may keep her Cabinet spot with the help of unlikely allies. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch and other congressional Republicans support Reno because of her willingness to name special counsels to investigate her fellow Administration officials. Senate majority leader Trent Lott has threatened to launch a new round of hearings if Reno is booted. If she does keep her job, it will be in part due to the perception that she is keeping the White House honest.

During the presidential campaign, Reno was conspicuous in her lack of rah-rah support for the Administration's new crime-fighting ideas, which White House officials thought so crucial to Clinton's re-election. "Janet would never let herself be used as a political operative, and that perhaps wasn't appreciated," says Reno friend Talbot D'Alemberte, past president of the American Bar Association. The reserved, no-small-talk career prosecutor who loves Florida's mangrove swamps sometimes seems like the loneliest woman inside the Beltway. She will never be found at Bill and Hillary's pizza-and-popcorn get-togethers in the White House screening room. Two weeks ago, as the Cabinet room was abuzz with chatter and back slapping, Reno was sitting all alone at the other side of the table, her eyes down, engaging no one, lost in thought.

An unrepentant workaholic, Reno rises at 5 a.m., walks to the office and labors there till late in the evening. Many weekends she holes up alone in her office and has been known to answer the telephone herself, listening to tirades against Janet Reno and politely promising, "I'll pass it along." When she gets out of the office, it is usually to promote her message about the nurturing of children, to exhort lawyers to do more pro bono work, and to promote her current pet project: alternative dispute resolution.

The problem with Reno, says a White House official, is that for her, "consultation with the White House is an afterthought." Her critics there claim that she acts as if she's on the Supreme Court, not an appointed official running an important agency for the President. Reno's decision to seek no fewer than four independent counsels to probe Administration scandals--from allegations regarding Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros to Whitewater charges--has exacerbated tensions with the White House. "They don't know what she's going to do," says a Reno aide

But it is her independence that accounts for both her successes and failures. It has helped restore public confidence in the justice system and attracted a new crop of young lawyers to public service. Her department's prosecutors have won convictions of high-profile criminals ranging from airline-bomb-plot mastermind Ramzi Yousef to Mexican drug tycoon Juan Garcia Abrego. And she has revitalized Justice's antitrust, civil rights and environment divisions. But she has also failed to harness her popularity to win important legislative battles, such as expanding the FBI's wiretap authority. Her darkest day remains the deadly assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas; its devastating effect on the morale of the FBI continues to haunt the agency.

Last week she rebuffed a call by Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona for a fifth independent counsel to investigate allegedly illegal contributions to the Democratic Party by wealthy foreign nationals. But other requests are pending, and last week offered new evidence of possible transgressions by former party fund-raiser John Huang. The Los Angeles Times reported that several Asian business executives visited or called Huang when he was a Commerce Department official, in at least one case seeking a specific favor from the White House, and sometimes within days wrote big checks to the Democratic National Committee. Also, in an interview with the New York Times Thursday, Clinton admitted he had policy discussions with James Riady, the wealthy Indonesian businessman whose family's company once employed Huang and has contributed large sums to the D.N.C. It is revelations like these that would make it increasingly awkward for Clinton to throw Reno, Washington's current referee, out of the game.

--With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/Washington

With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/Washington