"Even before he declared his candidacy, I used to tell people, 'Think about General Clark,'" Mr. Rangel said in an interview with The Observer . "They'd say, 'What does that mean?' And I'd say, 'You just trust me, because it wasn't that long ago I told you to think about Hillary Clinton.'"

See?

Mr. Rangel, dean of the New York Congressional delegation and arguably the nation's most important African-American elected official, is supporting the retired general despite ties to a number of the other candidates-like Richard Gephardt, his longtime House colleague, or fellow Harlemite Al Sharpton. And there's nothing low-key or apologetic about that support.

Sitting in his spacious Congressional office on Capitol Hill, Mr. Rangel laid out his reasoning for backing Mr. Clark's candidacy. It was, he explained, a pragmatic decision.

"Listen, I don't want to get out there with a loser," he said. "I mean, if there's a wart on Clark that I'm not seeing, tell me about it. People say he's not liked by generals, he's too articulate, he's too ambitious, too political. Hell, that all enhances him. He looks good, he sounds good, but more importantly, he takes the question of patriotism off the table."

Mr. Rangel, himself a decorated war veteran, says he was initially attracted to the general because of his opposition to the war in Iraq. And he says that his confidence in Mr. Clark was strengthened during subsequent conversations with his colleagues-including one with Hillary Clinton, who was particularly enthusiastic about the general from Arkansas.

"I talked to Hillary and I said, 'Holy mackerel!'" he said. According to Mr. Rangel, the Senator said of Mr. Clark: "He's smart, he's sharp-Bill and I love him. We go back to Little Rock. We've been supportive-he's a great man."

At the end of the conversation, according to Mr. Rangel, the Senator said: "Charlie, I want to make it abundantly clear that I'm not endorsing anyone and that I can't endorse anyone."

Mr. Rangel replied: "Look, Senator, if at some point in my political career I ask you for some endorsement and you can't see your way clear to giving it, then just give to me what you just gave to Clark." The Congressman added that he was "overwhelmed" by the Senator's non-endorsement. "Because I didn't know he was that good-I just thought he could win," he said.

Correctly anticipating a follow-up question on the much-speculated-about topic of collusion between Ms. Clinton and the Clark camp-some have suggested that the general is a stalking horse for the Senator-Mr. Rangel dismissed it all as "crazy conspiracy theories."

A Key Ally

Although few political endorsements are decisive in Presidential campaigns, Mr. Rangel's could be particularly important to Mr. Clark. For starters, Mr. Rangel says, he has already begun to organize some of his House colleagues for Mr. Clark, putting them to work on the general's behalf to provide his campaign with some of the organizational support that it currently lacks.

More importantly, Mr. Rangel sees himself in a position to sell Mr. Clark to black voters. "Rangel's is an extraordinarily powerful endorsement," said Democratic consultant Josh Isay. "He's got tremendous credibility in the African-American community, and he's seen by insiders as a political mastermind."

But there is no guarantee that Mr. Rangel's help will translate into minority support. To this point, there has been no firm sign that black voters are rallying in significant numbers to any one candidate.

Asked why he thought that the African-American community would support a white military man, Mr. Rangel laughed.

"The real assurances that I have to give my people is that he can whup Bush's ass," he said. "That's the first thing that I have to deal with-that he can win this damn thing. That's before they can even get into the whole civil-rights struggle-that we can get in there and whup this man and make up for all of the things that happened in Florida and the United States Supreme Court, and all of the injustices that this man has caused them since he's been in office. That's the goal and the battle plan."

Asked whether Mr. Clark's past support for Republicans like Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon might be a problem for Democrats, Mr. Rangel argued that it wouldn't. "A reporter once told me, 'Well, a guy who went to school with Clark in Little Rock said that he supported segregated schools,'" Mr. Rangel said, breaking into a wide grin. "So I said, 'Well, can you imagine what a great President he would be to show that type of growth?' I mean, damn-to a guy who now supports affirmative action in the military and in the [University of] Michigan case. Now that's a true American-not just a guy who was born thinking one way and dies thinking the same way. That's intellectual growth.

"I actually want to find where we have a problem with this guy," he continued, "so I can see if we can work it out. Right now, he looks almost too good."

For now, Mr. Rangel sees his primary task as helping to pull together the disparate elements in the Clark camp with whom he is in regular contact, including about 20 Representatives and any number of major New York–based Democratic donors and activists. Despite the apparent chaos surrounding the campaign at the moment, he said, it's starting to come together.

As an example, Mr. Rangel talked about his recent dealings with various donors.

"Those damn Democratic contributors had some type of a conspiracy not to give any money to anybody," he said. "They were so proud of themselves: 'The crowd's too big; there's no solid voice; we have to wait and see how things go; we're not going to throw good money after bad.' But pow! -in comes General Clark, and he got all their money. That may be very disorganized, but it works."

He described something similar going on with his fellow House members. "I'm carrying around more damn pieces of paper in my pocket with all these ideas for the campaign. My job is to tell about all of this wonderful advice to the general without making him crazy."

Mr. Rangel said that he'll be attending a meeting on Oct. 8 with Mr. Clark's campaign manager, Donnie Fowler, to discuss ways to get the campaign better organized.

Looking past the short-term campaign logistics, though, Mr. Rangel is confident that his instincts are going to be borne out again and that he's picked himself another winner. Asked if he thought that Mr. Clark was the only Democrat who could succeed, Mr. Rangel said: "You could have what you think is your best team on the field, and then someone tells you, 'Hey, there's a superstar who's eligible. And he's better than the opposition.' The others will say, 'Look, I've been with this team for a long time,' and so on. But in the end, it comes down to whether you just want to be liked, or whether you actually want to win."

From time to time, Blass, who was born in Fort Wayne, Ind., in 1922, was likened to Jay Gatsby, another character who escaped the American hinterlands and acquired great wealth and celebrity in the East. Given the frequency with which his name appeared in boldface alongside those of America's best-dressed column campers, and his passion for filling his much-photographed apartment on Sutton Place and his 18th-century stone house in New Preston, Conn., with princely furniture and pedigreed antiquities, it may have seemed that Bill Blass was gleefully living out the fantasy of Fitzgerald's "elegant young roughneck." But to those who knew him, the comparison didn't hold up.

It wasn't just that Blass-whose mother was a part-time seamstress, and whose father owned a hardware store and committed suicide when Bill was 5-never did anything to fabricate his past. Or that all the books on his shelves were real. Unlike Gatsby's West Egg mansion, Blass' homes were furnished with the rigorous taste of a man who acquired things not for show, but for the satisfaction of his own curious eye. His old friend, the Picasso biographer John Richardson, who advised him on his collection of drawings, said, "Bill didn't want anything religious or rococo. Nymphs and putti-out! He liked basic, vivid images-a human figure, a battle scene. Whenever we went to a museum or an art dealer, he knew exactly what he wanted to look at, and then we'd be out of there in 10 minutes."

The idea of throwing open his home to hordes of voyeuristic revelers would have been abhorrent to him. There were never more than six people for lunch or dinner in the cozy, wood-beamed dining room in Connecticut that had once been a tavern patronized by George Washington. ("He never slept here," Blass hastened to add.) The meals consisted not of caviar, sculpted mousses and baked Alaska, but a perfectly charred hamburger (slathered with Stilton cheese) or his robust, much-celebrated meat loaf, followed by a crisp green salad and a fruit cobbler with ice cream (all washed down with excellent claret). The visitors' length of stay would be carefully regulated-the handsomely understated rooms were devoid of chairs conducive to extended after-meal chatter-so that the master of the house could retreat to his bedroom with the good book he was always in the middle of, usually a work of biography or history.

Although Blass may have been photographed in black tie more often than any man in America, he was essentially a stay-at-home. At the occasional big soirée he felt obliged to attend, he never worked the room, but stood off to one side, coolly surveying the babble and always ready with a quick, side-of-the-mouth assessment of the whole faintly ridiculous parade: "She had been a has-been," I once heard him remark about the entrance of a woman who was conspicuously on the comeback trail.

Blass liked to say that he learned how to design for women from observing how they lived, and he cited as influences such society doyennes as Kitty Miller and Elsie Woodward, who welcomed him into their stylish houses when he arrived on Seventh Avenue in the late 40's as an unconscionably good-looking young man with rakish charm. But his inimitably American sense of style-which led him to put a T-shirt with a taffeta skirt, or a camel's hair polo coat over a short evening dress-came out of more accessible terrain. He loved to talk about how, as a boy, he'd spend entire days in a movie house luxuriating in the distant domains of Kay Francis, Carole Lombard and Constance Bennett. He once told me that the best years of his life were spent in the Army during the Second World War as an enlisted man, in a camouflage unit whose job was to position simulated weaponry to draw enemy fire. "It was the camaraderie I loved with men of all different types," he said, "from artists to coal miners."

More than any other designer of his generation, he took his cues from his clients-not just from women in New York, but from women all over America. He was the P.T. Barnum of the trunk show, hauling his wares from Pittsburgh to Portland, bringing to his well-heeled patrons his own highly refined notions about what they looked best in, while absorbing-and adapting-their own notions of what they felt comfortable in. He cultivated America. Blass designed by sketching on whatever was at hand-notebook, napkin, even saucer-and, like his observations, his figures are elegantly direct to the point of bluntness, teasingly alive for all their frugality of line. "He was a great editor of everything-rooms, people, clothes," says Brooke Hayward Duchin. Blue jeans, he wrote in The New Yorker a few years ago, are "the most significant contribution America has made to fashion."

On the road, he collected some awfully good tales, which I hope found their way into the memoir he finally got around to writing. (It will be published in the fall by HarperCollins under the title Bare Blass .) I heard no more telling comment about why Bill Clinton succumbed so readily to the charms of Monica Lewinsky than his account of taking a trunk show to Little Rock, Ark., and being repeatedly propositioned by a young hussy who kept turning up in his hotel suite, despite his requests to the management that she be thrown out. "Apparently in Little Rock," Blass said with the dry amusement of a rock-ribbed Republican, "they go with the room."

Stories of his generosity were legion among his friends, and not just because eight years ago he gave $10 million to the New York Public Library, which put up a plaque bearing his name in the card-catalog room. (The gift was testimony, in part, to his close friendship with the late head of the library, Father Timothy Healy, who friends surmise became something of a father figure to him.) Peter Duchin recalls admiring an unusual painting in the Connecticut house-a large, half-painted scene of the Corso in Rome-and jokingly asking whether it might be left to him in his will. A few weeks later, Blass turned up at a birthday party for the bandleader with the painting under his arm.

A lifelong bachelor, Blass maintained what John Richardson called a "cordon sanitaire" around his private life. It was a line that his friends, if they wanted to remain his friends, knew instinctively not to cross. And yet he was the most down-to-earth of companions. Marguerite Littman, one of his best pals in London-where he went four or five times a year to stay at the Connaught, have lunch at Harry's Bar, and prowl for antiques on Pimlico Road-remembers taking him to meet Princess Diana at Kensington Palace and being struck by how easily Blass, with his Midwestern straightforwardness and mid-Atlantic drawl, converted the princess into an old friend. "They were both enchanted with each other," Ms. Littman said. "Of course, he immediately saw the point of her-how funny she was-just as he always saw the point of everything."

Carolyne Roehm recalled the time, many years ago, when her boss, Oscar de la Renta, asked his good friend Blass to look after her one evening while they were all in Lake Como, Italy. "I was a 24-year-old assistant making $175 a week, and I was in awe of him," she said. "The very first grown-up dress I ever owned was a Blass. But he took me out to dinner and said, 'O.K., kid, so you want a martini?' He treated me as though he'd known me all my life, which of course is how he treated everyone, no matter who they were. I went to visit him a week ago and, as I was saying goodbye, I whispered in his ear, 'I love you very much.' He looked at me and growled, 'Oh, don't get all teary-eyed on me.'"

Junior-high history classes and cable-TV retrospectives have long hammered it into the head of anyone under 50 that the Soviet launch of the world's first satellite on Oct. 4, 1957, was both an epoch-making event and a national trauma for the United States. Well, maybe you had to be there. At 184 pounds, Sputnik was scarcely larger than a basketball and did nothing except emit beeps out of a battery-powered antenna. That beep brought on the only direct hardship America suffered from Sputnik: It reportedly activated electric garage-door openers from coast to coast. Post-Sept. 11, Americans may find it hard to credit contemporaneous comparisons of the Sputnik launch to the Pearl Harbor attack.

Freelance writer Paul Dickson shows why Americans of the 1950's were so freaked out. Relying on government records declassified only in the last half-decade, he has reconstructed not just the military stakes of the launch but also the Cold War society it so rudely roiled, giving a straightforward and snappy account of a crisis in American politics, science and self-esteem.

It's hard to imagine a time when America was worse equipped to absorb evidence of Soviet superiority in space. Political concerns, such as they were, were domestic. President Eisenhower, who would see his poll numbers drop 22 points in Sputnik's wake, was about to deploy federal troops to get Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus to desegregate Little Rock's schools. Most Americans didn't even know the word "satellite," referring instead to artificial "moons." Leave It to Beaver premiered the night Sputnik went up.

Mr. Dickson further sets the scene with a few where-they-were-when-they-heard vignettes. James Michener was on a plane crashing into the Pacific. Ten-year-old Stephen King was in a movie theater watching Earth Versus the Flying Saucers. Doris Kearns Goodwin was making out in a park with a high-school boyfriend. ("I didn't give Sputnik another thought," she recalls.) When Little Richard saw it pass during an outdoor concert in Australia, he walked off the stage, quit music and became a Christian evangelist. A panicky Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Senate majority leader, said of the Russians, "Soon, they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses."

His fears were well-founded. The Russian space shot came less than a year after Nikita Khrushchev's shoe-banging "We will bury you!" tirade on the floor of the United Nations. C.I.A. chief Allen Dulles called Sputnik part of a "trilogy of propaganda moves": Russia had fired its first intercontinental ballistic missile six weeks earlier, boasting of its ability to direct rockets "to any point on the face of the Earth." And it would announce the successful test of a hydrogen bomb three days after Sputnik went up. Russia's rockets were indeed advanced: The R-7 used for Sputnik was still the country's standard model for space shots in the mid-1970's.

What's more, all the Soviets' cosmonautical moves were carried out by military personnel in extreme secrecy from bases in Kazakhstan. It would be years before the world heard of Russian failures, from the half-dozen aborted and exploded missions preceding Sputnik to the multiple flops of Sputnik III in 1958, to the launch-pad blast in 1960 that left 165 people dead. In the eyes of the world, the Soviet space program looked invincible, a harbinger of the radiant future, while unrest in Little Rock made America look reactionary and backward. When the United States' first publicly announced satellite rocket fizzled and fell to pieces before liftoff in late 1957, the U.S.S.R. mischievously introduced a U.N. motion to list the United States as an underdeveloped nation eligible for technical aid.

It was in this atmosphere of humiliation that Wernher von Braun became a folk hero. The brains behind Hitler's rocket program (his V-2's had blown whole London neighborhoods to bits), von Braun was then the design director at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Ala. Mr. Dickson shows von Braun to have been neither particularly political nor particularly militarist, more an eccentric scientist than an ideologue. He had become a rocketeer for the German government under Weimar, was more interested in satellites and space stations than missiles, and quit the Army for NASA once it became apparent that the civilian agency would control the moon shots. Nor was the American space program more beholden to Nazi Germany's than the Russian one: The U.S.S.R.'s Pobeda rockets, too, were simply rejiggered V-2's designed by captured German scientists.

Von Braun had bragged in 1954, "Give me five years and $5 billion and we can land on the moon." But he'd been blocked-due, he thought, to a rivalry between the country's military branches, which had built a space program consisting of 119 different half-completed missile projects. In January 1958, von Braun's team finally launched America's first satellite. But even then, he would use the press to wage a P.R. war on his bosses, letting it be known that, a year before Sputnik, one of his Jupiter rocket launches had been meant to contain a satellite. (Eisenhower's Defense Department had intervened, replacing the final, satellite-bearing stage with a dummy capsule.)

Persistent rumors at the time-much like the ones surrounding F.D.R. and Pearl Harbor-held that Eisenhower had wanted the U.S. defeated in the space race. Mr. Dickson's bold conclusion is that those rumors were largely correct. The President worried about two things: first, the alleged Soviet ICBM buildup and, second, the ability of the U.S. to monitor it. In 1955, the Soviets had rebuffed his offer of an "Open Skies" policy that would have permitted satellites to orbit anywhere. Once Sputnik crossed the United States without incident, that principle was established de facto. Eisenhower then poured American resources into spy satellites that quickly outstripped the Russians. The CORONA program-revealed only in February 1995, when President Clinton declassified the work of first-generation spy satellites-allowed the United States to count Soviet missiles with such precision that, at arms-reduction treaties in the 1970's, "U.S. negotiators often knew more than their Soviet counterparts about the exact contents of the Soviet arsenal."

For Mr. Dickson, then, Ike was "the quiet unsung hero of the Sputnik crisis." He kept his cool. There was speculation in American newspapers that the Soviets would set off an atomic bomb on the moon as a propaganda display, and many suggested that the Americans should beat them to it. Eisenhower preferred perfecting the surface-to-surface rockets already in development, however, on the grounds that "we didn't have any enemies on the moon."

The U.S. space program was probably not inevitable. John F. Kennedy, for one, was bored to tears by it. (The "challenge" Kennedy issued to Congress in May of 1961 to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade was Lyndon Johnson's idea.) Grant that, and Sputnik appears indeed as a founding event of our world. It led to NASA, to certain wild excesses in the nuclear-arms race (the U.S. staged 77 aboveground nuke tests in the year after Sputnik) and to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which would spawn the Internet.

Sputnik changed the culture, too. It is responsible for the words "beatnik," "neatnik" and "refusenik." It killed the gaudy, three-tone Ford Edsel, which in crisis times was viewed as an embarrassing symbol of American materialism ("A higher standard of living, seen as prima facie evidence of American pre-Sputnik superiority over Russian communism," Mr. Dickson writes, "now became an emblem of national inferiority.") And it led to the National Defense Education Act, that monument of Cold War liberalism, which established college loans, subsidized the new math, shoehorned Darwin into podunk curricula and recruited women for the sciences. (It even promised to promote "independent thinking." Win some, lose some.)

The satellite's great legacy, however, was a healthy fear. Describing himself as one who'd had "the dubious privilege of living and working under a totalitarian government for many years," Wernher von Braun used to warn that expertise and morality were independent variables. Americans were indulging in dangerous nonsense if they thought there was anything inevitable about the victory of "free" science over "totalitarian" science. That Sputnik helped prove him right is as worth remembering today as it was then. In fact, more so.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

Since Mr. Stephens' house-hunt coincides with that of another couple from Little Rock, his purchase has raised questions: Will the Clintons have a key?

"I guess [New Yorkers] assume everybody from Arkansas is related, or somehow in cahoots together or something," said Mr. Stevens. "It really has nothing to do with the Clintons."

Mr. Stevens describes himself and his family as mostly Republican. "I don't believe I'm registered either way," he said. "I certainly tend to be more Republican in my views." The Stephens family is very active politically–everything from intellectual brainstorming sessions with candidates to multimillion-dollar campaign donations–and have several links to the Clintons. Warren Stephens' father, Jackson Stephens, chairman of the family company, reportedly once said that Hillary Clinton would have made a better governor than her husband. Before the 1991 death of W.R. (Witt) Stephens, Warren's uncle and the company's founder, Mrs. Clinton was a frequent guest at his lunchtime salons at the family's Little Rock offices. And C. Joseph Giroir Jr., the former Rose Law Firm partner who made Mrs. Clinton the firm's first female associate in 1977, was the longtime attorney to both Stephens Inc. and Jackson Stephens.

It was a last-minute loan from Worthen National Bank, a Stephens Inc. subsidiary, that kept the 1992 Clinton Presidential campaign afloat. Personally, Warren Stephens contributed to Bill Clinton in 1990 and 1992, but he said he did not give the President any money during the last race.

Asked whether he would support Mrs. Clinton's potential Senate campaign–and whether he would use his pied-à-terre to do that–Mr. Stephens said after a long pause, "I'm not going to be involved at all." He said that whether or not he would contribute financially to her campaign was private.

Mr. Stephens and his wife, Harriet Stephens, launched a series of house-hunting trips to Manhattan this spring. In April, their interest was piqued when they were shown a six-story town house at 134 East 71st Street, then priced at $7.5 million, but Democratic Party fund-raiser Shelby Bryan beat them to it. The couple–sometimes represented by their broker, Michael Spodek–also considered a town house at 19 East 92nd Street, which was listed at $6.9 million, and others in the same price range. By June, after a tense bidding war with another out-of-town couple, the Stephenses had signed a contract for $7.995 million on the 65th Street house, according to real estate sources. Their deal is to become final in late October.

In the midst of the Arkansas couple's town house tour–at a time when prices were rising through the roof–the phones at top brokerage firms in Manhattan were ringing off the hook with speculation about Hillary Clinton's rumored New York Senate run, and where the First Lady would settle in New York, candidacy or no candidacy.

"I can't believe all these rumors!" said a Corcoran Group broker whose client was allegedly selling Mrs. Clinton a three-bedroom apartment at 290 West End Avenue, which was on the market for $1.7 million.

"This is like one of those Princess Di rumors," said Alan Rogers, president of the brokerage firm Douglas Elliman. "How many times did she buy an apartment in New York?" The answer, of course, is never.

By Memorial Day, the Clintons had announced their interest in Westchester as their post-White House home. Still, some Manhattan brokers had an address in mind: the five-story, Federal-style town house off Park Avenue that an Arkansan couple was, at that very point, negotiating to buy.

Contacted in July, Mrs. Clinton's spokesman, Howard Wolfson, was unequivocal on the subject of 48 East 65th Street. "No, she's not going to live there," he told The Observer at the time. "We have nothing to do with it."

Warren Stephens is the second-generation director of his family's eponymous investment-banking firm, which was the 15th-largest regional investment firm in 1987 and now ranks 80th. "He basically is the scion," said Gene Lyons, a columnist at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette . "When you meet him, he seems to be a very sophisticated and well-educated guy. [Stephens Inc.] does a lot of business up there, and there's every reason why he'd want to have a presence in New York."

The 65th Street house, which is on the south side of the street, was built in 1876. Recently renovated by its owners, the home's interior is reported to be covered in marble; it has two separate entrances, a south garden and a wrought-iron gate in front. In June, singer Mariah Carey toured the house with a cadre of handlers but was turned off when, on the way out, she saw several rats run out of the trash bins, according to one real estate broker.

Speaking from his Little Rock office, Mr. Stephens was sanguine about his pending town house deal. "My family and I have enjoyed going up there [to New York]," he told The Observer , "and we just wanted to try having our own place. We're not moving there. I mean, we live here, you know."

However much brokers secretly wanted Mrs. Clinton's business, they found themselves on the receiving end of complaints after there were Secret-Service sightings in the neighborhood in May. "The quality of life, in having her as a neighbor, I think would deteriorate," said broker Michele Kleier.

When the complaining died down, the East 65th Street Secret Service sightings proved to be the security detail assigned to Vice President Al Gore, who had come to town to meet his first grandchild, Wyatt Gore Schiff.

In 1998, the same year she took over as co-anchor of ABC's Good Morning America , Lisa McRee and her husband, Don Granger, an executive at Paramount Pictures, spent $1.9 million on a fixer-upper brownstone at 166 East 81st Street between Lexington and Third avenues. That price was dwarfed by the added cost of the gut renovations Ms. McRee and her husband ordered: landscaping the garden, wiring the place with phone, fax and cable lines, installing central air-conditioning and an alarm system, repainting the house's facade and replacing the front stoop. But the bills had barely been paid when Ms. McRee was dumped from the show due to sagging ratings and replaced by another blonde, Diane Sawyer, who took the morning anchor's chair in the spring.

Before Ms. McRee moved to Los Angeles, where she is on maternity leave from ABC, she stuck a bitter $3.95 million price tag on the house. Within a month, a family with three children in elementary school, who had been living in a rented apartment in the East 80's and were probably oblivious to the network saga, seem to have pacified Ms. McRee with $3.7 million.

Ms. McRee, who gave birth to William Peter Granger on Aug. 12, seems to have been a victim of the heated ratings war over morning television. Her one-year stint alongside Kevin Newman–the duo were a younger version of Charles Gibson and Joan Lunden–saw the show's ratings drop to third place during one week last fall. While NBC sits at No. 1, CBS (No. 3) is readying a studio across the street from the Plaza Hotel for Bryant Gumbel, who is being lured back to the same time slot, starting in November. For Good Morning America , Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson–who has returned temporarily, despite having been shoved out when Joan Lunden left–are holding down the fort while ABC gets its act together. A new Times Square studio for the show is supposed to be ready by Sept. 13.

Ms. Sawyer and Mr. Gibson are said to have agreed to stay on until May 2000, while their bosses try to come up with a successful, NBC-proof morning team. A publicist for ABC had no comment on Ms. McRee's future plans.

Upper East Side

215 East 73rd Street (Eastgate)

One-bed, one-bath, 920-square-foot prewar co-op.

Asking: $335,000. Selling: $355,000.

Charges: $1,123; 41 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: 10 days.

A 24-YEAR-OLD WHO KNOWS WHO EMERY ROTH WAS. Where this Emery Roth-designed apartment was concerned, a 24-year-old woman in advertising profited from some insider information and having an extra $20,000 at hand. She got a tip from her sister, who lives in the same building, 215 East 73rd Street, that the apartment was on the market for $335,000. She toured the tasteful, 920-square-foot place and liked everything down to the shades of paint on the walls. However, two other hard-bargaining women were also interested. After all three made offers, the 24-year-old got cold feet. She called her broker, Wanda Bailey, and withdrew her bid for all of 12 hours. Finally, she raised her offer to $355,000 and will soon be under the same roof as her sister again. Broker: Corcoran Group (Wanda Bailey).

Upper West Side

279 Central Park West

Three-bed, 2.5-bath, 2,542-square-foot condo.

Asking: $2.45 million. Selling: $2.275 million.

Charges: $2,290. Taxes: $1,022.

Time on the market: six months.

PREWAR ON C.P.W., CIRCA 1988. A young couple with three children wanted their Manhattan crash pad to be something architecturally unique–not unlike their other properties in Paris and London. They were single-minded about TriBeCa until they agreed to look at a fourth-floor condo on Central Park near 89th Street. With Central Park and the Reservoir plastered across the living room, library and all three bedroom windows, this 2,542-square-foot apartment made them forget the name Nobu. While 279 Central Park West was only built in 1988 (which will make it older than most of TriBeCa before long), it attempts to mimic the prewar details of its Art-Deco neighbors. And besides that tremendous front yard, the building also has a playroom for kids. Broker: Halstead Property Company (Kellee Buhler); Sunshine Group (Susan deFranca).

Midtown

100 West 57th Street (Carnegie House)

One-bed, one-bath, 950-square-foot postwar co-op.

Asking: $360,000. Selling: $352,000.

Charges: $1,078; 30 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: one month.

HOW TO SKIM A LITTLE OFF THE COLLEGE FUND. With two teenagers heading off to college, a couple from Jericho, L. I., took out an extra mortgage for a place in the city. The apartment they found, a 950-square-foot co-op at 100 West 57th Street with one bedroom, had been fixed up by a young married couple. They refinished the wood parquet floors, spruced up the kitchen and bathrooms and installed fixtures in the foyer. The closing prices was $352,000, within a reasonable distance of what the couple was asking. Broker: Bellmarc Realty (Robert Cuozzo).

Brooklyn Heights

152 Remsen Street

Two-bed, 2.5-bath, 1,100-square-foot prewar co-op.

Asking: $350,000. Selling: $333,000.

Charges: $965; 48 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: six weeks.

CROSSTOWN ROMANCE LEADS LOVERS TO BROOKLYN. It sounds like the Woody-Mia story–only in a different income bracket and without the unhappy ending. A film producer and a nonprofit worker living across

Central Park from one another got sick of the frequent crosstown commute. In their case, the solution was to move in together, which for them meant Brooklyn. They found a 1,100-square-foot maisonette apartment with two bedrooms in a former church on the corner of Remsen and Clinton streets. The duplex has a private entrance on the street level and a staircase lined by stained glass windows on one side. Since the space is a little quirky, it's been on the market for some time, and the price had already dropped from $375,000 to $350,000. They got a slight discount–to $333,000–because the place needed a few repairs. Corcoran's Brooklyn Landmark (Nancy Giddins).

Barring Tina Brown's magazine launch party from the Brooklyn Navy Yard because Hillary Clinton might be the cover girl is nothing more than monumental pettiness. But Mr. Giuliani's attempt to rip up the City Charter simply to prevent Public Advocate Mark Green from becoming Mayor is a more serious matter. It shows breathtaking arrogance on the Mayor's part to assume-contrary to the constitutional process-that he can decide who will not be his successor. That's the function of elections. And, after all, elections are about the only thing separating Rudy's New York from a banana republic.

The Mayor seems to live by a twisted version of Tip O'Neill's tired maxim: All politics is personal. Whether threatening to ban Alfonse D'Amato from lobbying city agencies or wasting tax dollars to sue New York magazine for using his image in an advertisement, Mr. Giuliani rules this town with a vengeance. It's his kick-ass attitude that makes him a formidable mayor, but will his philosophy of government-"My way or the Joe DiMaggio Highway!"-work in the collegial corridors of the U.S. Senate?

Of course not. But that's no reason not to send him there. Indeed, it's the very reason why we should send him there.

Every election offers a fleeting glimpse of the man cowering behind the spin doctors of the world. A true glimpse of Bill Clinton came in 1992 when he left New Hampshire to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged man. That political murder (let's call it what it was) was an early sign of Mr. Clinton's cowardice. New Yorkers will soon have our own moment of revelation when Mr. Giuliani visits Little Rock, Ark. The trip, of course, is aimed not at voters in Arkansas, but in New York: "Ah've never lived here, ah don't know anything about the state, but ah'd sure like to be your Senator," the Mayor cackled to David Letterman in a hayseed drawl reminiscent of Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade .

The audience loved his not-so-subtle gibe at the First Carpetbagger, but it's tempting to wonder if by going to Little Rock, Mr. Giuliani is whistling past the graveyard. After all, traveling the length of the country to publicly declare-nay, celebrate-one's ignorance seems an astonishing admission from a man who aspires to Federal office.

This jaunt to Little Rock sounds ridiculous but does raise a valid question about who New Yorkers should choose for their next Federal representative: a woman who knows little about the state (so opts for a Oprah-esque "listening tour") or a man who boasts of knowing nothing about the rest of the country.

What Rudy does know is New York City, but the five boroughs are far removed from the clubby atmosphere of the Senate, as is the Mayor's unique method of garnering political support. There's little question that Mr. Giuliani could win, even though many upstaters probably hold equally negative views of the city and Mrs. Clinton. A more pressing question is whether Rudy should become New York's junior senator. For the sake of the city, the answer must be a resounding Yes.

Not on merit or principle, I hasten to add, for Mr. Giuliani is quite clearly lacking in both. Put simply, the pros of booting Mr. Giuliani upstairs-picture him playing the role of junior senator to Chuck Schumer-outweigh the cons of keeping him in City Hall.

Sure, the rider may change horses, but the lash will go on. Mr. Giuliani would remain a powerful political figure here. But it seems just to consign our most combative and brawling politician to America's most deliberative and sedentary body. At least he would wield considerably less power over the lives of New Yorkers than he does now. And if he tries to ring the steps of the Capitol with cops and concrete barriers-as he did with the People's Pulpit at City Hall-that's someone else's problem.

Only when Rudy Giuliani takes his temper tantrums and adversarial attitude to the nation's capital will we have a city where minorities needn't worry about arbitrary treatment, where cops do not act as judge, jury and executioner, and where fatuous editors can launch magazines wherever their little hearts desire.

So shout it loud: Rudy for Senate! Nothing personal, Hillary, but we need this more than you.

Terry Golway insists on returning to this space next week.

If the answers are as obvious as they seem, then it is difficult to understand why Republican lawmakers who profess to believe in an ideal of fairness oppose the nomination of Bill Lann Lee as Assistant Attorney General-unless they cannot resist the temptation to inflame racial animosities over affirmative action. Mr. Lee is the President's choice to head the Justice Department's civil rights division. His inspiring personal history demonstrates the effectiveness of affirmative action in dismantling the racial and ethnic barriers to individual achievement.

He grew up in New York City, the son of a Chinese immigrant laundryman who served in the Air Force during World War II. His father refused to teach young Bill the laundry trade; he had higher expectations for his son and his adopted country. At a time when few Asian-Americans could be found in the Ivy League, Mr. Lee was accepted at Yale University and then Columbia Law School, thanks to the conscious pursuit of greater ethnic diversity at both institutions. He chose to practice civil rights law and eventually rose to head the Western regional office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a post in which he fought relentlessly for his conception of racial justice, while winning the respect of adversaries who did not see things exactly his way.

Now 48, he has done this difficult, sensitive work with distinction for many years. Whatever stigma supposedly attaches to the beneficiaries of affirmative action has not marred his reputation. His qualifications for the post to which he has been named are not in dispute.

Senate Republicans have a problem with Mr. Lee, however, because he holds the same views about affirmative action as the President who chose him. Which is to say, he believes in strong measures, including in some cases the use of race and sex preferences to eradicate discrimination. Mr. Lee's realism is anathema to conservatives who like to pretend that American society is a "level playing field" of meritocracy.

Republican disdain for affirmative action tends to be quite selective, of course. By far the most popular figure in their party is retired general Colin Powell, whose rise was the direct result of the armed forces' exceptional affirmative action and integration programs. And Republicans did not hesitate to employ a racial preference in elevating to the Supreme Court an undistinguished attorney named Clarence Thomas, although they hid behind the ridiculous premise that he was the most qualified person for the position regardless of his skin color. In that strange affair, they played the race card in the name of abolishing affirmative action.

Now, at the urging of conservative lobbyists, Congressional Republicans are preparing to kill the nomination of Mr. Lee because they say he favors "quotas" and other constitutionally impermissible means of achieving equality. House Speaker Newt Gingrich has butted into the confirmation process with a letter to the Senate accusing Mr. Lee of "attempting to force through racial and gender preferences" in a discrimination case against the Los Angeles Police Department by using "underhanded methods." ("Underhanded" is a synonym for "sneaky"; remember the old stereotype of the "sneaky Oriental." Probably just a coincidence.)

The Gingrich charges, echoed by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch, were lies. Mr. Lee's opponents in the 1996 lawsuit over the L.A.P.D.-one of the most virulently bigoted outfits in the West-were the Republican mayor and the city attorney, both of whom have endorsed his nomination. The consent decree in the case negotiated by Mr. Lee actually forbade preferences; he used no "sneaky" tactics and was praised by Mayor Richard Riordan as an exponent of "mainstream civil rights law" who "does not believe in quotas." Robert Cramer, the assistant city attorney who litigated the matter, also wrote in support of Mr. Lee: "Although we have disagreed profoundly on many issues, I have respected Bill's candor, his thorough preparation, his sense of ethical behavior and his ability to bring persons holding diverse views into agreement." It is hard not to wonder how many of the Speaker's opponents would be willing to say the same about him.

What the Los Angeles case actually shows about Mr. Lee is that he possesses the qualities most needed in the field of civil rights. He seems able to conciliate without sacrificing principle, to seek justice without provoking bitterness. At a moment of polarizing conflict over race and equity, those rare capacities ought to be prized by all people of good will. That Republicans would spread false stories about him instead, hoping to inflame race relations for political gain, says more about them than about him.