THE MAN BEHIND THE HARPOONS

By KEVIN FEDARKO.

When Arkansas state troopers Larry Patterson and Roger Perry met with reporters last week, standing beside them as media liaison and anecdote prodder was a Little Rock lawyer whom friends of Bill Clinton have taken to calling ''Ahab.'' It is a befitting moniker: from the moment he began telling journalists last year that Clinton was lying about the draft, Cliff Jackson has been out to harpoon the President. The question is why. Surprisingly, the two have much in common. Both were overachievers who grew up in small Arkansas towns; both won scholarships to Oxford; they even served as co-captains on the same basketball team. Yet despite their similarities, Jackson and Clinton never became close: although Clinton today is said to remember Jackson as ''a nice guy,'' a member of the President's Oxford coterie says Jackson was ''not even in the third circle of Clinton's friends.'' While Jackson insists, ''I have no personal vendetta against Bill Clinton,'' one of his friends says Clinton saw Jackson as a bumpkin and treated him badly. Whether the slights were real or imagined, Jackson, he says, never forgot. When the two men returned home, Clinton began his rise to the top of Arkansas politics, while a flatter trajectory took Jackson into private law practice. He developed a flair for grandstanding; in 1986, for example, he filed a $2 million suit on behalf of a woman who said she had purchased a ''maggoty'' Hershey's Kiss. Jackson wrote his brief in rhyme, releasing to the press such lines as, ''There, wiggling and squirming all over the place,/ Were oodles of maggots flavoring the taste.'' In another incident, he staged a protest of a power company's rate hike by symbolically tossing electric bills down a toilet while flushing sounds played in the background. In February 1992, Jackson turned his guns on Clinton when he unveiled a letter offering proof that Clinton had received an induction notice for the draft. Over the next few months, he told anyone who would listen -- including CNN'S Larry King -- that Bill Clinton was not fit to be President. A conservative who is far enough to the right so that friends jokingly say he ''could be a staff adviser to Rush Limbaugh,'' Jackson has demonstrated an astute understanding of how the media works -- and how it can be manipulated. That skill served him well two weeks ago, when he refused to allow Patterson and Perry to speak with the Associated Press after they had talked to the American Spectator and the Los Angeles Times. He told the A.P. that he ''felt we needed the national TV hammer at this time.'' The hammer, it turned out, was CNN: on Sunday night last week the story was beamed worldwide, and by Wednesday morning it had made its way onto the front pages of the Washington Post and USA Today. Score another harpoon for Ahab.

With reporting by Dan Goodgame/Washington and Suneel Ratan/Little Rock