August 27, 1994

Democratic Congressional leaders and White House officials today all but conceded any chance of passing universal health insurance legislation this year. But they vowed to press on for what they can get, and suggested they would take anything that did more good than harm. As the Senate decamped for a two-week break, and the House extended its own vacation to match, the Senate majority leader, George J. Mitchell of Maine, and the White House chief of staff, Leon E. Panetta, both took sober stock of the remaining prospects for health insurance legislation and laid some groundwork for what might yet be won.

Eight months ago, President Clinton stood before Congress and waved a pen that he vowed to use to veto any measure that did not guarantee universal health care coverage. Today, the White House began laying the groundwork for him to wave a flag of truce. Mr. Clinton's aides are aware of the potential embarrassment that could follow their raising the idea of accepting merely incremental health care legislation. But they also argue that they can offset any acceptance of such legislation by reviving the President's campaign image as a fighter for change who succeeded in at least starting a job that his foes prevented him from finishing.

Less than three hours after setting out from Key West amid thunder and under darkening skies, the Coast Guard cutter Grand Isle encountered a first raft in the Florida Straits. It was empty except for what appeared to be a dead dog, its brown coat shiny wet. Over the next six hours on Thursday, the cutter found nine occupied rafts among many more "empties" and rescued 56 Cuban refugees who had been at sea as long as four days. They included two elderly men, six women and a 2-year-old boy sucking on a blue pacifier and wearing sagging diapers and a red T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Atlantic Ocean" over a maritime scene.

The customers in the coffee shop were talking politics: health care, the deficit, mandatory prison sentences. A television behind the counter was tuned to the news. As the screen flashed on the United States Senate, the crowd grew quiet, waiting for some impassioned oratory from that august chamber. What they saw was Alfonse M. D'Amato, the Republican Senator from New York, bouncing jovially and singing to the tune of Old MacDonald -- "here a pork, there a pork, everywhere a pork-pork" -- standing next to a huge picture of a pink pig feeding at a trough, intended to symbolize the waste in the crime bill, which the Senate passed late Thursday by a vote of 61 to 38. The next image on the screen was that of Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, countering Mr. D'Amato's claims with none-too-subtle references to what gets shoveled out of a pigpen.

A day after two tearful bedside meetings between a wounded transit police officer and the New York City officer who shot him, a lawyer for the wounded man's family, as well as his half-brother and a close friend, asserted yesterday that the transit officer had been manipulated and that the meetings had been set up by the Police Department. The lawyer also said that it was not until noon yesterday that the undercover transit officer, Desmond Robinson, gave his first detailed account of what he remembers of the shooting in the 53d Street subway station on Monday night.