THE EDUCATION OF AMY

AT 19, THE YOUNGEST CARTER GOES ON TRIAL OVER AMHERST PROTEST

Ah, the images waft back, tinted with nostalgia. "First Child," as she was known back then. Or was it "First Brat?" Amy overcharging at her Plains lemonade stand. Amy in a long party dress, reading "The Mystery of the Screaming Clock" at the table during a state dinner for the president of Mexico. Amy at her father's Oval Office desk, dwarfed by an American flag. Amy playing her violin for Anwar Sadat at Camp David. Amy arousing the fury of the Austrian press for too many trips to the restroom during a Vienna State Opera performance. Amy and her treehouse, and her pet hermit crab. Amy carving her initials on a White House windowsill.

Yesterday Amy Carter, a 19-year-old junior at Brown University, sans pigtails, sans braces, but with the same air of self-assured innocence, went on trial in Northampton, Mass., for a Nov. 24 protest against Central Intelligence Agency recruitment at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. If found guilty by the jury, she faces a possible six months in prison and/or a $500 fine.

"I don't really think of it as using my status," she said at a morning news conference. "It's me doing what I think I should be doing."

As for whether she's discussed this latest incident with her famous father, "I haven't talked to him that much," she said laconically. But her parents "know about what I'm doing and are completely supportive," she added. "Their main concern is that I feel good about what I'm doing."

She speaks in a soft voice, with only a hint of the South. Her gaze is direct, serious. For an interview last week in her third-floor walk-up a few blocks from the Brown campus in Providence, R.I., she made no effort to pretty up. The outfit was a faded denim miniskirt embroidered with stars, a loose T-shirt under a plaid flannel work shirt, red socks and white leather running shoes. Her long hair, the bottom half dyed brown, was pinned back in a messy chignon.

She lives with two roommates and a 12-year-old cat named Misty Malarkey, who also once tasted life at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The apartment is furnished with rickety rocking chairs and other secondhand furniture. Dishes are piled high in the kitchen. Bob Dylan records are strewn on the living room floor.

"CD," she said in a tone that assumed one knows it stands for civil disobedience, "is a last ditch effort after all that had been done. No one knows the facts of the case. No one wanted to listen to us. CD is not a lot of fun, but it's a real viable way of getting your opinion across."

On the armchair of the ragged couch was a paperback, "Psychoanalysis and Feminism," from a course she is taking on feminism, along with Native American studies, plant biology and linguistics. Her political philosophy, she said, could be more or less described as "feminist socialist." She said she gets most of her news from Oprah Winfrey's television talk show. She enthused over Isabel Allende's recent book.

Carter opened a fan letter from a Nigerian man who had read about her antiapartheid protests in the African press. Of the 30 to 40 letters she gets daily, about a third is hate mail. "I get a lot of mail from the South, calling me 'nigger lover,' " she said. "And letters that say, 'Your mother is the ugliest woman in the world.' It doesn't bother me. I just chuck it."

She expects to win in the trial. "I definitely feel I shouldn't be punished," she said. "I broke this little law to make clear there were bigger things that were happening ... Why do I feel so strongly about the war in Nicaragua? Because it's flat wrong to fund the contras. Our involvement is corrupt from start to finish."

How can she be so sure?

"My dad goes to Nicaragua and El Salvador and writes me letters about what the deal is," she explained. "It's completely galling. The worst part of it is that Reagan doesn't know what's going on and can't get the facts straight. Has there ever been a president this bad? I don't know. It's only the second president I remember. I'm not used to it."

Itwas dark on the campus of the University of Massachusetts last November when 50 state police in riot gear began to seize the protesters and load them onto buses. Amid the confusion of nightsticks, German shepherds and handcuffs, no one much noticed a strawberry-haired girl dressed in an army fatigue jacket, a lavender flowered dress and desert boots. As she chanted "No Pasaran" -- Spanish for "They Shall Not Pass" -- and lay down on the road to block the buses, two policemen grabbed her. Kicking and flailing, Amy Carter was hauled off to the station, charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing justice.

It wasn't her first brush with the law. Two years ago she was one of hundreds arrested at the South African Embassy in Washington, and last year IBM dropped trespassing charges against her and other Brown students for an antiapartheid sit-in at its Providence office. But the Amherst protest, she said at yesterday's news conference, "is probably the most important thing I have done."

Along with Carter, another remembrance of protests past was arrested at Northampton: Abbie Hoffman, the aging Yippie who has refused to give up. Now 50, with a grizzled beard and a pot belly, Hoffman lifted his middle finger toward the police and shouted as they shoved him into the bus, "Back to the future! It's 1968 out there!"

Although they had met before and corresponded, it was a coincidence that Carter ended up at the same demonstration as Hoffman, she explained last week. "I just happened to go up because someone from Amherst called and said they're taking over a building. We went up to support them with three or four friends. We knew people at the Radical Student Union there."

Carter said she arrived midway through the occupation of the building, and had to be hoisted in through a third-floor window from the fire escape. After several hours of "frenzied meetings and people screaming back and forth," police warned the 150 people inside to leave or be arrested. About half left, including Carter. But once outside, she said, "it was like an entire other deal. They'd called in the state police in complete riot gear, with mace and billy clubs. They were showing us their mace and saying things like, 'If you don't move we're going to bust your head.' "

Carter, having not intended to get arrested, found herself rather throwing herself in front of the buses after witnessing what she said was a police assault on several students. "They picked me up and threw me to the ground," she said. "They handcuffed me behind my back and pushed me toward the bus. It wasn't nice."

What about free speech -- for the CIA too?

"Free speech isn't the issue," she said. "It's a matter of false advertising. CIA recruiters refuse to answer questions. They come in and give this smooth talk. It's not like they even give their side in favor of destabilizing foreign governments. They pretend they are not even involved in destabilizing foreign governments."

The demonstration drew a sour response from University of Massachusetts Chancellor Joseph Duffey. "Neutral observers" did not see police brutality, he wrote in a December letter to The New York Times. "Our university trustees have affirmed several times over the last two decades the rights of students to protest and picket in a peaceful and lawful manner. They also have affirmed the right of students to inquire about careers of their own choosing.

"Ms. Carter," the letter continued, "joined students who took over an administration building, brought work there to a halt, harassed public employees, rifled personal papers and university files, and damaged public property." Students' moral passion about "the rogue behavior of the C.I.A. and of the Reagan Administration's unlawful use of the agency in covert activities" does not "justify trashing the civil rights of other students."

Carter termed the letter "off the wall ... What really infuriated me was that he sent a copy of it to my father, saying, 'I think you should know what your daughter is up to.' My father just threw it on my bed and said, 'I don't know why he sent it to me.'

"People treat you like you're 12 years old," she said.

Hoffman, in an interview last week in his cramped New York apartment (with a picture of Hoffman and Jimmy Carter on the wall), said, "Amy has a shot of being the first woman president. Most kids in the '80s haven't broken out of the yuppie designer-brain mentality yet ... They don't know which side we fought on in World War II, they can't define a molecule. Vanna White has 30 times the name recognition of Daniel Ortega. They know Ralph Lauren from Pierre Cardin, but they don't know what's going on in the world.

"Amy's broken the mold. She's an activist. She's risked getting thrown out of Brown. She's one of about 2,500 student activists around the country. In two years we'll have 5,000. Amy helps us because she's got good political instincts and she's good with the media."

It is Hoffman, veteran of the Chicago 7 conspiracy trial and now the e'minence rose of left-leaning student groups across the country, who helped organize what began as yet another minor protest into a media event -- the "The Amy and Abbie Brigade," as one news magazine has dubbed it.

"People think I'm a Svengali for Amy," Hoffman said. "That's the image -- but it's not true ... The media has a mythical image. She's pictured as the first of a generation who cares. I'm pictured as the last of a generation that wasn't Big Chilled. In fact, we are comrades who believe more or less in the same issues and who are part of a growing movement to stop apartheid and stop the CIA war in Nicaragua."

Leonard J. Weinglass, the Chicago 7 attorney, is among those representing 15 Northampton protestors, whittled down for easier handling from the 60 who were arrested.

All are pleading not guilty, based on the "necessity" to occupy a university building to highlight the CIA's illegal activities. More than a dozen witnesses are to testify, including Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers leaker; former attorney general Ramsey Clark; recanted Nicaraguan contra Edgar Chamorro; former CIA employes John Stockwell and Ralph McGehee; and several students, including Carter.

In recent months, there have been anti-CIA protests at the University of Colorado, Hunter College, Bowdoin College, the University of Minnesota and Louisiana State University. The CIA has continued to recruit on more than 200 campuses, interviewing about 10,000 students a year. Adding to the drama yesterday at Hampshire District Court, site of the 1786 Shays' Rebellion by farmers, a bomb threat temporarily emptied the courthouse during jury selection.

The Northampton case is "putting the CIA on trial," Hoffman said. "It is symbolic warfare ... This should be the trial of the decade -- or it's a bad decade."

A fundraiser, the I Spy Ball -- "come dressed as your favorite spy" -- was held last week at the Saint, a New York nightclub. Carly Simon showed up to have her picture taken with Hoffman and Carter. Other celebrities, including Art Garfunkel, Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger, lent their names. Yet at the courthouse yesterday, one could tell that it was the '80s and not the '60s: A dozen students from the UMass Conservative Alliance and the student Republican club staged a counterdemonstration. They waved an American flag and yelled, "Go Back to Woodstock." Hoffman was hung in effigy on a fence post.

And a sign held up by one of the counterprotesters asked a wistful question: "Amy, What Happened?"

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.