CLINTON'S SMOKE BLOWS STACKS

President Clinton got himself a richly deserved demonstration in front of the White House, with people chanting "Do the Right Thing" and carrying a huge banner that read, "YOU PROMISED."

The protest, one of the few since Clinton was sworn in, was aimed at the toxic-waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio, and while it was not large -- 200 at most -- it was organized, spirited and had for its celebrity Martin Sheen of "Apocalypse Now," one of the few Hollywood stars lately to be outside rather than inside the White House. He was arrested in Lafayette Square by a plainly starstruck police officer and led away in the demonstration's stylish, bring-your-own-handcuffs civil disobedience segment.

Sheen, an "old Buckeye" whose mother-in-law lives near the plant, was shackled on one side to Ohio activist Alonzo Spencer, whose wife teaches in the elementary school that is 1,100 feet from the facility, and on the other to a 63-year-old retired psychotherapist named Billie Elmore, who came up from North Carolina to brave the tender mercies of the District of Columbia prison system.

The chants, like the arrest patterns, were well thought out. One was "Al Gore, read your book." The vice president's book is called "Earth in the Balance." The follow-up taunt: "If you can't stop WTI {its ownership is shrouded, but the plant is called Waste Technologies Industries} , how on earth can you save the planet?"

All of the demonstrators seemed to be Clinton voters, and they were more disappointed than angry. They hope that his failure to rescue them comes from neglect rather than a change of course on the environment. They never expected to march and chant against him.

A bitter Pennsylvania doctor who was sitting on the curbstone waiting to be collared, said Clinton should be impeached because children near the plant had been found to have significantly elevated lead levels. "It's unconscionable," said Bob Knapp, "you can't buy bottled air."

Sheen still thinks that Clinton is "a personally good and decent man," but Lisa Tychonievich, a registered nurse from East Liverpool and mother of three daughters, said sadly, "We have got to make him more afraid of us." A farmer-environmentalist, Harold Clinesmith, from Ritzville, Wash., said: "We have only one recourse, to embarrass him."

The plant is burning toxic waste because several weeks before he left office, President George Bush ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to give WTI permission for a test burn. This was in clear contradiction to Gore's promise of last December that a study by the General Accounting Office must be completed before the plant was fired up. But now, the "environmental" administration says there is nothing it can do.

By way of appearing to do something, however, the administration recently ordered a new investigation to be done by Keith Laughlin, a Capitol Hill investigator. He met with representatives of Greenpeace and other environmental groups involved in the demonstration and members of the Ohio Valley Citizens. He promised to be quick about it.

WTI has become to the waste incinerator world what Seabrook was to nuclear plants. There is speculation that Clinton is under heavy pressure from these new moguls, some of whom contributed to his campaign. In this case, the president's notable desire to please everyone, cannot be achieved. There is no middle ground between environment and toxic waste.

It would seem that the nice people who smiled and waved as they were led to the vans singing "We shall not be moved" were the kind of motivated, dedicated -- and let's say it, focused -- friends no politician could have too many of.

And they were ingenious, too. Four of them had shackled themselves into concrete columns inside the special Greenpeace van, their arms thrust through holes in the side. Two more, one wearing a flowered straw hat, sat on the roof of the van, their arms imbedded in a steel tube encased in a smokestack that emitted non-toxic black clouds from a smoke machine inside. When police department technicians came with a kind of pneumatic jackhammer and attacked the smokestack, the greatly diminished number of demonstrators began a chant of "Right tools, wrong stack."

Hours after the other protesters had gone to the wagons, the chatter of the machine rent the air and three soprano sympathizers sang "We Shall Overcome."

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