t is not unusual for Washington's elite to jockey for the best seats in the house at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Butin an unusually bitter cultural contretemps, Clinton loyalists and the Bush White House are fighting over who should occupy seats on the center's socially and politically influential board of trustees.
A seat on the board of the Kennedy Center is one of the most prized plums a president can bestow, and former President Bill Clinton selected five lucky men for the honor as he was preparing to leave the White House. They expected six-year terms and special boxes at the center's concert halls. But there has been a hitch because the Bush administration says it cannot find the official records of Mr. Clinton's appointments, board members and administration officials said today. The official commission papers for the appointments, signed by Mr. Clinton in December, are missing and the appropriate filing procedure may not have been followed, officials said.
So the position of the Bush White House is: no papers, no appointments.
Among those caught in the cultural crossfire are two prominent Democratic fund-raisers, Smith Bagley, the grandson of the tobacco magnate R. J. Reynolds, and Mark S. Weiner, president of the Democratic Governors Association.
Scrambling to salvage the appointments, aides to Mr. Clinton are frantically searching for copies of the papers among the former president's archives of millions of White House documents at a warehouse in Little Rock, Ark., an aide to Mr. Clinton said. A search in August failed to turn up the papers. A second, more comprehensive search began last week, officials said.
A seat on the Kennedy Center's board of trustees is a prestigious political honor. It is like no other performing arts board in America. Thirty of its 47 trustees are appointed to six-year terms by the president, often as consolation prizes to friends and fund-raisers who do not get ambassadorships or who cannot move overseas. By law, among the other 17 members are 3 members of the cabinet, 10 members of Congress, the Washington mayor, the director of the National Parks Service and the librarian of Congress.
Several trustees said the board, which is a fiercely nonpartisan group, is trying to resist getting caught in the middle of a contentious dispute between members of the Clinton and Bush administrations.
"It's astonishing; it's awful," said James D. Wolfensohn, president of the World bank and a former chairman of the board of the Kennedy Center, in a telephone interview. Mr. Wolfensohn emphasized that he had heard only rumors of the appointment problem, but said, "It's clearly a sad state of affairs and doesn't help the institution because of the uncertainty it creates."
Tiki Davies, the Kennedy Center spokesman, said, "The Kennedy Center has no comment."
But a longtime board member said: "Everyone at the Kennedy Center is heartsick — it's a great shame. It is a tremendous disappointment for the people who were appointed. They didn't do it. The papers fell through the cracks somewhere."
In addition to Mr. Bagley and Mr. Weiner, the trustees whose appointments are now in doubt are Frank H. Pearl, a lawyer and chairman of the venture capital firm Perseus Capital; William F. McSweeney, the emeritus chairman of Ford's Theater; and Thomas E. Wheeler, the president and chief executive officer of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association.
Anne Womack, assistant White House press secretary, said the Bush administration had not threatened to block the five Clinton appointees if the commission records were not found. "We're working with the Kennedy Center," Ms. Womack said. "If they don't find them, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it."
Earlier this year, the executive clerk's office told officials in the White House personnel office that there were five vacancies on the Kennedy Center Board. But while the Bush officials began compiling a list of potential nominees, they learned from Kennedy Center officials that there were no openings on the board.
"That's when we discovered there was no paperwork backing up these five appointments," Ms. Womack said. "There is no official record of them ever being commissioned."
A Democratic strategist with knowledge of the dispute said, "The White House made it clear, if those records can't be found, they will block the appointments of the Clinton guys and go with their own people."
The five appointees, who first heard of the missing papers in July, have hired Robert A. Long of the powerful Washington law firm Covington & Burling. They have discussed filing a lawsuit against the Bush administration. The appointees either declined to comment or could not be reached for comment.
Behind the scenes, there have been bitter recriminations on both sides, and the dispute has inflamed political passions among some current Kennedy Center board members.
A Democrat who is a friend of Mr. Clinton speculated that the White House may have purposefully lost the documents so they could have the appointments for Mr. Bush. But a Republican supporter of the center scoffed at the notion and said: "Think of the last few weeks of that administration. It was chaos. It's hardly a surprise that these records were lost. If only this happened to the Marc Rich pardon."
Although their appointments might be challenged, the five men's names appear as presidential appointees on the Kennedy Center Web site. Their names are on the Kennedy Center stage bills that are distributed to audiences at every performance. And at least two of the trustees are committee chairmen. Mr. Pearl is chairman of the finance committee, and Mr. Wheeler is chairman of the personnel committee.
The appointment process is complicated. The documents that literally make the appointments, called commissions, should have gone from the White House personnel office to the White House executive clerk's office. From there, the papers should have been filed with the secretary of state's office, which usually makes an appointment of this sort official. In this case, the documents may have never left the White House, officials said.
News of the appointment problem has been closely held, and some of the trustees said this week they were unaware of it. Even James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, who sits on the board's executive committee, said in a telephone interview today that he knew nothing about it.