WASHINGTON -- Sometimes, after a day in the capital pressure cooker, it all comes crashing down on the strapping woman with the steely jaw, the robotic demeanor and the nation's top law enforcement job.

"Every now and then, I get frazzled late at night," Attorney General Janet Reno says, "and I just kind of sit there and just shake a little bit and say, 'I just do the best I can.' "

It's been that kind of year for the one-time star of the Clinton Cabinet.

This past winter, a year after becoming the first female Justice Department chief, the 55-year-old former prosecutor from Miami looked around to see her two top deputies departed, numerous key department slots still vacant, a crime bill evolving that reflected little of her more liberal crime-fighting agenda and an image that was beginning to look like a firing-range silhouette.

Nearly as rapidly as cherry blossoms vanish in the Washington wind, the bloom had fallen off the Reno rose. And this woman from the Florida Everglades who had been hailed as The Real Thing, someone who swam with alligators and would tame the nation's wild streets, had been deemed a disappointment. Inside the Justice Department, many saw her as a poor manager in over her head, while some administration officials complained that she had a tin ear for politics and was out of sync with the White House.

These days, Ms. Reno appears to be trying to pull herself back up the roller-coaster, trying to start anew and finally put the pieces of her department together. Recently -- 14 chaotic months and several staff shake-ups into the job -- Ms. Reno has finally begun to construct a management structure at Justice that aides say should allow her to function more competently as a chief.

As a first step, she replaced her deputy, Philip B. Heymann -- who resigned earlier this year, citing bad "chemistry" with his boss -- with Jamie Gorelick, an administration legal star with well-honed political skills. And long resistant to having a chief of staff, she recently acquired Ron Klain, another political master, from the White House to serve as a counselor.

It has taken her this long, one senior Justice official says, "to figure out that she couldn't bring Dade County here."

Replacing Hubbell

Both Ms. Gorelick and Mr. Klain have solid relationships with the White House, and are expected to take the place of Webster Hubbell, the associate attorney general and close Clinton friend who resigned in March, as a pipeline between Ms. Reno and the White House.

Ms. Reno has also been trying to deflect charges -- from Democrats as well as Republicans -- that she has failed to shape the Clinton agenda, especially on the highly visible issue of crime, the public's No. 1 concern. As President Clinton and his lieutenants have rallied behind an assault-weapons ban, scheduled for a vote in the House tomorrow, Ms. Reno has been a visible member of the team, participating in gun demonstrations and victims' forums and vigorously lobbying lawmakers.

Ms. Reno still enjoys great popularity outside the Beltway. She gets hundreds of letters a week from fans telling her that she's an inspiration to women or that she looks like their Aunt Edna and they might be related.

But inside official Washington, the tide began to turn against her last fall, about the time the Justice Department issued its final report on the deadly raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas -- the incident that had sparked the nation's infatuation with Ms. Reno when she publicly accepted blame for the April 1993 disaster.

Report's stings

While the Justice report concluded that the attorney general was not at fault, it suggested that she had not carefully read the FBI's assessment of conditions at the compound before she ordered the invasion. What's more, the report found no evidence that children were being abused in the compound -- the concern that was said to have been uppermost in Ms. Reno's mind when she ordered the raid.

Ms. Reno's performance on the crime bill further dimmed her golden aura. She was accused of having been "missing in action" in November, when the Senate crafted its tough-tongued crime bill -- a bill that ignored most of her views.

Justice officials "were completely absent," a Senate aide said. "That's unprecedented."

But a Justice spokesman, Carl Stern, defending the department'srole, said Ms. Reno once canceled an entire day's schedule to press senators to reinstate such items as boot camps and drug courts. He says the now-departed Mr. Heymann delegated crime-bill work to another staff person and blames that fact for contributing to the sense that "the department lacked input."

But those on both sides of the crime issue say Ms. Reno's reluctance to press forcefully her more sociological approach to crime -- an approach that focuses on rehabilitating nonviolent offenders and strengthening families -- resulted from an ideological collision with the White House, which wanted to appear as tough on crime as the Republicans and to focus on police and prisons.

Because of the impasse, one legislative aide said, Justice officials "never could come to grips with what their position would be."

Beth Carter, coordinator for the Campaign for an Effective Crime Policy, sees great "disappointment" among liberal, prevention-oriented groups that "this administration first appoints an attorney general with a strong point of view and then asks her to be quiet about it."

Conservatives like Terry Eastland, a Justice spokesman in the Reagan administration, blame Mr. Clinton's hurry in appointing an attorney general, after two false starts, for any ideological gap.

Was gender key?

"What the White House wanted was a woman," Mr. Eastland said. "I don't think they thought carefully about how the woman they were getting would fit with the substantive law-enforcement themes a new Democrat should be pushing. Gender was the consideration."

For her part, Ms. Reno acknowledges that she was not steeped jTC in the Clinton agenda when she signed on. But she denies that her views are out of step with a White House -- or public -- that is pushing for tough answers, or at least tough-sounding answers, to crime.

"I came to Washington so quickly, I didn't have any experience with the administration," Ms. Reno said in an interview. "People suddenly started asking me questions, and I started answering based on my positions. I find myself far more in the mainstream than I think some people, looking at it from a Washington perspective, think."

Any tension on the crime bill telescoped a year of minor skirmishes that suggested to White House officials that Ms. Reno was insensitive to the political dimension of her job and, worse, not a "team player."

The friction started with Ms. Reno's defense last year of Lani Guinier, who had been abandoned by Mr. Clinton as his nominee for the Justice Department's top civil rights post. It continued through such scuffles as her subtle disapproval of a trip Mr. Clinton took to Chicago to support the election of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, the subject of a federal criminal investigation.

If the White House has bristled at her independence, it has also exertedits muscle. After Ms. Reno approved a narrower legal interpretation of child pornography last year, causing the

administration to appear soft on crime, Mr. Clinton scolded her in letter that was made public, saying he wanted his administration "to lead aggressively in the attack against the scourge of child pornography."

And after Ms. Reno leapt in front in the TV-violence debate, supporting congressional bills that civil libertarians thought raised First Amendment questions in their regulation of TV programming, Mr. Clinton distanced himself from his attorney general's position when he addressed Hollywood executives.

"They respect each other, but they're not buddies," one Justice official said of Ms. Reno's relationship with the president. "I think he realized she's a popular person in the hinterlands, and it wouldn't serve him well to snipe at her."

This aide, who has close ties to both the White House and the attorney general and spoke on condition of anonymity, said such clashes are "inevitable" given Ms. Reno's outspoken, sometimes undiplomatic, personality. "She is independent. She will always be independent. That doesn't mean she can't be effective."

She seems to be especially effective on the road -- where she ventures often, giving speeches, visiting with police groups or schoolchildren and appearing far more relaxed and chatty than she is in Washington, where she is known for clipped answers to reporters' questions and a stoic, sometimes icy, style.

Here, she maintains a rigorous schedule, getting up in the dark to put on what she calls her "old jollies" -- sneakers and old clothes -- for a 5 a.m. walk so brisk it often leaves her security detail out of breath, and then walking to work from the furnished apartment she rents to start what is typically a 14-hour day.

Fall was no surprise

Given her experience in Miami, where she was alternately heralded and vilified, she says she expected the bumpy ride she's had and was ready for the fall.

She says she told an audience last spring, at the height of all the gushing: "You've created this monster. You've created me as this alligator wrassler. And I'm really just an awkward old maid who has a temper and such. I can well be the most unpopular attorney general in no time flat."

Given the unpopularity of some of her predecessors, she's nowhere near earning that dubious title. But given the challenges of running Justice -- a task few of her recent predecessors have managed for a full term -- it's not much of a surprise to hear critics already writing her resignation letter.

Asked if she expects to be sitting in her office a year from now, the attorney general herself is only a little more optimistic, suggesting that there are some things about political life -- about Washington -- that she understands all too well.

"I take every day on a day-by-day basis," she says. "I assume I will be gone in the morning or I may be here eight years from now, and I conduct myself accordingly."