The president's day started early - 5 a.m. or earlier. He'd dictate letters until 6:30 or 7, then take his ablutions before a hearty breakfast of goat soup, rice and palm butter - a tasty, artery-clogging Liberian stew made from the orange meat of palm nuts.

''He'd come out, and by about 8 o'clock he'd start seeing people in his private apartment,'' Shad Jr. says. ''And when I say people, I mean ordinary people. Everybody.''

Robert Smith, another Tubman biographer, wrote that each day 100 or more people would come seeking some of Tubman's time. To make matters worse, he was known to go out on his balcony and call people up from the street below. They would be cabinet ministers, legislators or minor officials. Foreign businessmen, a planter looking for his signature on a land deed, or a typist wanting to transfer to another government department. Just about anybody.

He would work in his office until 4 p.m. and break for lunch and a one-hour nap. ''Then 'round about 5:30 or 6, he'd start seeing people again,'' Shad Jr. says, ''and this would go on until 12 or 1 o'clock in the morning.''

Tubman's family knew that the country came first.

''I got married in '61, and my father died in '71. During that time he came to visit me twice. He would go to visit other people; he knew that (his family) would come to see him,'' Shad Jr. says. ''Believe me - this is an extraordinary thing about the old man. His family was the people.''

Maintaining the style

Jimmy Barrolle, President Tubman's butler for 30 years, has the air of a gentleman barber: neatly dressed and perfect in posture. He has a pleasant voice - a quiet, sparse chatter that you expect to hear mingled with the metallic swishing of shears - and the steady hands that you trust with a razor on your face.

But the small old man's eyes dance and his words tumble out in quick bursts as he talks about William V.S. Tubman.

Every afternoon the Liberian flag comes down from its post at Cape Palmas High School in the town the Tubmans helped found in the 1830s. The Liberian flag is identical to the one of their American antecedents except for the lone star that replaces the 50. JONATHAN ERNST/STAFF

In 1941, Barrolle's uncle took him to see Tubman, then a justice on Liberia's Supreme Court, to ask him to take on 19-year-old Jimmy as a tailor's apprentice. Tubman himself had been a tailor in his youth, before he established himself as a lawyer.

Tubman looked the young man over and said, ''I'm not going to take him as my tailor boy, I'll take him as my son.''

There was a tradition among Liberians to adopt natives, such as Barrolle (pronounced bah-ROLL), who was from the Bassa tribe, into their homes to educate and raise. Tubman did this for Barrolle, but also made him his righthand man for personal matters.

As Tubman's butler, he would become nearly as well known as the president himself. When Tubman wished to help out one of his financially strapped countrymen, it was Barrolle who would pay a visit with a sum of money.

One of the professional soccer clubs in Liberia took his name for their team and still plays today as Barrolle.

Barrolle - the man, not the team - was responsible for keeping up Tubman's trademark high style. The immaculate dress. The top hat and tails. The Johnny Walker Black Label scotch. The Cuban cigars.

Once or twice a week, when the president became overwhelmed by the crowds vying for his time at the executive mansion, Barrolle would prepare a quiet meal or maybe just drinks for Tubman at a secret house near the beach in Sinkor, a suburb of Monrovia.

Tubman made more formal weekend escapes to his estate at Totota, about 75 miles inland from Monrovia, or he would take the presidential yacht down the coast to his home at Cape Palmas - where the Tubman slaves had landed all those years ago, the antecedent paupers to this African prince. The Totota estate is a working rubber plantation, whose entrance is marked at the roadway by a sculpture resembling giant criss-crossed elephant tusks. Across the street is a restaurant called the Coco's Nest (pronounced KOO-koo), after the president's daughter.

Street vendors and pensioners, among others, gather on the steps of the former executive mansion in Monrovia - where President Tubman drew crowds of people seeking his counsel or favor on a daily basis. Even when he went to the country to escape the masses, he would not long tolerate the solitude and call out for visitors. JONATHAN ERNST/STAFF

There was also a small menagerie collected from all over Africa, including the pride of Liberia - the pygmy hippopotamus, which grows to only about 400 pounds. Shad Tubman Jr. remembers well the time his father wanted to share the tiny hippos with America.

''We sent a pair to Eisenhower, and were embarrassed when we found out they were both male,'' he says, falling into throes of laughter. ''So we sent them another one,'' he adds with a great smile.

Tubman made numerous official visits to Europe and around Africa and loved to vacation in Zurich every two years, just to rest and ''look at the mountains,'' Shad Jr. recalls.

But he wouldn't always have to go so far to escape the presidential grind. True to what he had told the bishop at the seminary years before, he never gave up his love of a good party.

Early in his first administration, Tubman was an active participant in dances and parties around the capital. At the time, Tubman was a bachelor - he and his wife, Araminta, had divorced in 1928, and his second wife, Martha, whom he married in 1938, had died suddenly just six months after his inauguration in 1944.

Over the next four years, according to biographer Henries, ''scores of Liberian belles vied for Presidential favor. Old ladies, middle-aged ladies, young ladies: all entered the lively competition for Tubman's affections.''

''He was a regular man,'' says Shad Jr. ''He liked women. He liked dancing. He enjoyed some of the crazier songs, like Yes, We Have No Bananas - which was a Depression-days song. Whenever the band was playing, he'd get on the kettle drums, and he'd beat them.''

Even after his marriage to Antoinette Padmore, in 1948, he was still the life of the party, talking late into the night and sending crowds into roars of laughter with his favorite jokes and jovial toasts.

Along with his party-boy past, Tubman also stayed close to his roots as a man of the people.

''I'll tell you right now,'' says Shad Jr., ''he was a sucker for women crying. When they started crying, he just broke down.

''And he would bury just about anyone who died.''

President Tubman was known to help everyday Liberians with the expenses of burying their loved ones and would frequently deliver eulogies for friends and neighbors, but the practice puzzled his son, who finally asked his father why he seemed to have such an obsession about paying for funerals.

''Some people coming to you, they've been to you before; they say their mother died,'' recalls Shad Jr. ''I say you've buried them two or three times already.''

His father told him, ''When I was a young man I used to love partying ... and this day I went out and had a big party and was flat broke.

''That's when my mother died. I didn't have the first cent to bury her. I had to go to a couple of clients and ask them for an advance. It was a humiliating experience, so I know how these people feel when this happens.''

''There are simple things that happen to us that bring about this type of thing,'' says Shad Jr. ''I say, well, that's God - maybe that's why God used that particular thing for him.''

HEAD:The pastor-president

William V.S. Tubman was never shy about his faith, even when his frequent quotations from Scripture became a source of ridicule in foreign newspapers.

In some ways, it was as if the former seminarian had molded himself into a pastor-president, taking the election as the ordination he never had.

''I have an abiding conviction,'' he said in that first inaugural address, ''that your call of me has sprung from the inescapable direction and dictate of God.''

He treated the country like his congregation, with an office open to all. He made speeches into sermons and found parables in the lives of the people around him. Like a good pastor, he met all of his people, rich and poor alike, on their level.

And, as is the case with some long-serving ministers, a few of his faithful flock confused him with God and made him the object of their worship. He had warned the Liberian people upon entering the high office that he would find ''little or no pleasure in being called the President of a Nation of weaklings, vassals or sycophants,'' but at times he was just that.

His son John Hilary Tubman recalls the time Tubman gathered a group of advisers and ministers on the porch of the mansion for a chat.

''Gentlemen, I want to ask you: This man has written so and so and so and so about me in the newspapers. What do you think I should do? One man said he should jail him; another and another said the same.

''I'm not going to do a damned thing to him,'' Tubman said to them angrily. ''Do you know why?

''He is saying what you are thinking, but scared to say.''

Tubman's birthday, celebrated during his presidency as a national holiday, became an annual contest for extravagant offerings from his worshipers around Liberia.

One year, Grand Bassa County presented him with a Chrysler sedan. The next year, not to be outdone, Maryland County gave him a boat. The following year, Sinoe County chose to ignore the fact that he hated to fly and gave him his own airplane.

In The Judgment of History; William V.S. Tubman, a Memoir, Tubman biographer Robert Smith didn't mince words.

''He was a power and glory.''

Abuses alleged

But not everyone was so charmed.

His high style - the parties, the yacht, the Cuban cigars, the top hat and tail coat - was an easy target for criticism. For the centennial celebrations in 1947, the Liberian government hired a decorator from Macy's department store in New York to personally oversee the installation of new furnishings in the executive mansion - mostly done in a modern style, except for the ceremonial parlor. That was made up in Louis XIV mode.

Jimmy Barrolle says that, yes, his dress and style were a source of pride for the president, but not him alone.

''The people too,'' the butler says. ''The Liberian people took great pride in that with him.''

And wasn't that one of his goals? Lifting that pride, the national self-esteem?

Not according to critic Tuan Wreh (pronounced TWON RAY), who decried what he saw as the president's abuses of power. He maintained that Tubman jailed, beat or killed political opponents on grounds of sedition and suffered from paranoid episodes during which he would lash out at his detractors.

''Tubman commanded an enduring form of economic strangulation on opponents, enabling him to secure their political allegiance. Leaders of Liberian society, once known for their courage and manliness, cowered before Tubman as if mesmerized,'' Wreh wrote in his biography of Tubman, The Love of Liberty.

''The birth of the Tubman era saw political bossism at its zenith,'' Wreh wrote. ''Tubman packed the legislature with his servants, cronies and favorites, many of them illiterate. One had functioned as his social secretary, another as his official chauffeur and another as his valet, another as his ward, a fifth was his business agent, and a sixth served as his press secretary.''

And there was the matter of changing the Liberian constitution, which when Tubman entered office said that a president was elected to an eight-year term. He could be elected again but couldn't succeed himself.

During Tubman's first administration, the law was changed to allow the president to continue succeeding himself in four-year intervals if he was re-elected after the first eight-year term expired.

The charges of political dirty tricks are familiar refrains to his son Shad, who says that they are largely without basis. Partly, it was the fault of the system and the power of the True Whig Party, he says.

''The Liberian political system was not unlike the system you had in this country where the Democratic Party was concerned, for many years, where a Democratic nomination in the South meant that you had won the election. The main contest in Liberia was for the party's nomination.''

His father's unbelievable popularity also made him invulnerable at the polls, Shad Jr. explains.

''So far as my father's concerned, once he became president he recommended that women be given the vote. He talked about unification and integration. With those two policies, you've got about 95 percent of the people behind you,'' Shad says.

''He didn't even have to campaign, frankly.''

Facing a challenge

William V.S. Tubman would nonetheless mount a vigorous campaign in 1951, at the end of his first term.

He was running against a native man named Didwo Twe (pronounced TWAY). Twe and his comrades were attempting to organize the Reformation Party and believed they could sweep the elections with the 1.5 million aboriginal voters behind them, Tubman's popularity be damned.

Officials from the Reformation Party were harassed or jailed, and equipment and funds were confiscated - on grounds of the party's ''sedition.''

Tubman would later say he watched with ''considerable amusement'' this party that was ''conceived in malevolence and born of defeatism.''

Eventually, Tubman ordered that Twe be allowed to run in peace, and he did so. But it was discovered just before the election that the Reformation Party had not filed its candidates' paperwork in time, and they were, on that technicality, left off the ballot.

Twe felt this was no less than the disenfranchisement of the aboriginal Liberians, and he did not go quietly when faced with the full power of the Tubman regime and the True Whig Party. Instead, he tried to take his case to the United Nations - which enraged Tubman - and Twe, fearing for his life, went into hiding.

Even though it never rose to the seriousness of the charges of slavery in the 1920s, the case nevertheless became an international embarrassment. For four months after the election, charges flew back and forth in a series of letters to the editor in The New York Times.

But even as Tubman was suffering this black eye - which he had largely brought upon himself - he found an opportunity to appear statesmanlike in addressing the most profound question of the Liberian condition.

Who, exactly, are Liberians?

''Mr. Twe refers ... to Americo-Liberians and aboriginees. Who are or ever were Americo-Liberians? Certainly not that band of stouthearted men who gave us, under God, this goodly heritage, its name, style and title! If any set of people were ever full-blooded Liberians and nothing else but Liberians without any other qualifying word or antecedent, it was they,'' he said as he addressed the nation on the eve of the election.

''While enslaved they were in the school of preparation for the great pioneer work of founding a nation that is destined to be the saviour and liberator of themselves and those who had sold them away as captives,'' Tubman said - in reference to the fact that many slaves were betrayed into captivity by their own African brethren.

''Wearing the fetters and shackles of slavery, bearing the scourge and the lash of the whip of their masters upon their hides, they were initiated by hardship into the knowledge and experience of endurance and intrepidity that would qualify them as adventurers, pioneers and nation builders.

''Let it be remembered that when those great men and women first landed here from the United States to found this nation, they met not a single, solitary one of their brothers who were civilized or educated, nor were there traces of Christian religion anywhere seen or known.''

There had been undeniable progress since that time - schools, churches, roads, bridges, and so on - for everyone in the country, he said. And he urged patience among the native peoples.

''Does Mr. Twe not further realize that as true as night follows day the tribes will produce a president who will be elected by the people of Liberia and not by a single tribe or a number of tribes... ?''

The speech was an eloquent masterstroke, meant to seal the election and gain the favor of Liberians on all sides of his still-fragile unification policies.

Furthermore, Tubman appeared to meet Liberia's multiple-personality disorder head-on. Were they Africans? Were they Americans? Who were their compatriots? The Americans who had enslaved them? The African tribespeople who many believed had sold them into slavery in the first place?

As for William V.S. Tubman, he saw an inescapable tie between the two cultures.

''I believe that nothing happens by chance and that behind all phenomena in the universe is the unseen hand of God. I believe, therefore, that the accident of African slavery, while iniquitous, criminal, devastating and degrading, was a part of the Divine Plan and that Liberia's role in that great drama makes her an indivisible component of all things American,'' he would say.