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Reputation, Bobby Ray Inman often says, has meant everything to him. Some
friends, although not all, said that is all the explanation they need for his
astonishing assertion that he was withdrawing his nomination for secretary of
defense because of "a handful of vitriolic attacks" by newspaper columnists.
 Mr. Inman's hourlong meditation on his media reviews, and a phone interview
later on, left a portrait of lifelong insecurity.
 Anyone who grows up clumsy and four-eyed in football-mad east Texas, Mr.
Inman has told his friends, has to look for another way to get by in this
world. A "Quiz Kids" radio show prodigy, Mr. Inman was 5 feet 4 inches and 96
pounds when he graduated from Mineola High School at 15. (About 1.63 meters
and 43.5 kilograms.)
 "How did I appear not to be a freak, and how did I avoid getting beaten up
going to the restroom?" he once said. "I learned to do two things. One was to
find two or three big athletes and help them with their homework. Absolutely
intentional. They became my protectors. And the other was to help people who
wanted to run for school offices."
 That same strategy - using brains and guile to make himself indispensable to
powerful sponsors - continued throughout a spectacular navy career. His
protectors included legends such as Admirals Arleigh A. Burke and Hyman G.
Rickover, and he scaled four-star heights never reached before by an
intelligence officer.
 Mr. Inman's public career progressed from praise to lavish praise. He got a
Defense Superior Service Medal for "achievements unparalleled in the history
of intelligence."
 Yet Mr. Inman's self-image, he said, was rather different. He is a man, he
said, who remembered anything but the praise. Described often as a consummate
Washington insider, Mr. Inman laughed bitterly. He called himself "this guy
who constantly saw himself as an outsider working to succeed on the inside" -
never quite reaching insiderdom himself.
 He said he got generally good reviews, "but not by all, though." And it was
the bad ones that him kept awake at night, sleepless with insecurity.
 "I'd wake up thinking about the stories, the hostile stories, not all the
friendly ones," he said.
 But can a man who held four major positions be as naive as he portrayed
himself Tuesday about the capital's folkways?
 This is the same retired admiral, after all, who teaches a course at the
University of Texas, his alma mater, on "How Government Really Works." The
syllabus says he examines "trends in media coverage" and "efforts to
manipulate public perception."
 Peter Flawn, a former president of the University of Texas and friend of Mr.
Inman's, pronounced himself "mystified" by the spectacle Tuesday. Another
friend, Joann DiGenero, said she could not believe Mr. Inman could be as
shocked as he sounded.
 "Some of the pieces are missing, and we certainly didn't hear them in the
press conference," she said.
 Asked whether some other skeleton had emerged to drive him from office, Mr.
Inman said no - but said reporters had been "out all over the country"
searching for one. One journalist, he said, even tried to find out whether he
had ever told "a racially oriented joke."
 Mr. Inman volunteered that there had been a whispering campaign about his
sexual orientation after a 1980 episode in which he refused to revoke the
security clearance of a homosexual man at the National Security Agency.
 "There were of allegations, whispers, suggesting that I must be of
comparative persuasion," he said. "Those had come from other agencies as well.
All of the law enforcement and security agencies were adverse to the
decision."
 When President Ronald Reagan nominated him for the post of CIA deputy
director in 1981, Mr. Inman said, he volunteered to take a polygraph test. He
said he was asked whether he was homosexual, that he denied it, and that the
polygrapher found his answer was "not deceptive."
 Mr. Inman's own explanation was stunningly simple. The last time he was up
for confirmation, in February 1981, he had a two-hour hearing and a 98 to 0
Senate vote in his favor for the No.2 CIA job. This time, he said, there were
prospects of opposition that could get ugly.
 "Given this reaction" to the nomination, he said, referring to unfriendly
columns by William Safire and Anthony Lewis of The New York Times and Ellen
Goodman of the Boston Globe, "to have gone on to the job, it would have been a
prescription for not doing a good job and being miserable."