JUAN BOSCH: A MAN OF HIS OWN TUMULTUOUS TIME

WASHINGTON -- Most people had forgotten the Dominican leader Juan Bosch before he died last week in Santo Domingo. He had lived so long (he was 92), and he had had only quirky and notably unsuccessful political campaigns since his glory days in the Caribbean of the 1960s.

But for those of us who covered the Dominican Republic in those years -- and who always had a special feeling for that wondrous but historically thwarted island -- Juan Bosch deserves far more recognition than he is receiving. For he embodied in his contradictory but fruitful lifetime, as president, writer and political symbol, the hopes and failures, the ebbs and tides, the raging passions and the banal disappointments of the Latin America of his age.

I met Bosch in 1965 when I was covering the Dominican Revolution and he was its shining symbol and hope for democracy. On the heels of the assassination of the heinous dictator, Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, Bosch had been elected president in 1963, only to be overthrown by the dregs of the old military eight months later.

I found him in hiding in Puerto Rico that spring. Poised to return, Bosch was awaiting his moment. Democratic forces inspired by him had started a small rebellion that was to grow swiftly into a worldwide cause against dictatorship.

On meeting Bosch, whom the poor Dominican masses affectionately called "Juan Bo," you knew you were in the presence of a unique and compelling man. His height and curly white hair gave him the air of a romantic legend. Although he was often taciturn, he could charm like few others when he wanted to.

But it was his rage -- usually against the United States -- that defined him. Because by that time, President Lyndon B. Johnson had committed one of the most foolish acts of his presidency. Believing in the spirit of the age that every rebellion had to be communist, he sent into the D.R. 22,000 Marines who more or less froze the revolution. From that moment on, Bosch, who had been courted by the Kennedy administration, became rabidly anti-American.

By the spring of 1966, as elections loomed in the country, Bosch had returned. He stayed in a roomy old house on a wide boulevard, surrounded by bodyguards. "If he takes a step outside the house, we'll kill him," the military threatened. He didn't. The opposition hammered home the idea that "Juan Bo" was a coward. Not only did he lose, but he lost to Trujillo's right-hand man, Dr. Joaquin Balaguer, who is still very much alive at 94 and who has amazingly dominated Dominican politics until recently.

In the years to come, the bitterness and trouble became etched in the craggy face of Juan Bosch. Mystical, temperamental and filled with furies, he continued to hypnotize thousands with his daily afternoon radio broadcasts, even after he lost presidential elections in 1978, 1982, 1986, 1990 and 1994.

When I saw him next, in 1970 in his simple walk-up apartment near the beautiful Dominican Sea, this "first real democrat" in the Caribbean had turned his seeking Cartesian mind to something he abstractly called "dictatorship with popular support." "Every day here people have less and less interest in representative democracy," he complained bitterly that day, as we rocked on his porch. "Even in the United States it doesn't work. Luckily, the American intervention opened the eyes of our people."

I was being facetious when I asked if we had not, then, done him a favor by intervening in 1965. "Yes," he answered seriously, "this is the way history works.

By 1976, he had drawn about him, like a protective shroud, an ingrown far-leftist group. He had his own ideological salon or cult, if you will. His accustomed expression of suffering had muted. His expressive face seemed finally at peace as he had gathered around him, much in the spirit of Socrates, his own intellectual family.

Politics, in truth, had driven him close to madness, but he had finally come home. "It is true, Georgie Anne, it is true," he told me. "I have never been so happy."

Yet, in 1982 there he was again. The man they had called "Mr. Democracy in the Caribbean" in the early 1960s was running for the presidency as an all-out Marxist. His young followers in their red berets, running in march time, were a new kind of "social fascist."

The last time I saw Juan Bosch, about five years ago here, he was lecturing at Georgetown University. A map of the Dominican Republic, along with its neighbor, Haiti, was displayed on the wall. "This is an island," he explained solemnly. The old surrealism had not died.

Juan Bosch was an original and even exotic intellectual, so one has to be careful where one places him in the pantheon of Latin American leaders over the last half-century. And yet, for all his pettishness and preening, the man's life does embody all the panoply of change: those early hopes for a quick and transformational democracy, authoritarian democracy, populist dictatorship, intellectualized Marxism ...

When he began the fight, the D.R. had one of the most brutal and repressive dictatorships in Latin America. Today, despite the many missteps, the country has a functioning democracy with more possibilities on the horizon. In many ways, his life marks the span between those two eras.