The best Rahm Emanuel story is not the one about the decomposing two-and-a-half-foot fish he sent to a pollster who displeased him. It is not about the time - the many times - that he hung up on political contributors in a Chicago mayor's race, saying he was embarrassed to accept their $5,000 checks because they were $25,000 kind of guys. No, the definitive Rahm Emanuel story takes place in Little Rock, Ark., in the heady days after Bill Clinton was first elected President.

It was there that Emanuel, then Clinton's chief fund-raiser, repaired with George Stephanopoulos, Mandy Grunwald and other aides to Doe's, the campaign hangout. Revenge was heavy in the air as the group discussed the enemies - Democrats, Republicans, members of the press - who wronged them during the 1992 campaign. Clifford Jackson, the ex-friend of the President and peddler of the Clinton draft-dodging stories, was high on the list. So was William Donald Schaefer, then the Governor of Maryland and a Democrat who endorsed George Bush. Nathan Landow, the fund-raiser who backed the candidacy of Paul Tsongas, made it, too.

Suddenly Emanuel grabbed his steak knife and, as those who were there remeber it, shouted out the name of another enemy, lifted the knife, then brought it down with full force into the table.

''Dead!'' he screamed.

The group immediately joined in the cathartic release: ''Nat Landow! Dead! Cliff Jackson! Dead! Bill Schaefer! Dead!''

Today, Rahm Emanuel is, at 37, one of the most powerful people at the White House. He is also the middle brother of two similar tank commanders: Ariel Emanuel, 36, a relentless Hollwyood television agent who left International Creative Management under cover of darkness to create a rival firm, and Ezekiel Emanuel, 39, an oncologist (with a doctorate in political theory) who is a nationally known medical ethicist at Harvard and a leading opponent of assisted suicide.

''We were cloned, full grown,'' says Ezekiel.

Of the three brothers, Rahm is the most famous, Ari is the richest and Zeke, over time, will probably be the most important. Zeke is also, according to his brothers, the smartest. Rahm, naturally, gets the most press attention. Last erm he managed the President's campaigns to pass the crime bill and the North American Free Trade Agreement, but this term he has taken over the job and close-to-the-Oval-Office cub-byhole of his friend Stephanopoulos. Now chief promoter of Clinton's small-bore issues like stopping teen-age smoking and requiring trigger locks on guns, Rahm has been singled out in recent profiles as the centrist, hyperactive counterreaction to the Stephanopoulos liberal cool. The articles are more colorful than is typical of the genre (the dead fish helps), but Rahm is more interesting, and reflective of his time, in the context of his brothers.

Together, Emanuel Freres are a triumvirate for the 90's. All are rising stars in three of America's most high-profile and combative professions. All understand and enjoy power, and know how using it behind the scenes can change the way people think, live and die. All have been called obnoxious, arrogant, aggressive, passionate and committed. All three get up before dawn. All are the sons of an Israeli father, now a 70-year-old Chicago pediatrician, who passed secret codes for Menachem Begin's underground. Iregun, and an American Jewish mother, who worked in the civil rights movement and owned, briefly, a Chicago rock-and-roll club. All three also worry about a less successful Emanuel: Shoshana, 23, their adoptive siser, who crash-landed into the family at the age of 8 days, when the brothers were in their teens.

No one would call it an ordinary upbringing in Wilmette, Ill., the lakeshore Chicago suburb. The Emanuel boys always had to prepare for dinner, and that did not just mean washing up. ''You had to be up on the news,'' says Marsha Emanuel, their mother, who is now a psychiatric social worker. Every Sunday there was a family cultural excursion, sometimes to the Art Institute of Chicago, other times to the ballet. (All the boys, at their mother's insistence, took lessons, and Rahm still does.) The neighbors thought it odd when Marsha dragged the three boys to ''The Nutcracker,'' but then they went with her to civil rights demonstrations, too.''

The Boys went to summer camp in Israel, and reveled in the family lore: in 1933, after their uncle Emanuel Auerbach was killed in a skirmish with Arabs in Jerusalem, the family changed its last name to his first, as a tribute. Political passions always ran deep. Raham still remembers the time his mother and her father got into such a furious argument at the dinner tble over Henry Wallace and the 1948 split of the Democratic Party - a quarter century after the fact - that father threw daughter out of the house. ''And it was her house,'' Rahm says. ''I thought, 'This is nutty.' ''

Today, the brothers argue just as passionately about the role that environment and genetics played in the life of their sister, who in recent years has been on and off the welfare rolls that Rahm worked so hard to cut. Benjamin Emanuel met his daughter when he gave her a well-baby checkup and discovered that she had suffered a brain hemorrhage at delivery. The baby's future was unclear; Shoshana's birth mother, a young woman of Polish Catholic background, asked Dr. Emanuel if he knew someone who wanted her child. ''But I couldn't find placement,'' Benjamin Emanuel says. After a week of debate between both parents and sons - Marsha Emanuel had always wanted a girl - the Emanuels themselves took Shoshana in. ''What are you going to do?'' Benjamin Emanuel says philosophically.

Intellectually, Shoshana developed normally - like her brothers, she graduated from New Trier, one of the most competitive high schools in the country - but she needed four operations and years of physical therapy to give her 85 percent use of her left side. She had a difficult adolescence, and today Marsha Emanuel, at the age of 63, is raising Shoshana's two illegitimate children. (None of the Emanuels will talk about Shoshana in detail, and she declined to be interviewed for this article.)

The conversation the brothers continue to have about Shoshana is also, of course, a conversation about themselves. Were Zeke, Rahm and Ari simply successful products of Jewish middle-class parents who valued education and hammered them with expectations? How much of their drive came from their immigrant father? Certainly each Emanuel brother derives a large part of his identity that of the others. No one else, it seemed, mattered as much. ''The pressure is that you were judged by the family,'' Ari says. ''Our family never cared about the kid down the block.''

THE EMANUEL BROTHERS GOT TOGETHER NOT LONG AGO in Washington for the bris of Rahm's first child, Zacharia. ''He's fabulous,'' Rahm says.

''He looks cute,'' Zeke agrees. ''We don't think Rahm's the father, though.''

So goes a pre-bris interview with the three over tea at the Four Seasons Hotel that regresses into giggles, insults and much nervous jiggling of legs. At one point, all three brothers, apparently unkowningly, are jiggling in unison; at another point, Zeke and Rahm leap up to give each other a high five. ''Our wives say we go right back to when we were 16, 14 and 13,'' offers Rahm, feeling this needs to be pointed out. ''Every spouse not only marries her partner, she gets the other two shmegegges with us.''

The brothers are close friends - they talk almost daily - but when together they fall into the roles assigned within the family: Zeke the brain, Rahm the politician, Ari the jock.

''Ari can carry on a conversation!'' Rahm says at one point, noticing that his younger brother is talking with me about Los Angeles. ''What an accomplishment! A complete sentence!''

Ari retaliates when the conversation turns to money. ''I.Q. brings down - I'm not going to go into it,'' Ari says impishly.

''Income?'' shouts Zeke. ''Is that what you were going to say? I.Q. and income are correlated?''

''They should be!'' counters Ari, who says he made between $1 million and $2 million last year.

''Inversely, that's the thing,'' says Zeke.

''This is all off the record,'' says Rahm.

The conversation moves to how wonderful their wives are. Ari is married to Sarah Addington and Rahm to Amy Rule, both now stay-at-home mothers of young childrn. Zeke is married to Dr. Linda Emanuel, the vice president of ethical standards for the American Medical Association. They have three children and live in Chicago; Zeke commutes to both Washington and Boston.

''I'm going to tell you something, O.K.?'' Ari says. ''So I walk in yesterday -.''

''My wife-,'' Zeke interrupts.

''Shut up!'' says Ari

Growing up, Zeke and Ari were at each other's throats, with Rahm acting as mediator. ''Rahmie was the calmest,'' says his mother, aware of how strange this sounds given his reputation as a barracuda.

''I was the classic middle child,'' Rahm says, talking in his White House office one morning. It is a peaceful Tuesday, with not a crisis in sight, although you would never know it from Rahm's boby language. He is lean, handsome, wired. Earlier, the President had wandered through the door connecting the Oval Office to Rahm's little digs. ''Where is he?'' the President asked. Rahm was in an adjoining office talking to his secretary, but at Clinton's words he sprang up and disappeared into the President's dining room like a rabbit. He returned to sit on the ege of his seat, his face inches from the television, mouthing the words along with Clinton as the President announced, before live cameras in the Oval Office, a ban on the use of Federal money for cloning humans.

''This is discovery that carried burden as well as benefits,'' Clinton and Rahm said in unison.

Rahm, the senior adviser to the President for policy and strategy, recently broadened his scope to serve as Clinton's political strategist in the budget talks. ''It's the biggest role he's had in his new job,'' says Erskine Bowles, the White House chief of staff.

Rahm's portfolion does not include defense of Whitewater or the 1996 fund-raising scandals, although he is part of the White House team that says it is pushing for campaign finance reform. He has not been questioned about his role as Clinton's fund-raiser in 1992 - a different era, when Clinton did not have a Lincoln Bedroom to offer - but is evasive when asked how he defends the Clinton campaign fund-raising practices in 1996. ''The 1996 election was not about fund-raising,'' Rahm begins, portentously. ''The 1996 election was about two different visions for this country. ...''

I ask again about fund-raising.

''Fund-raising for the last hundred years - go back and read the Lincoln books - is an unseemly business,'' he says.

Does he think the 1996 Clinton campaign went too far?

''I'm not going to pass judgement on the 1996 fund-raising!'' he finally says, yelling. ''O.K.? It's a broken system. There's no prettiness in 1996.''

Rahm is one of Clinton's longest-serving advisers - he started in Little Rock in 1991 - and talks nearly as bluntly to the President as he does to everyone else. Once, when Clinton was made about how an event with the police was shaping up, Rahm, in the words of the former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, shot back: ''What the hell are you worried about? The key is to get your picture with the cops.'' White House advisers say Clinton drops by Rahm's office regularly for gossip and talk, knowing he'll get something good. ''He's always got a carrot to give to the big guy,'' says one White House official.

Reporters say Rahm is smart, but complain that he has a bad habit of peddling shopworn goods as scoops. ''I got along with him, but like everybody else who ever covered that place, I also hung up on him,'' says David Lauter, who was in charge of the 1996 election voerage for The Los Angeles Times. ''You just want to say to hi, 'Enough,' He'll call you up and start spinning something about how this is the greatest thing that any President has done in the history of man.''

Rahm did not show promise early on, and was in fact so undistinguished a student in high school that his guidance counselor suggested to Marsha emanuel that her son might want to consider ''alternatives'' to higher education. He went on to Sara Lawrence College - ''for mother,'' he says - ostensibly because of the dance program, which he ignored once he got there. By the early 90's he was back in Chicago, raising money for the mayoral campaigns of Richard M. Daley. Rahm liked what he heard when an ambitious Arkansas, raising money for a Presidential campaign that had $600,000 in the bank and a tiny team of finance people who kept Little Rock bankers' hours.

''He got up and stood on a table and yelled at them for 45 minutes on his first night there,'' George Stephanopoulos says. IN 20 days, Rahm organized 26 fund-raising events that produced $3.3 million, which kept Clinton alive through New Hampshire and the Gennifer Flowers explosion. He was rewarded with the job of White House political director, which lasted six months, due in no small part to his screaming matches with Susan Thomases, then First Lady Hillary Clinton's very powerful friend. Exiled to what he describes as a White House closet with a Playskool phone, Rahm was made director of speical projects. He grabbed on to Nafta and the crime bill and crawled his way back. ''He didn't take his ball and go home,'' says his friend William Daley, the Secretary of Commerce and the Chicago Mayor's brother.

ARI EMANUEL HAS HAD A SIMILARLY TUMULtuous career, culminating in March 1995 when he and three other agents plotted to leave International Creative Management and start a boutique agency of their own. But their plan was discovered when an I.C.M. employee, noticing an assitant carrying out files of one fo the rogue agents after hours, alerted I.C.M. executives, who promptly fired Ari and friends. As Ari tells it, the I.C.M. chairman, Jeff Berg, called him at home at midnight, threatening a lawsuit. ''I said, 'I don't work for you,'' Ari recounts. ''Don't raise your voice at me.' And I hung up.'' (No suit was ever filed.)

Ari, a George Clooney look-alike, relates his cloak-and-dagger tale over lunch at the Palm in Los Angeles, where we have driven in a rental car. (His Jaguar is in the shop.) Ari is permanently attached to his car phone, but then this is Los Angeles. In his office, Ari watches four TV screens at once, practices his golf putt and, of course, livesin his phone headset. ''You were a half-hour late with the chairman of NBC!'' he shouts at one caller, spicing his words with profanity. When he gets off, he smiles. ''It's my life - right here,'' he says happily. ''I just sit and scream all day.'' He has a nice view of the haze over Beverly Hills, and very good suits. ''All I wear is Paul Stuart, Armani and Calvin Klein,'' he says later, and with such joy I feel I should be pleased for him.

Despite the bravado, Ari does have a certain sweetness and a what's-not-to-lo9ve kind of self-confidence. ''There are times when Ari gets very earnest,'' says Leslie Moonves, the president of CBS Entertainment. ''I have to say, 'Ari, we're in the television business.' ''

Ari's agency, Endeavor, has nearly 200 clients, many of them writers like Greg Daniels, a creator of the new hit series ''King of the Hill.'' Endeavor also represents a smaller number of actors; Wesley Snipes, Adam Sandler and Lisa Kudrow are a few of the better known. In Hollywood, Endeavor is part of the up-and-coming new guard. ''They're hungrier,'' Moonves says.

As a child, Ari was diagnosed as both hyperactive and dyslexic. ''I was ont he ceiling,'' he says. Ritalin helped, but learning to read was an enormous task. ''My mom, to her credit, spent hours helping me.'' He graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul in 1983, playedon the professional racquetball circuit, then moved to Paris, where he was financed by his father. ''Shik gelt,'' Ari would write, in Yiddish. ''Send money.'' Benjamin Emanuel knew full well his youngest son was entertaining a long list of girlfriends. ''So?'' says Benjamin Emanuel now. ''Who didn't?'' Ari was gratefull. ''I had a blast,'' he says.

He moved to New York and eventually went to work for the agent Robert Lantz. ''Nothing stopped him,'' Lantz remembers of Ari, who soon followed the money to television in Los Angeles. By 1987, Ari had a job as a trainee at Creative Artists AGency, at its height under Mike Ovitz. He moved on to Inter Talent, then I.C.M. When he was accidentally hit by a car driven by an I.CM. client, Ari cracked his ribs, tore open his knee and rethought his life. ''I wasn't going to sit around and say my big book on my life when I'm 50 years old is C.A.A. or I.C.M.,'' he says. ''I'd shoot myself.''

Ari credits his father for teaching the brothers to question and challenge authority. (Any number of the brothers' superiors will say their father did this annoyingly well.) Benjamin Emanuel puts it differently: He says he taught his sons self-reliance. ''I never told them, 'Go to your room and study,' '' he says. He believes the secret ot child-rearing is to ''sit and talk to your kids,'' and thinks that the drive in hs sons came from both him and his wife. ''I know I'm hyper,'' he says. Rahm, he adds, ''is an aggressive guy and a very good administrator.'' Ari ''always figured out the angles inbusiness. I knew when he was 15 that he'd be a millionaire.'' And Zeke?

''Zeke,'' he says, awed, ''is really brilliant.''

AS ELDEST SON, ZEKE FEELS HE BORE THE BURden of following in his father's path. ''I was a sort of fullfillment,'' he tells me one day in his very quiet office at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, affilliated with Harvard Medical School. ''But if I did the doctoring that my father had inmind, I would hate it.'' That, he says, would have been biomedical research, the route at the time to a hospital chairmanship. ''When I decided that I wasn't going to do that, he thought I was crazy,'' Zeke says. ''But I created for myself the kind of career that I like.''

We are talking on a day when a freak spring blizzard has kept everyone at home. Perhaps it is the mood crated by the snow swirling silently out the window, perhaps it is Zeke, but clearly he is the most thoughtful and mature of the brothers. This isnot to say he is not brash and contentious - he is, infamously so among his colleagues. But he seems more willing, and able, to articulate what has driven the three brothers to such extraordinary success over the years.

''One thing that I think is very important is the fact that we've all failed,'' he says.

Zeke's first failure, as he tells it, was flunking a calculus final his first semester at Amherst, although he is better remembered by friends for scoring so high on an organic chemistry midterm that he destroyed the grading curve. Later, he wasn't nominated for a Rhodes scholarship - ''I was crushed'' - and over the years has warred with authority figures at Harvard. ''If I listed to you the number of times that people have tried to throw me out of this institution,'' he says, ''or the number of times people have tried to prevent me from doing research, or the number of times I've had my grants rejected. ...'' He trails off.

Zeke - along with his wife, Linda - represents the cutting edge in medical ethics. Unlike the theologians and philosophers who dominated the modern beginnings of the field in the 1960's and 1970's and who focused on abortion and human experimentation, Zeke is both a medical doctor and a Ph.D. with a grounding in philosophy. Only handful of people in medical ethics span both disciplines, a combination considered crucial for the future. ''He's the model of the next generation of bioethicists,'' says Arthur Caplan, the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Because Zeke sees patients, he combines clinical data with informed theory. Working as a consultant, he is building up the department of medical ethics at the National Institutes of Health.

Zeke's influence, through his research, writing and speaking, is in three large areas of 1990's debate: doctor-assisted suicide, which he opposes legalizing becuase it would transform the practice into a ''routine intervention''; ''advanced directives,'' or living wills, which he favors and ethical standards in managed care, which he promotes. His goal is that all doctors get some training in ethics.

Zeke is the ascetic in the family. He does not own a television set, for example, even though it is the lifeblood ofhis brother Ari. In his view, a sense of struggle was crucial in the development of the boys. ''My father did not make a whole lot of money for most of my formative years,'' Zeke says. Benjamin Emanuel came to America with nothing, as his sons proudly recount, and slowly built up a practice from scratch. In the beginning, the family lived in a small apartment in Chicago, but by the time Zeke was ready for high school, the Emanuels managed a move to the suburbs, to a split-level house in the western part of Wilmette, far from the large homes along the lake. ''And that was a big stretch,'' Zeke says.

They were there when Shoshana was born in late August 1973. A week later, the Emanuel boys had a new sister and quickly grew devoted to her, at least as their mother remembers it. By this time, Benjamin Emanuel was 46, well established in a busy practice and prosperous - all much to Shoshana's disadvantage, in the view of Zeke. ''They were struggling much more when we were being raised,'' he says. ''I think too much comfort is not a good thing. It doesn't lead to certain character formation.'' Zeke, however, is too well traveled in the complexities of family and the big ideas of life to do anything but mull over the unanswerable. ''I don't think there's a 'the' cause there,'' he says of his sister.

The brothers say things began to go very wrong with Shoshana when she was 15, but they think she is finally coming out of a bad time. She now has ajob and talks to her father every day. ''I wish I could talk to the other kids every day,'' Benjamin Emanuel says. ''But everybody's busy.'' The boys add that following in their wake must have been brutal on Shoshana. ''Growing up in my shadow was not good for my brothers, either,'' says Zeke.

The boys, meanwhile, worry about how their mother is managing with two young children. ''I spend most of my time exhausted,'' Marsha Emanuel says matter-of-factly, over a cup of coffee in her kitchen. ''I think, gee, I shouldn't be at this age.'' She shrugs. When I start to say something lame about how strong she must be, her sresponse is swift.

''If one more person tells me that, I'll shoot them,'' she says. ''And I'm nonviolent.''

What, then, should people say? ''The nicest thing that people can say to me is, 'God, you have a nice family,' '' she says. But she admits that the question of nature versus nurture is on her mind all the time. ''Day and night,'' she says softly. ''Day and night.''

Rahm, the new father, has similar questions these days. ''But I don't know about gene pool,'' he muses. ''I'm a big believer in environment. If I wasn't, I wouldn't be so worried about trying to balance this job with parenthood.'' He calls his mother and father ''Uber-parents'' who ''left an indeliable print that they expected nothing but the best from us, and taught us to expect it from ourselves.''

That, he says, is the most important lesson he will pass on to his son. ''Luckily,'' he adds, ''I got the crib notes from somebody.''