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WASHINGTON — Colin Powell. Several women. A couple of Hispanics. By the time President-elect Bush announced the last of his Cabinet selections this week, he had managed to assemble a group every bit as diverse as the one put together by the man he will replace. 

President Clinton began his presidency in 1993 with the most diverse Cabinet in history, fulfilling a campaign promise to build a government that “looks like America.” 

He also set a new standard for his successors – one that Bush has met. 

“I don’t really think it’s possible anymore to form a government of all white men in this country and that’s quite remarkable,” observed Ruth Mandel, director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University and an expert on women and politics. 

Bush is putting women and minorities in charge of eight of 14 statutory Cabinet departments. He has tapped three women, two blacks, two Hispanics, one of whom is female, an Asian-American and an Arab-American. The Republican president-to-be also has chosen a women to run the Environmental Protection Agency, which he has designated a Cabinet-level post, as did Clinton. 

Clinton also had eight women and minorities in his first Cabinet. Three were women, including one black. There also were two Hispanics and three black men, along with a female EPA chief.  

Clinton also put women in charge of several other Cabinet-level agencies. 

His replacements for departing secretaries included one black woman, a Hispanic, two black men, another female and the first Asian-American named to the Cabinet. 

In contrast to Bush’s diverse Cabinet, the incoming House Republican leadership for the 107th Congress picked all white men to head legislative committees. That left Rep. Marge Roukema of New Jersey without a chairmanship, despite 20 years in the House and seniority on the banking committee. 

Cecilia Munoz, vice president for policy at the National Council of La Raza, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights organization, said Cabinet diversity did not start with Clinton but that “his commitment to it has set a standard which is clearly being followed.” 

The all white-male Cabinet changed some in 1933, during the Great Depression, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose Frances Perkins, a woman, to head the Department of Labor. 

More than 30 years later, in 1966, the country got its first black Cabinet member in Housing Secretary Robert Weaver, who served under President Johnson. 

President Carter named the first black woman, Patricia Harris, who oversaw two departments – Housing and Urban Development and later Health and Human Services. 

In 1988, late in his second term, President Reagan appointed the first Hispanic, Education Secretary Lauro F. Cavazos, who continued in the post under President Bush, the president-elect’s father. Bush also had Manuel Lujan Jr., a Latino, as interior secretary. 

Six months ago, Clinton made Commerce Secretary Norman Mineta the first Asian-American Cabinet member. Mineta also has agreed to serve the president-elect as transportation secretary. 

In his second term, Clinton also named the first Hispanic woman to the Cabinet, Aida Alvarez, who became head of the Small Business Administration in March 1997. 

While the younger Bush’s Cabinet is visually diverse, ideologically it is the opposite. Most members hold moderate to very conservative views, and several face opposition from labor unions and women’s, environmental and civil rights organizations. 

Diversity also extends to Bush’s White House staff, where his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is black and his chief legal adviser, Alberto R. Gonzales, is Hispanic. Another top White House adviser is Karen Hughes. 

“It will be good for America to have African-Americans in nontraditional roles. He (Bush) did this for the right reasons,” Rice said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “That’s what’s most important to me. In fact, that’s what’s very nice about this. Maybe it says something about where we are 140 years after slavery, which is pretty remarkable.” 

Bush has no Jews in the Cabinet, but some of his closest advisers are Jewish, such as policy aides Josh Bolten, Paul Wolfowitz and former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith. Ari Fleischer, who will become a familiar face to Americans as White House press secretary, also is Jewish. 

Erwin Hargrove, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University, said Bush’s selections are just a first step. More important, he said, will be how they all govern. 

“I think it must now be incumbent on a Republican president to show you’re just not a white, male corporate group, even though that’s what they are,” Hargrove said. “I think he’s just saying this is the country as we well know it and I commend him for that.”