The Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church stands atop a rise just off a two-lane blacktop that winds through the rolling, red-earth farmland of rural Macon County. It was here the great lie that engulfed Charlie Pollard's life began.

He is 91 now and recently celebrated his birthday at the church with friends. His gait is slowed. His memory dimmed. But he recalls with clarity the Sunday afternoon in 1932 when nurse Eunice Rivers, the black nurse who worked for the white doctors, dropped by after worship in search of recruits.

By the time she left the church that day, Pollard had unwittingly signed up to join what became one of the most devious medical research projects ever conducted in the country. He was 26 years old.

It was called the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. And for the next 40 years, Pollard was part of an experiment in which government doctors watched the effects of unchecked syphilis on 399 black men and examined the bodies of those who died.

The men were never told they were part of a study. They were never told they had the disease. They were unaware of the risks to their health. For this deception, President Clinton wants to apologize on behalf of the federal government.

"I didn't know nothing," Pollard says. "I was just a poor plowboy."

Between 1932 and 1972, the Public Health Service tracked the health of 600 black men in Macon County---the 399 infected men plus 201 free of syphilis who served as a control group. The men were examined once a month, and each month the doctors took a blood sample.

But they did not offer the standard treatment available at the time, arsenic and mercury, nor penicillin when it became available after World War II.

Some of the men were told they had "bad blood," a vague term used in rural reaches of Macon County to describe many ailments such as anemia they were told that the white doctors from Washington and all of them were white - had come to t" treat their bad blood for free. In a poor county, where most of the men were semiliterate sharecroppers, the offer of care was, irresistible. "I thought I was getting treatment for my health," Pollard says. "I went along with it They should have given me the medicine."

Of the original group, only eight are alive to receive the president's apology, which has not been formally arranged. They are frail and fading. The youngest is 87, the oldest 109. Pollard, for years the chief spokesman, has yielded that role to Herman Shaw, who at 94 is still spry, still farms and still navigates Macon County's roads in his champagne-colored 1988 Buick.

The men want Clinton to come to Alabama. They say it would have more impact if he visited the place where the study occurred. "It would go a long way toward revitalizing confidence in the government," says Fred Gray, their lawyer.

After the study was exposed in 1972, it was condemned as ethically unjustified and scientifically unsound. The study also was denounced as racist, and few disagreed.

"African-Americans were not the only ones in Macon 'County in 1932 who had syphilis," Gray says. "But they were the only apes involved."

But the most incredible thing is that the Tuskegee study lasted as long as it did.

Originally, the project was envisioned as a treatment program.

In 1930, syphilis was epidemic, especially among blacks in the South. It was considered almost as dangerous to public health as AIDS is today. The Public Health Service launched an experimental treatment program in six heavily black counties, including Macon. Treatment for Syphilis in those days involved taking a sequence of arsenic and mercury shots for a year. It was expensive and imprecise. In Macon County, home to 22,000 blacks, the doctors found that 36% were infected and 90% untreated.

Treatment began, but the Great Depression dragged on. After two years, the money dried up.

So the Public Health Service made a fateful decision in 1932. If the government could not afford to treat syphilis, perhaps its doctors would learn something by studying its effects. So what began with hope edged into an awful experiment.

The newly fashioned study was to last a year. But it gained bureaucratic momentum as the doctors convinced themselves that they were on to something big. Racial prejudice ran so deep at the time that the white doctors believed syphilis had a different effect on blacks than it did on whites. Documenting the differences, they thought, would help lead to a better cure.

The doctors made no attempt to keep their work secret. They published regular reports in medical journals.

Then in 1972, The Associated Press also wrote a report about Tuskegee, although not in the same language as the doctors'. The AP used terms like "human guinea pigs," and "doubts about morality. In the thunderous outrage that erupted, the Tuskegee study finally collapsed. ' I

At the time, 28 of the men in the study I had died of syphilis and as many as 100 had died from complications stemming from the disease. The government later determined that 40 wives had been infected by their spouses while the government withheld treatment. At least 19 children had been infected by their mothers in the womb.

So what kept the men coming all those years?

In 1932, Macon county was one of the poorest places in the nation.

The average income was $2 a day. People were ill-fed, ill-clothed and ill-housed.

According to the 1930 Census, nine doctors, one of them black, served a population of 27,103. And they served only those who could afford to pay.

When nurse Rivers showed up in the churches offering free medical care, free meals and trips to Tuskegee, the county seat, who was going to turn her down?

The prestigious black school, the Tuskegee Institute, which relied on federal funding, provided its hospital for exams and autopsies. (The institute withdrew when the study doctors opted to withhold penicillin when it came onto the market in 1946.) Over the years, the doctors went to great lengths to ensure that their subjects remained untreated. The doctors intervened, for example, to keep the men out of the Army during World War II, where they would have been treated.

When men moved away, they were followed. If they sought treatment elsewhere, it often was thwarted.

In 1947, Herman Shaw was sent back to Macon County after he rode the bus to Birmingham to get penicillin shot The federal and state governments had launched a massive campaign to wipe out syphilis. Free shots were given at Legion Field. The night Shaw arrived, he met a nurse searching for him.

''She told me, 'You're not supposed to be here. You're supposed to be in Tuskegee, " Shaw says. "So they gave me breakfast and put me on the bus."

Nothing seemed to deter the doctors. Not even the Nuremberg trials of the German scientists who conducted medical experiments in the concentration camps of World War II. Historian James Jones, author of Bad Blood, a book about the study, once asked a chief doctor if he saw any parallels between Tuskegee and the Germans. "We were not Nazis," the doctor said.

Left untreated, syphilis can cause blindness, insanity, heart disease, arthritis and death. It advances through the body in three stages. In the first stage, sores appear. In stage two, the victim develops a fever and a rash and experiences heart palpitations. Joints become sore. When the symptoms disappear. The body enters a period of remission that can last weeks or decades. The lucky ones overcome the infection. . .

But the rest experience the most debilitating phase. Tumors grow. The disease attacks the liver. Bones are eaten away. More frequently, syphilis burrows into the heart, which begins to leak. Eventually, the disease spreads to the brain. .

Pollard and Shaw were among those who suffered only mild effects. Pollard's uncle Frank Cooper went blind.

Cooper's daughter, Emma, now 81, recalls how a neighbor, Jethro Potts, struggled to walk. "He used to pass one of my friends' houses and had to stop two or three times," she says. "You had to walk everywhere in those days, and he would have to sit down and moan until the cramps would leave him."

It would seem that such debilitating symptoms would attract attention. But the entire nation was ravaged by poor health in I. the 1930s. Infant mortality ran high. Typhoid and diphtheria were common.

Tuberculosis ranked as the sixth leading cause of death. Newspapers of the day cataloged the illnesses in the county: 1,922 cases of malaria in 1929, 1,072 cases of hookworm in 1934.

The doctors were eager to examine body organs after death. So they offered the men small life insurance policies to pay funeral costs if they agreed to allow an autopsy. Herman Shaw got $35 to bury his father-in-law, who died of syphilis in the early years.

Although Pollard was not well off, he was one of Macon County's most prominent black residents. He and his father farmed cotton and corn on 500 acres.

His monthly medical exams were conducted in the one-room school next to his church. When school was in session, he was examined in his cousin Wood’s front yard.

For his "bad blood," Pollard was given some little white pills, a liquid "blood tonic" and some salve, which was smeared on his sides under a belt, worn to help it penetrate his skin. .

The medications were part of the deceit. None of them treated syphilis.

"If a man Came in and he had a terrible cold, (the doctor) would give him something for that cold," nurse Rivers said in a taped interview made just before she died. "And we always carried the iron tonic and aspirin tablets and vitamin pills…. They really enjoyed it very much. These vitamins did them a lot of good."

In many ways, the entire project revolved around the helpful black nurse. The men loved her. "Oh, my God, she was their mama," Emma Cooper says.

She was the link between the men and the doctors. She visited the men at home and chauffeured them around in her station wagon with the government emblem on the door. Over the years, Jones noted in his book, the men "came to understand that they were members of a social club and burial society called 'Miss Rivers' Lodge: "

Every four months, the nurse drove the men into Tuskegee for more extensive exams and took them to dinner afterward. The exams included X-rays and, briefly, painful spinal taps. The doctors got the men to agree to the spinal injections by sending out letters advertising the procedure as the "last chance for special free treatment."

"One held my head, and there was one on each side," Pollard says. "I laid in the bed for a week."

Rivers' involvement still puzzles people today. In a report, one doctor suggested Rivers wore "two hats" and wondered if her dual roles created conflicted loyalty. On the one hand, she was "a public health nurse locally coordinating the study" the doctor On the other, she was the "local Negro lady identifying with those local citizens---all of her race--- who have been 'exploited' for research purposes."

But lawyer Gray says Rivers must be viewed in the context of the times. No nurse in the 1930s would have challenged a doctor, and in Alabama, no black would have challenged a white.

After the study was exposed, the government reformed research practices. It paid $10 million to the participants and their heirs and provides free medical care to the infected men and any infected wives or children. But the ghost of Tuskegee refuses to die. And in his apology, Clinton will be hard pressed to avoid facing up to its legacy.

Tuskegee has become a touchstone for suspicion of government in the black community. It is at the root of the current conspiracy theory that AIDS was created by the government as a form of genocide to kill off the black race. Tuskegee lurks just beneath the surface when public health officials ponder ways to overcome the reluctance of blacks to donate blood or vaccinate their children.

Albert Julkes, whose father and two uncles were part of the study, counts himself among the suspicious if only because what sounded far-fetched in Tuskegee turned out to be true. ' '

Julkes says his father, who was in the study's control group, was monitored when he sought medical care after he moved north.

"I don't know how they did it," Julkes says. "But they did."

Julkes, 54, lives an hour away in Columbus, Georgia, and drove over to Shiloh Missionary Baptist recently when four of the survivors held a news conference to ask for a presidential apology. He found himself battling conflicting emotions.

"It was as if we are burying something yet resurrecting something," he says. "I sat there talking about something that I want to forget, and yet 1 know that something has to be done to bring it to closure. The animosity toward the government still ferments."

Pollard, who sat silently through the news conference, is beyond such emotion. His anger is spent. He lives alone. His wife died in 1989. The government pays for three nurses to tend to him 24 hours a day.

In an interview with the Atlanta Constitution newspaper in 1972, Pollard confessed that despite his faith in nurse Rivers and the doctors, he eventually reached a point when he gave up on their pills and tonics and resorted to home remedies.

One cure for his arthritic back involved soaking splinters from a long leaf pine in whiskey.

"And every now and then, I'd take a sip of that," he said. .

The day after his birthday party, Pollard was asked "if it was true that he'd used such a remedy. He reached down behind the arm of the sofa and pulled out a longnecked bottle filled with long, slender slices of pine.

Yes, he said, laughing. The remedy seemed to work fine, although he no longer uses whiskey. Now he uses gin.