ASHINGTON, Nov. 9 — Two weekends ago, Harvey L. Pitt took his son and friends in a stretch limousine to a remote part of Maryland to shoot paint-ball guns.

Donning battle fatigues, Mr. Pitt traipsed in the woods with the teenagers as they pelted each other with paint shots from their weapons. A large and lumbering man, he quickly got drenched, people who were watching said. For Mr. Pitt that Saturday, playing the role of attractive target could hardly have been more fitting.

He had been unanimously confirmed just 14 months earlier to be the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission by a Senate whose members had hailed him as one of the nation's most brilliant lawyers, just as the agency was headed into one of its most difficult periods, a string of corporate scandals that shook investor confidence in Wall Street.

But by his final days on the job, he had become the object of derision by Democrats and political cartoonists, scorned by editorial writers of diverse philosophical persuasions, a "political piñata," as Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, put it.

Friends and colleagues, as well as detractors, say Mr. Pitt had ultimately become a casualty of his personality, haunted by the ghost of his predecessor, and struggling to remain a loyal Republican without understanding how his partisanship at what is supposed to be an independent agency would alienate important Democrats.

On Oct. 25, the day before his faux combat, Mr. Pitt had led an unusually rancorous meeting to select William H. Webster to lead a new accounting board over an alternative contender, John H. Biggs, a decision that would ultimately cost Mr. Pitt the job that he had long coveted. According to Mr. Biggs and two of the commissioners, Mr. Pitt initially promised the job to Mr. Biggs at a Sept. 11 lunch. But in early October, he told Mr. Biggs he could no longer support him.

Accounts differ as to why. Mr. Pitt has denied accusations by lawmakers that he buckled under pressure from the accounting profession, which objected to Mr. Biggs because he has been a voice for aggressive oversight of the profession. Others at the commission have said that Mr. Pitt became enraged by the campaign by Arthur Levitt, his predecessor, on behalf of Mr. Biggs, and was determined to oppose him on that basis alone.

Whatever may have happened, his supervision of the selection of the new board caused a political uproar. It grew too much for Mr. Pitt when it surfaced six days after the vote that Mr. Pitt had failed to tell the other commissioners that Mr. Webster had headed the audit committee of a virtually insolvent company that had been accused of fraud.

Mr. Pitt's mishandling of the selection of the board was the last in a series of political blunders over the last year that have baffled his many admirers.

He had offered an olive branch in a speech to his former clients in the accounting profession just before it came under harsh criticism for its role in a series of corporate collapses. Career S.E.C. officials said that he had demoralized the staff by repeatedly meeting with executives of companies under investigation.

To the consternation of Wall Street, he had only belatedly attempted to coordinate investigations with aggressive state prosecutors, like Eliot Spitzer, the attorney general of New York. He was late in seeking more money from Congress for the cash-strapped commission. And to much ridicule among Democrats and anger at the White House, he had secretly lobbied to have his status elevated to cabinet rank to put him on a level with the secretary of state and the attorney general.

`Larger Than Life'

To supporters and his detractors, Mr. Pitt is the closest thing to a modern-day Shakespearean character.

"He is larger than life on both sides," said Joel Seligman, an historian of the commission and securities law expert who has known him and followed his work closely for the last 15 years. "His talent as a litigator and writer has been profound and influential. His flaws are also larger than any chairman in the history of the commission. You're dealing with someone of extraordinary pluses and minuses."

Mr. Pitt declined to comment for this article. In a speech on Friday at the annual conference of the Securities Industry Association in Boca Raton, Fla., he suggested he was the victim of partisanship.

"Unfortunately, turmoil surrounding my chairmanship makes it very difficult for the commissioners and staff to perform critical assignments," he said. "I hope my successor isn't greeted with the same climate of attack and partisanship.

"It's easy to find fault and it's easy to criticize. In a partisan environment, criticism often devolves into attack. This doesn't help anyone. In fact, it's not just unproductive, it's counterproductive."

Lawyers on Wall Street said that Mr. Pitt's lucrative Rolodex of clients, which he built up after finishing an earlier stint at the S.E.C. to become a securities-law attorney in New York, had been the envy of other practitioners. His career gave him better training for the job than any of the 25 chairmen who preceded him, according to scholars and lawyers who follow the agency.

"We were all so excited when he got the job," recalled Stanley Sporkin, Mr. Pitt's mentor and one of the agency's most effective prosecutors. "We wanted so badly for one of our own to succeed. What has happened here has hurt all of the old career staff people, who wanted to live through Harvey."

But officials at the commission and former law partners say Mr. Pitt's personality was mercurial and he surrounded himself with aides too intimidated to openly question his judgment. They say he occasionally saw enemies where none existed and would personalize a professional disagreement.

Other commission officials say that they came to believe they could not always trust him. They say that shortly after he told Mr. Biggs that he would support his candidacy to lead the new oversight board, and that Mr. Biggs should retire early from the private sector to be ready to take the assignment, he secretly began talks with others for the same job.

Mr. Pitt could be brilliant, S.E.C. officials recalled last week. They cited one decision he made to require senior executives to certify their financial statements and another decision to press the enforcement staff to file a securities fraud lawsuit against WorldCom only a day after it disclosed its problems. He also led a relatively collegial and unified commission on many substantive issues.

But to the staff, he could also be difficult. In closed enforcement proceedings, S.E.C. officials said, he could obsess over seemingly obscure points, driving an already overworked enforcement staff of the commission to deep distraction — much of it, in the minds of some officials, unnecessary.

S.E.C. officials said that he also tended to discount the advice of the career senior staff in favor of the political officials he had appointed. One senior career person warned him against trying to elevate the chairmanship to a cabinet level post, they recalled. But they said he dismissed that suggestion when one of his political advisers urged him to make the recommendation.

Rather than turn to the seasoned enforcement or general counsel's staff at the commission to examine the background of Mr. Webster, Mr. Pitt instead relied on his old friend, Robert K. Herdman, who had no investigative experience. Until he was hand-picked by Mr. Pitt to be the agency's chief accountant, Mr. Herdman had spent most of his career as an executive at Ernst & Young. Mr. Herdman resigned from the commission late Friday.

No Follower of Footsteps

From his first days as chairman, Mr. Pitt made clear in an interview at the time, he was determined to be sharply different than his predecessor, Mr. Levitt, who in both appearance and style could not be a stronger contrast.

Both men had come from Wall Street. But Mr. Levitt had no legal background and left details to others while Mr. Pitt reveled in getting involved in the intimate details of making rules and prosecuting cases. Where Mr. Pitt would try to shut out reporters who were critical of him, Mr. Levitt would take the most critical of them to lunch to charm them. Privately, Mr. Pitt would complain to friends that Mr. Levitt's favorable press was not justified by his track record, these friends said.

If Mr. Levitt would become known for holding town meetings around the nation, Mr. Pitt was determined not to have them, he told friends. They said that if Mr. Levitt were seen as orchestrating a campaign for Mr. Biggs to head the oversight board, Mr. Pitt was determined to derail the effort.

Government officials and some of his former law partners at the Wall Street firm of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson who were interviewed last week said his fall, though tragic, was unsurprising. They noted that in 1997, the firm announced his five-year appointment as Fried, Frank's co-chairman.

But a year later, following complaints about his style, he relinquished that post even though he was the firm's most profitable rainmaker.

Mr. Pitt's obsession with preventing news leaks was compared by one of his Republican allies on the commission to the self-destructive tendencies of former President Lyndon B. Johnson. Mr. Pitt was so concerned about the premature disclosure of the new accounting board that he refused to tell his fellow commissioners about his choices until the morning of the actual vote, the commissioners complained.

But he never appeared to have fully realized that the selection of the oversight board even remotely threatened his own job.

"I have not the least bit of concern about me personally," he wrote in an e-mail message in the middle of October to a former S.E.C. official who disclosed them on the condition of not being identified. "Nor do I fear for my job. Unless people are lying about it, my status is assured."

"The press coverage does not affect me or my family," he added, even as the editorial pages of virtually all of the nation's most prominent newspapers had by then called for his resignation. "Nothing the press says can worsen what has already happened. In my own heart, I know I am doing a fabulous job for the agency."

"We read the stories," he wrote, referring to himself and his wife, Saree Ruffin Pitt. "When they are negative, we say, as President Reagan did, `There they go again.' "

There were also signs that he had changed over the last year. When he started the job in August 2001, he vowed in an interview to lower the partisanship of the commission, to not make the mistake of Mr. Levitt of making enemies of important lawmakers and to work vigorously to achieve political consensus.

But he then surrounded himself with former top aides to Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican who is widely considered to be among the most combative members of the Senate.

A Promising Beginning

Harvey Lloyd Pitt was born on Feb. 28, 1945, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, 11 years after the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission. His father, Morris, worked his way up from a deli counter to the management ranks of Waldbaum's supermarkets. His mother, Sara, was a seamstress. Harvey Pitt became the first in his family to get a higher education when he enrolled in Brooklyn College.

In 1968, his last year at St. John's University School of Law in Jamaica, Queens, he argued a case in the regional finals of the national moot court competition. The case would have resonance in the current climate. It involved an investor who sued an accounting firm that had certified the financial statements of a company that had committed fraud.

Mr. Pitt lost the argument but immediately earned the respect of a lawyer from the Securities and Exchange Commission who was the judge of the competition. Even though Mr. Pitt's side lost, the S.E.C. lawyer, Meyer Eisenberg, was so impressed with his performance that he urged him to apply for a job at the commission.

Mr. Pitt did, and he rose swiftly through the ranks. Beginning as a staff attorney, he became a legal assistant to Commissioner Francis M. Wheat a year later. Then he moved to the general counsel's office, and became chief counsel of the S.E.C.'s division of market regulation.

When G. Bradford Cook resigned as the chairman of the commission because of a scandal related to Watergate — the only other time a chairman had resigned in political turmoil — President Richard M. Nixon appointed Ray Garrett Jr. to be his replacement. Mr. Pitt then became Mr. Garrett's top assistant, at the age of 28.

Former S.E.C. officials recalled the time as one of great achievement for Mr. Pitt.

"He was smart," said Mr. Sporkin, the top enforcement official at the agency at the time. "He was a hard worker. He was easy to work with. He had no ego. He was a super guy."

After the Carter administration changed the leadership of the commission, Mr. Pitt left the agency in 1978 and went to Fried, Frank.

His work habits there were legendary. Mr. Pitt worked such long hours that the firm employed three sets of secretaries to keep up with him. His most famous client was Ivan F. Boesky, the Wall Street arbitrageur who pled guilty to insider trading. He ultimately would come to represent virtually every investment bank, accounting firm and stock exchange on the Street.

What Might Have Been

Shortly after he returned to the commission last year to become its chairman, he told a reporter that he had no intention of ever practicing law again.

Last week, one of his former partners at Fried, Frank said that Mr. Pitt's tumultuous time at the commission was unfortunate, and that he gave up an enormous amount personally to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming chairman.

"There's a wonderful paradox," the partner said. "If Harvey had stayed at Fried, Frank through the last year, he would have had the greatest practice in the world because every troubled company from Enron down would have wanted him to represent them."