School for Scandal

"That would be what I call the 'head-held-high strategy,' " says Jane Sherburne, a veteran of the Clinton scandal wars as one of his White House lawyers.

"It's extremely hard, but it's got to be head-held-high. You can't go into hiding. You have to keep circulating, keep focused. . . . You're less effective if you're defensive or if you look like you're hiding. It's sort of a shoulder to the wind, that kind of notion where you are just trying to carry on with some dignity and let people know that you're perfectly capable of weathering the storm."

They are in limbo, those three -- Raines, Ney and Jefferson -- not charged, not (yet) defendants, innocent until proven guilty.

But the scandal machine -- that nexus of prosecutors and FBI agents and news stories and gossip -- renders these folks guilty, if only of being suspects.

Though we don't know for sure how this trio has reacted privately, we do know that some figures in similarly tough spots are known to kick and scream and cry and rant.

"Most of my experience has been with screamers," says Michele Roberts, a white-collar criminal defense attorney with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. "That's better than people who cry. Screaming is good. There's a certain amount of frustration. . . . It's a very stressful situation when you have a federal prosecutor impaneling a grand jury to indict you. Sometimes it means getting drunk with them or yelling at them or shaking them."

But in public, politicians caught in scandal tend to stay on-message. It goes like this: I have done nothing wrong and will just go about my duties with the dignity and integrity that is my trademark. Or some such paradigm of innocence.

Lanny Davis, another Clinton-era lawyer, has written a book about facing scandal. Its title speaks volumes: "Truth to Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself."

He advises clients -- he does legal crisis management these days -- to do "a Geraldine Ferraro" by answering as many questions about the alleged scandal as they can safely answer without digging themselves into a deeper legal hole. That's what Ferraro, the first female vice presidential candidate, did in 1984 to try to put to rest questions about her husband's alleged financial impropriety.

The trouble with talking, though, is that it's hell for defense attorneys.

"It's criminal law 101 that you always advise the client to shut up," says Roberts. But politicians feel they have to talk publicly, have to explain their predicament, at least to their constituents.

As political scandals go, today's seem less seamy than those of yesteryear, such as the 1974 spectacle of Rep. Wilbur Mills's companion, a stripper, leaping into the Tidal Basin as police stopped their car, and the 1987 photos of Gary Hart, the senator and presidential candidate, caught in an extramarital liaison aboard a boat called Monkey Business. And who could forget the 1990 episode involving a crack-smoking Mayor Marion Barry (now a D.C. Council member), caught on videotape?