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By Lloyd Grove It has been, for Harold Ickes, a dizzying plunge from the White House to the hot seat. He has landed with a thud. Yet last week in his first interview since the start of Senate hearings on campaign fund-raising abuses, the former deputy White House chief of staff stiffened his upper lip, and even curled it occasionally, as he expressed sympathy for the plight of others. "I don't envy Mike Madigan," he said, referring to the chief Republican counsel of the Governmental Affairs Committee -- the Senate panel investigating Ickes and his fellow Clinton operatives. "This is a huge, amorphous, undisciplined, unfocused case. Were it not for the so-called Asian connection" -- a reference to questionable donations from the Far East to the Democratic campaign -- "I don't know where they would go." Ickes -- who insists he knows little about the Asian connection ("Very lucky for me," he said) -- nursed two drinks, a cranberry juice and a vodka neat, at Washington's I Ricchi restaurant. His red hair was coiffed like a Dr. Seuss character's, and he sported, under his tweed jacket, a lobster-colored shirt open to the chest -- a costume that was equal parts old-shoe and wise guy. "What with the tens of thousands of pieces of paper they have," Ickes went on, "and knowing how disorganized the Democratic National Committee is, it must be a nightmare." Many of those papers -- some bearing the president's more newsworthy writings ("Ready to start overnights right away," Clinton scribbled on a memo proposing that fat cat donors be put up in the Lincoln Bedroom) -- came from Ickes' voluminous personal White House files, which he turned over to House Republican investigators last February. Why Ickes retained and delivered the damaging documents without a fight -- catching the White House by surprise -- is still a subject of speculation among Clinton loyalists. Was this Ickes' way of getting back at a president who'd rewarded his loyal work with dismissal last November? "Was it revenge? Absolutely not," Ickes said. "If there was going to be revenge on the president, it would not be done in broad daylight. . . . Was I not supposed to respond to a request from Congress and insist that they serve me with a subpoena?" Ickes' fellow White House insider and longtime adversary, political consultant Dick Morris, concurs. "If Harold really unloaded, there'd be a whole lot more going on now than there is," Morris said. "If Harold ever broke with Bill Clinton, you'd know it, believe me." Former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta offered an alternative theory. "This is not complicated," he said. "This is a person who probably felt deeply wounded and said the time had come basically to protect himself from the onslaught that was coming. And he did not at that point feel that he had to necessarily check with the White House. This is a simple story." In late June, Ickes spent a day and a half being deposed by Senate staffers, and came away impressed by chief counsel Madigan's straight-arrow, no-nonsense approach. If Ickes goes before the Senate committee in the coming weeks -- and it's still unclear when, or whether, he'll be called -- it will be, by his account, the 14th time he has testified under oath since coming to Washington from his Long Island law firm. These include two grand jury appearances, various depositions and two Whitewater congressional committee sessions in his role as the point man for the Clinton White House's scandal management effort. On the vagaries of campaign finance, he could be an especially compelling witness. "Ickes is important because he basically ran the Clinton-Gore campaign for the White House for the better part of two years," a Senate Republican staffer said. "He has a wealth of knowledge that can't be gotten from anywhere else. But what he says, how far he's willing to go in sitting down and explaining the facts, is a whole 'nother ballgame."
Before the Fall A mere eight months ago, Ickes, 57, was one of the most powerful men in America as President Clinton's political vicar -- the straw boss of Clinton's Cabinet and a chief architect of his reelection. He could take pride in serving a U.S. president, much as his legendary father, Harold Ickes the elder, toiled for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But today, Ickes is operating out of a makeshift office on Connecticut Avenue, struggling to launch a government relations consulting business with his longtime aide-de-camp, Janice Enright. While he accepted the president's assignment to organize the recent Summit of Eight in Denver, probably his Clinton administration swan song, he's still smarting from his embarrassingly public defenestration last November from his White House job. He didn't even get an invitation to a recent Democratic Party fund-raising gala. What's more, he's paying thousands of dollars in legal fees -- more than $100,000 so far, he estimates -- to blue-chip lawyer Robert Bennett. It's the cost of being a key player in the various congressional and Justice Department probes of last year's fund-raising abuses. "I think what I've learned, other than get a retainer agreement with your lawyer before you come down, and bring a good accountant, is that there is a magnifying-glass effect in Washington," Ickes said. "It's really fascinating. Things you think will be a problem never become a problem. Some things can go wrong that you'd never think would be a problem. And suddenly it becomes a problem and then becomes magnified, and before you know it you've got an explosive issue. . . . "In the White House, everything that's said and everything that's done is potentially the subject of public scrutiny. You can't have a meeting of four or five people and the president without it getting on the street. Boy, is that inhibiting! As I look back, I don't think I did a goddamn thing wrong, but would I have done some things differently? Sure. I would have acted more cautiously, because the magnifying glass does breed enormous caution." Caution, however, has never been the Ickes MO. "Harold is a `Throw yourself in front of the train' kind of guy," said former deputy White House counsel Jane Sherburne, whom Ickes recruited to run the damage control team. Ickes -- who once during a New York mayor's race bit an adversary on the leg -- was renowned in the Clinton White House for his explosive temper, which frequently came out in profanity-laced rants. Yet he was also known for his absolute loyalty to the president, and his willingness to do unpleasant jobs that a more graceful bureaucratic maneuverer might have avoided. After joining the White House staff in 1994 (his arrival delayed by negative stories about union clients with ties to organized crime), Ickes took responsibility for the Whitewater damage control operation, the doomed health care reform effort and the disastrous midterm elections. But he survived to organize Clinton's triumphal reelection juggernaut. "Harold is a lightning rod and it can be useful for an administration to have someone like Harold around," said Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), whom Clinton installed, at Ickes' behest, as general chairman of the Democratic National Committee. "He is blunt, he is direct with everyone he deals with. Some people can take it, others can't. But I think he was just invaluable." Other colleagues have decidedly mixed feelings, however. "If Harold is your friend, he can be extraordinarily loyal," a Clinton insider said. "But if Harold decides he doesn't like you, he's absolutely brutal to people. He's almost like a schoolyard bully, maybe because of his insecurities. He likes to humiliate people. What he respects is power. If you've got it he's going to give you your due. If you're weak, he doesn't need to bother with you." According to witnesses, Ickes singled out presidential assistant Rahm Emanuel for special abuse, which subsided when he realized that Emanuel gave as good as he got, and, more to the point, knew how to get things done. But Clintonites still talk about Ickes' eruptions, during the Democratic Convention in Chicago, at deputy White House personnel director Marsha Scott (he savagely dressed her down at a staff meeting) and at an uncooperative confetti vendor (he threatened to hurl the man out of a skybox). "Harold is a grown-up, whatever else you may say about him," said television producer and Clinton pal Harry Thomason. "When he screams at people, I think it's for effect. I've seen him do it and I get tickled by it -- maybe it's the ex-football coach in me. But then, he's never screamed at me."
All Work, No Play Don Fowler, whom Ickes tapped to be Dodd's co-chairman at the DNC, cannot say the same. Their shouting matches during the weekly Wednesday morning meetings at the White House were excruciating -- and ultimately ended a 25-year friendship. "Sometimes I'd be around for those things and I'd walk out of the room," Dodd said. "I didn't want to be in the room. So I would, in those instances, try to extricate myself." Ickes' behavior eventually grated on his fellow deputy chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, a Southern gentleman who seldom raised his voice and studiously avoided Anglo-Saxonisms. Said a White House denizen: "People like Erskine are, like, `How many four-letter words can you take when you're sitting in the Roosevelt Room?' Especially when it's all for effect. It's like, `Okay, we've heard that word before. Let's knock it off.' " "Erskine thought Harold was nuts," said Morris. Bowles as well as Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan worked hard at being the president's social companions in ways that Ickes, the consummate staff man, couldn't bring himself to do. The two were Clinton's favorite golfing partners, and as a result had influence on the president's thinking. But Ickes lacked the finesse, to say nothing of the desire, to be a presidential buddy. He derided those who practiced the courtly arts, was frustrated by their clout with the president and suffered tense relations with some of them, notably Jordan. "I steadfastly refused to learn how to play hearts," Ickes said proudly in the interview. "I'm not going to go out and play golf with the president. I think it's the most boring goddamn game on God's green earth. Walking around with a bag of iron over your shoulder and hitting a goddamn ball. And getting Lyme disease from it, give me a break!" Lyme disease? "Yes. If you're playing golf, walking in the bushes and in the rough where there's a lot of Lyme disease ticks, you're bound to pick them up."
Endgame When Panetta announced his decision to quit as White House chief of staff after the election, Ickes told him that he'd like to be considered for the job. Panetta informed Ickes that he was a long shot and that Clinton was pursuing Bowles, who had left the White House before the election to return to private business. According to Ickes' critics, he should have accepted Panetta's words as a strong signal that it was time to exit gracefully. But Ickes was happy in his work and wanted to stay in Washington. "He saw the train coming, and instead of stepping out of the way, he tied himself down to the railroad track," one Clintonite said. "I never expected to be chief of staff," Ickes insisted. "But I also did not expect to be fired two days after a successful reelection. If you call that burying your head in the sand, then I stand accused." The Thursday after the election, Ickes heard rumors that Bowles, extremely reluctant to return to the White House, told Clinton that his condition was Ickes' immediate departure. Ickes said he was disappointed but prepared to cooperate. "It never occurred to Erskine that Harold wanted to stay," a spokeswoman for Bowles said. "He thought Harold did a terrific job for the president, and Erskine would in no way have done anything that he thought would have been hurtful or reflected poorly on Harold." "I always thought we enjoyed a pretty good relationship," Ickes said. "I was going to call him and say, `Hey, Erskine, if this is the way you want it, fine. Let's talk about it among ourselves and figure out how to do it. I don't need to be blindsided.' But I woke up and got the Wall Street Journal on the front porch of my Georgetown estate. So I never made that call." That Friday in its "Washington Wire" column, the Journal reported Bowles's anti-Ickes condition. The leak was humiliating for Ickes. Now the whole world knew that after ensuring Clinton's second term, Ickes was being kicked out of the White House. In his only public statement about the incident, Clinton told the National Journal last March: "I was physically sick about the story. Somebody here in this office leaked a story about it which had an angle that was unfair and unfriendly to him." In the end Ickes' friends came to believe that Vernon Jordan -- whose relationship with Ickes was marked by cordial contempt -- was the culprit. "I've heard that," Jordan said. "The only comment to that is: I don't leak, I never have, and I'm not going to start now. It's nonsense, period. . . . I also think there are times when people deliberately create phantoms as justification for whatever they need justified." On Friday afternoon, Ickes and Clinton met in the Oval Office. Ickes was blunt and angry. Clinton was cool yet sympathetic. But the result didn't change: Ickes was out. "Everybody felt horrible for Harold and everybody was furious at the president," a White House insider said. "How could you do this to Harold two days after he engineered the campaign that got you 379 electoral votes? You wouldn't treat your dog like this!" But in February, after Ickes delivered his campaign documents and detailed notes to the House Republicans, feelings changed. As embarrassing news accounts of the materials accumulated, Ickes heard that people high up in the White House had considered trying to portray him as a rogue employee -- a claim that would have been very difficult to support. "When he just handed these documents over, it just hit like a bombshell," the same insider said. "What shocked everybody was that he kept all these documents in the first place." "Why did I keep the documents? I've always kept documents," Ickes said, adding that at one point he did consider keeping a White House diary but ultimately decided not to. "I don't have a good memory and I'm a notorious pack rat. . . . So I guess you come back to the question of why, given the history of this administration, why didn't I destroy the stuff, not in an illegal way, but why didn't I just get rid of it? And the answer is, I just kept it." Clinton told the National Journal that "I would stake my life" on the belief that Ickes was not trying to get even. "He has an old-fashioned standard of ethics in politics, which is all too rare today. . . . He just would never do anything like that." Ickes, for his part, said: "It's my conclusion that if everything is going to come out anyway, it's always best to get it out on your terms and under the best possible light. It's another cliche of Washington that the perceived coverup is worse than the crime."
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company Go to Campaign Finance Report | Go to Politics Section
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