Eminentoes/What's in a Good Name ?
Platt, Adam
EMINENTOES WHAT'S IN A GOOD NAME? ften in Washington, the rumor of k..1 a prominent man's demise is finalized in a social way. In the case of Clark Clifford, word began to move not long after the...
...As chief political adviser to Harry Tillman, Clifford organized presidential poker games and plotted electoral strategy with equal facility...
...He is at the center of scandal, practically convicted without trial...
...sort out the question of Israeli statehood...
...Clifford calls Marshall's accusation that he played election politics with the issue "grossly unfair...
...What I am so vitally interested in," he told Wallace at one point, "is my good name...
...Clark sensed that and fed it back to him...
...Whatever the history, Clifford clearly wants to establish himself as a man of high policy, not a political fixer...
...banks wouldn't do business with them because the stench was so high," says Jack Blum, who investigated BCCI in 1988 for a Senate judiciary subcommittee chaired by John Kerry...
...If it happened to me or to someone who was close to me, I would fmd it sad...
...The Washington Post is reporting that he and Clifford made millions from a sweetheart stock deal financed by BCCI...
...At issue was Clifford's representation, before various government agencies, of an unseemly and ultimately crooked group of Middle Eastern investors controlling the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI...
...A partisan Democrat, he shunned electoral office because "I preferred to work with greater deliberateness, in private, with time for careful preparation...
...His public career, spanning nine administrations—three of which he played a substantial role in—has been remarkable by any modern standard...
...That his "good name," so fiercely nurtured all these years, should be impugned now, long after the money has ceased to matter, is ironic, but not completely surprising...
...Old enemies smile...
...Their reputations are price enough for a single misstep...
...But for a time, leading up to the fmal decision in May 1948, Truman had favored letting the U.N...
...His memoirs, long coveted by New York publishers, were published in May.' The book is an impressive historical document...
...Clifford moved the deal through, in part by vouching personally for Adebi and his fellow investors before the Federal Reserve Board...
...I always considered myself an amateur in politics," he writes, "a professional in law...
...He's been around a long time and done a lot and I'm not interested in shooting at him...
...It was Kennedy who joked that Clifford had requested nothing in return for his services, save that "the name of my law firm be printed on the back of the one-dollar bill...
...Clifford has followed a similar path in his professional life...
...I am an advocate," he said, "not a judge...
...I fmd it interesting...
...This shows that Clark is one of us...
...George Marshall was not a fan...
...Committee investigators have since accused sca's lawyers of stonewalling...
...Clifford, at 84 on the verge of canonization, played the role of aggrieved pontiff...
...Achesonian ring to the whole performance, sometimes appropriate, sometimes not...
...I am befuddled," says New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb, who served under Clifford at the Pentagon...
...Yet when he did hold genuine government responsibility, Clifford's policies were usually reactive, as in his famous flip-flop on Vietnam...
...Outside of time in the Navy, he has spent only six years of his life in public service...
...Of course he had: in various subtle ways, being "used" has been his business for more than four decades...
...In it, Clifford takes pains to portray himself as a government part-timer...
...But no one doubted that LBJ had misjudged his man...
...He was Kennedy's personal lawyer and, for a brief, unhappy time, Johnson's secretary of defense...
...Either way, he looks like a shill...
...He has been used as a kind of political talisman by Democratic Presidents ever since...
...For men who have attained a certain level in government, legal proceedings often take a back seat to public spectacle and innuendo...
...counter-jumpers being the shop clerics, always male, hired by the great Midwestern department stores to ingratiate themselves with female customers...
...The inference was clear: on some fundamental level, Clark Clifford was finished...
...Clifford welcomes the press into his office, famously dim and cluttered with mementos...
...Alice Longworth—the eldest daughter to Teddy Roosevelt famous for her wicked tongue—used to call him "Pauline Davis's counter-jumper...
...Aside from being Manuel Noriega's favorite bank, BCCI has been implicated in a $2 billion S&L debacle in Miami and a possible arms-purchasing scheme with Iraq...
...But he deals with questions of state, of foreign and domestic policy, at length, as if these were his full-time calling...
...that got him into trouble...
...In his mannered, acutely affable way, Clifford dissuaded both men...
...I don't know whether Clark invented the phrase or his critics did...
...Although the tone of the prose is deceptively flat, there is a consciously 'Counsel to the President- A Memoir, by Clark Clifford, with Richard Holbrooke...
...Truman offered him a place on the Supreme Court, and Kennedy considered doing so...
...tohn Kennedy never made that mis- take...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991...
...I knew what the President wanted," he writes, "and, more importantly, how he felt...
...He was getting "beat up," as an old friend of his put it...
...By the time Johnson announced he would not run for re-election, Clifford had abandoned him completely for what was, by then, the prevalent Democratic view of the war...
...More than any of Clifford's Presidents, Kennedy gauged perfectly the old lawyer's changeable, pragmatic quality...
...As with all subsequent dealings with BCCI, Clifford says he did this in ignorance of the bank's shady activities, and therefore in good faith...
...He insists that Truman had already decided on early recognition of the Jewish state, and that he was merely advocating established policy...
...By 1985, various major U.S...
...He's an old man in a well-tailored suit, fighting a rear-guard action in a town that never holds heroes for very long...
...These must be bitter times for the grand old man...
...A more likely candidate is his law partner, Robert Altman, until now best known as husband to the star of the old TV show "Wonder Woman...
...Always Clifford has operated with a high degree of discretion and, until recently, with a high degree of success...
...A Manhattan grand jury is also trying to decide if and when the two lawyers knew of aca's by Adam Platt alleged ownership of controlling stock in First American Bankshares Inc., the $11 billion bank holding company in Washington, D.C., of which Clifford is chairman...
...Old friends cluck their tongues...
...Clifford graciously begged off an interview with The American Spectator...
...Those closest to the man remain incredulous...
...This spectacle, inconclusive as it was, flabbergasted many of the old lawyer's friends and supporters...
...So while the richest legal talent argues Clifford's case in New York, the vultures have begun to gather, taking a piece here, a piece there...
...Marshall, serving then as secretary of state, was incensed when Clifford pushed 'Duman to recognize Israel in 1948...
...Clifford's account of how he maneuvered Johnson to halt the bombing and move toward peace talks in Paris makes for riveting reading...
...He has amassedmillions as a legal fixer, an advocate for clients as various as Howard Hughes, Bert Lance, and the state of Algeria...
...Last January, in 'Pampa, BCCI pled guilty to charges of money laundering...
...When Kerry asked for explanations, Clifford went to bat for the bank before the committee...
...These were tasks the old advocate, who declares again and again that he was "completely happy" in private practice, was glad to do...
...He was cursed by hardliners for this, his major role in history, and lauded by everyone else...
...indeed, he opens his book with it...
...In fact, Clifford was always at his best working the margins of political power...
...But I find it hard to be sad about the way history operates...
...For over ten years, he also served as legal counsel to BCCI...
...In the end, it was the deliberate sale of his "good name" to Adebi & Co...
...According to Truman biographer Robert Donovan, Clifford was "a source and a conduit" for intense lobbying efforts by pro-Zionist groups and election-conscious Democrats in Congress...
...Even if he were to be cleared, such treatment was unacceptable for a man of Clifford's stature...
...Friends describe him as being deeply wounded by the whole business...
...They are also asking the Fed why it took nearly a decade to begin scrutinizing BCCI...
...Mike Wallace pursued the story in his resolute and seedy way...
...The tall, highly dressed lawyer became a great favorite of Pauline Davis, the reigning social hostess of the day...
...Marshall thought he was a nitwit and a political operator," says one former Truman official, "and I rather shared that view...
...You will understand," he told me over the phone, "I am overscheduled at the moment...
...He was such a vociferous hawk thereafter that Johnson chose him to take up the cause when McNamara begged off...
...Clark Clifford's basic instinct for government has always been shrewdly political...
...After the Truman administration, Clark went out and became the leading five-percenter," says one of his contemporaries...
...Clifford presents this confrontation with Marshall as a defming one...
...bank, something Clifford had long denied...
...Louis at the relatively advanced age of 38, but quickly earned a reputation for extreme competence, although some of his more august contemporaries thought him a calculator and a fraud...
...In March, the Luxembourg-based bank admitted to holding secret shares in the U.S...
...Publicly, Clifford's old allies are closing ranks...
...He has complained to Mike Wallace, and to the New York Times, that he was "gulled" by a Pakistani banker named Mohammed Hassan Adebi...
...For a character so unique to Washington, Clifford is now suffering a peculiarly local fate...
...Clifford came out privately against the war as early as 1965, but was shouted down by Robert McNamara, the leader of Johnson's hardline claque...
...A large, masked figure," one of his contemporaries calls him, "a master of the machinery in the basement...
...At dinner one evening, a fairly grand Washington figure, someone with long experience in Clifford's world, grasped my elbow, and, apropos of nothing in particular, said, "Poor Clark...
...In any case, he was the original five-percenter in Washington, and he was the best at what he did...
...He has been robbed of a last historical flourish, and he knows it...
...Clark is a man of absolute discretion, trust, and good judgment...
...Gelb is right...
...Marshall was clearly wrong about Israel, and Clifford was right...
...His explanation may not satisfy Republicans on the House Banking Committee, who have requested subpoenas for Adebi, Altman, and Clifford...
...He waves his hands about his face and smiles solicitously, trying to work the old magic...
...In the case of Clark Clifford, word began to move not long after the eminent lawyer first appeared on the news program "Sixty Minutes...
...Maybe so...
...Clifford says he was misTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 21 led...
...Some people say it's very sad that Clark's career should end with this kind of mess on his shoes," one longtime lawyer in the city told me...
...In Washington, Clark Clifford has been generally revered...
...As Kennedy's lawyer, Clifford organized the White House transition, got Teddy rehabilitated by Harvard after the notorious cheating incident., and even persuaded a recalcitrant landlord to rent the Kennedys her country house...
...He came to Washington from St...
...There is a real sadness to this spectacle...
...Despite his protests to the contrary, Clifford has been trading on his reputation for years...
...Random House, 709 pp., $25.00...
...No one I talked to believes Clark Clifford will actually be indicted...
...Johnson was a brutal fellow," says a former official who served under both men...
...it happened there—I can't believe you would have gotten a different opinion from anyone...
...Conventional wisdom has it that, with age, the grand vizier lost track of all the strings he was pulling...
...poor, poor Clark...
...His "good name," once part of his cachet, was gone...
...Now his displays of public bereavement seem a little desperate, his voice a little shrill...
...Instead, he must now play a role he wants no part of...
...It was possible I had been used," he writes in a note on the BCCI mess...
...Clark's a very sensitive fellow," says a former government official who served with Clifford during the Johnson time...
...Adebi, who founded BCCI, retained Clifford in the late seventies to finesse the purchase of First American Bankshares...
...The hurried publication of his memoirs could go a long way to restoring the old luster, but Clifford is fair game now...
...Adebi was put on to Clifford by Bert Lance, who dropped out of the transaction after taking considerable heat in the press...
...Up until this damn event—whatever the devAdam Platt is co-author of I've Seen the Best of It, the memoirs of Joseph W. Al-sop which will be published by W W Norton next January...
...When the administration began to take real political fire after the Tet offensive in January 1968, Clifford reversed field again...
...He made the decision early to cash in his chips, and he never really wavered...
Vol. 24 • July 1991 • No. 7
