Father Confessor to the President's Men
Olson, Theodore B.
THEODORE B. OLSON ATHER CONFESSOR TO THE PRESIDENT'S MEN Bob Woodward has been hearing the secrets of the mighty for almost three decades. But how much faith can his reporting inspire? Aside,...
...The earlier, and vastly shorter, segments of Shadow on Clinton's four predecessors make for an interesting comparison...
...According to Woodward, Nussbaum told Clinton that history would consider the president a "wimp" if he fired him...
...I also served as President Reagan's attorney during Lawrence Walsh's jihad and saw how immensely time-consuming, threatening, and frustrating such an experience was even for a former president who opened his files, waived all claims of executive privilege, and invariably told the truth...
...Woodward has written about Clinton before, in The Agenda and The Choice...
...If Woodward's quotations are correct, nearly all of these lawyers felt sullied by their experience with such a consistently unprincipled and persistently slippery client...
...Two years after I left a Reagan administration Justice Department position in 1984, I found myself enmeshed in a seemingly endless, and in my view utterly unwarranted, independent counsel investigation...
...This, as we have learned, is the natural evolution of single-mission prosecutors with unlimited checking accounts, no time limits, and nothing else to do in life...
...It is one thing to describe a fact or an event from the perspective of undisclosed sources...
...So Woodward's theory, however contrived it may seem, has enough validity to unify the otherwise disparate portions of his book...
...Politicians, being human, continue to make tawdry missteps like taking government aircraft to golf courses, accepting tickets to sky-boxes, and failing to put their libidos in cold storage when they enter government service...
...oodward is certainly correct that presidents have been plagued by Watergate, the independent counsel law it spawned, and politically inspired criminal investigations...
...Like many, many other excursions into the thoughts of the protagonists of this and other Woodward books, these are attributed only to a "knowledgeable" source or sources...
...But it doesn't explain why Mikva keeps defending Clinton...
...As Woodward recounts, Clinton was warned by Republicans to let the independent counsel law stay in its tomb...
...Virtually every lawyer, public or private, was either lied to, misled, circumvented, abused, or mistreated in some fashion according to Woodward's ostensibly verbatim accounts...
...I do not recommend the experience to others...
...Elsewhere Woodward reports what Bennett "expected," what Bennett "could not imagine," and when Bennett "felt well prepared...
...Aside, perhaps, from a nightmarish concoction of the most bizarre moments of the Jackson, Harding, and Kennedy administrations, there has never been an American president quite like Bill Clinton...
...Therefore, if they talked, they presumably did so with Clinton's consent, which also seems improbable...
...Mikva, according to Woodward, meekly said, "Okay...
...Woodward leaves these questions unaddressed...
...Time after time they circumvented or lied to their counsel, or put them in positions to mislead the public, Congress, or prosecutors...
...Each presidency must have its scandals, and every scandal must be compared to Watergate...
...As Al Gore seems fated to relearn on a daily basis, the Clinton living legacy can be a curse...
...But where Woodward perceives the legacy of Watergate as constant suspicion and hair-trigger investigations, he forgets that it is the media fueling these suspicions and demanding these investigations...
...As the Clintons keep proving, if there is a lot to lie about, there will be lots of lies...
...On the same page, Woodward writes that Kendall "worried" what Starr's investigation would do to Clinton's legitimacy as president, what Kendall "believed to the core," what Kendall "could imagine," and what Kendall "believed," "thought," and "wished...
...Shadow does this on virtually every page...
...It is a fusion that makes fascinating reading...
...For example, Woodward describes at length intimate and presurnably confidential conversations between President Clinton and his Paula Jones case lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, and between the president and his principal criminal defense lawyer, David E. Kendall, including their (until now unpublished) thoughts, beliefs, and reactions while representing the president...
...Ford's pardon of Nixon, however well-intended, was controversial enough to tie Ford forever to Nixon and to sink Ford's presidential campaign in 1976...
...Can it be that every single one of the lawyers was drawn into the Clinton atmosphere of deception, witness tampering, and intimidation, yet feels no responsibility to speak out...
...As.the president himself says to his closest aide, Bruce Lindsey, on page 345 of Woodward's book, "I don't know how these people can characterize the meetings since you and I were the only two people in them...
...Woodward discusses the lies, but does not tell us how Clinton has held together so many willing facilitators and sent them out in public to defend him...
...No matter what one thinks of those prior presidents and their abilities, one is left with the impression that they were decent, essentially honest individuals doing the best they could for their country...
...And every reader of The American Spectator knew the same thing after this publication's thorough revelations of Clinton's misuse of his office and subordinates to satisfy his sexual appetites during his tenure as Arkansas's governor...
...Why worry about special prosecutors...
...Shadow is a fascinating portrait of the Clinton administration, especially of the president and his spouse: their empty hearts, vacant souls, bitter and paranoid characters...
...And what is Woodward telling us with this quote...
...How then can the author recount precise conversations between Clinton, on the one hand, and Kendall and Bennett, on the other, and what they were thinking at the time...
...After he finally gave up trying to tie Reagan and Bush to the diversionof Iranian arms-sales profits into aid for the Nicaraguan anti-Communist rebels, Walsh transformed his mandate into an investigation of unproduced notes and diaries: a perceived cover-up and obstruction of justice, just like Watergate...
...Areall these sordid truths—and recriminations— coming from sources other than these lawyers...
...You better keep your f--king nose out of it...
...From within the executive branch, every journalist is now seen as a potential Woodward on the prowl for a place in history, a front row seat at the Oscars, and a presidential head mounted in the den...
...Hoist with his owne petar," as Shakespeare wrote...
...As Clinton thus learned, and as Linda Tripp's mentor Lucianne Goldberg put it when the Lewinsky story broke into the open several year later, "there is a God...
...If true, we can surmise why Mikva resigned...
...When one considers that Wood-ward's sources are virtually all Clinton intimates, and not the vicious Clinton-hating right-wing conspirators that, as the Clintons see it, write in the pages of this magazine, the emerging picture is even more bleak, appalling, and depressing...
...It is impossible to evaluate the accuracy of what Woodward reports...
...All this on only one of over 500 incredibly insightful pages...
...In this sense, Watergate will be re-lived by every president after Nixon...
...Clinton sat in approving silence while Bennett, again unwittingly, repeated and endorsed his client's lies...
...Carter seems to have seen this measure as another cardigan sweater—good feeling and a great symbol...
...Legal ethics would prohibit them from revealing client confidences without their client's consent, and one must presume that neither of them would violate these very serious laws...
...The impression Woodward leaves of the Clinton presidency is of lies, manipulation, abuse of power, intimidation, and political expediency...
...In one passage, Woodward reports: "T--k it,' Bennett concluded...
...He doesn't seem to realize that, for most of America, Watergate is Bob Woodward as much as it is Richard Nixon, and Woodward — i.e., his brand of journalism — is the real shadow of Watergate...
...Watergate, however, transformed televised congressional investigations and media feeding frenzies into American rituals, and today's ultra-fast and constantly accessible channels of communication have made instantaneous gossip and incessant political chattering into regular features of our daily lives...
...And Hillary Clinton and Bruce Lindsey and all those other White House intimates such as George Stephanopoulos surely knew the truth about Clinton's insatiable needs and reckless efforts to gratify them...
...As Thomas Jefferson noted, "when a man assumes a public 26 September 1999 • The American Spectator The American Spectator September 1999 27 trust, he should consider himself a public property," and no office justifies that precaution more than the presidency...
...Or believe his careful lies in the videotaped Paula Jones deposition...
...Clinton, both lawyers themselves, shamelessly abused the lawyers they sent forth to defend—and often to obscure or misrepresent—their conduct...
...For his successors it was an enormously uncomfortable hair shirt...
...A federal judge ultimately found Clinton in contempt of court for these lies and fined him S9o,000...
...But this president is a fertile subject, THEODORE B. OLSON is a Washington lawyer...
...Clinton should have known better...
...Woodward quotes the federal judge handling the Paula Jones case as saying, "everyone in Arkansas knows he plays around...
...The law was finally allowed to lapse by President Bush in the last month of his presidency only to be resurrected a year later at the insistence—and to the everlasting regret—of William Jefferson Clinton...
...Nor has there been an American political journalist quite like Bob Woodward...
...The Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush chapters are, in any event, a natural preface to his reconstruction of the riveting struggles within the Clinton White House to stave off the debilitating effects of one scandal after another...
...The Iran-Contra investigation by Lawrence Walsh had distracted, bedeviled, and disabled the Reagan and Bush presidencies for six years...
...Woodward describes Kendall's contemporaneous reaction to Independent Counsel Starr's request for some White House notes this way: "T--k you,' Kendall thought to himself...
...He has imbued his presidency with a reckless, manipulative, idiosyncratic style that inspires both awe and loathing in friends and enemies alike...
...But if that is one of Watergate's shadows, an equally oppressive one is the penumbra cast by Bob Woodward, his Pulitzer Prize, and the Academy Award-winning movie, All the President's Men, made from Woodward's and Carl Bernstein's book...
...Why then could so many people in Clinton's administration — and so many Americans — believe his rehearsed public lie that he "did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky...
...So he ignored the Republicans' advice, and his own last-minute premonitions, and launched the law back into existence, just in time for it to give birth to Clinton's Javert, Kenneth W. Starr...
...In the meantime, he will remain an immensely popular, and highly readable, but never entirely trusted, journalist...
...As Woodward relates on page after page, Clinton, Lindsey, and Ickes used the Office of Counsel to the President to dissemble, obscure, mislead, delay, and obstruct, and usually worked around, over, and under the lawyer holding the title of counsel to the president...
...Clinton's second White House counsel, Washington eminence grise Lloyd Cutler, found working in the White House "untenable," because he was not told about crucial meetings and because the president "was constantly shaping his views about policy and other matters to attract the largest number of people...
...One is left hoping for at least one more Woodward book to answer these questions...
...Woodward states that Clinton declined to be interviewed...
...Of course, neither Woodward nor any other journalist can tell that story without losing his sources...
...Until he does, we must be as suspicious and skeptical of it as Woodward would be were the same thing reported to him...
...Neither Bennett nor Kendall has acknowledged speaking with Woodward, and neither is identified as a source...
...Did Bennett or Kendall talk to Woodward in such elaborate detail...
...Before the law expired again this June, five more independent counsels were appointed to investigate Clinton cabinet secretaries...
...Cutler was replaced in short order by federal appeals Judge Abner Mikva...
...Moreover, Carter bequeathed his successors the independent counsel provisions of the Ethics in Government Act, a pox that was, indeed, the progeny of Watergate...
...He has rewritten the rules of his profession, producing one fictionalized non-fiction best-selling analysis of Washington political life after another, invariably causing his sources and subjects to gnash their teeth at his uncannily lifelike re-creations of their actions, motivations, and innermost thoughts...
...President Reagan twice tried to kill the independent counsel law, only to be thwarted by Democratic Congresses and their media partners (including Woodward's paper, the Washington Post), who gleefully used the law to torment 12 years of Republican administrations...
...Bennett was even forced to sit and watch while his client, without his knowledge, lied in the face of a federal judge...
...One would have thought that Clinton would have heard the train a comin', but feeling invincible, he recreated the instrument of his own ultimate impeachment...
...These two unique and uniquely American institutions come together in Woodward's new book, Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate...
...But Clinton had created "the most ethical administration in history...
...Something troubling is going on here...
...When Mikva dared to protest that his subordinate Jane Sherburne was not keeping him advised as to what she was doing, and leaving him out of decision-making, he was screamed at by Harold Ickes in a "blinding rage," "you better get this f-- k ing straight and listen up...
...Or did they describe The American Spectator • September 1999 their thoughts and private conversations with their client to others who became Woodward sources...
...Not only does Woodward have thousands of emulators, he's still at it himself...
...The book's thesis is that Watergate changed American presidential politics by making every post-Nixon president subject to second-guessing, microscopic scrutiny by the press, and abiding suspicion of Nixonian crimes and cover-ups...
...Their first White House counsel, Bernie Nussbaum, famous for stonewalling the deputy attorney general of the United States after White House aide Vince Foster's suicide, was unceremoniously dumped when the Clintons needed someone to take the fall (Continued on page 63) 29 Woodward/Olson (Continued from page 29) for some early aspects of the Whitewater crisis...
...No point in wasting scores of eager, well-placed, and gossipy sources...
...In fact, each of the five presidencies Woodward examines did experience episodes to which the suffix "gate" became affixed...
...How could anyone be expected to relate with accuracy what Kendall or Bennett said to Clinton when the two of them were alone, or what either was thinking at a particular moment...
...Time will usually prove or disprove the mysteriously sourced assertion...
...28 September 1999 • The American Spectator Woodward's problem is that, were he to recognize his personal contribution to the culture of suspicion and paranoia, he might have to answer questions about the most interesting, and most untouchable, story of politics in Washington today: the symbiotic relationship between politicians and the media...
...Most of their lawyers seem to have wound up not liking them very much...
...Indeed, the next Woodward book on Clinton is undoubtedly already being researched...
...One thing that is abundantly clear from Woodward's book is that the president and Mrs...
...It certainly rings true...
...or he has produced an unreliable work of speculation and fiction...
...Hubris, the Greeks called it...
...and the latest addition to the ongoing Clinton melodrama takes up well over half of Woodward's analysis of the controversies of five presidencies...
...One of Woodward's gifts to his profession is the extent which his books, beginning most prominently with The Final Days, recount in dramatic detail what people are thinking and feeling...
...That sort of material can generally never be proven—nor credibly disproven— even by the participants...
...Suspicions were aroused, highly publicized investigations conducted, misconduct or venality on some order exposed, contritions for "mistakes having been made" expressed, and expendable subordinates tossed overboard...
...Imagine having to explain—or defend—the volcano...
...Woodward must tell us more about how he learns what he reports...
...Imagine being harnessed to a volcano that erupts at unpredictable intervals in unforeseeable ways...
...But Woodward's vignettes from the four non-Clinton presidencies merely prove that the American presidency—the most powerful and influential position in the world—is naturally subject to intense media scrutiny, controversy, and suspicion...
...Either he has produced a truly remarkable depiction of the innermost workings of the Clinton administration and the thought processes of its highest officials, agents, and supporters, based on first-hand interviews with intimates such as Kendall, Bennett, White House lawyers Bernard Nussbaum, Lloyd Cutler, Abner Mikva, jack Quinn, and Charles Ruff, as well as many other familiar Clinton figures, such as Ickes and Lindsey...
...Woodward's treatment of these two episodes—with which I cooperated on the record—is thoughtful and accurate...
...Of course, according to Woodward, everyone in the Clinton administration, especially the president and his lovable aide Harold Ickes, uses the same verb/noun/adjective all the time...
...The relationship of media and source is an unstated subtext of Shadow...
...He knew the old adage: 'The worst defense lawyers are the ones that believe their clients.'" (Despite the jealousy and animosity between the two lawyers, which Woodward recounts throughout his book, Kendall and Bennett apparently used the same vernacular when communicating silently to themselves...
...And a potential front-page story for each one...
...How indeed...
...But if they did not tell these things to Woodward, his detailed renditions are hearsay, and subject to serious question...
...One must wonder why anyone would work for such a man...
...The American Spectator • September 1999 63...
...And if you don't like it you can just go f-- k yourself...
...It is quite another matter to recount conversations purportedly verbatim, or unspoken thoughts as precise, perfectly recreated expressions, without greater attribution...
...Carter owed much of his success that year to the nation's desire to turn away from the ghosts of Nixon and his chosen successor (just as a Republican may be elected in 2000 to purge the repugnant aftertaste of Clinton and his acolyte Gore...
...Yet none of them will speak out and say on the record what Woodward says they really feel...
Vol. 32 • September 1999 • No. 9
