ON POLITICAL BOOKS Cliffhanging

...But these days, Clifford's role in Washington history isn't half as interesting as his role on a single bank board...

...By stripping Clark Clifford's approach of its respectability, the BCCI scandal may help us see influence-peddling—and Washington's celebration of it—for what it really is...

...What begins as a practical need becomes a psychological necessity...

...Perhaps he was a victim of octogenarian forgetfulness...

...As for the money, well, he couldn't have done it for that, right...

...I cannot, and I will not, represent any client before the president or before any of his staff...

...The Monthly revealed that the miners' pension fund was deposited in the bank in a noninterest-bearing account, meaning that the money benefited not the black-lung victims but the bank executives and union bosses...

...What Clifford seems to be saying is that lawyers have the right—no, the obligation— to skirt the line of the law as closely as they can...

...The amount of money Michael Milken was convicted over, for instance, was trivial compared to his net worth...

...But precedent is against him...

...He recounts President Kennedy's joke at an Alfalfa Club banquet in 1961...

...He writes that by 1961, when he headed the Kennedy transition team, he had made the decision that to help staff the administration and then take a cabinet job would be improper...

...an indictment has to be considered at least a fair possibility...

...Ed respected, even loved, the law...

...that would be admitting that they were exploiting a "loophole" rather than acting appropriately...

...The first was from Phillips Petroleum, which became a big client...

...He recently hired a criminal lawyer...

...Louis were depleted...

...Clifford might have pooh-poohed the money motive to Mike Wallace—he took the banking assignment as a challenge, he says— but, in truth, money is always part of the challenge...

...It was, he and I both believed, what kept us a civilized nation...

...The second was from Howard Hughes, whom he never met but represented in Washington for years...

...After all, Clifford spent only six years working full-time for the government (five as a counsel to Harry Truman and one year, 1968, as Lyndon Johnson's secretary of defense...

...This is about as clear a statement of the fundamental amorality of the Washington law practice as one is likely to find...

...They are not supposed to admit—even to themselves— that they are doing so...

...This sounds nice, but except for refraining from directly lobbying the president of the United States—which is pointless and embarrassing—it bears no relationship to the way Clark Clifford or any other Washington powerbroker really operates...

...This is clue number two...

...In it, Clifford writes of the pain the episode is causing him and puts a predictable and wholly inadequate gloss of innocence over it...

...I do not consider that this firm will have any influence of any kind here in Washington...

...After all, until this year, Clifford was the personification of the shrewd Washington insider, the last of the wise men, confidante of Democratic presidents, blah, blah, blah...

...But before we proceed, there is one point I must make clear...

...In the book, Clifford mentions his bank activities in only one sentence...

...By the seventies, Clifford no doubt had friends worth tens of millions...

...During the Truman administration, when more momentous events occurred in a month's time than might now take place in five or 10 years, he was central, as he was during the debate over Vietnam...

...For Clifford (who spoke into a tape recorder) and Richard Holbrooke, a former assistant secretary of state under Jimmy Carter (who wrote the book and gets almost a co-byline), the timing is horrendous...

...Clifford now claims that he presided over First American for nearly a decade without knowing that it was really controlled by BCCI...

...It's almost as if Clifford were saying that lawyers have a duty to do whatever they can get away with...

...After such a distinguished career, how could Clark Clifford get himself into such dreadful trouble...

...As longtime readers of The Washington Monthly know, this is not the first time Clifford has played the fool...

...Otherwise, although he contributed occasional advice to presidents on critical issues and personnel choices, he spent the vast bulk of his time in Washington as a lawyer...

...But even though he knew all the facts and could no longer maintain the innocence he has persistently claimed in the BCCI scandal, he didn't fulfill that responsibility: He declined to blow the whistle, quietly leaving the board a year or so later...

...if the law was flawed, the legislative branch could change it—but unless and until they did, it was the law and applied equally to all...

...Now the search is on for some answers to the Clark Clifford riddle...

...laughing with Truman following the astonishing 1948 upset because certain "supporters" claimed their preelection endorsement letters had been lost in the mail...

...Was Clifford's age an answer...

...Many of his stories from that period are memorable and evocative (if relentlessly self-promoting): playing poker with Truman and Winston Churchill en route to Fulton, Missouri, for Churchill's famous "Iron Curtain" speech (all the Truman poker tales, including one in which Chief Justice Fred Vinson calls the president a son of a bitch, are delightful...

...The man was already a multimillionaire...

...What he doesn't mention is that, if he took a cabinet job, he would have had to miss out on becoming a multimillionaire...

...For instance, shortly after starting his practice in 1950, he received two phone calls...

...You can't do anything for me [in terms of an appointment]," the new president quotes Clifford as saying...

...If you want influence, you should consider going elsewhere...

...If he'd only known the truth about BCCI, he says now, he would have done the right thing...

...But if you insist, the only thing I would ask is to have the name of my law firm printed on the back of the one-dollar bill...

...It is a distillation of everything that is phony about power in the capital in the second half of the 20th century...

...So much for age...

...that, accordingly, he turned down a few chances to be on the Supreme Court...

...battling George Marshall, who vigorously opposed U.S...

...He was relatively hawkish in between...

...But the coincidence of the scandal and the memoir may help provide some clues to Clifford's motives—and to why it took the rest of us so long to be suspicious of them...

...It wasn't that Clifford was greedier than everyone else, but that he helped make it respectable—even desirable— to profit from the access game...

...It would be so much easier if Clifford were fundamentally a bad guy and wrong on the great issues of the day...

...In describing the importance of advocacy, Clifford recounts the philosophy of his friend, the late Edward Bennett Williams: Every defendant has the right—and his lawyer an obligation—to test the law to the limits to get the best possible outcome from the courts...

...Nobody, of course, believes this...

...It's mostly true, actually, as his long-awaited memoirs* suggest...

...To Hughes, Clifford recited a little speech that he says he gave so many times over the next 40 years that his associates could repeat it by heart: I look forward to our association...

...Curiously, in the typescript draft of the chapter sent to reviewers, the word "absolute" is crossed out...

...He realizes—just by giving that speech—that what he does for a living is not entirely honorable, which is more than can be said for most of today's practitioners...

...After the story appeared, Clifford called the editor of this magazine to say he was shocked, shocked to hear of it...

...Clifford also discloses the peculiar story of how a newly elected JFK sent him to talk Kennedy's father out of insisting that Bobby be named attorney general...

...In 1970, Clifford, still in his prime, served on the board of the National Bank of Washington, then controlled by the United Mine Workers (UMW...

...The denial of "any influence of any kind here in Washington" is Orwellian in its boldness...

...His public service and tremendous charm made his approach to practicing law not just acceptable, but enviable—a model for generations of young lawyers flocking to Washington...

...That Kennedy would tell a joke like this suggests how new the whole game was...

...In the early eighties, BCCI couldn't get regulatory approval to operate in the United States, so the owners secretly bought First American Bank and installed Clifford and one of his law partners, Robert Altman, as chairman and president, granting them loans to buy hugely lucrative stock...

...Why shouldn't he be worth that, too...

...I'm going to see to it that Bobby gets the same chance we gave Jack," Joseph Kennedy told Clifford in settling the matter...

...Loopholier than thou But the few mentions of his practice do hold some clues to the Clifford riddle...

...It's true that the rise of the Washington law firm was also a response to the increasing complexity of government, but the real money was still (though the lawyers would die before admitting it) in the door-opening: in the client's ability to say, "I've got Clark Clifford on this one...

...Except for descriptions of Clifford representing Senator John Kennedy in threatening suit against ABC for questioning Kennedy's authorship of Profiles in Courage (among other matters) and defending Bert Lance in 1977, Clifford's law practice is almost invisible...

...Clifford played at least a walk-on role in almost everything that was compelling about Washington from the late forties to the end of the seventies...

...Admittedly, practicing law is a lot more boring than advising presidents, but it's remarkable how little space in this huge book is devoted to Clifford's main occupation...

...In describing the terms under which he became chairman of First American in 1982, Clifford writes: "On the absolute assurance that the investors would not interfere with First American operations, I accepted...

...We will be able to give you advice on how best to present your position to the appropriate departments and agencies of the government...

...The younger Clifford would never have stood for such shenanigans, say the rationalizers...

...Midway through the addition, though, lies an inadvertent sign of just how difficult this matter has become...

...The client speech is worse than a convenient fiction that both parties recognize as such...

...Clifford writes that he left a position of tremendous power in the Truman administration in 1950 in part because his savings from his years practicing law in St...

...There are some genuine historical insights in this book, some fascinating accounts of how government really works...

...No doubt he tried to insulate himself from the grubby details of such peddling by letting his partners and subordinates act in his name as much as possible—the name, of course, wedging the door open in the first place...

...But he was right—on civil rights under Truman, on Joe McCarthy, and on Vietnam, both in 1965, when he and George Ball were the only insiders arguing against escalation, and in 1968, when he was a dovish defense secretary...

...Clifford explains how Johnson's famous hatred of Bobby extended past RFK's death, when LBJ refused to have the government pay for a permanent grave site...

...He doesn't cite any figures, but he probably calculated that he just needed to sock away a couple of hundred thousand, recharge his batteries, and return to public service...

...It seems so natural now, but only in the postwar era did law firms like Arnold & Porter (Abe Fortas's firm) and Clifford & Warnke begin trading on their good names and government experience for big profit in the Washington legal world...

...Unfortunately for Clifford, the age excuse won't wash...

...recognition of the new state of Israel in 1948...

...ON POLITICAL BOOKS Cliffhanging by Jonathan Alter How the consummate counsel came to need a lawyer In the drawing rooms of Georgetown, the conversations now take a particularly predictable path...

...But understanding that the scandal could not go completely unaddressed, Random House recently sent out a hastily added footnote...

...The good stuff about Clifford is precisely the problem...

...As he should have been: As a lawyer, unless he was incompetent, he had to know perfectly well the trustees' fiduciary responsibility to the miners—to ensure that their pension fund was invested to their maximum benefit...

...To his credit, Clifford at least has some sense of shame about influence-peddling...

...Perhaps sensing that, Clifford makes a stab at further justification...

...That was what made the law work...

...How sad, how terribly sad, the hostesses say, almost in unison, as their guests nod and cluck...

...The lawyers, obviously, are already very much on the case...

...To the lawyer, there was no such thing as a loophole...

...Washington isn't as interested in the details of BCCI as in the riddle...

...Still, Clifford's implicit admission of shame does not justify how he spent the bulk of his career...

...At the time, the UMW was run by Tony Boyle, who was widely suspected and eventually convicted of arranging the murder of Jock Yablonski, his predecessor as president of the union...

...For those who missed "60 Minutes" and the rest of the coverage (The New York Times has been especially skimpy with the details), Clifford's troubles involve the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a sleazy Arab-owned bank that has been accused of laundering drug money, among myriad smelly practices...

...Reduced to admitting he played either the crook or the fool, Clifford is opting for the latter...

...The problem with the money argument is that it's used any time someone rich gets into trouble...

...He writes several times that he sees himself primarily as an advocate...

...To the lawyer, there was no such thing as a loophole...

...The last time he stared down a scam, he ignored universally recognized professional ethics and did nothing...

...What we can offer you is an extensive knowledge of how to deal with the government on your problems...

...In that sense, the staining of this Washington legend, however traumatic for himself and his family and friends, is actually healthy for everyone else...