Politically, too, I wasn’t a bad match for what the Clinton people seemed to be seeking. When I was first old enough to vote, I registered as a Democrat, but that was mainly in deference to my dad, a part-time ward worker for the party in Hudson County, New Jersey. In the years since, both the Hatch Act and my own lack of interest in partisan politics had kept me from associating closely with either party. Senator Alphonse D’Amato had recommended me and Sterling Johnson for judgeships in Manhattan and Brooklyn, respectively, and introduced us to the press at his New York City office. (I later recommended Sterling to replace me as director. A former New York City police officer, federal and state prosecutor, and navy veteran, Sterling was an excellent judge, with the experience, credibility, and—most important—independence to be a great FBI director.) D’Amato, of course, was a Republican, but when a reporter asked him about my party affiliation, the senator, for one of the few times in his life, I’m sure, had no idea what to say. “You know,” he finally blurted out, “that’s a good question and I don’t know.” In fact, at no time during the nominating process did D’Amato or anyone in authority ask me what party I belonged to. If someone had, I’m not sure what I would have answered. I always respected D’Amato after that, and our New York City and Italo-American roots led us to be friends.
Finally, and President Clinton would come to regret this, I’d never been anyone’s water carrier. Integrity and independence make or break an FBI director. The incumbent has to be able to say no to the attorney general or even the president if no is the right answer. Functioning as merely another direct report and saluting the “General” in all matters was not the role envisioned by Congress when it gave the director a ten-year term, removable only for cause, not disagreement with an improper or unlawful command.
Once, the secretary of state and attorney general asked me to deploy our Hostage Rescue Team (HRT), the FBI’s most elite special operations group, to Bosnia in order to find and arrest fugitives wanted by the United Nations tribunal for Balkan War Crimes. I considered the matter but then I said no—the mission was too dangerous for our agents and could not be logistically supported by military or intelligence operations. I later found out that the secretary of defense had declined to send special operations military personnel for the same assignment after he determined it was too dangerous.
Examples of this are endless. Once, early in the new Bush administration, the acting deputy attorney general told me that the “Department’s” priorities would be guns, drugs, and juvenile crimes. My response was that terrorism, complex economic crimes, and just about everything else we were doing domestically and internationally was of more import. The response I got was “Those are our marching orders,” to which I said, “Those aren’t my marching orders.” Lockstep, blind obedience by the director to an attorney general without questioning potentially unlawful or even dumb orders is a formula for disaster—both for the FBI and the nation.
So, looking back, I can see why I might have made someone’s shortlist for the director’s job, but the first indication that I actually was on the list came from another of my mentors, John S. Martin. John had been the one who hired me for the U.S. Attorney’s Office back in the early 1980s, a risky move given my lack of experience. More to the point for this purpose, John was an old friend of new White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, and Bernie, it seemed, had called him to feel out my suitability for the director’s job. After my shock wore off, John and I had a good laugh at the irony that he might be a conduit for forcing me back to the Hoover Building after rescuing me from the place only a decade earlier.
I told John what I deeply believed: that I wasn’t the least bit tempted. He was quick to agree that I would be crazy to forgo the lifetime tenure of a federal judge for a political post that had all the tranquility of a lightning rod in a thunderstorm. Still, John said, I should at least talk to Nussbaum and tell him myself that I wasn’t a candidate.
Every lawyer in New York worth the title knew and respected Bernie Nussbaum. He’d come up through the same U. S. Attorney’s Office where I had cut my teeth, and he’d gone on to earn a well-deserved reputation as both a brash and brilliant litigator and a man of the highest integrity. Bernie was thick with the Clintons, too. Back in the mid-1970s, he had hired a new Yale Law School graduate named Hillary Rodham to assist him when he was serving as congressional counsel for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Bernie liked to tell people that when Hillary introduced him to her boyfriend, Bill Clinton, in the late ’70s, she nonchalantly described him as a future president of the United States. No sooner had that prediction come true than Bernie’s New York friends began making book on whether he would choose to be White House counsel or U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bernie had chosen to be Mr. Inside, and that had led him to me.
In our first telephone conversation, I politely told Bernie that I was honored to be considered but that I had no interest in leaving my job to become director. He was charming and pleasant as he persuaded me that I should at least come to Washington to talk to him about the post. Even if I had no desire to be a candidate, we agreed, I could shed some light on whom the White House should be looking for to replace Judge Sessions, once they officially got rid of him. How could I say no? We set the get-together for late April.
On that early visit, Bernie, his deputy, Vince Foster, and I talked for maybe an hour in Bernie’s West Wing office about the FBI and the issues we thought were important in selecting the next director. Then Bernie took me to meet Attorney General Janet Reno at the Department of Justice Building, on Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues, between Ninth and Tenth Streets. Completed in 1934 at a cost of $10 million, Justice was built on a monumental scale, and the massive fifth-floor conference room next to Janet’s office is no exception.
I could remember being sent there in January 1981 by then FBI director Bill Webster to argue that Democratic senator Howard Cannon of Nevada should be included in a public corruption indictment as had been recommended by the Bureau’s Organized Crime Strike Force. To me, the case was obvious. Cannon had clearly gone along with efforts by the Teamsters Union to defeat a trucking deregulation bill introduced by Ted Kennedy. Deputy Attorney General Charles Renfrew, to whom I made my case, agreed in principle but declined to include Cannon because Justice had already told the Senate Ethics Committee that he would not be part of the indictment. After the jury convicted Cannon’s coconspirators of bribery, jury members asked—reasonably enough—why the senator had been left out. Still later, on January 20, 1983, one of those convicted, Allen Dorfman, was gunned down in Chicago while awaiting sentencing.
The attorney general’s office is large enough to house a small dining area and a lounge up a small flight of stairs, where Bobby Kennedy liked to take naps, but compared to the conference room next door, the office seemed cozy, even intimate. Janet Reno herself was perfectly delightful. By the end of our brief meeting, though, I found myself wondering exactly why I had been summoned to Washington. Janet and Bernie seemed to be going out of their way not to mention any of the controversy that had swirled around the Bureau, Justice, or the White House in the few months since Bill Clinton had been inaugurated. As I recall, no one mentioned Travelgate or the fact that Judge Sessions had dug his heels in and seemed to have no intention of leaving of his own volition. Given the “Nanny” turmoil that engulfed the administration’s first two choices for attorney general—another “-gate” that ultimately had landed Janet Reno in the job—I was also surprised that no one wanted to know if I had a similar skeleton in my closet.
The biggest silence in the room that day was Waco, Texas. The bloody end of the Branch Davidian standoff there was less than two weeks old. More than seventy people had died inside the compound. The TV footage of the fires that had engulfed the place were still red-hot in the public memory. In their aftermath, the attorney general and the Bureau had both come under withering criticism, some of it from people who seemed to forget that the entire sequence had
been set in motion nearly two months earlier when four Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents were gunned down by cult members. I feel fairly certain we mentioned the matter, but only in passing. It was clear to me that no one wanted to get into the nitty-gritty of that.
Pondering my meetings as I headed back to New York that evening, two interpretations seemed possible to me. Either I was the only candidate for the job, so that substantive discussion about the serious issues facing the Bureau was unnecessary, or I was not a very serious candidate at all. It didn’t take me long to come down in my own mind on the latter side, which was just fine with me. I’d had an affable day with pleasant people, April was maybe the prettiest time of the year to visit the capital, and now I could go back to a job I loved, surrounded by dear colleagues and friends and plenty of challenges.
When July rolled around and two months had passed quietly, I was sure I was right. Bernie seemed to have taken my word that I wasn’t interested. Even better, no one had floated my name for the post to see what kind of flak it might draw—an old Washington practice that can leave plenty of scars. Only Marilyn, Bob Bucknam, John Martin, a few other close friends, and the inside-the-loop crew in Washington even knew I had been approached. Like everyone else with a vested interest in the Bureau, I was curious what the administration was going to do, but I also thought I had a good candidate to replace Judge Sessions. My old boss Floyd Clarke, the Bureau’s number-two man, had all the skills necessary to make an excellent director. If anyone in D.C. had asked my opinion, I would have recommended Floyd for the permanent job.
I also was on the verge of solving a time crunch that was leaving me too little space for what I care most about: my family. In 1981, shortly after we were married, Marilyn and I had bought a home in North Bergen, New Jersey, only a few blocks from where I had grown up and within fairly easy commuting distance—by Gotham standards—from my office in lower Manhattan. By rising before dawn, I could generally get in a good run, leave home by 6:15 or so, and be at work no more than thirty to forty-five minutes later. Then, in 1991,just as the first President Bush was about to nominate me for the federal judgeship, I got a call from someone in the White House Counsel’s Office who wanted to vet a few final details. Was I, for example, a resident of the Southern District of New York, on which bench I would be serving?
No, I said, we live in New Jersey. Was that going to be a problem? (Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think, I was aware of this, but I had been going full bore on a case that involved lots of travel back and forth to Georgia.)
Oh, no, my caller assured me, just buy a little condo or apartment in Manhattan. That’ll take care of it.
“You probably haven’t looked at my financial statement,” I shot back, stunned at the prospect.
Marilyn and I solved that dilemma by quickly buying a house in Katonah at the northern extreme of Westchester County. Our new home was affordable, barely, and large enough for a family that had grown to include three sons, but it left me with a grinding sixty-mile, ninety-minute commute to work. (And incidentally forced me to switch my jogging schedule to midday.) I wasn’t about to give up my job—or so I thought—but when the call went out for judges willing to transfer to a soon-to-be-opened auxiliary courthouse being built in White Plains, only half an hour from Katonah, I jumped at the chance. The great chief judge and all-around great guy Charlie Brieant and I had all but sealed the deal down to my courtroom and chambers, even my new furniture, when Bernie Nussbaum called again.
Just as I had two months earlier, I told Bernie that I wasn’t interested, but this time he was raising the stakes. My prior FBI experience and the recent tradition of selecting sitting federal judges for the director’s post made me the ideal candidate, he said. Then he cut to the chase: What would I say if the president offered me the job? Since I honestly didn’t know the answer and had convinced myself that the matter would never be raised, I countered with a question of my own: Why doesn’t the president ask me and we’ll both see what I say? That, Bernie informed me, was unacceptable. The president of the United States was not going to make such an offer unless he knew that I would say yes.
Round and round we went until I finally agreed to meet with the president. After we had interviewed each other, we would see if we could come to an agreement. That way, no one would have to lose face, but I had one stipulation that I insisted on in advance. If I read my name in the newspapers in connection with the director’s job, it was all over. Bernie agreed and promised to personally handle all arrangements for the visit in order to avoid any publicity.
It wasn’t until after I hung up that I realized why I had been able to dictate the conditions for my meeting with Bill Clinton. Whatever had occurred during the intervening two months had taken the selection to me. I was the only one being considered. The fact that I really didn’t care about being picked for the post—that I hadn’t done one thing or asked one person to help me lobby for the job—put me in the best position, I figured, and not just for the president’s and my head-to-head. It had to be obvious to the White House now that, if nominated and confirmed, I would be a completely apolitical and independent director—exactly the kind of person the country needs in an office of such immense importance.
In its own way, the U.S. Courthouse at Foley Square is as impressive as the Justice Department building itself. One of the last designs by the famous architect Cass Gilbert, the courthouse was finished two years after Justice, in 1936. Both were part of the massive public building projects meant to help pull the country out of the Great Depression. Both are done in the neoclassical style, although the courthouse has a thirty-one-story office tower jutting out of its top. (The tower is meant to suggest the Campanile in Venice’s St. Mark’s Square.) Both dominate their settings. Most important to me, both are powerful three-dimensional statements of the nation’s commitment to the rule of law and to blind justice.
Leaving the courthouse this time for Washington, I felt as if I were walking away not just from my job or my place of work but from a good portion of my own history as well. I remembered how nervous I had been back in August 1975 when, as a raw twenty-five-year-old FBI special agent, I had first testified in one of the building’s magnificent courtrooms. Later as a prosecutor, I would try dozens of criminal cases here over a ten-year period, always in awe that I was representing the United States of America in a two-hundred-year-old legacy. My home back then, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, was housed in the modern annex next door. Chinatown, Tribeca, Little Italy—they were all around me. The World Trade Center, which earlier that year had been attacked for the first time, was a dozen blocks away. From its upper floors, I could look down on Jersey City across the Hudson, where I was born. I had done some of my earliest undercover work as an FBI agent across the other river in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, where my dad had been raised, only a stone’s throw to the south; North Bergen was maybe six miles north as the crow flies. Some of my fondest memories and closest friends bind me to that courthouse and to courageous judges like Mike Mukasey, Kevin Duffy, Pierre Leval, John Keenan, Milton Pollack, Dick Casey, Barbara Jones, and Ed Palmieri, just to mention a few.
All that was on my mind as I took the subway to Penn Station, a crowded and noisy trip at that hour of the day, and boarded the 1:00 P.M. Metroliner for the trip to D.C. The contrast couldn’t have been greater. My car was half-empty; the ride, whisper-smooth. But as we surfaced from under the Hudson and I saw the familiar grimy railscape of my homeland, I distinctly remember wondering if I was riding Amtrak in the wrong direction.
Washington was its usual midsummer self: hot, suffocating, and sticky. (Until the malarial swamps along the Potomac River were filled in to lengthen the National Mall, the British considered the American capital a diplomatic hardship post.) Whatever the weather, though, Union Station remains one of the premier urban gateways in existence. When the station opened in 1908 (the same year the FBI was founded), it was the largest train depot in th
e world. The Washington Monument could be laid on its side in the concourse with room to spare. Seventy years later, when I first started riding the train to D.C., the building was a mess. Part of the great barrel roof had collapsed, and rain damage had sent the place on a downward spiral. By 1981, Congress had to choose between razing the station or rehabbing it. The second option won out, and five years and $160 million later, Union Station reopened as a vibrant travel and commercial hub. Inaugural balls have twice been staged there, in 1997 and again in 2001. Both galas would have been unthinkable two decades earlier.
The heat and humidity were waiting out front at the cab line, but even there the view of the Capitol dome and all it means to so many people around the world never fails to inspire me. This time, too, there was some cloak-and-dagger intrigue to spice the mix.
Speculation on who would replace the FBI director had naturally risen to a fever pitch. The post had been in turmoil for months, and the journalists who cover such matters abhor a vacuum just as much as I hated the prospect of finding my name in some gossip sheet. To avoid any publicity for my visit with the president, Bernie Nussbaum had instructed me to meet him at his apartment at, of all places, the infamous Watergate complex. From that ironic staging ground, he was going to somehow sneak me into the White House. This was the early ’90s, not the early ’70s. Still, I couldn’t help but sense the ghosts of Richard Nixon, G. Gordon Liddy, and all the rest as my cabbie drove past 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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