JEFF CONNAUGHTON
Connaughton lived in a basement apartment on Sixth Street, on Capitol Hill, beneath Mitch McConnell and next door to Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A few blocks east, north, and south were the kind of run-down streets he’d seen back in 1979 when he got lost on his way from Alabama to find a Republican senator to debate Biden. But Connaughton never went into those neighborhoods. While he was on Biden’s staff, Capitol Hill was where he worked, slept, and socialized. The hours at the office were long; then he spent weekday evenings with other young staffers at the Tune Inn, the Hawk ’n’ Dove, and other Hill meeting places.
For the next two decades he remained a Biden guy, yet he actually worked for the senator only four years. During that time Biden learned Connaughton’s name, if not his value. He could do the kind of staff work—research, writing, bringing in experts, and sounding out interest groups—that would make the senator look substantive. That was the purpose of the postdisgrace Biden operation, after the senator recovered from an aneurysm that nearly ended his life and brain surgery that put him out of action the first half of 1988: to prove that he wasn’t just a flashy talker who’d been caught out, that he had the gravitas and legislative prowess to deserve a second chance at the presidency. Connaughton worked with the Association of Trial Lawyers and blocked a change on a law regarding international airline liability. He proposed setting up several hearings on drug policy, which would give Biden a reputation for being tough on crime. He put together a dossier of the senator’s achievements—a counterpoint to the scandal archive—that was used for Biden’s 1990 reelection campaign. And he endured the muttered rebuke at a hearing, the silence that answered every joke he tried. Eventually, Connaughton sat at a desk right outside Biden’s office, but he never dared to ask to see the boss. “I just didn’t have the foundation under me to deal with Biden, who is like a political genius,” he said. “If you went in there and he could sense any confusion, doubt, or uncertainty in your mind, he’d pounce on it.” Just like the journalists who had pounced on Biden when they smelled his blood.
Then, in 1991, Connaughton decided that he needed to go to law school. A law degree would allow him to move in and out of politics, to know the substance of government, to make money in the course of a career, and—perhaps—to move back to Alabama. He spent his Wall Street savings on three years at Stanford. When he graduated in 1994, he went to clerk for Chief Judge Abner Mikva, of the D.C. Court of Appeals (a Biden aide helped him get the job). Mikva was a former congressman from Chicago, widely respected and liked. Almost immediately, there were rumors that Mikva would be named President Clinton’s counsel. Suddenly Connaughton’s dream of a path to the White House took a shortcut that had nothing to do with Joe Biden. He called Ted Kaufman. “I need Biden to call Mikva and tell him I’m great and that he should definitely take me with him.” Connaughton had worked for Mikva only a month, and a word from the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee would be worth a lot.
A few days later, Kaufman called Connaughton back. “Biden doesn’t want to call Mikva.”
“What?”
“He doesn’t want to call Mikva. It has nothing to do with you. He doesn’t like Mikva.”
For once, Connaughton was too angry to bite his tongue. “Who cares whether he likes Mikva! This is about me.”
Kaufman sighed. It was one of his duties to defend the principal to his underlings, to protect Biden from the consequences of the slights and indignities he dealt out. Usually this meant the tactical silences, feigned ignorance, or euphemisms with which the wife of a tyrannical father mollifies the children. But Kaufman cared about Connaughton, and he spoke candidly. “Jeff, don’t take this personally,” Kaufman said. “Biden disappoints everyone. He’s an equal opportunity disappointer.”
Connaughton never really forgave Biden, and would never be truly surprised or disappointed by him again. For many years to come he would continue to associate himself with Biden, raise money for him, campaign for him, be a Biden guy, but the romance of that pursuit died with the phone call Biden refused to make. There had always been a transactional aspect to Connaughton’s obsession, and now it was the central aspect. Biden had used him, and he had used Biden, and they would go on using each other, but that would be all. It was a Washington relationship.
Mikva took Connaughton to the White House anyway, because Connaughton did what he always did as a number two, which was to make himself indispensable. Before being offered a job, he wrote a detailed transition plan for Mikva’s move to the counsel’s office, with a media strategy and a summary of the issues that he would face. Mikva named Connaughton special assistant to the counsel, at thirty-two thousand a year (his clerkship salary). Neither of them had any idea what the job meant.
Connaughton first set foot in the West Wing on October 1, 1994. It was a Saturday, and he was wearing what he thought would be appropriate attire for a weekend in the White House: blue blazer, white shirt, khakis, and loafers, as if dressing for dinner at the country club. The first person he recognized was George Stephanopoulos—slouching down a hallway in sweatpants and stubble. Offices in the West Wing were surprisingly small and antiquated, like rooms in a shabby-elegant museum from the Federal period. The counsel’s office was up the staircase to the right of the lobby, in a corner of the second floor. There were four desks in the reception area, and Connaughton was given the one used by a volunteer named Kathleen Willey, whom everyone understood to have a “special relationship” with the president, and whom Mikva’s deputy, Joel Klein, wanted to get out of the West Wing. Another desk had recently been vacated by Linda Tripp, an executive assistant to the late deputy counsel and close Clinton friend Vince Foster, dead the year before of a self-inflicted pistol shot in the mouth.
To Connaughton, the whole building was sacred real estate, and the awe never really wore off. He started giving after-hours tours to everyone he knew who wanted one. By the time he left, sixteen months later, he must have given three hundred fifty.
On that October Saturday, the president used his morning radio address to urge Congress to pass a bill that would prohibit gifts from lobbyists and require full disclosure of their business. The U.S. military intervention in Haiti was a week old. The siege of Sarajevo was in its third year. The First Lady’s health care initiative had recently been euthanized in the Senate. Some of the Clintons’ top aides and best friends—Webster Hubbell, Bruce Lindsey—were under investigation by Kenneth Starr, the newly appointed special prosecutor in the Whitewater matter. The president was being sued for sexual harassment by Paula Jones, an Arkansas state employee. Within a month, Congress would fall to the Gingrich Republicans, blowing a massive hole in the middle of Clinton’s first term.
Whitewater, Travelgate, the daily pounding of the press corps, the relentless attacks of the Republicans, the independent counsel’s drilling: a fog of siege and paranoia spread through both wings of the White House, but the worst start to any presidency in living memory always led back to the corner office on the second floor. That was why Clinton was burning through counsels at a record clip—Mikva was the third, after less than two years. Colleagues joked that Connaughton was the only lawyer in the White House who didn’t have a lawyer of his own.
Not long after starting work, Mikva and Connaughton met with an official from the communications team named David Dreyer. Mikva was speaking the next morning at The Christian Science Monitor’s monthly breakfast, and Dreyer came with instructions: Mikva was to announce that he had looked into Whitewater and found nothing.
Judge Mikva, in his late sixties, white-haired and sage, was silent.
“Why would he say that?” Connaughton said. “He’s only been here two weeks.”
“I’ll tell you why,” Dreyer snapped. “It’s his job to say that.”
“It’s not his job to throw away a lifetime’s worth of credibility in a single morning. No one would believe him.”
Dreyer insisted: Mikva was the president’s lawyer and had an obligatio
n to defend him. That was what working in the White House meant—everyone worked for the president, personal loyalty was the highest imperative.
“Let me think about it,” Mikva finally said.
At the breakfast, Mikva avoided committing himself to a position on Whitewater. He was asked about Clinton’s legal defense fund, which had been started by the president’s supporters after Jones filed her lawsuit accusing Clinton of having her escorted to his Little Rock hotel room in May 1991, dropping his pants, and asking her to fellate him. (The charges were eventually settled in November 1998 when the president’s defense fund and insurance companies paid the sum of the plaintiff’s claim, $850,000, without a presidential apology—one month before his impeachment by a narrowly partisan vote of the House on charges of perjury resulting from his testimony in the Jones lawsuit; three months before his acquittal by the Senate; two years before Jones posed nude in Penthouse to pay off a large tax bill on the house she’d bought with her settlement money; twenty-six months before Clinton was stripped of his Arkansas law license for five years on his penultimate day in the White House; and four years before Jones lost a match on Fox TV’s Celebrity Boxing to the former figure skater turned felon Tonya Harding while filling in for the former teen shooter Amy Fisher.) “I’m uncomfortable,” Judge Mikva replied. “I expect the president is uncomfortable.” He added that he saw no alternative to a legal defense fund other than limiting the presidency to the very rich.
Every paper in the country ran with the story, and Mikva learned that Hillary Clinton wasn’t happy that he had sounded off about the First Family’s controversies without permission. Mikva, who was as naïve about politics in the age of the war room and the Drudge Report as he was wise about constitutional law, stopped talking to the media. It would be months before he understood that Hillary Clinton, not he, was in charge of Whitewater and related matters, through a back-channel team of lawyers that she had installed under Mikva’s nose while the Clintons benefited from his reputation in Congress for cover.
At first, as the Clintons and their staff fumed and schemed and battled for their lives, Connaughton had almost nothing to do. He had finally made it to the top of Everest, and he was bored out of his mind because Mikva had never defined his role. There was only one wall between him and the high-stakes meetings in Mikva’s office, but in Washington that wall made all the difference. The odd jobs given to him took an hour or two out of the day. He was so worried about looking superfluous that he’d leave the West Wing with a handful of papers and head next door to the Old Executive Office Building, where he walked the halls and shuffled through the papers as if he were on important business.
This was a different kind of humiliation from working for Joe Biden. Connaughton called Ted Kaufman and said that he was thinking about leaving. Kaufman urged patience.
One day, Connaughton and another aide went with Mikva to Biden’s office in the Russell Building. Mikva wanted to have a good relationship with the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. They ran into Biden in the hall, and Biden draped an arm over Connaughton’s shoulder. “Jeff, how you doing, buddy?” he said. “Great to have you here. You know from all your years with me where to take these fine people. Go make yourselves at home in my office, and I’ll be right down.”
As they continued toward Biden’s office, Mikva quietly asked, “Did Joe know you were with me before today?”
“Oh, yes. He knew.”
“I always thought he’d call me.”
Now Connaughton understood why Mikva was keeping him at a distance. But just as a twenty-seven-year-old campaign aide couldn’t tell a presidential candidate, “I waited six years and left Wall Street to work for you, but you can’t give me five minutes,” a thirty-five-year-old White House special assistant couldn’t tell his boss, “Biden didn’t call you about me because he thinks you’re a fool.” So Connaughton smiled and said nothing. A whole life in politics could pass with such omissions.
At the meeting, Biden dropped Connaughton’s name a dozen times, as if he’d been part of his inner circle. “Jeff would be the first to tell you that when he was here…” Connaughton played along.
Over time, he found his place on the counsel’s staff. He helped write Mikva’s speeches. After the Republican landslide in the midterms, he prepared a memo on legal reform issues that the White House would face with the next Congress. And he began to understand how power worked in the White House. People didn’t have it—they made it. If you wanted to be included in a meeting, you didn’t wait for an invitation; you just showed up. He told Mikva, “If you don’t use your power, you won’t have any power.” It was like fundraising, where you wanted to ask people for favors, just as a cow had to be milked in order to keep the milk coming.
Connaughton soon realized that he was working in the treetops, above the forest, dealing only with other people at the top, only the heads of organizations that had business with the administration, only American elites. A key indicator of status in Washington was whether you could get your phone calls returned, and for the first time, Connaughton’s were returned instantly—especially by reporters, who found him a reliable source.
Once a week, Janet Reno, the attorney general, would come to the White House to discuss legal matters with Mikva. One day, as she left their meeting, Vernon Jordan, the president’s consigliere, happened to be standing by the outer door of the office.
“Hi, Vernon, how are you?” Reno said.
“Hi, General Reno. You haven’t returned my call.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, “I’ve been so busy.”
Jordan, from his imposing height, in his super-elegant suit, glared at her. “That’s no excuse.”
Connaughton, sitting fifteen feet away, drew an instant lesson: if Vernon Jordan couldn’t get Janet Reno to return his calls, he wasn’t going to be able to make shit happen for his clients. He had to face her down. And he wondered how Reno would handle this naked power move. Was she thinking, “I know you’re the president’s best friend, but I’m the attorney general of the United States?” In a couple of years, Reno would authorize Kenneth Starr to widen his investigation of Whitewater and the Paula Jones case to include an intern named Monica Lewinsky, whose story would place Vernon Jordan under suspicion (though never more than that) of obstructing justice. But this time, she yielded.
“Let’s have lunch next week.”
Connaughton came to believe that there were two kinds of people in Washington: those who crossed the room at a party to greet someone they knew, and those who waited for the other person to cross the room. Several years later, he and Jack Quinn, a Democratic Party insider who succeeded Mikva in the counsel’s office, ran into Jordan.
“Let’s have lunch someday,” Quinn said. “Give me a call.”
“You call me,” Jordan replied. “You’re the junior partner in this friendship.”
* * *
An obscure item in Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America became the highlight of Connaughton’s tenure in the White House. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 was drafted by Republicans to weaken the antifraud provisions of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and to make it harder for companies whose executives talked up their stock prices with misleading forecasts of performance to be sued. Corporations considered these suits frivolous and extortionate, and they were determined to keep them out of court. The bill had the most powerful axis of support in American business—Wall Street and Silicon Valley. One of its authors was Christopher Cox, who would go on to preside over the gutting of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the administration of George W. Bush and whose performance during the financial crisis of 2008 was so passive that he would earn the contempt, once they needed him, of the very bankers who had profited from his negligent approach to regulation. By the time the bill got the full attention of the Clinton White House, in the early summer of 1995, it had passed the House of Representatives and was under consideration in the Senate.
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sp; Connaughton thought it was a corporate power play and a gift to Wall Street. He saw the world of civil law through the eyes of plaintiffs rather than corporations, and he knew the importance of trial lawyers to the Democratic Party. He also saw a chance to raise his stature in the White House and create a small power base. He talked daily to lobbyists for trial lawyers and leaked information to a few reporters. He forged a bond with regulators at the SEC, and even with its chairman, Arthur Levitt, who wanted modifications to the Republican bill. Against the view of others on the president’s staff, who didn’t want to offend a hair on the head of the technology companies that wrote some of the Democrats’ biggest checks and gave them cover as friendly to business, Connaughton urged Mikva to push Clinton to demand changes that would make the bill less onerous to plaintiffs.
One night in June, Connaughton was working late when the presidential scheduler called the counsel’s office with a summons: the president was ready to discuss the issue. Mikva, Connaughton, and Clinton’s old friend Bruce Lindsey, who was Mikva’s deputy, crossed over to the East Wing, where they were told to wait for Clinton in his private study on the second floor. The Clintons had covered its walls in vermilion simulated leather, which at this hour looked closer to dark burgundy. On one wall, Connaughton noticed the famous oil painting The Peacemakers, which depicted Lincoln and his generals planning the last phase of the Civil War on board a steamship in Virginia, a rainbow shining in the sky outside their window. Few members of the White House staff ever got to see the president’s private study, but it was too late for an official White House photographer to be on hand—so, for the purposes of impressing friends and clients with a photo behind the desk where he would work in his post–White House career, the peak moment of Connaughton’s political life might as well not have happened.
The Unwinding Page 13
