The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (18 page)

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.

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.

At a little after nine, Clinton walked in. Despite his suit and tie and graying hair,
he still looked like the ebullient, red-cheeked, slightly overweight high school sax
player Connaughton had seen in photographs. The president and Lindsey exchanged banter
about an old acquaintance from Arkansas who had refused to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom
the night before out of loyalty to the Lost Cause. Then Clinton said tersely, “So
what have we got?”

Lindsey and Connaughton described the burdens the bill would place on plaintiffs in
fraud lawsuits.

“Well, that’s just too high,” Clinton drawled. “I’ve stood out there in Silicon Valley,
and I’ve heard them go on and on about how bad some of these class action suits are,
but I can’t be in a position where it looks like I’m protecting securities fraud.”
He mimicked the voice of a radio attack ad that could use the issue against him.

When the briefing was over, Mikva and Lindsey walked over to the dining area, where
Hillary Clinton was having dinner with Ann Landers, an old friend of hers and Mikva’s.
Connaughton waited, alone, in the hall outside the study. After a few minutes, Clinton
came out and looked him in the eye. “You think I’m doing the right thing, don’t you?”

Connaughton would never forget this moment. He would always feel an emotional connection
with Bill Clinton and believe that Clinton was in politics for all the right reasons.
When someone on the White House staff would get up at a function and say, “Why are
we here? We’re here for America’s children,” Connaughton would think: “Are we? Or
are we really here to climb the greasy pole of Washington power?” But Clinton and
his wife were in the White House because they wanted to do good for people. Years
later, Connaughton still got choked up thinking about a speech the president gave
to his staff on the South Lawn—no press, no cameras—after the crushing defeat in the
1994 midterms. “I don’t know how much time we’ve got left,” Clinton had said. “But
whether it’s one day, one week, one month, two years or six years, we have a responsibility
to come to work every day and do the right thing for the American people.” During
another dark hour, the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment, Connaughton—by then two years
out of the administration—went on television at least thirty times as a B-list talking
head on
Crossfire
and
Meet the Press
and
Geraldo Live!
to defend Clinton against overzealous prosecutors and a partisan Congress. He never
felt that way about any other president.

“Absolutely, Mr. President,” Connaughton said in the hallway. “You can’t undercut
the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission on a question of securities
fraud.” Chairman Levitt, a former Wall Street broker, was getting angry phone calls
from the bill’s supporters in the Senate, especially Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut
Democrat, who was one of the finance industry’s biggest champions in Washington.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Clinton said. “And Levitt is an establishment figure, right?”

Levitt had been the chairman of the American Stock Exchange for a decade. Before that,
he had been a Wall Street partner of Sanford Weill, the future head of Citigroup.
He had owned a Capitol Hill newspaper,
Roll Call
. During his eight years at the SEC, he allowed Enron and other companies to loosen
their accounting controls. After leaving the commission, he would work as an adviser
to the Carlyle Group, Goldman Sachs, and AIG. Without question, Levitt was an establishment
figure.

“Yes, Mr. President,” Connaughton said. “That’s right.” And it was remarkable that
the president of the United States needed Jeff Connaughton to assure him of it—to
say, in essence, “Yes, Mr. President, you’ll have some cover when the financial and
political elite come after you,” because the establishment was much bigger than any
president. In his second term, Clinton would prove it by moving in the opposite direction,
supporting the deregulation of banks, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act,
and preventing financial derivatives from being regulated. For now, though, he stood
fast.

The Senate passed the securities litigation bill in spite of the president’s objections.
Clinton vetoed it, and Congress overrode the veto, one of only two times that happened
to Clinton. Even Ted Kennedy changed his mind and joined Dodd in voting with the corporations.
Biden, a former trial lawyer, stuck with the president.

At the end of the year, Mikva quit, and Connaughton left as well. After almost a decade
in politics, he was thirty-six and broke, renting a modest apartment in Virginia.
In December 1995, he took a job as a junior associate with Covington & Burling, a
top Washington law firm. If he made partner, he’d become a millionaire.

He hated the work. A minute ago he’d been briefing the president and battling Congress,
and now he was literally on his knees, sifting through fifty boxes of documents one
page at a time doing an attorney-client privilege review, or stuck at his desk, writing
memos on behalf of a silver mine that was polluting groundwater in Idaho. As far as
Connaughton was concerned, the firm was just churning the client for billable hours.
He did research on another case in which the plaintiff had been moving bottles of
acid with a forklift, accidentally broke some bottles, and burned most of his body
as he repeatedly slipped into the acid. Covington was representing the company.