Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/112392/11239928.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 8KB | 161 lines

                                                                                THE TRANSITION, Page 28

CLINTON'S PEOPLE

A Faithful Friend And Confidant


Clinton's best buddy, BRUCE LINDSEY works quietly at the
Governor's side to make sure he gets the best information and
makes the right decisions

By PRISCILLA PAINTON/LITTLE ROCK


    Little Rock, Arkansas, these days is a sump of brazen
supplication. Members of Bill Clinton's transition staff report
that a lawyer from Wyoming called to say he should be made a
federal judge; a businessman from Arkansas wrote a five-page
letter explaining why he should be named ambassador to the Court
of St. James's; and people with the remotest connection to the
President-elect say they have not paid for a lunch or dinner in
weeks. But there is one man who is so close to power that he
does not need to ask for any. He is Bruce Lindsey, a 44-year-old
lawyer from Little Rock who is Clinton's closest friend and most
trusted adviser, the first to see him in the morning and the
last to see him at night, the only person in Clinton's entourage
to sit in on all the meetings.

    Lindsey's virtue is that he understands the centripetal
nature of power -- that to get to the core of it, you have to
almost disappear. Lindsey is everywhere and nowhere at the same
time. "He's like oxygen," says Clinton strategist Paul Begala.
"You can't see him, and you can't live without him." After
years of his being at Clinton's side -- Lindsey was the
presidential candidate's first traveling companion when the two
trekked anonymously through airports, carrying their own bags
-- there is practically nothing in print about him. He shuns
interviews and does not do the morning shows, and it wasn't
until the last six weeks of the campaign that he left his seat
next to Clinton to walk to the back of the plane and converse
with reporters. Even then, he didn't say much. "We believe we
have a legitimate shot in these states" was a typically
innocuous Lindseyism.

    Unlike his late father Robert, a patrician Little Rock
lawyer with a lanky frame, Lindsey is short (he looks like a
miniature version of British Prime Minister John Major) and so
unassuming that even journalists in Little Rock misunderstood
his role. "I thought for a long time that he was just Clinton's
gofer, but it's obvious he's much more than that," says John
Brummett, political editor at the Arkansas Times. In fact,
Lindsey is the outside, practical manifestation of Clinton's
political anima, a campaign unto himself: he took the competing
opinions of the staff to Clinton to extract decisions from him,
and then he applied his own prosecutorial mind to the candidate
to make sure that decision was the best one. He reads everything
and remembers what everyone said and when they said it. "He's
the tape recorder running when the deal is being cut," says an
aide. On the campaign plane, he was known as "the Enforcer" for
gently policing the quotes from staff members in the morning
papers. When Begala once referred to President Bush's rear end
("If he wants to debate, he can get his butt up to Michigan"),
it was Lindsey who told him to get out of macho overdrive.

    Lindsey is also the official worrier, often pacing in the
back of the room, not easily contented. Last week it was he who
fretted to associates that the vacuum created by the Governor's
lack of activity in the early days of the transition had
created a number of not fully favorable stories. "Bruce isn't
satisfied if the Governor just hits the ball out of the park,"
George Stephanopoulos, the campaign's communications director,
is fond of saying. "That ball has to go out of the park, over
the river and through an apartment window."

    Lindsey is both the genie and the detail man. The
candidate and the campaign counted on him to divine when Clinton
could be approached with bad news, and they also counted on him
to be the lawyer's eye that would catch a mistake fatal to his
client. He pored over the daily 100-page briefing book on the
plane, pointing out when a local politician was erroneously
omitted from the list of introductions or when a history of,
say, Tyler, Texas, failed to mention a recent racial incident
there. When just before midnight on July 8 it came time for
Clinton to pick up the phone and tell Senator Al Gore that he
was the choice for Vice President, only Lindsey was in the
room, and he knew what was missing -- a camera. He made Clinton
wait while he rummaged around the Governor's mansion to find
one, an Instamatic, and then he took the historic shot. He
prodded the campaign headquarters every day into producing a
reasonable schedule, and he prodded the candidate every day into
moving along.

    Above all, Lindsey commands respect because he knows his
limitations. He declined to be the campaign manager, choosing
for himself the meaningless designation of campaign director,
because he knew he was not a pro. He put pressure on Clinton to
make two of his early and best hires -- Stephanopoulos as the
communications chief and Bruce Reed as the on-the-road issues
director. Then he let them, and the campaign staff hired later,
do their jobs. "He's the guy who doesn't have to say something
at every meeting and won't unless things are going the wrong
way," says Reed. Lindsey knows he is a candidate's ultimate
noncandidate. Says his wife Bev, a longtime Democratic activist:
"Bruce takes facts, absorbs facts and spits out facts. Bill
Clinton takes facts and dreams with them."

    Lindsey's sense of security comes from his family's
Midwestern Presbyterianism. "Presbyterians have a sense of
predestination, and that's what makes Bruce easy about who he
is," says Mack McLarty, the chairman of Arkla, a natural-gas
company, and a close friend of Lindsey's and Clinton's.
Presbyterians, especially wealthy ones, also impart a sense of
noblesse oblige: young Lindsey got that, but with a rebellious
twist. His father, who moved from St. Louis, Missouri, to Little
Rock to become a founding member of a prestigious law firm, was
a moderate Republican with a white-shoe lawyer's distaste for
politics. Lindsey was barely 18 when, on leave from a summer job
in a bicycle factory, he got involved in the gubernatorial
campaign of liberal Congressman Brooks Hayes and got the bug.
He went off that fall to Southwestern at Memphis, a small
liberal arts college now known as Rhodes, to study history and
became so active in the civil rights movement that he was at the
Memphis rally on the night Martin Luther King delivered his
"I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech on the eve of his
assassination.

    But significantly, Lindsey's protest was within the
Establishment: he fought to make his fraternity pledge a black
friend (and resigned as a member when the national organization
balked), and he fought to drop some curriculum requirements,
arguing that academic standards in those courses were so low
that students were not learning anything. In the summer of 1968
he worked in Senator J. William Fulbright's office in
Washington, where he met Clinton and a group of other bright
young anti-Vietnam War idealists, and he returned to a job there
upon graduating in 1971. He earned a law degree in 2 1/2 years
at Georgetown University so he could return to Little Rock in
time to help elect David Pryor Governor.

    In the past 20 years in Arkansas, Lindsey has managed to
be counselor to the state's three most prominent -- and
sometimes rival -- political egos: Clinton, Senator Pryor and
Senator Dale Bumpers. He is their "conscience," they say, and
their walking institutional memory. "Bill looks up and sees
Bruce in the room and feels rooted," says Clinton's longtime
friend Carolyn Staley. That is largely because the
President-elect knows that Lindsey will never change: that he
will always wear khaki pants and a navy blazer, that he will
always have the latest political biography on his shelf, that
he can sing along to Heartbreak Hotel and play hearts with
Clinton until the candidate comes down from his political high
and goes to sleep, and that he won't take himself too seriously.
"You know what the worst thing about winning is?" Lindsey
recently asked a friend. "You have to shave on Saturday."