Over the weekend, President Clinton was looking for a "Lloyd Cutler type" to replace departing White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum and help calm a nearly week-long crisis over the Whitewater affair.
But finally, as Clinton said Tuesday, "I just decided I would go to the original first and see how I could do."
The original, a 76-year-old veteran of the Carter administration and a quintessential Washington operator, now is charged with injecting his prestige and savvy into a White House once more in dire need of a cool, seasoned hand.
Said Cutler: "In government, as in other aspects of life, trust is the coin of the realm, and, Mr. President, I pledge myself to do what I can to assure that that trust is maintained."
The selection of Cutler, who was chief counsel in the Carter White House from 1979-81, to follow Nussbaum's messy, forced departure brought almost unanimous bipartisan praise.
Cutler, who called himself a "senior citizen," will stay on the job no more than 130 days, working for free. He mentioned possibly donating his pay to a federal deficit fund.
Old friends said Cutler is a perfect choice to guide Clinton through the rising Whitewater furor.
Special counsel Robert Fiske last week subpoenaed six senior White House aides in the latest development of his probe of the relationship of a failed Arkansas savings and loan to the first family's Whitewater real estate venture.
Said Cutler of his much-criticized predecessor: "I think Bernie Nussbaum had a lot of bad luck."
Cutler "was always calm and reasoned and brought the kind of approach where you didn't have fits of panic in a crisis," said former Carter budget chief Bert Lance. "He brings experience and institutional memory . . . and all those things are so important."
Cutler's appointment also follows a long Clinton pattern that reaches back to his days as governor in Arkansas. When in trouble, bring in a older, respected, establishment type to smooth the waters.
In the campaign, when Clinton was under fire on charges of evading the draft during the Vietnam war, he brought forth former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, retired admiral William Crowe, then 68, for help.
During the early days of the administration, David Gergen, just 51 but perhaps the ultimate Washington insider of his generation and a veteran of three Republican White Houses, was hustled aboard as counselor.
A self-described liberal Democrat who has been both a Washington and Democratic Party powerbroker for decades, Cutler seems to the left of Clinton's "New Democrat" administration, but he has also shown an independent streak.
His clients, in recent years, have included conservative Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., and former secretary of State George Shultz.
And in 1987, when most Democrats were working to defeat the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, Cutler scandalized his liberal peers by defending Bork.
Cutler, who served on President Bush's Commission on Federal Ethics Reform, also is no stranger to White House ethics brush fires.
He came into the Carter White House under similar circumstances, during a period in which Carter also was trying to soothe Washington's power elite by bringing in one of their own and when presidential brother Billy Carter's ties to Libya were under congressional investigation.
In USA TODAY last July, Cutler gently chided the administration for last year's tumultuous reorganization of the White House travel office, citing "the personal ambition and excessive zeal displayed by some White House staffers."
On Whitewater, he offered this advice in The Washington Post recently, words that may now have new meaning.
"There are no winning solutions," Cutler wrote. "If you had all the experience in the world, these are still very difficult choices to make."
