Why Must We Pay For Damage Control?

I don’t want to pay Bruce Lindsey’s salary any more.

It has taken a while to piece together exactly what the elusive Lindsey does. But every time we turn over a Clinton rock, there is Lindsey trying to hold it in place. Why should Americans subsidize a White House official whose role is to make sure the improvident president can go on being improvident?

For $125,000 a year, we could get someone interested in government, rather than someone whose life is devoted to the Sisyphean task of keeping Bill Clinton’s personal and political messes under wraps.

Why should the public pay somebody to keep the president out of trouble? That is, after all, what we pay the president for. But it’s the darndest thing - trouble just keeps finding him.

If the leader of the free world can’t handle that simple task, then he should have to pay for a handyman out of his own salary.

Lindsey is Clinton’s closest aide, an old friend from the days when they both worked for J. William Fulbright. His job is damage control. For those who have come to believe that the Clinton White House excels in making the innocent look guilty, Lindsey’s zealous efforts to shield the president on Whitewater and Indonesian money look more like what one Clinton official calls “damage enhancement.”

The description hardly does Lindsey justice, because his stonewalling successfully postponed damaging revelations from surfacing until after elections.

Michael McCurry, the president’s spokesman, said that Lindsey honestly believed that it was appropriate to characterize as “social visits” the discussions on trade policy between the president and the Indonesian billionaire James T. Riady, who had his run of the Oval Office in return for his financial help.

Please, even the president now admits these were not social visits.

Lindsey has had various titles. His latest is deputy White House counsel, although he’s no one’s deputy and he’s sorely in need of counsel. The gaunt, 48-year-old lawyer is unassuming, but everyone at the White House must live in fear of him because he is so close to the president and is the keeper of the secrets. Other aides fly blind when they face the cameras to defend the Clintons. Lindsey stays in the shadows, but he knows what is hidden. He is the innermost circle. Between hearts games with the president, he cleans the stables.

The Washington Post quoted a campaign flight attendant who worked on Clinton’s plane in 1992 as saying Lindsey told her not to appear on the tarmac with Clinton when the cameras were rolling and not to accept Clinton’s invitations to work out with him at the Little Rock YMCA. She also said Lindsey called her after he was in the White House and asked if reporters had been trying to find out if Clinton had flirted with her. He instructed her to say “all positive things.”

Lindsey also called several Arkansas troopers and asked them to put a more positive spin on charges that had begun to emerge about Clinton’s nocturnal activities. He tamped down the accusation of one trooper that Clinton dangled jobs before troopers if they agreed not to talk to the press about his sex life.

The late David Ifshin, a Clinton friend who was the general counsel of the 1992 campaign, once described a 1991 meeting in the Arkansas governor’s mansion, with Bruce Lindsey present, where he and Clinton talked about how the press would treat Clinton’s past if he ran for president. He asked Clinton if he would level with the press.

“I can’t open up my closet,” Clinton told Ifshin. “I’ll get crushed by my skeletons.”

Lindsey’s strategy of slamming the door shut on reporters carried the day. He later prevailed against David Gergen, who wanted to turn over all Whitewater papers to The Washington Post, and against Mark Fabiani and Jane Sherburne, the White House lawyers hired to answer Whitewater questions, who urged that the president tell the truth about the visits with Riady during the campaign.

With Bill Clinton having won his final election, maybe it’s time for Bruce Lindsey to go somewhere that needs his special skills. Texaco, perhaps?