New York Times

By Michael Lewis

September 21, 1997, Sunday

On Jan. 20 of this year, Harold Ickes left his job at the White House and returned to private life. He had been fired on short notice from his job as President Clinton's deputy chief of staff and was not fully prepared for the ordeal of departure. Just getting out of the White House takes four or five hours, even for a man who dismisses red tape with obscenities as often and as gustily as Harold Ickes does. You must pay off your debts at the White House mess, return your cell phone, fill out forms, submit to security debriefings. But for Ickes the departure was especially arduous; he left with more baggage than most.

Once he'd finished with the official checkout he trundled box after cardboard box down from his office into the parking lot. Janice Enright, his White House assistant, had parked her car in the first slot beside the West Wing exit, and Ickes filled it up to the brim, several times over. In all, he carried out about 50 boxes groaning with papers: news clippings, fund-raising documents, private notes scribbled during White House meetings, private memos to the President. In one pile were detailed notes about the Asian fund-raiser in chief John Huang. In another pile was a three-ring binder that contained a brief history of fund-raising for Presidential campaigns that Ickes had compiled for the President in the summer of 1995. This was done in response to newspaper articles that accused Clinton of selling access to the highest bidder. Sensing the President was embarrassed by the accusations and might need a fall guy, Ickes also sent Clinton his resignation

The President declined to accept the resignation, and there begins the most newsworthy subplot in the friendship between Harold Ickes and Bill Clinton. Right up to Election Day, 1996, Ickes continued to offer access to the President in order to raise money for the Clinton campaign. So insatiable was the candidate, and so alarmingly gifted was Ickes, that he was among the first to catch the eye of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, headed by the Republican Fred Thompson, when it began its investigation earlier this year of campaign finance.

Sometime in the next couple of weeks Ickes will be hauled before Thompson's committee as it continues its mind-numbing hearings. The Senators are likely to question him ad nauseam about John Huang, Buddhist nuns, Chinese conspiracies and the fine points of soft and hard money, and Ickes says he will do his best to take the Senators seriously.

At this point they are no longer trying to get at the truth," he says. They are just trying to catch you on perjury.

But just beneath the surface of the Senator's ponderous questions will lie the giddy hope that Harold Ickes -- the patron saint of Presidential ingratitude -- will turn on Bill Clinton and spill the beans. And there are a lot of beans to spill. For 25 years Ickes, 58, has been a friend of Bill Clinton's. But he has also been something else. Ickes has been caught up in so many of Clinton's scandals and crises that he came to describe his function in the White House as "director of the sanitation department."

As campaign manager of Clinton's '92 New York campaign, he persuaded the state's Democrats to stick with Clinton while Gennifer Flowers strutted luridly through the national imagination. (His persuasion saved Clinton's candidacy.) He was present in the most famous opening scene in Presidential literature, the first few pages of "Primary Colors," when the candidate charms the pants off everyone in Harlem. (Ickes is given the pseudonym "Howard Ferguson 3d" but other than that, he says, the author Joe Klein took the scene straight from life.) At Clinton's behest Ickes came to Washington in 1994, ostensibly to work on health care, but was instead handed the Whitewater file and told that it was now his problem. As the 1996 election approached Ickes helped guide his friend Jesse Jackson to the decision not to run, and then he put together the most wildly successful, and most successfully wild, money-raising operation ever conducted by the Democratic Party.

But three days after Clinton's triumphant re-election, Ickes walked out onto the doorstep of his Georgetown house, picked up The Wall Street Journal and read that he was on the way out. The man Clinton wanted as his new chief of staff, a well-to-do Southerner and relative newcomer to Clinton's life named Erskine Bowles, had demanded Ickes's head as a condition of service. Clinton was going to give it to him.

And so now the President's garbage man was leaving, and taking with him the records of what he did. And Lord, what records they are! From the moment Ickes arrived at the White House he was the guy everyone else in the room noticed scribbling notes. Even after the Whitewater hearings, when it was clear that anything you put down on paper could be held against you, Ickes kept scribbling away. He couldn't have been more conspicuous about it: he scribbled his notes standing up! It gave him the air of a man who refused to join the crowd, but the main reason Ickes stood through meetings was to avoid falling asleep.

When he was 25, Ickes had entered Columbia University Law School and promptly contracted -- if that is the right word - narcolepsy. For 10 years or so Ickes took massive doses of Dexedrine. Five milligrams of the stuff would wire a normal person for 48 hours; Ickes swallowed 60 milligrams a day to keep himself awake. At the White House Ickes had a special terror of falling asleep in the Oval Office. He imagined a day when a pride of Cabinet members would be sitting around the yellow sofas, Al Gore would be going on about the ozone layer and whoosh ... he'd be nodding off on his feet like some giant flamingo. He says: "It's hard to fall asleep on your feet but it can be done.Just give me a nice, dark cozy corner."

The note taking was not about staying awake, however. Ickes didn't trust his memory, and he especially did not trust the memory of others. He had also found that the written word was the quickest way into Bill Clinton's mind. "The President is difficult to talk to," he says. "You go in to tell him one thing and he wants to talk about all these different things and you end up never getting to your point. But if you put it on paper he reads it. And he remembers every goddamn thing he reads. The man can process an incredible amount of paper."

Of course, in this day and age, saving that paper is not a simple business. There is no clear line between private thoughts and public property. If you take personal notes during a meeting in the Oval Office you are permitted to tear them up and throw them away afterward. But if you keep the notes in a file, or circulate the notes and then, months later, some Congressman gets it in his head to dig into the business you discussed during that meeting, the notes could be considered part of the public record, and if you then decide to throw them away you can go to jail. But the law is vague; it does not clearly define what constitutes personal notes.

For his part Harold Ickes is certain the papers belonged to him when he took them from the White House and could not care less about the subsequent legal niceties. "I still don't know who owns them," he says. "But I have them. And what is that old expression? Possession is nine-tenths of the law."

Why he had hoarded the paper is a different matter. The man in the room who scribbles the notes and keeps the records is built differently from others. He's staking his private claim on public life. From the moment he moved to Washington from New York, Ickes longed to keep a diary. He explains: "There is a huge, huge public record out there these days. But what really counts in a diary is the private nuance, the impressions you pick up. People either lose the nuance, forget or misremember. What kinds of questions did the President ask? Whom did he ask them of? Whom did he listen to? All of those things can be of very great interest."

II.

I have often wished that my father and his father, to say nothing of ancestors back of them, had left some written record, however brief, of their lives and times. To most of us, if we go back of our fathers' generation, our ancestors are only names. They may not even be that. They are not living realities. We speculate about them: we wonder how they lived and what they thought, but except for an occasional isolated and unconnected fact or legend they are to us total strangers.

For years I have played with the idea of setting down in the form of a running narrative enough of what I have done, been and thought to give my children and theirs, if they should care to read, some notion of who I was and how I lived.

Those words were written by Harold LeClair Ickes, Harold Ickes's father, at the outset of the diary he kept during his years as an adviser to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a member of his cabinet. Like his son he had come to Washington as an outsider, to work for a President for the first time. Roosevelt had tapped him to be his Secretary of the Interior, and though Ickes was the Cabinet officer Roosevelt knew least well, he would outlast all the others. But he was more than a Cabinet officer from 1933 until Roosevelt's death in 1945 Ickes played for F.D.R. something of the same role that his son would play for Clinton -- mad dog during the campaigns, champion of the dispossessed once that campaign has been won.

When the first of four planned volumes of Ickes's diaries was published in 1953, the year after his death, reviewers marveled that he had found the time to write so many words. He was helped by his chronic insomnia: since his early 20's he'd had the most hellish time falling asleep. Only after massive doses of whisky and, occasionally, pills could he manage a few hours of rest, which left a lot of lonely hours for prose-making. But even so! The three volumes that were eventually published as "The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes" -- all of them big sellers -- ran to about 700,000 words. Left behind in trunks at the Ickes family home in Maryland was another four million words that his editors deemed, for one reason or another, unfit for public consumption.

In addition to his diary of public life, Ickes wrote millions of words of letters and memoirs that no one knew much about until the mid-1980's, when his biographer, T. H. Watkins, rummaged through the collection, by then at the Library of Congress, and read tens of thousands of documents. The Ickes papers demonstrate, among other things, the mental compartments that a sensitive, intelligent man, if left to his own devices, will naturally create for himself when thrust into public life. He will have one place in his mind where he keeps the public version of his public life: the story he disseminates through his words and deeds. Inside of that there will be another, smaller room in which he keeps a private version of that public life -- his diary. But inside this room there is still another room; for Ickes it was sufficiently large and sacred that he penned an entirely fresh memoir that he probably never intended to publish. This relatively minor work -- a truly secret memoir -- runs to 800,000 words. It is the story of his private life and it betrays an emotional complexity he never exhibited in public, even in his "Secret Diary." It takes you out of the realm of crude political explanation and into a private shadow world where there exists no clear explanation.

III.

It took a few weeks before anyone really noticed the cardboard boxes that Harold Ickes had stashed away in his Georgetown basement. They were piled up high, an eloquent record of his unwritten diary. But during those weeks friends back in the White House called Ickes to warn him that a new story was being spun about his role in the Presidential campaign. By now, of course, some of the money raised to re elect Bill Clinton had officially become a scandal. And a few people in the White House had a bright idea how to defuse the new scandal: Harold Ickes was in charge of raising the money... and Harold Ickes had been fired!

"The White House story was going to be that Ickes masterminded all of this fund-raising by himself," Ickes told me recently, during one of a series of interviews. "That he was the rogue employee and that the rest of the White House had nothing to do with any of it."

Well, we all know what happened to that neat little idea. The Congressional investigation committees run by Republicans wrote letters to Ickes. The letters said they wanted to see his private papers. Ickes, who saw no point in waiting for the inevitable subpoena, sent them right over. The most hopeful Senate investigator probably was unprepared for what he encountered; even after Ickes's lawyers winnowed out everything but papers directly responding to the committees' requests, there remained 3,500 to 4,000 pages. And in these the Republican investigators found all sorts of wonderful encouragement to Ickes written by the President himself.

The Ickes papers, if nothing else, gave the uninitiated some idea of how an important aide spends his hours in the White House. He spends them in meetings. Most of Ickes's job as the garbage man meant gathering people together to decide what to tell the world about the garbage. "You prepare for meetings, you go to meetings, and then afterward you talk about what happened in those meetings," Ickes says. "That is what you do in the White House. The art is in knowing what meetings to attend and what meetings not to attend."

The meeting Ickes held with John Huang -- in which a great deal of garbage was created -- was most definitely a meeting not to attend. Ickes's notes betray the chaos of raising millions in campaign money when you aren't, by tradition, the party of the rich. In the first notes, dated Oct. 2, 1995, Ickes scrawls the sugar plum seeds that Huang, then an official in the Commerce Department, planted in his head: "55 million overseas Chinese"; "Silicon Valley -- one-half of the companies are $(illegible$)Chinese and Indians"; "better mobilize Asian-Pacific vote." After Huang has Ickes hot for Chinese money he issues his conditions: "Willing to work out of D.N.C. but needs a reasonable title." On a second page of notes, dated Oct. 4, 1996, Ickes writes, inscrutably, Who is John Huang.

It was only a matter of time before copies of the documents leaked out of the committees and wound up on front pages across the land. The media assumed that Ickes was handing over the documents to get back at the President who dumped him. By the end of last winter Harold Ickes's phone was ringing off the hook. ABC News trained cameras on the back and front doors of his Washington office; NBC was waiting outside his home to pester his 11-year-old daughter. Janice Enright, now Ickes's partner in a consulting firm, asked reporters who called whether they planned to write another "biting, fighting, bad suits and peanut butter story," a reference to, in order: a) a famous fight that ended with Ickes biting his opponent in the leg; b) his reputation in the White House as the man who couldn't be bothered to find a matching tie, and c) the jar of peanut butter he keeps behind his desk at all times, together with a box of Ritz crackers. Anyone who wrote about Ickes got caught up quickly, and understandably, in his quirks. Among them were a truly spectacular rage, which scared the bejesus out of most everyone in the Clinton White House, and a willful inattention to the finer points of schmoozing with the President. Ickes had spent most of his career as a lawyer for big unions, and he emerged from the experience with the temperament and diction of a long-haul truck driver in a traffic jam. About his inability to relax with a President who can, Ickes says: I don't give a $(expletive$) about golf or hearts. If people want to waste time chasing after a little white ball, that's their business."

Last spring's articles about Ickes hewed largely to a simple theme: another close friend had been betrayed by Bill Clinton, but this time the friend got even. Suddenly, important people were phoning Ickes to congratulate him for getting even with the President. "People were calling us up and saying: 'What a move! Way to go!' " Enright says, "And these were grown-ups !" TIt all drives Ickes to distraction. "First of all," he says, "if someone's gonna $(expletive$) the President of the United States, it ain't gonna be public. You don't $(expletive$) the President publicly. I don't care who you are. If you are gonna do it, it's a brown paper bag with a rock in it through the window of The New York Times." Even his old White House enemy Dick Morris, when asked, says: "I don't question his motives in handing over the documents. If Harold was going to get even with the President, the President would know it."

The world is now heavily populated with Presidential victims -- people who feel betrayed by Bill Clinton, many of whom once considered Bill Clinton a friend, some of whom have since tried one way or another to do him harm. Ickes plainly does not consider himself one of these people. He has run up nearly $200,000 in personal legal bills defending himself from fallout from the various Clinton scandals and has been rewarded with far more than his share of betrayal and humiliation. But for a certain kind of person -- a person like Harold Ickes -- that is not quite enough to pry him from the original position.

The lawyers from the Senate committee investigating campaign finance took Ickes's deposition, in the hope that Ickes would right then and there serve up rancorous tidbits about his former boss. What he told them was so conspicuously dull that the committee decided not to call him as its first witness. "Do I know things that could embarrass the President?" asks Ickes, rhetorically. "Yes, I most certainly do. Am I going to tell you about them? No. Any document that was really embarrassing to the President -- or to any living person -- I threw away."

This business of serving the President is not a simple matter. It requires you to be a layer cake of cynicism and faith. You must watch a man betray others and debase himself without losing your belief in his essential worthiness. The sordid stories about the boss that make news every day -- and those stories that never become news -- sustain your cynicism well enough. But maybe the more interesting question, at least to put to a man who has been through what Harold Ickes has been through is: Where do you find the faith?

IV.

The more you read the father's diaries in light of the son's experience the more they come to seem what he intended them to be, a letter from a father to a son explaining who I was and how I lived. The letter remains unread, however. Harold LeClair Ickes was 65 when his son was born; Harold McEwan Ickes was 12 when his father died, and the son, like many young sons of prominent older public men, was almost willful in his disregard of his father's career. "When I was a boy I used to be embarrassed to say my last name," Ickes says. "I'd like to think I've grown out of that."

But the son's ignorance of the father can still send a sharp tingle down the spine of anyone familiar with the careers of both men. In one of our conversations, for instance, Ickes mentioned that his time in Washington seemed to be punctuated by accidents, and he told the following anecdote. It was during the first month that he worked in White House, in January1994, and he was going to dinner at the home of some friends:

"You can never see the numbers on these goddamn Washington houses," he recalls. "So I got out of the car to look. Without warning, my feet went out from under me on ice and I landed on my left side. I've never been hit that hard. I finally got up and went back to the car.

We found the house," he continues. "I sat through cocktails and dinner but the pain wouldn't go away. Finally, Donna" Donna Shalala -- "said maybe I should go to the hospital. It turned out I had broken three ribs. It was the only time I've ever broken a bone in my life. Funny. With all the fights I've been in."

Even the phrasing had a familiar ring, and I found myself saying, not for the first time, "Just like your father." Ickes replied, "No, my father never broke his ribs."

Later, I returned to his father's Secret Diary. I hadn't been mistaken:

Halfway down $(the driveway$) both feet went out from under me and I came down harder than I ever have done in my life on the ice. . . . After a minute or two I was able to get to my feet and I then proceeded to the garage where I got into the car and then went to the of fice. ... The pain began to increase and so I had a doctor brought in. . . . An X ray at the hospital showed that one rib had been broken (Dec. 16, 1933).

But where the father's diary is most relevant to the life of the son is in the descriptions of his friendship with the President. The President is F.D.R. but often the reader feels it could be any man who happens to be in the Oval Office. Ickes senior, who was otherwise a shrewd and ruthless judge of his fellow man (his nickname was the Old Curmudgeon), suspended all such judgment when it came to Roosevelt. The smallest attentions Roosevelt pays him become the subject of long, loving passages; when he visits Ickes in his hospital room After his fall on the ice, Ickes vibrates like an adolescent girl:

On Tuesday afternoon, shortly after five, the President came over to see me. He must have spent some 25 minutes in my room chatting about public affairs and other matters in his natural and delightful manner (Dec. 16, 1933).

On some days Ickes senior writes that he knows Roosevelt for what he is: An opportunist. A liar. A politician. On other days he forgets and gives himself over to his longing for affection and approval (and advancement). Such ambivalence is the inexorable consequence of putting together the sort of man who becomes President with the sort of man who tries to serve him as a friend. "Ickes had a personal, emotional commitment to the man," says Watkins, Ickes's biographer, "and Roosevelt did not reciprocate. You have the feeling that the President was incapable of deep love and commitment."

Harold Ickes Sr. had a fantastic ability to see in Roosevelt what he needed to see. Harold Ickes spent his whole life looking for a father," Watkins says. "Every relationship with a man that became intense on a professional level with Harold always carried with it that personal baggage."

Ickes was eight years older than his President, but he treated the President as his elder right up until Roosevelt's death -- an event that as good as finished Ickes's interest in public life. "We do not know what went through his mind," writes Watkins of Ickes on the day of Roosevelt's death, "because, unlikely as it may seem, he never recorded it. We do know that for the first and last time in his public life, Harold L. Ickes cried."

There are several ways to understand the friendship between Bill Clinton and Harold Ickes, and they correspond -- as they did for his father -- to the compartments a man creates in his mind when he enters public life. The public version of the Clinton-Ickes relationship is that Clinton simply needed Ickes and used him. Clinton combines an understanding that winning is dirty work with a distaste for doing the dirty work himself; he uses and abuses people like Ickes in order to get what he needs. "Harold was always the guy with the iron butt," says George Stephanopoulos, when asked what role Ickes played in the Clinton White House.

As a public man Ickes is known chiefly as a hard-edged operator, a cynical realist, and he has done a lot to cultivate that reputation. Seated very near the center of the campaign-finance scandal, he talks like a man who hasn't the slightest hope that any good will come of it. "Money is like water," he says. "If there is a crack water will find it. Same way with political money." When he speaks of Clinton he works hard to prove that he has no illusions about the man. "He is a politician, first and foremost," he says. "And a politician's instinct is self-survival. Bill Clinton has strong survival instincts. This sense in him is extraordinarily powerful."

He'll tell you point blank that Clinton does not care about campaign-finance reform, and that he's just using the issue for his own purposes, none of them altruistic. He'll let you know in so many words that he -- like Clinton -- understands you must do certain things to win, and that everything starts with winning.

The private version of the public friendship -- the Secret Diary version, if you will -- cuts a bit closer to the bone. Ickes and Clinton got to know each other in the early 1970's, and when they'd meet, they were often joined by their mutual friend Susan Thomases. The ghost of Harold Ickes Sr. was ever present. He had long been one of Thomases' heroes; she worshiped him," she says. It was for that reason, in part, that she knew who Ickes was when he was protesting the Vietnam War at Columbia. (Their friendship was born during Eugene McCarthy's 1968 campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination; they both worked for him.)

"In high school I was asked to write a report about a politician who had done something of which he was subsequently ashamed, or of which he should have been ashamed," she recalls. "I chose Woodrow Wilson and wrote about the executive order he signed that segregated the Federal Government. After it was done the teacher said, 'Fine, but who undid racial segregation in the Federal Government?' I had no idea. I didn't even know where to find out. So finally I went and asked an African-American teacher in my school, and he said: 'You should know this. It was Harold Ickes.'

"This teacher explained that not long after Ickes became Secretary of the Interior two black men broke with custom and dined in the cafeteria. When asked by two white women what he planned to do about it, Ickes replied, 'Not a damn thing, ladies.' When told that some white employees were upset, he said: 'Their paychecks are waiting for them. They can leave at any time."'

It was the first of a series of such gestures by Ickes that led Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal," to describe Ickes as the "informal Secretary of Negro Relations" of the Roosevelt Administration. When he discovered that blacks were not permitted on Washington golf courses, he set aside land for a black golf course. Perhaps most famously he stepped in after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred Marian Anderson from staging a performance in Washington's Constitution Hall. Ickes offered her the Lincoln Memorial in its place and the gesture received such notice that 75,000 turned up to hear her sing from the top of the memorial's steps.

Politics did not come as naturally to Harold Ickes as it did to Bill Clinton. Ickes graduated from high school functionally illiterate, and didn't finish his undergraduate work at Stanford until he was 24. He was, to put it mildly, a loner. "I don't remember having a single close friend before age of 25," he says. The first job he took out of school was as a cowboy on a ranch in Northern California.

But in 1964 he was drawn by some invisible thread into the civil rights movement, and went to work for the cause in Mississippi and Louisiana. In 1965, in Tallulah, La., three or four white men attacked a car carrying Ickes and two black men. Ickes told the blacks to run and faced the gang by himself. The men fired a shotgun over his head; Ickes responded as he had been taught. "We were trained to curl up in the fetal position," he says, "Fighting back was a good way to get yourself killed. So I fell to the ground and curled up in a ball. And they really kicked me around." When the local sheriff finally arrived he arrested Ickes for disturbing the peace and let the others go free. Ickes lost a kidney from the beating.

To understand Harold Ickes's attachment to Bill Clinton you have to know that story, I think. At the roots of his attachment there is a great deal of sentiment, and at the core of that sentiment there is empathy for the underdog. That is what pulled Harold LeClair Ickes to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That is what attracted Susan Thomases to Ickes senior. And that is what hews Harold Ickes to Bill Clinton. Clinton gave political expression to whatever it was inside him that led Ickes to thrust himself in between a group of defenseless blacks and a white mob. "Bill Clinton is not a phrasemaker," Ickes says. "There is not a single phrase of Bill Clinton's I can recall. But you get him in a room with 25 people and, man, he will knock your socks off. He'll be talking about the young black kid in the ghetto who was shot to death while doing his homework and I mean it is breathtaking . Better than anyone I have ever heard. Nobody, nobody can say that this guy does not have enormous emotional and intellectual depth."

Many former friends of Bill Clinton once thought he shared their most essential beliefs. What distinguishes Ickes from the others is that he remains convinced of it. When you press him on details (How about his signing the welfare bill?) he waves you away with great impatience. "If there is a true north to Bill Clinton," he says, "it is race. I never had a doubt in my mind where he stood on this issue. I have just seen it too many times with people. He identifies with people who have the short end of the stick." His faith in Clinton's belief is perfectly unshakable. He can't explain where his faith comes from, not exactly. "I can't think of a concrete example to prove the point," he says. "It's an accretion what I would call the nuances." (Again that word!). "I can't get any more explicit than that."

The point is not that Ickes is wrong to believe as strongly as he does in Bill Clinton. The point is that he cannot explain to you why he believes as he does. A man so keen on detail that he carts off 50 boxes of documents when he leaves the White House remains unable to find a few sentences to sum up what it is that drew him to Clinton in the first place.

Perhaps there is one way to understand the sort of political attachment Ickes formed with Clinton. It is hinted at not in Ickes's voluminous documents but in the later pages of his father's unpublished memoirs. Once Harold LeClair Ickes left office his family life came to occupy a larger place in his diaries, which he continued to write at a furious pace until his death in 1952. And as his son grows up he assumes the role he has played ever since, the Difficult Son. Every few pages we read something like this:

It was "no no no" to every proposal made to him. He rebelled contumaciously against his mother's and my plan for him to take sailing lessons this summer. ...He would not look you in the eyes while being spoken to and he never spoke himself....His mother and I became almost frantic in our desperation as to know what to do for the boy.

Over and over again the writings express the father's concern that the son isn't growing up a normal boy -- that he prefers adults to children, and that he is obstinate to the point of insurrection, that he spends all of his time alone. In the process Ickes senior opens a window onto a relationship that the son has been all but erased from his memory. (A dangerous business in a family of note takers.) For instance, during the summer before his death, Ickes senior writes of young Harold's worries one night about his father's failing health

He was worried about "Daddy." Most of the children customarily call me "Hump," for what reason I do not know....He did not want "Hump" to die. He loved "Hump" and could not live without him. His mother comforted him as much as she could and shortly afterwards when Harold came up to bed I slipped into his room and got into bed with him.... This touched me because although I have loved Harold and have been conscious that he loved me, I never knew the apparent depth of his feeling.

The son for his part retains few vivid childhood memories of his father, and most relate to his death. One is of his mother sorting through the magnificent pile of paper his father had saved. "She went through boxes and boxes and boxes of materials," he says. "He kept everything. She was literally throwing out notes he had taken from old legal cases he had worked on. I mean the most unbelievable junk." Another is of the memorial service for Harold LeClair Ickes at the Lincoln Memorial, where Marian Anderson sang to an audience of thousands, including half of official Washington.

"The Marian Anderson incident had a profound impact on my mother," Ickes says. "And she in turn told me the story of it. And I have the vivid memory of our cook, Flo, who was black, telling me what a great man my father was because he had let Negroes go where whites go."

But when asked what he recalls of his father while he was alive Ickes comes up very nearly blank. After a pause he says, "I have only the vaguest memories, I was only 11 when he died." Other times he will say he was 12 or 13 when his father died. (He was 12.) When he is pressed further he says, "My father was stern."

"Stern?"

"It wasn't a hostile relationship. I'm sure that he loved me but he never held me."

He paused.

"I have no memory of being held by my father," he says.

V.

Ickes didn't come to Washington to serve his friend Bill Clinton until he had been in the White House for a year. He recalls those days not from notes but from memory and, as usual, he is intensely aware of the tricks memory can play. He says, "I want to preface everything I say with 'as best as I recall.' "

As best as he can recall the first sign he had that his friendship with Clinton had changed was the first time he visited the President in the Oval Office: "The first time I went to brief Clinton I knew him as my friend. He's my friend, I'm thinking. He's the President but he's my friend. And I'm standing there waiting for him to acknowledge me, but. .. he's...doing a crossword puzzle."

The crossword puzzle isn't what's unusual; everywhere the President goes he carries a crossword puzzle, a deck of cards and a book. What's unusual is his new attitude. "I am standing in front of his desk," Ickes says, "waiting for him to give me his undivided attention. I mean he's sitting there like there is no one else in the room. This guy is now the President. But he's also my friend. I'm thinking: 'Hey Pal. I'm here. Let's go.' Without looking up he finally says, 'Yeah, what do you want?' And so I just start briefing him. He never stops doing the crossword puzzle. After I'm finished he looks up and he says What about this, what about that -- he has taken it all in. You got used to working with him that way. I'd walk in and say, 'You want me to start talking.' And he'd say 'yeah' or 'no.' And if he said no you stood around, waiting."

Over time Ickes developed some feeling for the nuances of Presidential service and friendship. Maybe his most telling experience came after the 1994 mid-term Congressional elections. The Republican landslide devastated Clinton. "He took it as a personal repudiation," Ickes says. Clinton was tormented by the results and in a state of mind Ickes had never before seen. He had always been prone to rages, especially in the mornings, but he was suddenly spending a lot more time than usual waving his arms and screaming at the ceiling of the Oval Office. And this time there was only one person to scream at; everyone else who routinely went in and out of the Oval Office had taken off for Christmas vacation.

"It was 'Home Alone' with the President," Ickes recalls. "And I tell you, it was not fun. He would go into these towering rages -- 'Harold, you should have done this, Harold, you should have done that.' It went for days until he had to take off for -- what's that stupid thing called -- Renaissance Weekend."

Before his departure, however, Clinton had agreed with Ickes on a course of action. "I thought he had green-lighted all sorts of things," Ickes says, "from personnel decisions to policies. I should have known. I remember telling him that I was going to rehire Stan Greenberg as his pollster, and he said, 'If that's what you think we should do, then fine."' Ickes had taken this as a straightforward assent, but when he considered the sentence later, he saw that it wasn't. A few days later Leon Panetta returned and mentioned to Ickes that Clinton had been speaking regularly to Dick Morris. It emerged that the whole time Clinton was telling Ickes one thing he was agreeing with Morris to do almost exactly the opposite.

A lot has already been written about the feud between Morris and Ickes. Ickes himself recalls one incident involving Morris, and one conversation about him, above the others. The incident occurred not long after Morris came to the White House. Ickes had secured a promise from Clinton that he would review all campaign advertising. Soon thereafter Morris ran a campaign ad for Clinton that Ickes had never seen. It showed Latin Americans scrambling over fences and under bushes and conjured up the image of hordes of illegal immigrants storming the borders. Ickes couldn't do much about it himself. "I had no credibility on the subject of Dick Morris," he says. "Everyone knew exactly what I thought about him." So he called up Henry Cisneros, who had the ability to shame Clinton on the subject. Cisneros complained to Clinton, and Clinton had the ad pulled and recut.

The conversation Ickes had with Clinton about Morris took place before Morris came to the White House. Ickes had worked up the steam to tell Clinton exactly what he thought of Morris. After the long, Ickensian diatribe, Clinton remained silent for a moment. Then, as Ickes recalls, Clinton said: "I agree with just about everything you said. But that man understands the underside of politics better than anyone I have ever met."

VI.

On the day he read in The Wall Street Journal that Bill Clinton had agreed to let him go, Harold Ickes was scheduled to brief the President on the portfolio of scandals. Clinton was to hold a news conference that day, and he was sure to be grilled about campaign finance. And so Harold Ickes did the only thing he could think to do: he walked down the corridor to the Oval Office to brief the President. He found him seated behind his desk. Ickes remained standing front and center. The irritation he felt was fairly intense but not all of it was directed at the President. He reserved some of it for people who wondered why he continued to serve a man who would treat him so poorly. When I asked Ickes why he went and briefed Clinton that day he shouted, "If you are on his staff you accept his decision and you back him up."

And so he briefed the President. When he'd finished, the President, as usual, had something else he wanted to talk about. Ickes recounted for me what followed in considerable detail:

Harold, let's talk about you, the President said.

-- O.K., let's talk about me, Ickes said, following the President's suggestion to take a seat on his right. In itself that presented a problem. An accident in his early 20's left Ickes deaf in his right ear, and so he had to ever so slightly twist himself around to hear the President. (His father, in his early 20's, lost the hearing in his left ear.)

How are you doing? asked the President, pulling his chair right up close to Ickes. You know, Mr. President, I've been better. No. 1, this whole experience of working for you is costing me a great deal of money, and being fired in public does not make it easier for me to make a living. No. 2, I do not deserve this treatment.

The President pulled over his chair and brought his head right next to Ickes's, and hung it in that way he has when he is upset. I know. It's terrible. Someone leaked. I cannot believe it. But what can we do?

You gave me up to get Erskine Bowles. You cannot very well go back on the promise you made him.

The President didn't respond directly to this.

I don't think I can get you confirmed for anything.

Ickes let this hang. At this point he had not asked for another job -- until a few hours earlier it hadn't crossed his mind that he'd be in the market for one just three days after getting Clinton re-elected. But he knew without being told that there was no chance that he would be offered any job requiring Senate confirmation. That is the price you pay for being the President's garbage man. Your faithful service makes you, from the point of view of the other side, unacceptable. His confirmation hearings would quickly become a three-ring circus. But he had an idea.

Director of the National Park Service. Ickes always thought National Parks would be a good job. Director, among its other pleasures, does not require Senate confirmation.

What a great idea. The President said he would call Bruce Babbitt, the Interior Secretary. And there they left it, until two days later. Ickes was in his office at the same oak desk his father worked from when he received calls from Roosevelt. Janice Enright handed him the phone and said that the President is on the line.

I've got some bad news. I've just been sent the new Parks bill. It gives a new power to the Senate, to confirm the Director. The new law is retroactive. You can't have the job.

These days Harold Ickes works out of his small office in downtown Washington, cluttered with photographs of Bill Clinton. "To Harold," reads the inscription on a photo of the two of them in Bosnia surrounded by American troops. "I always knew that you'd go into battle with me but even you need a helmet."

When Ickes is hauled up to testify before Fred Thompson's committee in the next few weeks, he will be asked to explain how the man who let him go was re-elected. Ickes is not looking forward to it. The Ickes papers may still fuel the campaign-finance scandal. Certainly they will be Topic A when Ickes drives up to Capitol Hill. But the papers -- and the peculiar temperament they reflect -- have a great deal more to tell us than what some Senate investigator will want to know. Among other things they whisper to us the secret of why a certain kind of man goes into politics -- or, at any rate, why he stays until the bitter end. He possesses in uncommon quantities both the tendency to doubt and the capacity to believe.

Ickes hasn't heard from the President for some time and has to think hard to recall the last time he saw him. But then he remembers. It was in Las Vegas, in July, during the gathering of the nation's governors.

The President's close friend Bruce Lindsey had told Ickes to wait after the speech, and Clinton would walk out to the car with him. That's not what happened, however. The President changed his plans. After the speech Clinton worked the rope line, and Ickes found himself at the end of the rope, on the customer side.

"When the President arrived he gave me a big hug and asked me how I'd been," Ickes says. "And that was the last time I saw him." Standing on a rope line in Las Vegas, waiting to shake hands with his old friend, the President of the United States.