Clinton’s Attorney Also Feels Investigative Heat

WASHINGTON — It was late in the day, near the end of the Senate’s lengthy inquiry into White House fund-raising, when the ghosts of Watergate quietly slipped inside the cavernous hearing room.

On the witness stand: Charles F.C. Ruff, a onetime Watergate prosecutor whose fateful career path had led him into the White House, where he now serves as President Clinton’s chief counsel and a fierce defender of the Oval Office.

The interrogator: Fred Thompson, the burly Tennessee Republican who had been a Senate attorney during Watergate and now was investigating charges of wrongdoing in the Clinton White House, charges that have kept Ruff scrambling for almost a year.

Suddenly, Thompson recalled their “other lives,” a time when both men played different roles in the scandal-ridden demise of Richard Nixon’s presidency. “Another life that you and I lived, yes,” Ruff recalled solemnly.

Such turns of fortune make up the biography of Ruff, 58, a tough and plain-spoken defender who has rescued more than a few politicians from the legal abyss.

These days he represents the most important client of all: “the president in his official capacity,” as he put it in a rare interview. It is a role that has pulled the media-wary lawyer into the hot center of controversy, subjecting his own actions to unusual scrutiny as Congress and the Justice Department investigate White House fund-raising activities.

Critics charge that Ruff’s office has been intentionally slow in turning over records--part of what Thompson calls a “slow-walking” strategy by the White House to stymie investigators.

Although Ruff emphatically denies the charge, his office’s tardy turnover of White House videotapes--records of coffees that included campaign contributors and potential donors--at a critical moment in the fund-raising investigations raised eyebrows about his judgment and fed into darker theories about White House efforts to sandbag investigators.

“He won’t come out of that job with the same reputation he had when he came in,” predicted Henry S. Ruth Jr., who preceded Ruff as the Watergate special prosecutor. “And that’s too bad, because he’s a superior individual.”

Clinton, meanwhile, has become increasingly reliant on Ruff, who is widely respected inside Washington if not well known outside it. Indeed, Ruff’s admirers describe the no-nonsense lawyer as a powerful bulwark for a White House besieged by investigators, subpoenas and partisan accusations of impropriety.

His calm, non-flamboyant performances on Capitol Hill have drawn upbeat reviews from Democrats: “Anybody can see it--he gets to the witness table and he just reeks credibility,” said James M. Jordan, Democratic spokesman for the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee chaired by Thompson, which is conducting one of the fund-raising probes.

Even some Republicans note that the blame for White House intransigence cannot be laid solely at Ruff’s door. “They don’t keep Ruff in the loop on a lot of these things, so they can hide behind his good name,” contended one House GOP source.

Ruff is the fifth man under Clinton to serve as White House counsel.

Clinton’s first counsel was Bernard Nussbaum, an aggressive defense lawyer who left after 15 months amid criticism of his handling of the Whitewater affair and other matters. Next came Lloyd N. Cutler, the patrician insider who agreed to fill the seat for only 130 days. Abner J. Mikva, a savvy former congressman and federal judge, lasted just a year before citing exhaustion.

Jack Quinn, who was Vice President Al Gore’s chief of staff before succeeding Mikva, was dubbed a “pit bull” for his protective response to Republican lawmakers’ document requests--and his willingness to block them with claims of executive privilege. After a year, Quinn announced that he wanted to spend more time with his family.

In his own way, Ruff is as fierce as any in defending his client’s interests. Recently, for example, he refused to turn over 43 videotapes sought by the Senate. The reason, a spokesman said, was to block “a fishing expedition.”

Yet Ruff, who oversees a staff of 17 lawyers, also has used his position to soothe partisan passions. When Democratic members of the Thompson committee sought a White House log of Bush administration videotapes--a ploy designed to embarrass Republicans--Ruff opposed the idea, noting that Bush had not intended to leave the log behind.

“Ruff put the kibosh on it, for reasons, I think, of propriety and seemliness,” said one committee source. “He just recoiled at the politicization of it all.”

The White House counsel often works in the murky world where politics meets the legal system: picking federal judges, acting as a liaison with attorneys in federal agencies, overseeing financial-disclosure forms, considering line-item vetoes. But especially since Watergate, the office has been ensnarled in the politics of scandal, which demands endless hours poring over internal records and responding to subpoenas for documents.

This year alone, the White House has turned over more than 100,000 pages of fund-raising-related records in response to “hundreds of requests” from House and Senate committees, according to a White House official.

“Subpoenas arriving at the White House counsel’s office have changed from an occasional shower to a steady downpour,” said Charles Tiefer, a professor at the University of Baltimore Law School and deputy House counsel from 1984 to 1995. “It really represents a new way of congressional combat with the president.”

To survive in the job, Ruff has drawn on inner resources he has used throughout an unusual career.

As a law school graduate in the 1960s, he embarked on an idealistic adventure in Africa, using a Ford Foundation grant to teach law in Liberia. “I walked by the [college] bulletin board one day, and it said, ‘Anybody want to go to Africa?’ ” he recalled. “And I asked my wife, and she said, ‘Why not?’ ”

After contracting an unidentified disease, Ruff left Africa in a wheelchair. After six months in the hospital, Ruff began his legal career in the organized-crime section of the Justice Department.

Ruff joined the Watergate team in 1973 and was named the fourth and final special prosecutor two years later. After a three-month investigation into whether Nixon’s successor, Gerald R. Ford, had misused union campaign contributions, he cleared Ford.

Later, as the U.S. attorney in Washington, Ruff helped prosecute members of Congress in the Abscam bribery case, and he initially supervised the case against John W. Hinckley Jr., President Reagan’s would-be assassin. He got to know Atty. Gen. Janet Reno when he worked for the Justice Department under President Carter and she was the state attorney in Dade County, Fla.

In 1982, Ruff joined the Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, where he earned a reputation for saving public officials in legal peril.

Among his clients were;

* Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), accused of intervening with federal regulators on behalf of savings and loan executive Charles H. Keating Jr.; the lawmaker ended up being scolded for “bad judgment.”

* Sen. Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), investigated for conspiring to violate wiretap laws and lying to investigators; a federal grand jury declined to indict him.

* Ira Magaziner, czar of the president’s health care reform plan, accused of perjury for his statement about the makeup of the health-care task force; the U.S. attorney dropped the case.

“He’ll never mislead you,” former Covington & Burling colleague Bruce A. Baird said of Ruff, recalling him as someone who “was able to talk clients through hard judgment calls and persuade people to do what the right thing was to do.”

Two years ago, Ruff astounded many of his peers by leaving the firm to become the chief lawyer for the District of Columbia--just when it was at the peak of a financial crisis. The pay cut was enormous--while partners at Covington & Burling average a reported $475,000 a year, Ruff earned about $80,000--and the conditions were comparatively shabby.

“It’s true--the computers don’t work as well and the Xerox machine would break down,” said Ruff, but he added that he had been “feeling really itchy” for a return to public service. Lawyers in the District counsel’s office, he pointed out, “also have more fun than most lawyers do.”

In his White House job, Ruff is sometimes criticized for venturing into aspects of Whitewater that some argue should be the sole province of Clinton’s personal attorneys. But the biggest controversy has centered on his office’s belated turnover of the videotapes, which had sought by investigators months earlier. White House officials have blamed earlier staff miscommunication over subpoenaed materials.

Ruff did not mention the tapes at a meeting with Reno a day after he had discovered them. Just hours later, she told the House Judiciary Committee she did not plan to seek appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the coffees and overnight stays by campaign contributors in the Lincoln Bedroom. The next day, Ruff’s office informed the Justice Department of the tapes.

“He didn’t tell the attorney general,” said Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), who served in the White House counsel’s office under Reagan. “He didn’t tell the chief of staff. He didn’t tell the president. . . . Just the appearance of all that is horrible.”

Ruff’s admirers vehemently dismiss such criticism. “The possibility that Chuck was involved consciously in anything remotely like an obstruction of justice is like my ability to take on Michael Jordan one-on-one--it’s not possible,” said attorney Roger M. Witten, who worked with Ruff on the Watergate investigation. “He doesn’t have it in him to do that.”

In the interview, Ruff said he had not considered the videotapes “in the context” of Reno’s deadline with Congress, but conceded: “I should have seen to it that she was told.”

Despite the headaches, Ruff remains enthusiastic about a job “that cannot be matched anyplace else in the world.” And he reveals no plans to leave: “One thing I’ve learned is stick around, enjoy what you’re doing--and who knows what will come down the road next.”

Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.