A thin, red-haired Stanford senior stood rapt, listening to a speech that was about to change his life. Civil rights leader Allard Lowenstein, the speaker addressing the crowd at Tresidder that night, was not exactly famous -- not yet, in the spring of 1964 -- but he was a cult figure on campus. A former dean of men at Stern Hall, Lowenstein had a hypnotic gift for inspiring the young and would soon become a pivotal figure in American liberalism of the '60s and '70s.
The senior who stopped to hear him had a more famous name, but his face was unfamiliar to most of his classmates. Twenty-four-year-old Harold Ickes, son and namesake of Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of the interior, lived alone in a seedy trailer off campus. Ickes kept to himself, showing little interest in the social rituals of college life or the ideological struggles just beginning to engulf the decade. No one would have guessed that the sullen economics major would himself become pivotal in American liberalism -- in his case, during the '80s and '90s.
Starting that night, the loner became a joiner -- ultimately, one of the consummate networkers of his generation of Democrats. Lowenstein's speech, calling for volunteers in the Mississippi Freedom Project, ignited in Ickes, '64, a lasting passion for civil rights and political organizing. "Al was a totally charismatic figure. He was just a f---ing spellbinder," Ickes recalls. A few weeks after graduation, the young man was on his way to Mississippi to help mobilize blacks to picket, march and vote.
And so a life in politics began, one in which Ickes would barely survive an assault by Southern racists; serve as a lieutenant in the antiwar crusade to dethrone Lyndon Johnson; emerge as a master in the Byzantine court of New York City politicking; and devoutly support a succession of losing Democratic candidates as diverse as Edmund Muskie and Jesse Jackson before finally landing in the White House with a winner named Bill Clinton. That last phase turned out to be the most turbulent of all.
His title under Clinton was White House deputy chief of staff -- a rather bland designation that hardly captured the reality. Ickes was the president's man at ground zero, handling legislative strategy, scandal management and the 1996 bid for reelection. Known for his explosive temper, he clashed repeatedly with consultant Dick Morris. He was dismissed after the re-election, then frantically summoned back to help bail water in the bleak days of January 1998, when it looked as though the Clinton ship might founder in the Lewinsky affair.
The stormy White House years tested two core traits that have shaped Ickes's career. One is his readiness to strike a balance between pragmatism and ideals. Most colleagues say that Ickes, though a liberal without apologies, is in the end a realist rather than an ideologue. His other defining quality is loyalty. His friends and co-workers characterize him as supremely faithful, not to institutions or even causes, but to individual people -- even when they have not always been loyal to him.
It was a wandering but continuous path that took Harold Ickes from his 1964 encounter with Al Lowenstein to a more private meeting 35 years later. This time, he was sitting in the Yellow Oval Room of the White House with Hillary Rodham Clinton on the day the president won acquittal in his impeachment trial. Ickes wanted to know if the first lady was willing to give up most of her duties in Washington to run for the U.S. Senate in New York. Her answer was clear: she did want to run, fervently. For hours they mulled the practical problems and implications of an ambitious and highly polarizing first lady seeking office on her own. Four months later, she announced her Senate bid.
These days, Ickes serves as her unofficial strategist, hand-holder and occasional teller of unpleasant truths. His workday usually begins at home in Washington with a 7:30 a.m. conference call with fellow campaign strategists. From there he heads to his "regular" job as corporate lobbyist. The day often ends late at night with a call from the candidate, or sometimes her husband, about the latest turn of the campaign.
During an interview this summer over coffee and peach pie at a diner across from his Dupont Circle office, Ickes spoke of a relationship that allows him to speak to the first lady in a way that few other advisers would dare. "I have the luxury of telling her exactly what I think . . . [although] sometimes she won't talk to me afterward for several days. I'm not a close personal friend, but I've known Hillary for a long time and we are friends, so I can give her very candid advice."
His eccentric history and edgy style -- raspy, foul-mouthed, sometimes combative -- make him one of the capital's most arresting personalities. From his activist days he has retained -- and cultivated -- an iconoclastic aura. At events where others wear suits, the wiry 60-year-old shows up in jeans and open shirts (way open: he often leaves the top several buttons undone). He is known for his collection of flamboyantly ugly ties.
Washington insider status might seem a birthright of the son of a New Deal legend, but for Harold McEwan Ickes, things are more complicated. His father, Harold LeClair Ickes, was 65 when young Harold was born in 1940. Ickes says he only dimly knew his father, a prodigiously hard worker who died when the boy was just 12.
His childhood memories include snapshots of history -- FDR shucking corn at the Ickes family home in Maryland, summers at a ranch owned by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas -- but most of what he knows of his father and that era comes from biographies and family papers. For much of his life, in fact, he saw his name as something of a burden, creating expectations he had no particular desire to fulfill. Only in recent years, as he has recognized some striking parallels between his father's career and his own, has Ickes come to accept that legacy as a source of pride. Historians have noted, for instance, that his father, an ardently progressive supporter of civil rights, viewed FDR with two parts admiration and one part disdain -- a mix not so different from his own relationship with Bill Clinton.
Young Ickes had the instincts of a rebel, not an aristocratic statesman like his father. As a teenager attending Washington's prestigious Sidwell Friends School, he was, literally, a cowboy. More comfortable roping cattle than kidding with classmates, Ickes was neither a team player nor a natural student, and he graduated with deplorable grades. Unprepared to apply to any elite college, he spent several years working on ranches, doing construction jobs and earning a private pilot's license. In 1960, he enrolled at the University of Arizona-Tucson, where he became interested in economics and began tending to his studies. He transferred to Stanford a year later. "I was kind of a loner in those days," Ickes says. It wasn't until he immersed himself in civil rights work that a more purposeful persona began to emerge.
Looking back on the so-called Freedom Summer, he downplays the challenges he and other "privileged kids with connections" faced on their glorified field trip to the South. The truly valorous individuals, he says, were the blacks and whites already living there who were willing to take a stand for civil rights. Still, the idealism and intensity of that summer -- when he lost a kidney after a gang of white racists beat him up -- solidified his commitment to politics as an agent of social change.
Ickes earned a law degree at Columbia in 1967, but politics remained his calling. There was always another campaign: McCarthy, Muskie, Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson. That roster might suggest he was ideologically hard-core, but even then, the reality was more complex. Many of his fiercest battles in the '60s and early '70s pitted him against the radicals of the New Left like Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin, says Greg Craig, another Lowenstein follower. "Liberal realists" like Lowenstein and Ickes refused to align themselves with protesters who advocated violence or flew the Viet Cong flag, Craig explains. They "believed in using American institutions to change America, while the other side wanted to destroy those institutions," Craig says. "Harold believes in the redemptive role of government."
Lanny Davis, a Muskie campaign worker who first met Ickes in 1972 and later became a Clinton spokesman, makes a similar observation. "In all the years [Ickes] has been in politics, he's been the center," Davis says. "He believes in building coalitions and that you can be a liberal without being suicidal."
After law school, Ickes joined a New York firm representing labor unions and became a veteran activist in the ever-powerful Democratic organizations of Manhattan's West Side. There he got a clear view of the underbelly of politics, where money gets raised, deals get cut and sometimes unseemly compromises are made.
Pragmatism was a necessity, of course, for a liberal toiling through the '70s and '80s, an era of conservative ascendancy. The irony is that Ickes would find his beliefs tested far more in the years of victory than in those of defeat.
Bill Clinton's election in 1992 marked the end of a long dry spell for Democrats. For Ickes, the triumph was a special pleasure: he had known the winning candidate since the early '70s, when they had both worked on something called Project Pursestrings, an effort to end funding for the Vietnam War.
Unlike some who knew the young Clinton, Ickes says he didn't necessarily have him picked as a future president: Clinton was simply a bright and appealing young man, plainly talented and plainly ambitious. After years of political organizing, Ickes knew lots of people who fit that description. But Clinton would occasionally travel to New York when Ickes was working there and would call him up for dinner. "He was wonderful to be around if you did not feel like talking, because he did all the talking," Ickes recalls. "You could recognize his talent and his interest in people and ideas. You could not help but like the guy."
After managing the 1992 Democratic convention in New York, Ickes hoped to join the new administration, but his appointment was deferred for a year when Republicans raised questions about work his law firm performed for unions with mob ties. The controversy dissipated when no one could show that Ickes did anything inappropriate. He finally arrived at the White House in January 1994 as deputy chief of staff.
Today, Ickes looks back with ambivalence on his decision to leave New York for Washington. "I don't regret it," he says, "but if I had known everything then that I know now, I would not have come."
To say the Clinton years have been a trial for him would be an understatement (although trial is the one legal proceeding he has managed to avoid). Ickes has been summoned on 34 occasions to testify under oath to grand juries or congressional panels and has received 32 subpoenas or other requests for information. He's got several hundred thousand dollars' worth of legal bills to prove it. Simply put, there are some people in Washington who cannot believe he is still willing to toil on behalf of anyone whose last name is Clinton.
From the beginning, it seemed his role in the White House was to take on every sticky job the Clintons had to offer. One of his first responsibilities was the political strategy for Clinton's doomed overhaul of health care. His defenders believe that by the time Ickes arrived, a series of substantive and political mistakes had already sunk prospects for passage. For good measure, he also oversaw the response to the metastasizing Whitewater controversy.
The end of 1994 brought disaster for the Clinton administration: a Republican takeover of Congress. This led directly to Ickes's last big assignment for Clinton. He was put in charge of organizing the problematic bid for re-election.
Ickes's strength is nuts-and-bolts politics. With his deep ties to unions and other Democratic interests, he worked to reassure the party base that Clinton was still the best hope for progressive politics. He functioned as the White House ambassador to Jesse Jackson, who eventually scotched plans to challenge the president. He also took on the job that later kept his lawyers busy: from the White House, he oversaw the Democratic National Committee, including its extensive fund-raising effort.
If he still had any illusions about practical politics, the 1996 election cycle stripped them clean. The unabashedly liberal Ickes was in charge of organization but found himself powerless when it came to Clinton's message and policies. The president effectively turned those over to Dick Morris, an ideologically ambidextrous consultant whom Ickes had known for nearly 30 years from New York City politics -- and had heartily despised the entire time.
Even for his admirers, working closely with Ickes can be an ordeal. He startled the White House staff with his operatic rages -- a longtime Ickes trademark. In his New York days, he once bit into an opponent's calf; during the Muskie campaign, he's said to have hurled furniture on the eve of the Wisconsin primary. "I've seen him so angry that it cost him his effectiveness," Davis recalls of the 1972 campaign. Yet he and others say Ickes often is wonderful company, full of stories and cynical badinage, and always generous to people on his side. And, like Lowenstein, Ickes has a cadre of protégés. One is Dwight Holton, 34, a federal prosecutor who worked with him in the White House. "Harold has a combination of resolve and bedrock principles," he says, "that allows him to get things done -- and to make sure he is getting the right things done."
But as Dick Morris's stock with Clinton went up, Ickes's went down. In August 1996, liberals in the White House implored the president not to sign the Republican-drafted welfare reform bill. Morris argued that signing it would put the last nail in Bob Dole's coffin. Clinton signed.
The ultimate disappointment for Ickes came just days after Clinton's 1996 victory, when the indispensable man of the re-election effort found out he was dispensable after all. Ickes read in a newspaper that Clinton had chosen conservative businessman Erskine Bowles to be his new chief of staff, replacing Leon Panetta, and that Ickes would be dismissed.
In interviews at the time, Ickes stayed "on message," saying Clinton was entitled to whomever he wanted as chief. Privately, friends say, he was sputtering as if he'd swallowed ash. Soon all of Washington knew he was furious over the backhanded treatment. Many people assumed that Ickes, the keeper of many secrets in the White House, would be looking to even the score.
Some Clinton aides began chattering that the money debacle of the Democratic National Committee -- with its illegal foreign donations and Lincoln Bedroom slumber parties -- had been principally an Ickes project. Ickes quickly disabused the would-be scapegoaters. It turned out that when he left the White House, the files he brought with him included thousands of pages of internal memos that made clear the president's active role in the money chase. And when congressional investigators asked Ickes to turn over those documents, he did.
But it soon became clear that he wasn't after payback. Though embittered toward Clinton, he was still loyal to the president, both as a person and as leader of the Democrats. To his admirers, Ickes's finest moment came after he left the White House, when he was summoned in September 1997 to appear before the Senate panel investigating the 1996 fund-raising controversies. Some previous witnesses had taken an apologetic or groveling tone. Ickes acknowledged that there had been some procedural lapses, but he directly challenged the whole premise of the investigation. He asserted that the Clinton White House had done nothing wrong and that raising money for the re-election was a noble cause. "Innuendo is easy, Senator," he shot back at one particularly aggressive Republican, Don Nickles of Oklahoma, during the televised hearings. "I'm tired of innuendo."
Demoralized Democrats were thrilled. Among those cheering was Doug Sosnik, a former senior adviser to Clinton. "For a lot of us," he says, "Harold represents the heart and soul of the Democratic Party -- both for his role in keeping the party together in 1996 and for standing up for the party the next year."
Indeed, Ickes was still standing with Clinton a few months later, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted. The day the story broke, Ickes happened to be at Stanford speaking to the Knight journalism fellows. In Washington, the presidency appeared to be in meltdown. Hillary Clinton, frustrated by the seemingly shell-shocked response of her husband's West Wing staff, summoned Ickes back to help out with damage control. Once again, he answered the call, serving throughout the ordeal as an unofficial adviser to both the president and first lady.
His reddish hair has thinned over the years, but his lanky frame has hardly thickened. The streams of unusually creative profanity he can summon when the occasion calls have not been diluted by time, although the free-floating rage behind the invective seems to have tempered. Ickes claims he has learned to control his anger, and friends say they do discern a bit of mellowing. "He's more polished now, and more guarded -- he keeps his own counsel," says longtime friend Sarah Kovner, who first met Ickes while organizing for Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and now works for Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. "But what makes him good now is what made him good then. He works 20 hours a day, and he outlasts everyone."
Ickes still lives in northwest Washington, where his wife, Laura Handman, practices law and their teenage daughter goes to Sidwell Friends. He and former aide Janice Enright have run their own lobbying firm since 1997. He says he has no trouble putting his political savvy at the service of corporate clients. "As a lawyer, you often represent people that you have no use for and who do some pretty scuzzy things," he reflects, "but you do it under the great rubric that every person deserves representation."
It was surely his hard-boiled realism, rather than his idealism, that Hillary Clinton was so eager to tap at the start of her campaign. How much money would have to be raised? What uncomfortable questions would reporters ask? What kind of message would New York voters support? Realism, no less than idealism, comes at a cost. A campaign that some activists hoped would become a progressive crusade -- Hillary Clinton carrying the torch of Eleanor Roosevelt -- has in fact become a methodically pragmatic exercise. The candidate's speeches have been blandly centrist, every word preapproved by campaign pollster Mark Penn. Ickes, close sources say, sometimes despairs that her campaign has become too pragmatic for its own good. He has argued for her to show more fire, to reveal more of her life story, values and policy passions.
And yet Ickes, no less than the candidate, remains focused on the larger goal, which is to win an election. People close to him say he was drawn to this assignment in part for love of the game -- being close to the action in a historic campaign -- and in part because his loyalty dictated coming to the aid of a friend of nearly 20 years' standing.
His steadfastness is in some ways more impressive because his feelings are tinged with ambivalence. "I choose my friends very carefully, but once I choose, I'm with you a long way," Ickes says. "I certainly didn't like the way I was treated [in the White House], but I do like the Clintons. They get up every morning and they work their asses off for the things they believe in. Is some of that self-serving for them? Yes, but they've got grit. They know how to take issues and put them into political action."
Kind of like Harold Ickes.
John F. Harris covers the White House and national politics for the Washington Post.
