Cliffhanging; how the consummate counsel came to need a lawyer

Washington Monthly, June, 1991 by Jonathan Alter

In the drawing rooms of Georgetown, the conversations now take a particularly predictable path. How sad, how terribly sad, the hostesses say, almost in unison, as their guests nod and cluck. After such a distinguished career, how could Clark Clifford get himself into such dreadful trouble? After all, until this year, Clifford was the personification of the shrewd Washington insider, the last of the wise men, confidante of Democratic presidents, blah, blah, blah.

It's mostly true, actually, as his long-awaited memoirs suggest. Clifford played at least a walk-on role in almost everything that was compelling about Washington from the late forties to the end of the seventies. During the Truman administration, when more momentous events occurred in a month's time than might now take place in five or 10 years, he was central, as he was during the debate over Vietnam. There are some genuine historical insights in this book, some fascinating accounts of how government really works. But these days, Clifford's role in Washington history isn't half as interesting as his role on a single bank board. Now the search is on for some answers to the Clark Clifford riddle.

For Clifford (who spoke into a tape recorder) and Richard Holbrooke, a former assistant secretary of state under Jimmy Carter (who wrote the book and gets almost a co-byline), the timing is horrendous. But the coincidence of the scandal and the memoir may help provide some clues to Clifford's motives-and to why it took the rest of us so long to be suspicious of them.

For those who missed "60 Minutes" and the rest of the coverage (The New York Times has been especially skimpy with the details), Clifford's troubles involve the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a sleazy Arab-owned bank that has been accused of laundering drug money, among myriad smelly practices. In the early eighties, BCCI couldn't get regulatory approval to operate in the United States, so the owners secretly bought First American Bank and installed Clifford and one of his law partners, Robert Altman, as chairman and president, granting them loans to buy hugely lucrative stock. Clifford now claims that he presided over First American for nearly a decade without knowing that it was really controlled by BCCI. Nobody, of course, believes this. Reduced to admitting he played either the crook or the fool, Clifford is opting for the latter.

He recently hired a criminal lawyer; an indictment has to be considered at least a fair possibility. In the book, Clifford mentions his bank activities in only one sentence. But understanding that the scandal could not go completely unaddressed, Random House recently sent out a hastily added footnote. In it, Clifford writes of the pain the episode is causing him and puts a predictable and wholly inadequate gloss of innocence over it. Midway through the addition, though, lies an inadvertent sign of just how difficult this matter has become. In describing the terms under which he became chairman of First American in 1982, Clifford writes: "On the absolute assurance that the investors would not interfere with First American operations, I accepted. . . ." Curiously, in the typescript draft of the chapter sent to reviewers, the word "absolute" is crossed out. The lawyers, obviously, are already very much on the case.

Washington isn't as interested in the details of BCCI as in the riddle. Was Clifford's age an answer? Perhaps he was a victim of octogenarian forgetfulness. The younger Clifford would never have stood for such shenanigans, say the rationalizers. As for the money, well, he couldn't have done it for that, right? The man was already a multimillionaire.

Unfortunately for Clifford, the age excuse won't wash. As longtime readers of The Washington Monthly know, this is not the first time Clifford has played the fool. If he'd only known the truth about BCCI, he says now, he would have done the right thing. But precedent is against him. The last time he stared down a scam, he ignored universally recognized professional ethics and did nothing.

In 1970, Clifford, still in his prime, served on the board of the National Bank of Washington, then controlled by the United Mine Workers (UMW). At the time, the UMW was run by Tony Boyle, who was widely suspected and eventually convicted of arranging the murder of Jock Yablonski, his predecessor as president of the union. The Monthly revealed that the miners' pension fund was deposited in the bank in a noninterest-bearing account, meaning that the money benefited not the black-lung victims but the bank executives and union bosses. After the story appeared, Clifford called the editor of this magazine to say he was shocked, shocked to hear of it. As he should have been: As a lawyer, unless he was incompetent, he had to know perfectly well the trustees' fiduciary responsibility to the miners-to ensure that their pension fund was invested to their maximum benefit. But even though he knew all the facts and could no longer maintain the innocence he has persistently claimed in the BCCI scandal, he didn't fulfill that responsibility: He declined to blow the whistle, quietly leaving the the board a year or so later.