All for one and all for one

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 12, 1998 | by Sean Paige

After years of being a senator and vice president, Al Gore has built a trusted circle of advisers who are just as determined as he is to gain control of the White House.

If the names Leon Feurth, Kathleen McGinty, Roy Neel, Peter Knight, Jack Quinn, Elaine Kamarck and Mark McNeely aren't exactly household words, they may be soon if Al Gore ascends to the presidency. And if one truly knows a man by the company he keeps, the members of Gore's inner circle can tell us a great deal about this man who would be ... president.

According to interviews and published accounts, the vice president's cadre of trusted aides and advisors is tightly knit, loyal, disciplined, ideologically centrist (except on environmental issues) -- and already too superstitious to speculate in public about the plum positions to which they aspire in a Gore White House. They tend to be well-educated fortysomethings who eschew showboating in favor of working the oars, and have long-standing ties to their boss, often going back to Capitol Hill and Tennessee.

True Gore insiders don't talk loosely with the media about themselves or how a Gore administration might differ from Clinton's, according to one of them, Elaine Kamarck, who headed the vice president's National Performance Review and now is at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Everyone who has worked for [Gore] has been an integral part of this administration," Kamarck tells Insight. "This has not been a White House where the VP's staff has been at war with the president's staff."

Political observers marvel at the relatively seamless integration of agendas, personnel and power-sharing between Clinton and Gore people -- a happy symbiosis rarely found in the White House. "Areas where Al Gore makes the decisions -- and the president rubber stamps -- are science, technology, NASA, telecommunications, the environment, family leave, tobacco, nuclear dealings with the Russians, media violence, the Internet, privacy issues and, of course, reinventing government," former Clinton strategist Dick Morris has said.

"I think that his staff tends to reflect Gore's own personality -- they're bright and they're methodical," Clinton political strategist James Carville tells Insight. "Meetings with Gore and his staff are a lot more organized than they were with the then-governor [Clinton] and his staff." The "Gore corps" clearly has a strong environmentalist bent, but does not otherwise strike Carville as ideologically strident. "Ideology is not the first word I think of when I think of them," says Carville. "If you had to peg them ideologically, they're probably centrist Democrats for the most part."

But whatever their true ideological leanings, Carville continues, Gore's key political aides and advisers undoubtedly are busy figuring how safely to maneuver the vice president between his desire to appear loyal to President Clinton and his need to delineate his own policy platform, where it differs from Clinton's, while distancing himself from Clinton's scandals. "I suspect that they're thinking of that on a very regular basis right now," according to Carville, who says of Gore's delicate dance: "It's going to depend a lot on what happens in the current unpleasantness."

"There is a natural process in the election cycle when a vice president begins to campaign for his own presidency," Kamarck says. "Now is not the time to differentiate him."

All such protestations aside, the New York Times reported in February that political powwows already were being held regularly at "NAVOBS," shorthand for the vice president's residence on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory in Northwest Washington -- meetings so discreet that Gore's chief of staff reportedly does not allow those who attend to make copies of the agendas.

Among the more recognizable Gore confidants are Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo, Environmental Protection Agency chief Carol Browner, former Rep. Thomas Downey, veteran Washington image-maker Bob Squire, New Republic Editor in Chief Martin Peretz ... and Gore's wife, Tipper.

Less known but still important lieutenants in the Gore camp are Chief of Staff Ron Klain, National Security Adviser Leon Feurth, Council on Environmental Quality Chairwoman Kathleen "Katie" McGinty, Assistant Attorney General Frank Hunger and four former political aides -- Peter Knight, Roy Neel, Jack Quinn and Mark McNeely -- currently cashing in on their Gore connections in the private sector.

Most of the Gore coterie has embraced the boss' desire to look as much as possible like a Boy Scout -- "There is no one in this crowd that is going to wake up in the morning and take a helicopter ride to a golf course," Neel has said. "These people do things by the book." But even the vice president's squeaky-clean facade occasionally has cracked and fallen away, so it is not surprising that the current and former staff sometimes find their own halos slipping.

Among the latter is former Gore congressional aide Knight, who reportedly helped Gore get the contract to write Earth in the Balance, the tome that codified the then-senator's reputation as an environmentalist (see "The High Priest of Ecoalarmism" p. 18). Knight has gone on to parlay his connections with the vice president into one of the most lucrative lobbying careers in Washington. When and where questions about the vice president's ethics have been raised, Knight's name almost invariably comes up.