She's a White House veteran

By James Oliphant

May 11, 2010 12 AM PT

WASHINGTON —

The White House during President Clinton’s second term was a combustible, ambitious place. While to the public it appeared that the chief executive was spending most of his time embroiled in scandal, a small group of staffers worked behind the scenes to pursue an aggressive policy agenda.

Elena Kagan was one of them. She had come to the Clinton domestic policy shop in 1997 after serving as an administration lawyer. By the time she left two years later, she had put her stamp on the office, a unit that took on tobacco and gun industries, advocated campaign finance reform, backed affirmative action and worked to preserve abortion rights.

Because Kagan, President Obama’s pick to be the next justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, has never been a judge or even a prolific academic writer, much has been made about her lack of a paper record. But Kagan has left behind a different sort of trail -- a personal one, cut by the relationships she forged, and a bureaucratic one, memos circulated between herself and other White House principals.

In the Clinton years, according to memos and those who worked in the office, Kagan was part of a nerve center that included domestic policy advisor Bruce Reed, then-Chief of Staff John Podesta and current Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. And she had a direct line to the president.

“Clinton viewed her as an independent source of advice and wisdom in grappling with those difficult policy questions,” Podesta said.

Kagan was a player, the consummate insider working within a nexus of law, politics and policy, comfortable in all three areas. In the White House, she learned skills she would later put to use at Harvard Law School as dean, bridging the gulf between liberals and conservatives and expanding the school’s political influence. She may use those skills again on the court if she is confirmed.

“To the extent that you are looking for someone to get to five votes, she’s someone who works hard to listen to other people,” Podesta said. “It’s characteristic of the way she operated to build policy consensus.”

Since her Ivy League days as an undergrad at Princeton and a law student at Harvard, Kagan, 50, has traversed the corridors of power. But she grew up modestly, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, one of three children of an elementary school teacher mother and a lawyer father who represented mostly tenants.

Both her parents are deceased, and Kagan said Monday that her biggest regret was that they could not share in the historic occasion. Both her brothers teach high school in New York, one at the same public high school she attended.

At Princeton in the late 1970s, while working on the school newspaper, she met Reed, who would become a lifelong friend and would hire her 30 years later. Her success at Harvard Law would define the course of her life. She first clerked for Abner Mikva, a judge on U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and then for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the trailblazing African American and civil rights icon.

Her start in politics came in 1988, when she volunteered to work on Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign.

A self-described flunky, she worked in the research department, defending Dukakis from political attacks and conducting research on the opposition. From there, she took a job in private practice in Washington, at the litigation firm of Williams & Connolly, before taking a teaching position at the University of Chicago, where Obama also taught.

Mikva gave Kagan a job in the White House in 1995 as an associate counsel to the president. “She is very thoughtful, a great intellect,” he said Monday.

But she had already learned some of the ropes in Washington, having served briefly as a staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee in the early 1990s. She worked for Sen. Joe Biden, now the vice president, and with Ron Klain, then a White House lawyer and Biden’s current chief of staff. Klain played an instrumental role in the nomination process that yielded Kagan.

During her stint with Mikva in the White House, Kagan worked on the legality of the sweeping welfare reform package Clinton pushed through Congress.

According to records at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark., she also drafted an executive order restricting the importation of certain semiautomatic assault rifles. She also helped prepare a question-and-answer document advocating the campaign-reform legislation then proposed by Sens. Russ Feingold and John McCain.

At the end of Clinton’s first term, she planned to return to the University of Chicago Law School to resume teaching when Reed persuaded her to stay in the White House as his domestic policy lieutenant, his right hand.

Reed said Kagan wasn’t a political hire. “We had plenty of those,” he said. “I wanted a brilliant lawyer who could run circles around everyone else.”

Reed and Kagan operated as equals, running policy decisions in the office and up to the Oval Office.

“The way Bruce and I structured the office was that both of us really superintended the entire operations of the office,” Kagan said in 2003. “Bruce and I took responsibility for the whole.”

On a regular basis, Reed and Kagan proposed a seemingly never-ending batch of policy proposals to the president: a presidential commission on race, a ban on research for human cloning, an elder-abuse initiative. By and large, following the lead of their boss, they hewed to a centrist course.

That meant, where abortion was concerned, supporting a proposed congressional ban on so-called partial-birth abortions, but only if the law contained exceptions for the health of the mother. Clinton vetoed a 1997 ban because it lacked such an exception. Kagan helped draft a letter to senators outlining the president’s position.

A centrist course meant negotiating with the firearms industry on a deal to put child-safety locks on guns rather than risk a legislative showdown. Gun-control efforts were a hallmark of the Clinton administration. Kagan had already been involved in an executive order that required all federal law enforcement officers to install locks on their weapons.

Those moves angered the National Rifle Assn., which became even more alarmed in late 1998 when Clinton proposed closing the “gun show” loophole that allowed firearms purchases without background checks. A legislative effort to do just that was launched as Kagan departed the White House for Harvard in 1999.

Richard Feldman, a former firearms lobbyist who helped broker the trigger-lock deal with Emanuel, said the NRA could make trouble for Kagan simply because she was part of the White House efforts at the time. “They’ll try to use it against her,” Feldman said. “They’ll find a memo.”

Kagan left her biggest mark in the area of tobacco regulation.

On Capitol Hill, the occasional cigarette and cigar smoker helped strike a deal among Democrats and Republicans on a bill to allow the Food and Drug Administration to regulate the industry. (The effort didn’t succeed until last year.)

A source present at those negotiations, who asked to remain unidentified because of their sensitivity, said Kagan “was very effective and driving things toward a decision, identifying what the central issue was. She was very pragmatic -- and non-ideological.”

The administration sued the industry in a massive racketeering lawsuit in late 1999. By then, Kagan was already at Harvard, where she would become dean in 2003.

The trail she left behind at the White House, paper and otherwise, has yet to be fully documented. A showdown between Senate Republicans, who will want access to memos written by Kagan that have yet to be made public, and the Obama administration may be inevitable.

joliphant@latimes.com

Bob Secter of the Chicago Tribune contributed to this report.

BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX

Elena Kagan

Age: 50

Born: April 28, 1960

Birthplace: New York City

EDUCATION

Hunter College High School; graduated 1977

Bachelor’s degree in history from Princeton University; graduated 1981

Master of philosophy degree from Oxford in 1983

Harvard Law School; graduated 1986