Powerful Insider Lands in ‘Noose’

I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby began most of his workdays with a predawn, chauffeured ride from his home in suburban Virginia to Vice President Dick Cheney’s residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory. From there, the two would ride together to the White House.

It was an arrangement that symbolized Libby’s influence. He was the closest advisor to the most powerful vice president in modern times. So close that his boss wanted him on hand before entering the West Wing.

On Friday, Libby exited the White House grounds perhaps for good. He resigned after being indicted on charges of obstruction of justice, making false statements and perjury after the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame was disclosed.

Libby said Friday he was confident that he would be “completely and totally exonerated.”

The indictment represents a significant blow to the Bush administration brain trust. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who remains under investigation, is a more powerful and better known figure -- the political advisor who helped orchestrate George W. Bush’s rise from Texas politics to the presidency.

But Libby had a more direct hand in the national security decisions that largely have defined Bush’s administration, particularly the invasion of Iraq. And in a workplace where a single job title carries considerable clout, Libby held three: chief of staff to the vice president, assistant to the vice president for national security affairs and assistant to the president.

Libby has varied interests -- he is a skiing fanatic, a fan of the occasional shot of tequila and the author of a well-received novel, “The Apprentice,” which has erotic themes and is set in a blizzard in turn-of-the-century Japan.

“He’s a little edgy,” said an administration official who has worked with him, noting that Libby is fond of pursuits “you don’t think of a guy named ‘Scooter’ doing.”

Libby’s current troubles are mind-boggling to many of his closest colleagues and friends, who say he is not a conservative ideologue and is known for his discretion.

Jackson Hogen, Libby’s roommate at Yale and a frequent skiing companion, recalled questioning Libby on a ski lift several years ago for his views on how the administration planned to confront North Korea. Libby deflected the question by joking that he believed that the United States “should adopt a policy of vigorous name-calling,” Hogen wrote in a 2003 column in Ski magazine.

“By nature and profession, he is someone who prizes discretion and saying the right thing at the right time,” Hogen said in a telephone interview this week. “It does seem odd that he would be the one shoved into this particular noose. But this tale is nothing if not strange.”

Libby was not charged with leaking Plame’s name after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, said the administration “twisted” intelligence on Iraq. But the 22-page indictment accuses him of repeatedly lying to investigators and the grand jury -- and even fabricating a story about when he learned that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA, how he learned it and what he did with the information.

Libby, 55, was raised in Connecticut, the son of an investment banker who gave him “Scooter” as a nickname after watching the boy scoot across his crib. (The initial “I” is for Irving.) Libby attended the elite Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., where he was a prominent figure on campus and the head of the debating society.

In the late 1960s, his political leanings were Democratic. He supported the presidential campaign of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. But at Yale, Libby enrolled in a class taught by a young professor named Paul D. Wolfowitz, and became enamored with the idea that the United States should be more assertive in spreading American-style democracy overseas.

In 1981, it was Wolfowitz -- now president of the World Bank -- who launched Libby’s career in government. As an assistant secretary of State in the Reagan administration, Wolfowitz recruited Libby from his law practice in Philadelphia to become a speechwriter at the State Department. Later, in the George H.W. Bush administration, Wolfowitz brought Libby to the Pentagon as his assistant.

The two helped draft a post-Cold War manifesto that urged the U.S. to establish itself as an unrivaled superpower. They also disagreed with the decision by the first President Bush to end the Persian Gulf War after Saddam Hussein’s troops were expelled from Kuwait.

“We objected to it,” Libby said of the decision to halt the war rather than extend the fight and perhaps allow Iraqis to rise up against Hussein, according to an account in “Rise of the Vulcans,” a history of Bush’s war Cabinet by former Los Angeles Times reporter James Mann. “I was floored by the decision. Neither of us liked it.”

It was during his stint at the Pentagon that Libby caught the notice of Cheney, then the secretary of Defense.

After the Republicans lost the White House, Libby spent much of the 1990s working at a Washington law firm, where his client list included Marc Rich, the financier fugitive who was given a controversial end-of-tenure pardon by President Clinton.

When George W. Bush was elected in 2000, Cheney asked Libby to be one of his top aides. And after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the two men were among the administration’s leading proponents that the U.S. response should include a confrontation with Iraq.

Libby played a key, behind-the-scenes role in making the case for the invasion of Iraq. His office drafted a 48-page document -- drawing on dozens of shards of intelligence on Iraq -- that was the basis for then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s February 2003 presentation to the United Nations, in which he argued, “Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.”

Powell agreed to give the speech only after discarding what he considered shaky claims about Iraq’s weapons programs and ties to Al Qaeda. Even so, the case crumbled when significant quantities of such weapons were not found after Hussein’s regime was toppled.

As the main rationale for going to war began to unravel, the White House sought to contain the political damage. It was in an effort to protect the case for war -- and to protect Cheney -- that Libby apparently stepped into legal jeopardy.

He has been in the cross-hairs of Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald for more than a year, and on occasion acknowledged his looming troubles with gallows humor.

After a long day on the campaign trail with Cheney in Des Moines, last year, Libby encountered a group of reporters who had just finished dinner at a saloon-style restaurant.

“Heading for the bar?” one reporter asked.

No, Libby said, pointing to an alternate destination across the street: a storefront with a sign advertising the services of a bail bondsman.

Libby has expressed to close friends a desire to devote more time to writing, skiing and his family. He is married to Harriet Grant, a lawyer and former Democratic staff member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. They have two children.

The skiing might have to wait awhile: Libby broke a bone in his foot last week, reportedly while running up stairs, and is on crutches.

When he was in law school at Columbia University, he spent a winter at Breckenridge, Colo., where he split his time on the slopes and in a lodge cranking out an early draft of the novel that would take him 20 years to complete. It was published in 1996.

“I went out to Colorado, drank tequila and wrote,” Libby told CNN’s Larry King in a 2002 television interview promoting the paperback release of his book.

Libby’s prose style could be seen in a letter he wrote to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, one of the journalists he talked to about Wilson’s wife. Urging Miller to end her 85-day stint in jail and cooperate with the investigation, he displayed a capacity to understand the sort of longings one must feel in a cell.

“You went to jail in the summer,” Libby wrote to Miller. “It is fall now.... Out west, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work -- and life.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX

‘It is with regret that I step aside’

The text of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s statement:

Earlier today I submitted my resignation to the president. Obviously, today is a sad day for me and my family.

It has been my great privilege and honor to have the blessing of serving our country in public service in the State Department, the Defense Department and recently the office of the vice president.

I’ve spent much of my career working on behalf of the American people and for the safety of our citizens. I have conducted my responsibilities honorably and truthfully, including with respect to this investigation.

It is with regret that I step aside from that service today. I am confident at the end of this process I will be completely and totally exonerated.

Source: Associated Press

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Times staff writer James Gerstenzang contributed to this report.