When Does Friendship Become Cronyism? Ask any President

Seldom has any U.S. president been so defined by his friends as Bill Clinton. From the first moment the passenger lists on the 1992 campaign plane began to carry the emblematic acronym “FOB,” the “Friends of Bill” have become part of the national political furniture.

Some of that furniture has started to look more than just shabby, as the galloping infection of misfortune has nibbled its way into the FOBs. Some--like Webster L. Hubbell and Susan McDougal--are in prison, so far for misdeeds not directly connected with the presidency.

Others face alarming legal bills as the inquiries of congressional committees and various independent counsels probe the affairs and bank balances of the FOBs. Many await with nervousness the new round of inquiries, not into the tangled mass of the Whitewater embarrassments, but into the fresh pastures of that ruthless enthusiasm in fund-raising that helped ensure Clinton’s reelection.

It can be a perilous business, being a FOB. It has also proved to be a tragic one, as FOBs have been tossed from the careening White House sled whenever the wolves got too close, or the passengers outlasted their usefulness. C. Lani Guinier, an old Yale friend, was ditched early for fear that her legal musings on minority rights might be used as ammunition in her confirmation hearings to be assistant attorney general for civil rights.

David Watkins, a devoted political loyalist throughout the 1980s, was dispatched brusquely back to Little Rock after being photographed taking a White House helicopter to a golf game. Harold M. Ickes, a friend and political ally for more than 25 years, learned from the media that there would be no place for him in the second Clinton administration.

Politics can be the most selfish of professions, where friendships carefully developed during the rise to power, can be ruthlessly discarded once that power is achieved. The history of U.S. presidents is littered with cronies who became embarrassments, to be discarded like old Kleenex. Indeed, the fate of presidential friendships and their capacity for bringing the Oval Office close to disaster, is often the most revealing of clues to the character of the man in the White House.

Friends damaged Ronald Reagan’s presidency, even without including the overblown allegations by Kitty Kelley that Frank Sinatra’s dalliance with Nancy Reagan tarnished the Reagan legacy, just as his unsavory connections had muddied the reputation of John F. Kennedy. As Reagan’s head of the Central Intelligence Agency, William J. Casey brought a passion for the cloak and dagger to his anticommunist crusade, and his massive covert operation against the Sandinista “threat” in Central America led directly to the Iran-Contra scandal.

President Jimmy Carter’s reputation for probity never quite recovered from the storm of allegations against his old Georgia friend and banker, Bert Lance. Though Lance was finally cleared, the scent of hypocrisy lingered around a presidency that had promised to be “as good as the American people,” even as the first brother was hustling business with Libya’s Moammar Kadafi.

Leave to one side Richard M. Nixon’s ruthless dismissals of John Erlichman and H. R. Haldeman, and recall the damage done to the presidential image by friendship with that grim-faced Florida businessman, Bebe Rebozo. Photos of Nixon and Rebozo, in black business suits and sunglasses, looking as if they were heading for a Mafia funeral as they cruised in a motorboat, revealed more of Nixon’s dark soul than any number of tapes.

It would be merciful to draw a veil over Kennedy’s embarrassing friends and lovers, even as Judith Exner essays yet another revelation. But even the cleanest of presidents have been besmirched by friends. Recall President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Sherman Adams. This chief of staff was know as the incorruptible man--until he was found to have had his hotel bills and his vicuna coat paid for by a New England textile magnate in gratitude for Adams’s help with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Unsavory friendships need not be lethal. Harry S. Truman survived his embarrassing connection to Thomas J. Pendergast, the mighty political boss of Kansas City; and Franklin D. Roosevelt was well served in World War II by his close friend Harry Hopkins--despite allegations that Hopkins converted the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration into a political recruitment and jobs machine to help the Democratic Party.

Trusted friends can be useful to presidents, able to circumvent bureaucracies and diplomatic formalities. Edward M. “Colonel” House, the notorious fixer of Texas politics, redeemed his reputation and justified his friendship with President Woodrow Wilson by the personal missions he undertook during World War I. House can even claim to have been a co-author of Wilson’s 14 Points, that ultimate statement of American idealism in world affairs.

There is nothing unprecedented about the misfortunes of Clinton’s Arkansas loyalists. President Warren Harding brought his “Ohio gang” to Washington in 1921. They had already made their state into a synonym for corruption, and repeated this at the federal level. The interior secretary was imprisoned for taking $400,000 in bribes to lease federal oil reserves at Elk Hills and Teapot Dome to private oilmen. The director of the Veterans Bureau was imprisoned for fraud; his legal advisor committed suicide. So did the fixer for the attorney general, who himself stood trial twice.

But it was President Ulysses S. Grant who had the most scandal-ridden administration--not because of his own corruption, but through the greed of friends and family. His brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, conspired with the financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk in a plot to corner the New York gold market. This conspiracy brought about the nation’s first Black Friday, Sept. 24, 1869.

America’s juiciest-ever scandal broke in Grant’s second term, when Treasury Secretary Benjamin Bristow broke the Whiskey Ring. Among the beneficiaries of this plot to defraud the government of its whiskey taxes were Grant’s secretary and the chief clerk of the Treasury. The inducements offered by the ring included bunches of cigars wrapped in $1,000 bills, and the services of a courtesan known from the color of her lingerie as the Scarlet Woman.

Grant never learned. William Belknap, his secretary of war, was impeached (and escaped on a technicality) after taking bribes. Even in retirement, Grant trusted his savings to the banking firm, Grant & Ward, where his son, Ulysses Jr., was a partner. Ferdinand Ward was a crook, and Grant lost the lot, which at least had the merit of forcing him to recoup his fortunes by writing what are still the finest of all presidential memoirs. Faced with multimillion-dollar legal fees, Clinton will have to make the best book deal he can--without the benefit of Grant’s Civil War recollections.

What is unique about the friendships of Clinton is not just their range and their extraordinary capacity for embarrassing his presidency, but their promiscuity. A man with so many FOBs may be said to have few real intimates. And one striking feature of the FOBs--including the 1,500 who gathered last week for the annual New Year’s ritual at the Renaissance weekend at Hilton Head, S.C.--is the degree to which their accumulation seems a calculated act of political recruitment.

There were fellow Rhodes scholars from Oxford, chums from Georgetown University and Yale Law School, old comrades from the antiwar movement, and fellow veterans of past political campaigns, including George S. McGovern’s 1972 presidential race.

There were the allies from that crucial new centrist grouping, the Democratic Leadership Council, and fellow-governors Clinton impressed during 12 years of attention to the National Governors Conference.

And there were the massed ranks of Arkansans, from the legislature and the array of Clinton-appointed state boards. They came from the state’s universities, from its giant corporations, like the Tyson’s food empire, and from the courthouses and big law firms of Little Rock.

All politicians depend on their friends--on the reliable fund raisers, on the policy professionals who can color their advice with personal conviction, on the intimates who can relax a harried candidate with reminiscence. But Clinton elevated his far-flung band of loyalists into something more, into a symbol of the way he aspired to run for a new generation, into a 1990s version of Kennedy’s claim to have assembled an administration of “the best and brightest,” and into a living testimony to his own vast gift for friendship.

As early as 1981, when his aide Betsey Wright took advantage of his brief eclipse from the governorship to organize and computerize the endless lists of the FOBs, there were more than 10,000 names. They were listed on small index cards, and stored in an old wooden library catalog chest, with the overflow stuffed into shoe boxes. They included names and addresses and dates of birth, additions for children and promotions and new books that inspired congratulatory notes, a code for the place and circumstances of the first meeting and a separate listing for campaign donations received.

They were the raw material of a campaign, a catalog of an enormous political ambition, Clinton’s swollen version of the Reagans’ fabled Christmas card list.

But Clinton has elevated his friendships into a tool of political innovation. The Reagan administration was credited with turning the daily work of the presidency into a permanent campaign. Clinton has taken this to the logical conclusion of mounting the permanent fund-raising operation. Photographs with Chinese businessmen and coffee with Indonesian billionaires; tea with Thais and Taiwanese; discreet dinners with $100,000 donors at the Jefferson Hotel and nights in the Lincoln bedroom for the most favored.

There is a double sadness here. Not only has the presidency itself been brought wretchedly close to disrepute by Clinton’s promiscuity with presidential favors, but so has the very concept of friendship.

It is tarnished in part by money, but more by the way that the hosts of FOBs are stuck in a one-way relationship--to be junked at will by a president who is the veritable dark star of loyalty. He draws it in like a black hole sucks in light, but none of it ever seems to escape.