Bowles’ Exit to Boggle the White House

It was after midnight when President Clinton summoned his chief of staff to the presidential quarters in Beijing during his trip there last June.

The chore? The president wanted Erskine Bowles to join him in a complicated word game, Boggle, that had caught his fancy.

Bowles, 53, ever the loyal aide, trod over to Clinton’s suite and took up the challenge.

Now Clinton will have to find a new game companion, golfing partner--and a new manager of his increasingly difficult White House work. Bowles, who more than a year ago talked about leaving Washington, is joining the exodus of senior presidential aides. They are citing exhaustion, the desire to spend more time with family, or a readiness to grab the bigger bucks of the private sector. With Clinton under siege in the Monica S. Lewinsky matter, their departure couldn’t be more inopportune.

White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry made his getaway last week; Rahm Emanuel, Clinton’s senior advisor for policy and strategy, has announced he will leave within weeks.

Bowles is leaving the White House for North Carolina, the state he left six years ago for a relatively obscure job as head of the Small Business Administration in the fledgling Clinton administration.

His departure has not been formally announced, but he said in Durham, N.C., on Sunday that he was leaving as soon as the current session of Congress ends, perhaps by the end of the week. He is widely thought to be planning to run for governor in two years.

If Clinton moves deputy chief of staff John Podesta into Bowles’ slot--the course most White House observers expect--he’ll be gaining a partisan with a lengthy background in Democratic politics who has quarterbacked the White House’s political response to the Lewinsky scandal.

But, said one close Clinton advisor, the White House is losing “the person who has the best capacity to deal with the Republican [congressional] leadership on substance.” And Clinton will be left with a “White House in which he sees no peers on his staff.”

Bowles’ predecessors--Thomas F. “Mack” McLarty, a boyhood pal of the president’s, and Leon E. Panetta, an experienced former member of Congress--were presidential peers. Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, a presidential peer in age and world experience, filled such a role when he was head of the National Economic Council.

But, complained one Republican familiar with White House operations, for all his standing, Bowles “would never wag his finger at the president and say, ‘You’ve got to clean up your ways.’

“The major failing Erskine had was he chose to keep his eyes covered and not to get his hands dirty in this overwhelming scandal. He chose to focus on governing and not on Clinton’s indiscretions,” he said.

Still, working largely behind the scenes, Bowles won nearly unanimous praise not only from others on the White House staff but from Republicans as well.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) was one of his fans. They found common ground in their Southern backgrounds that helped in negotiating a balanced-budget agreement last year.

“He’s done a remarkably good job under difficult circumstances,” said Kenneth M. Duberstein, who, as deputy chief of staff and then chief of staff, helped pull Reagan up from the depths of the Iran-Contra scandal. “He brought discipline to the process of governing in the White House. He has been the First Adult.”

Bowles had the difficult job of keeping the White House staff on track in the first stunning days when details of the Lewinsky matter became known with Clinton’s testimony before the grand jury.

On Aug. 17, several hours before Clinton testified, Bowles was said to have acknowledged the distractions of the scandal--something on which he had tried to not let his staff dwell since the story broke seven months earlier.

But he also was said to have told his colleagues on the White House senior staff: “There isn’t a person in this room who may not have said something or done something they’d like to take back.”

With that in mind, he added: “It’s easy to be there for someone when they’re up, but it’s the good ones who are there when you’re down.”

The greatest impact that Bowles had at the White House may have been his imposition of business-like discipline on the notoriously disorganized Clinton staff. Most days, he even scheduled time for the president to read or contemplate long-range issues.