At White House, ‘Parallel Universes’

The catch phrase at the White House these days is “the parallel universes.” It refers to the science-fiction concept of two worlds existing side by side but never intersecting.

Building a wall of sorts between White House policy officials and the president’s legal defense team has allowed the work of the presidency to continue. Appointments get made. Policy is formulated. A budget is prepared. And the State of the Union speech, which President Clinton is to deliver Tuesday, gets written, rewritten and written again. It is now so long it must be cut in half to meet the one-hour goal.

But the instinct to fence off the president’s impeachment troubles from the daily work of his presidency is making for some unexpected moments.

In a practice that has taken place in one form or another for decades at the White House, the senior staff gathers each morning around a long, polished table in the Roosevelt Room. Each office reports its business of the day. Attendance is not optional.

On Friday, as the day before when the president’s Senate trial began in earnest, Charles F.C. Ruff, the White House counsel, ignored the ritual. His place at the table was vacant.

Lawyers Stop Going to Meetings

“The lawyers don’t even come to the meetings anymore,” White House Chief of Staff John Podesta observed--proof, he pointed out, that the White House staff had completed its division into parallel universes. One, peopled by the lawyers, is at work trying to keep the president in office. The other, encompassing nearly everyone else, is trying to keep the office of the president at work.

As portrayed by his staff, the president operates largely apart from the legal team, receiving reports on its work and approving the legal memorandums and strategy papers intended to prevent him from being the first president convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Typical of that approach, he was given a 10- to 15-minute briefing by his lawyers Thursday evening, said White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart. That was after 8 p.m.--after he had spent three to four hours working on the State of the Union speech, including at least an hour alone in the Oval Office. He also met into the evening with senior economic advisors about efforts to revamp the Social Security system.

Such division of his time fits with the description of Clinton as a chief executive long accustomed to putting competing demands on his time into separate compartments.

But the responsibilities of four of the most senior White House aides--Podesta, Deputy Chief of Staff Steve Richetti, senior presidential advisor Paul Begala and presidential counselor Doug Sosnik--require that they mind the political problems Clinton faces, the legal elements, and the policy initiatives of his approaching seventh year in office. For them, compartmentalization is a luxury available to the president alone.

The four have said repeatedly that 95% of the overall White House staff--the people monitoring developments in Africa for the National Security Council, those working on criminal justice programs on the domestic policy staff, those investigating appointments for little-noticed commissions--has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with his defense against articles of impeachment.

Still, staff members are torn between tracking the House prosecutors’ presentations in the Senate and the nitty-gritty of their jobs.

One presidential assistant had to turn aside from the magnetic pull of watching the impeachment proceedings on television to take a telephone call from Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.). Rangel wanted to find out what the White House could do to fend off George Steinbrenner’s flirtation with moving the New York Yankees out of the Bronx.

Clinton flew to New York Friday, sitting through nearly an hour of introductions by nine speakers so gushing in their praise that Clinton said they sounded as though they were addressing his funeral. “I don’t think we’re there yet,” he said.

The president spoke for almost a half hour at a forum sponsored by the Rev. Jesse Jackson on government and Wall Street support for downtrodden urban and rural areas.

Speaking in a restaurant atop the World Trade Center, its windows shuttered as the wind of a winter storm raged outside, Clinton said that the fiscal 2000 budget he will present in two weeks will propose a program of tax credits and loan guarantees intended to stimulate $15 billion in private investment in targeted areas.

Scandal Details Can’t Be Avoided

Alternately employing passion and humor as he called for bipartisan support for communities left behind in the nation’s economic growth, he said: “I’d be glad to call it the Herbert Hoover-Warren Harding-Calvin Coolidge Economic Development Act. I’d do anything to pass it.”

Such presidential days notwithstanding, in which not a nod of public recognition is given to the drama surrounding the president, is it possible to fence off the messy details of the scandal from the work, and the workers, of the presidency? Of course not, one senior presidential assistant acknowledged.

“One-hundred percent of the staff reads the same newspapers as the rest of the country,” he said. But they can proceed with their work, at least to a large degree, because “this thing has been going on for so long.”

“You get used to it,” he said. Then he corrected himself. “No, you never get used to it. But we don’t know any different. We just keep pushing ahead.”

The attempt to divide the practical and political on one side and the legal on the other reflects a lesson of that previous great crisis of the presidency, the Watergate scandal.

As his administration began to crumble, Richard Nixon said others might “wallow” in Watergate but he would not. He would carry on the nation’s business. But as the scandal enveloped his White House, little could be accomplished. He eventually took to grueling foreign travel, where leaders could be counted on to turn out adoring crowds and, back in the White House, to talking to pictures on the wall, according to authors Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.