Ruff Brings Broad Legal Background to Defense

In White House Counsel Charles F.C. Ruff, President Clinton has one of the capital’s most respected lawyers, a man with two decades of experience at the highest levels of government as both a prosecutor and a white-collar defense attorney.

Ruff also is a tight-lipped defender who, according to colleagues, insists on absolute secrecy and total control over any legal issue in which he is involved.

He angered Mike McCurry, then White House press secretary, and other presidential advisors in July by failing to tell them--at a time when they were taking the president’s case to the public--that Clinton had received a formal subpoena to testify before federal grand jurors. Some critics believe that he has also resorted to too many legal technicalities in defending the president.

But as the fifth and longest-serving of Clinton’s White House counsels, Ruff, 59, enjoys the president’s full confidence, associates said. He is one of the few presidential aides with a firm grasp of all the facts and legal developments surrounding the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal.

Ruff, in fact, is forthright about his belief that confidences should not be shared beyond the tight circle of lawyers with a similar need to know. “A less-rather-than-more approach,” he has called it--perhaps an inadvertent play on the “more rather than less” openness promised by Clinton when the Lewinsky allegations first surfaced a year ago.

Among the few ornaments in his spacious second-floor office is a souvenir brought back from Africa by his deputy counsel, Cheryl Mills, who is another prominent member of the president’s defense team. It is a trio of carved monkeys in a pose of “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

Ruff seldom talks about a less pleasant memento from another trip to Africa: his physical disability. It resulted from a trip to Liberia in the 1960s to teach law under a Ford Foundation grant after he had graduated from Swarthmore College and Columbia University Law School.

He awoke one morning with a flu-like illness and could not move his legs. He has used a wheelchair ever since. The mysterious disease has never been identified.

Joining the Justice Department soon afterward, Ruff excelled in white-collar criminal prosecutions and was appointed as Watergate special prosecutor to wrap up affairs after the 1974 resignation of President Nixon.

Ruff, who is married and the father of two grown daughters, later served as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

If he felt comfortable in the Senate on Tuesday, it may have been because he once defended, as a private lawyer, both Sen. Charles S. Robb (D-Va.) and former Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) in the early 1990s.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Profile: Charles F.C. Ruff

Background on the White House counsel who began President Clinton’s defense Tuesday:

Age: 59

Personal: Married, two grown daughters. Born in Cleveland, reared in New York. Confined to a wheelchair since being stricken with a polio-like virus while teaching law at the University of Liberia in the 1960s.

Education: Bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in Pennsylavania; law degree from Columbia University in New York.

Background: Worked in the Justice Department’s organized crime section, then joined Watergate prosecution team and served as fourth and final special prosecutor for the scandal. In 1981, began the prosecution of John W. Hinckley Jr. for the attempted assassination of President Reagan. In 1982, joined Washington’s lucrative Covington & Burling law firm. In 1995, gave up private practice to accept $82,000-a-year post heading Washington Mayor Marion Barry’s legal office. Named White House counsel in 1997.