Ickes Could Be A Tough Witness

He's scheduled to testify before Senate panel on Tuesday

WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, Oct. 6) -- After former Clinton staffer and fund-raiser Harold Ickes testified at a Whitewater grand jury, he and his attorney playfully pretended to flee in panic from the waiting press.

"Ahhhhh!" Ickes screamed. "Where's your driver when you need him?"

In fact, Ickes is a tough guy -- a former cowboy. Senators will find out just how tough when he testifies Tuesday before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, which is looking at campaign fund-raising abuses.

"Harold, of course, is a person who doesn't express himself as clearly as you might like," Sen. Christopher Dodd, the former Democratic National Committee co-chair told one Democratic gathering. "He's sort of vague from time to time about how he feels about things. There's a shyness to him in private meetings when it comes to telling you exactly what he thinks of you, your idea and your plans."

Dodd was kidding, of course. Ickes' screaming fits, his use of the "f-word" and all the other words, are legendary.

He brought the 1980 Democratic convention to a standstill over platform issues even though his candidate, Edward Kennedy, had already lost. He talked about giving Jesse Jackson's delegates whistles in 1988, and won some rules concessions.

He's a tough witness. During the Whitewater hearings on Capitol Hill, a lawyer read an excerpt from one person's diary that said Hillary Clinton didn't want counsel "poking into 20 years of public life in Arkansas."

Replied Ickes: "This is coming from Mr. Altman's diary. I don't remember it, but I will say to you that I wouldn't want anybody poking around in 20 years of my life."

He had hoped to stay on

He campaigned for Clinton in 1992 and came to Washington in 1994 after a stint as a New York labor lawyer. He hoped to stay on in a second term.

"If asked, I would be greatly honored to stay on," he told CNN's Larry King.

His father, after all, had been interior secretary for Franklin Roosevelt.

"He had more stamina than I will ever have. He came in with Roosevelt in 1932 and served two years under Harry Truman and they had a falling out, and my father, I think, quit about two minutes before Harry Truman fired him," Ickes said.

The son's timing wasn't that good. New White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles demanded Ickes' ouster. Clinton said yes and Ickes read about it in the Wall Street Journal. He later turned over thousands of documents to congressional investigators, but was never gabby about his dealings with the president.

"If you think for one minute, while I'm standing here with all these guys looking at me and recording all this, that I'm going to tell you what I said to the president, I'm not going to do that," he told one reporter.

FDR's Ickes was 65 when Clinton's Ickes was born and died when his son was 12. But they shared a passion for civil rights.

The father helped Marian Anderson sing at the Lincoln Memorial. The son was a civil-rights volunteer in Louisiana and lost a kidney after local whites beat and kicked him.

And he once explained his devotion to Clinton -- not the kind of traditional liberal he had backed before -- by saying, "If there is a true North to Bill Clinton, it's race. I never had a doubt in my mind where he stood on this issue."

In Other News:

Monday Oct. 6, 1997

• Clinton: Delayed Release Of Tapes Was Accidental
• The Coffee Tapes
• Ickes Could Be A Tough Witness
• Clinton Uses Line-Item Veto On Military Projects
• Clinton Says Climate Change Risk Is Real
• Supreme Court Hears Credit Union Case