White House deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes showed up in the Oval Office one day last month wearing a bright orange sport coat. Ickes is notorious for his defiantly unstylish wardrobe, with its ill-fitting suits, ankle-length pants and belt buckle worn above the left hip. “Harold,” said President Clinton, “you look more like a Southern tobacco dealer than a New York corporate lawyer.” Ickes, the irascible son of FDR’s legendary Interior secretary, doesn’t mind the razzing he gets about his clothes, the Skippy peanut butter and Ritz crackers he keeps in his West Wing office for meals or the way he clumsily switches between red and black pens while taking notes during meetings (red for urgent matters, black for routine). But no one in the White House laughs about the seriousness of his mission over the next 17 months: getting Bill Clinton re-elected.
Clinton will name other major 1996 players–including a campaign chairman and manager–later this year. But Ickes, who has the mind of a litigator, the mouth of a Teamster and the finesse of a nightclub bouncer, will remain a pivotal figure. He is quietly putting the White House on a political footing–scrutinizing the electoral map for a winning combination of states, calling in party operatives from battlegrounds like Ohio and California for strategy sessions and scouting regional consulting talent. Any Democrat contemplating a challenge to Clinton’s renomination will also have to contend with Ickes’s mastery of party rules and ballot access. “Harold Ickes puts points on the board,” says White House aide Rahm Emanuel. “Is it graceful? Is it street ball? It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day he puts the ball through the hoop.”
Liberal losers: That depends on how you keep score. Ickes has worked for a long list of liberal Democratic losers from Eugene McCarthy to Mo Udall to Jesse Jackson. Those credentials make Clinton’s centrist supporters nervous-especially as the president struggles to navigate a “third way” between the orthodoxies of left and right. Ickes’s fingerprints are also visible on some of the administration’s biggest political disasters. Assigned to control damage from the Whitewater affair last year, Ickes only added to it. He provoked charges of political interference when he and Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos called Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Alt-man to complain about the appointment of a former Republican prosecutor hired to conduct an early probe. As political manager of the administration’s health-care-reform package, Ickes alienated key lawmakers with a brash and dismissive attitude. In last fall’s midterm elections, it was Ickes who engineered the White House strategy of attacking trickle-down Reaganomics, a classic Democratic theme that failed miserably this time. While Ickes doesn’t deserve sole blame for any of these misadventures, some administration insiders wonder if he’s up to another major assignment. “He gets a lot of praise and accolades, but look at his record: he went zero for three,” said one Clinton adviser.
Yet despite his missteps, there are few people in Washington the Clintons trust more than Harold Ickes. By all accounts, they are convinced that he has no agenda other than theirs. “If there’s a Bobby Kennedy in the Clinton White House, someone with a bottom-line interest in the president and his political standing, it would be Harold,” says a White House colleague. The Clintons also appreciate Ickes’s ability to impose order-and it may be needed. Presidential re-election campaigns are often organizational nightmares, plagued by turf fights between the White House, the national party and the campaign staff. Ickes can be a steely enforcer. At a senior staff meeting last year, former chief of staff Mack McLarty scolded aides for chronic press leaks. “I am tired of this,” said the courtly McLarty. Then Ickes spoke up: “I have one thing to say to whoever is doing this: ‘Shut the f– up’.”
Ickes is also one of the administration’s strongest links to traditional party groups (African-Americans, unions, women) that must be rallied in 1996. While Clinton and Vice President Al Gore tack to the center, as they must to win re-election, Ickes will be instrumental in reaching out to the left–especially to Jackson, who has hinted about running an independent candidacy. That could be disastrous for the president. Ickes “is the only white man Jesse Jackson trusts,” says one senior aide.
Savage beating: Ickes’s friendship with Clinton stretches back to the antiwar movement of the early 1970s. Clinton was a glad-handing student politician hovering on the fringes of protest; Ickes was a labor lawyer and bloodied veteran of the civil-rights struggle who’d lost a kidney after a savage beating several years earlier while registering voters in Louisiana. They remained close enough that Clinton asked him to run his crucial New York primary campaign and the uncharacteristically harmonious Democratic convention. On the morning after his nomination, Clinton called Ickes the “one person without whom I might not be here.” Clinton wanted Ickes as his deputy chief of staff from the outset, but the appointment unraveled when federal investigators began looking into Ickes’s firm’s representation of a New York restaurant-workers union with ties to organized crime. No charges were ever brought.
When Ickes finally arrived at the White House in early 1994, liberals hoped he would pull the president to the left. In policy debates, he’s tried, but not always pre-varied. He recently argued, unsuccessfully, against giving law enforcement too many new powers in the antiterrorism bill Clinton sent to Congress. Nonetheless, Ickes believes Clinton is a bona fide progressive in the tradition of his New Dealer father–or at least as progressive as the times will allow. “That’s one of the problems with so-called liberal Democrats,” he says. “They are continually looking for perfection. There is no perfection.”
Ickes’s most significant role in the White House, it turns out, is not as ideologue but as manager. In an administration that former Treasury secretary Lloyd Bentsen called the “meetingest” he’d ever seen, he tries to push business along in a brusque, no-nonsense style. “There’s no foreplay with Harold,” says one lieutenant. One recent White House job candidate sent to Ickes’s office for an interview recently got the treatment. Ickes arrived late and said, “Besides being good-looking and having a nice suit, what do I need to know about you?” He is famous for maniacal work hours–at his desk by 6 a.m., often remaining until after 11 p.m.–and a volcanic temper. (In 1973, when an argument with a campaign colleague turned into a scuffle, Ickes bit the leg of another staffer who tried to intervene.) Ickes says he’s mellowed, but an aura of menace remains. One old campaign colleague says Ickes is the only person she knows who can string together grammatical sentences using nothing but obscenities.
One friend says Ickes’s demeanor stems in part from simple insecurity. Before taking the White House job, he called her and asked, “Can I do it?” And his famous father, who was 65 when Ickes was born, casts a long shadow. “The Old Curmudgeon” administered the massive public-works projects of the Depression era and cleared the way for black contralto Marian Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial after she was barred from Constitution Hall. Ickes remembers driving across the country after his father’s death, feeling unworthy and embarrassed when people recognized his name. But at 55, it’s no longer a problem. When he came to the White House, one of his first acts was a trek to Interior, where he reclaimed his dad’s old desk. Now, Harold Ickes would like to establish another link to that glorious Democratic past–by helping Bill Clinton become his party’s first president since FDR to win re-election.
