• U.S.

Clinton’s People: Bruce Lindsey

7 minute read
Priscilla Painton/Little Rock

Little Rock, Arkansas, these days is a sump of brazen supplication. Members of Bill Clinton’s transition staff report that a lawyer from Wyoming called to say he should be made a federal judge; a businessman from Arkansas wrote a five-page letter explaining why he should be named ambassador to the Court of St. James’s; and people with the remotest connection to the President-elect say they have not paid for a lunch or dinner in weeks. But there is one man who is so close to power that he does not need to ask for any. He is Bruce Lindsey, a 44-year-old lawyer from Little Rock who is Clinton’s closest friend and most trusted adviser, the first to see him in the morning and the last to see him at night, the only person in Clinton’s entourage to sit in on all the meetings.

Lindsey’s virtue is that he understands the centripetal nature of power — that to get to the core of it, you have to almost disappear. Lindsey is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. “He’s like oxygen,” says Clinton strategist Paul Begala. “You can’t see him, and you can’t live without him.” After years of his being at Clinton’s side — Lindsey was the presidential candidate’s first traveling companion when the two trekked anonymously through airports, carrying their own bags — there is practically nothing in print about him. He shuns interviews and does not do the morning shows, and it wasn’t until the last six weeks of the campaign that he left his seat next to Clinton to walk to the back of the plane and converse with reporters. Even then, he didn’t say much. “We believe we have a legitimate shot in these states” was a typically innocuous Lindseyism.

Unlike his late father Robert, a patrician Little Rock lawyer with a lanky frame, Lindsey is short (he looks like a miniature version of British Prime Minister John Major) and so unassuming that even journalists in Little Rock misunderstood his role. “I thought for a long time that he was just Clinton’s gofer, but it’s obvious he’s much more than that,” says John Brummett, political editor at the Arkansas Times. In fact, Lindsey is the outside, practical manifestation of Clinton’s political anima, a campaign unto himself: he took the competing opinions of the staff to Clinton to extract decisions from him, and then he applied his own prosecutorial mind to the candidate to make sure that decision was the best one. He reads everything and remembers what everyone said and when they said it. “He’s the tape recorder running when the deal is being cut,” says an aide. On the campaign plane, he was known as “the Enforcer” for gently policing the quotes from staff members in the morning papers. When Begala once referred to President Bush’s rear end (“If he wants to debate, he can get his butt up to Michigan”), it was Lindsey who told him to get out of macho overdrive.

Lindsey is also the official worrier, often pacing in the back of the room, not easily contented. Last week it was he who fretted to associates that the vacuum created by the Governor’s lack of activity in the early days of the transition had created a number of not fully favorable stories. “Bruce isn’t satisfied if the Governor just hits the ball out of the park,” George Stephanopoulos, the campaign’s communications director, is fond of saying. “That ball has to go out of the park, over the river and through an apartment window.”

Lindsey is both the genie and the detail man. The candidate and the campaign counted on him to divine when Clinton could be approached with bad news, and they also counted on him to be the lawyer’s eye that would catch a mistake fatal to his client. He pored over the daily 100-page briefing book on the plane, pointing out when a local politician was erroneously omitted from the list of introductions or when a history of, say, Tyler, Texas, failed to mention a recent racial incident there. When just before midnight on July 8 it came time for Clinton to pick up the phone and tell Senator Al Gore that he was the choice for Vice President, only Lindsey was in the room, and he knew what was missing — a camera. He made Clinton wait while he rummaged around the Governor’s mansion to find one, an Instamatic, and then he took the historic shot. He prodded the campaign headquarters every day into producing a reasonable schedule, and he prodded the candidate every day into moving along.

Above all, Lindsey commands respect because he knows his limitations. He declined to be the campaign manager, choosing for himself the meaningless designation of campaign director, because he knew he was not a pro. He put pressure on Clinton to make two of his early and best hires — Stephanopoulos as the communications chief and Bruce Reed as the on-the-road issues director. Then he let them, and the campaign staff hired later, do their jobs. “He’s the guy who doesn’t have to say something at every meeting and won’t unless things are going the wrong way,” says Reed. Lindsey knows he is a candidate’s ultimate noncandidate. Says his wife Bev, a longtime Democratic activist: “Bruce takes facts, absorbs facts and spits out facts. Bill Clinton takes facts and dreams with them.”

Lindsey’s sense of security comes from his family’s Midwestern Presbyterianism. “Presbyterians have a sense of predestination, and that’s what makes Bruce easy about who he is,” says Mack McLarty, the chairman of Arkla, a natural-gas company, and a close friend of Lindsey’s and Clinton’s. Presbyterians, especially wealthy ones, also impart a sense of noblesse oblige: young Lindsey got that, but with a rebellious twist. His father, who moved from St. Louis, Missouri, to Little Rock to become a founding member of a prestigious law firm, was a moderate Republican with a white-shoe lawyer’s distaste for politics. Lindsey was barely 18 when, on leave from a summer job in a bicycle factory, he got involved in the gubernatorial campaign of liberal Congressman Brooks Hayes and got the bug. He went off that fall to Southwestern at Memphis, a small liberal arts college now known as Rhodes, to , study history and became so active in the civil rights movement that he was at the Memphis rally on the night Martin Luther King delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech on the eve of his assassination.

But significantly, Lindsey’s protest was within the Establishment: he fought to make his fraternity pledge a black friend (and resigned as a member when the national organization balked), and he fought to drop some curriculum requirements, arguing that academic standards in those courses were so low that students were not learning anything. In the summer of 1968 he worked in Senator J. William Fulbright’s office in Washington, where he met Clinton and a group of other bright young anti-Vietnam War idealists, and he returned to a job there upon graduating in 1971. He earned a law degree in 2 1/2 years at Georgetown University so he could return to Little Rock in time to help elect David Pryor Governor.

In the past 20 years in Arkansas, Lindsey has managed to be counselor to the state’s three most prominent — and sometimes rival — political egos: Clinton, Senator Pryor and Senator Dale Bumpers. He is their “conscience,” they say, and their walking institutional memory. “Bill looks up and sees Bruce in the room and feels rooted,” says Clinton’s longtime friend Carolyn Staley. That is largely because the President-elect knows that Lindsey will never change: that he will always wear khaki pants and a navy blazer, that he will always have the latest political biography on his shelf, that he can sing along to Heartbreak Hotel and play hearts with Clinton until the candidate comes down from his political high and goes to sleep, and that he won’t take himself too seriously. “You know what the worst thing about winning is?” Lindsey recently asked a friend. “You have to shave on Saturday.”

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