The Man with the President's Ear

By Maureen Dowd

After a rocky start, Clark takes charge in the White House

Charting the balance of power in the Administration requires sensitivity to the slightest tremor and the subtlest nuance. So when two chairs in the waiting room of Bill Clark's basement White House office were removed, Administration watchers seized upon this seemingly unimportant event as another sign of the National Security Adviser's growing influence. "The place was becoming the Grand Central Station of the West Wing," an aide explains. "Everybody was realizing that it's worth your time to drop by and see Uncle Bill." Now plants sit where chairs once did, politely discouraging people who would wait.

The ascendancy of William Patrick Clark in Washington has been swift and, to many, unsettling. The Judge, as he is called, still wears cowboy boots with his three-piece suits and acts like a country lawyer. But this son of a hardscrabble California rancher has come a long way since his 1981 Senate confirmation hearings for Deputy Secretary of State, when his embarrassing ignorance of foreign affairs (he could not define detente or Third World) made him the butt of jokes around the globe.

Few imagined then that Clark, who served as chief of staff when Ronald Reagan was Governor of California, would become a key foreign policy adviser. He lacked training for such a role: he dropped out of two colleges and law school and had no academic or professional foreign policy expertise.

But the tall, soft-spoken Clark, whose open face, ruddy cheeks and piercing brown eyes make him look like a 1940s-style Hollywood version of the Irish priest he considered becoming, has a history of overcoming handicaps and surprising people who underestimate him. Indeed, his management ability, infighting skills and close ties to Reagan have made him, in the judgment of many, the second most powerful man in the White House. Clark has encouraged the President to follow his raw, conservative instincts rather than the more pragmatic and politically savvy agendas suggested by White House Chief of Staff James Baker. This uncritical "let Reagan be Reagan" approach has resulted in a harder line and some political embarrassments.

In contrast to his flashy and intellectually potent predecessors, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Clark regards his role as that of an expediter of policy rather than an implementer. He says he relies on instinct and consensus in a job Kissinger called "the most exciting and dangerous in Government." Clark has won praise for his ability to prod a slow-moving bureaucracy and get decisions on track. Impatient and eager to please his boss with quick results, Clark sometimes acts without fully weighing the consequences, as he did when he allowed the fleet to set out for Central America.

The Judge is not a conceptual thinker. When he discusses the importance of Central America, it is not in geopolitical terms. The danger, he says, is that a Communist takeover would send a flood of refugees over the Southern border that would cost the U.S. millions of dollars. Conservative Columnist William Safire calls Clark "living proof that still waters can run shallow."

Despite such criticism, Clark, 51, has grown increasingly self-confident. When he went to Washington 2 1/2 years ago as Alexander Haig's deputy, Clark did not even pretend to be well informed on foreign affairs. "I had to start pretty much from ground zero and educate myself on subjects I'd never thought about before," he said. He was at his desk before 7 a.m. six and sometimes seven days a week, working his way through endless stacks of paper and earning the respect of his State Department colleagues. He played his role modestly and effectively, smoothing relations between the mercurial Secretary of State and the White House.

After Clark replaced the discredited Richard Allen as National Security Adviser in January 1982, he continued to play mediator, coordinating advice from the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA and his National Security Council staff. At first he was reticent about pushing his positions or even revealing them. He presented himself as "an honest broker of ideas" and, with gentle self-mockery, said he had learned "to recognize an issue when I see it." He would talk to reporters only off the record and "on background" and avoided lobbying on Capitol Hill. But as he has zealously pursued his mission of getting Reagan more directly engaged in foreign policy and national security debates, Clark has become more active in influencing decisions.

Although he still sidesteps discussions of global strategy, he has become knowledgeable enough to start taking the lead in briefing the President on national security affairs. And last week he made a rare, albeit unsuccessful, appearance on Capitol Hill to help Secretary of State George Shultz give a briefing on the Administration's Central America policy. "Bill is taking a certain amount of pleasure in his role now," said one Administration official. "He feels that he has come into his own."

Clark and his wife Joan enjoy Washington's social whirl, but often prefer evenings of classical music, especially Mozart, at the Kennedy Center. They live in a small apartment in Foggy Bottom that Bill Clark finds confining because there is no open air for his beloved barbecue grill. The apartment is modestly furnished, dominated by a contemporary wall tapestry of St. Francis of Assisi and pictures of their five children, ages 20 to 27. The couple are devout Roman Catholics who attend church regularly and prefer Latin Mass.

Joan Clark is a petite woman who has said she is content with being a 19th century wife to a workaholic husband. When they attend formal dinners, Clark looks uncomfortable in his black tie and slightly dazzled by the famous personalities eager to engage him in small talk. He speaks slowly and has a deliberate gait, and somehow seems out of place in fast-talking Washington. His features often convey puzzled concentration, and he likes to foster the idea that he yearns to return to raise Herefords and barley on his 888-acre ranch in San Luis Obispo County, Calif, which is being run by his three oldest sons. Says one friend: "The aw-shucks style is a little bit of a put-on."

An apolitical man, Clark is clearly driven more by his devotion to the President than by personal ambition. The men are strikingly similar in temperament and outlook. They are amiable California ranchers who started out poor and Democratic and are more comfortable on horseback than in desk chairs.

Clark's White House office is filled with Western props. There is a large photo of three horsemen, taken in 1967 when Clark was Reagan's chief of staff in Sacramento. The riders are Reagan, Clark and Clark's father William, formerly a rancher and the police chief of Oxnard, Calif. In the corner, Clark's gray stetson dangles from a hat rack. Near by, encased in glass, rest the Colt .44 revolver and marshal's badge that belonged to his grandfather Robert Emmet Clark, once the sheriff of Ventura County and a U.S. marshal.

Bill revered his grandfather, a colorful figure of local renown who mingled with some of Hollywood's top stars. Western Hero Tom Mix gave young Bill a cowboy hat, and at a dinner given by his grandfather, Bill and Shirley Temple were made honorary marshals. Despite this childhood exposure to movie stars, Clark never saw a Reagan film until last year, when the President finally showed him Knute Rockne--All American in the White House screening room.

His parents spoke Spanish, and as a youngster he says he was "bothered by prejudice against those with slightly darker skins and Spanish accents." That same prejudice, he says, led to neglect of Central America politically, and now "we have to play catch-up ball."

Young Bill was the class valedictorian and a standout athlete at Villanova Preparatory School in Ojai, Calif. He entered Stanford University in 1949 but found it "disagreeable." After a difficult year, he dropped out and enrolled in an upstate New York Augustinian seminary. Allowed only five hours of sleep a night and two hours of conversation in the afternoon, Clark decided the priesthood was not his calling. He tried to return to Stanford, but as he recalls, "the dean was good enough to tell me that I should consider some other line of activity."

He enrolled in the University of Santa Clara. Although he never graduated, his grades were good enough to get him into Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. But after a year there, he was drafted. He served as a counterintelligence agent in Germany, where he met his wife, Joan Brauner, a Czech refugee working for the U.S. Army.

The couple returned to the U.S. in 1955 and started a family. By day Clark worked as an insurance adjuster. At night he resumed his studies at Loyola, but his grades were so lackluster that the dean urged him to go full time or quit. Clark left Loyola without graduating and studied for the bar exam on his own. On the second try, he passed. He went home to Oxnard, "opened up my own firm and waited for the phone to ring." It did, and Clark became quite successful as an attorney. He was also active in the family ranching business.

Clark, who had come from a family of staunch Democrats, became disillusioned with the party when Edmund G. ("Pat") Brown was Governor of California in the late 1950s and early '60s. His mother, Bernice Clark, once remarked, "He moved so far to the right, we can't even discuss politics." At about the same time, Reagan made his switch from Democrat to Republican.

The two newly minted conservatives met at a fund raiser 17 years ago, during Reagan's first gubernatorial campaign. Clark was so impressed that he took his first plunge into politics and became Reagan's campaign chairman for Ventura County. Reagan was equally taken with the amiable Clark and made him chief of his Sacramento staff early in his first term. Clark's staff included Edwin Meese III and Michael Deaver. To lighten the paper flow into the Governor's office, Clark developed the famous "mini-memo" system of single-page briefings, which is still in use at the White House. When aides groused that many ideas were too complex to be boiled down to a one-page memo, Clark replied, "If you can't get it on one page, you are unable to understand your problem."

In 1969, after he had promised to "take the politics" out of judicial appointments, Reagan named Clark a superior court judge in San Luis Obispo County without even consulting the local judicial committee. Reagan subsequently nominated him to the court of appeals and in 1972 to the prestigious state supreme court. Clark was an extremely conservative jurist, competent if not distinguished. Then, as now, he was willing to acknowledge his limitations and depend heavily on a good research staff.

In a new book about Rose Bird, Clark's controversial colleague on the state supreme court, Journalist Betty Medsger charges, among other things, that Clark depended on his staff so heavily that he never did original work on his opinions during his two years on the court of appeals and during his first year on the supreme court. She also claims that Clark, in an unethical effort to discredit Bird, was the anonymous source for a Los Angeles Times report on Election Day in 1978 that Candidate Bird and fellow Justice Mathew Tobriner were deliberately delaying release of a controversial decision about the state's so-called use-a-gun-go-to-jail law until after the voting. (Bird won the election anyway.) Clark later testified before a commission on judicial performance that he believed the decision was ready "well in advance of November," but he was unable to offer any proof. Clark and a number of respected California jurists fiercely dispute Medsger's allegations.

After Reagan was elected President, Clark was sounded out about senior posts in the new Administration. When Reagan pressed him to take the No. 2 job at the State Department to help smooth rocky relations between Haig and the White House staff, Clark came to Washington. His confirmation hearing was a debacle. As background in foreign affairs he listed his work as a young lawyer for a Salzburg ski-binding company, his wife's Czech origins and the education of his children in Germany. At one point, when Democratic Senator John Glenn asked for his views on official recognition of Taiwan, the Judge answered, "I think it could be very dangerous for me to have a personal opinion in this."

He was reluctantly approved, the biggest point in his favor being his access to the President. Clark and Haig hit it off, and Clark was responsible on several occasions for saving the high-strung Haig's job. He confined himself to making things run smoothly, playing the quintessential bureaucrat. When Richard Allen was removed as head of the NSC after a scandal concerning gifts from Japanese, Clark was moved into the post.

While Clark has made the NSC machinery work more smoothly--among other things, he reorganized the council's 40 professionals largely according to geographic specialties to make for a better mesh with the State Department--his lack of expertise has produced a number of policy fiascoes. It was Clark who was responsible for the misguided embargoes against West European suppliers of parts for the Soviets' natural gas pipeline. Clark urged Reagan to stick to an unrealistically hard line in defending the size of this year's defense budget increase. He also sponsored Kenneth Adelman to be Eugene Rostow's successor as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, despite Adelman's unfamiliarity with arms control issues. Last spring Clark encouraged Reagan to go ahead with his curious star wars missile-defense speech despite the cautions of Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Shultz. "It's the first time in my life," says one colleague and ally about Clark's style, "where intelligence and the power of your logic are not what it's about in arguing policy. Trust does it."

Clark's loyalties are steadfast only to Reagan. They seem to shift according to circumstance when other Administration officials are involved. For instance, after he moved to the NSC, Clark helped engineer the ouster of his former boss, Haig. In encouraging the President to vent his anger about the nuclear freeze movement and El Salvador, Clark prevailed over James Baker and his aides, whom Clark dismisses privately as "political types" and "civilians." In January, Clark interceded against a White House reorganization that would have diminished Meese's role. That intervention strained his relations with his old friend Deaver, who devised the plan, but blunted the attempt of Clark's rivals, "the civilians," to grab more power. The tension thickened in February, when Clark tried unsuccessfully to oust Press Spokesman David Gergen against Baker's wishes. Though Clark failed in that effort, his position in the White House is even stronger in the wake of the debate briefing book flap, which reflected unfavorably on Baker and Gergen.

Clark's obsession with secrecy and press leaks has created political difficulties for the White House. Last spring, when the Administration was desperately trying to save the MX program, Clark tried to go ahead, on his own, with the appointment of Robert Dornan, a right-wing, very hawkish former Congressman from California, to a middling position in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. This heavyhanded move undercut the Administration's campaign to project a more conciliatory image on arms control negotiations. Clark dropped the idea when Congress balked.

Clark is popular among subordinates, and morale at the NSC, with its enhanced access to the President, is higher than it has been in years. But some Congressmen have told Clark they are worried about the void created by the departure of his talented deputy, Robert McFarlane, to become the new Middle East envoy. The Judge has a natural antipathy toward the "striped pants" bureaucrats at State who move too slowly for his taste. For his part, Shultz is sometimes frustrated by Clark's lack of knowledge and his headstrong approach to diplomacy.

With Shultz receding in influence, Clark will probably be forced into a more public role, especially when it comes time to explain Administration positions on Capitol Hill. Congressional Democrats--and a few of Clark's rivals within the Administration--relish the prospect, believing that such appearances will lay bare his shaky grasp of foreign policy. Says one detractor: "I think he'll eventually hang himself." But for the moment, friend and foe alike may find it worthwhile to drop by and see Uncle Bill.

--By Maureen Dowd.

Reported by Laurence I. Barrett and Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, Gregory H. Wierzynski This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.