Not a Golfing Buddy

By Jay Branegan/Washington

When Erskine Bowles first arrived at the White House as deputy chief of staff, he had a problem with one of his subordinates. Actually, the problem was that John Podesta refused to be his subordinate, even though the President had ordered it. "John's the kind of guy--you've got to earn his respect," says Bowles, laughing. "He damn well wasn't going to give it to me."

Not a particularly good start. But when the two were thrown together to salvage the doomed nomination of Henry Foster for Surgeon General ("It was pretty well screwed up by then," Bowles says), Bowles noticed something about the prickly, rail-thin Podesta. "Every time this guy said something, it was acerbic, but it was always on target," Bowles told TIME. Both of them eventually left the White House to do other work, and both returned--but this time Bowles had recruited Podesta back to be his deputy. And when Bowles was ready to leave as chief of staff, he was the one lobbying hardest for Podesta to replace him.

Podesta is tightly coiled. He's moody. When word spreads around the White House that he's in one of his frequent foul humors, people like to say "Skippy" (as in evil twin) is in that day. He's allergic to the spotlight in a city where most people crave it. "I'm into the cult of nonpersonality," he once told the Washington Post, via a spokeswoman. His brother Tony, an outside adviser to Vice President Al Gore, says his brother's "real ambition is to open up a T-shirt store in Maui." All these traits would seem to make Podesta an odd choice for a job that consists of keeping peace in the brawling White House and selling its products to the outside world. Until now, Podesta rarely showed up on Washington's two big power circuits: on TV or at cocktail parties. He doesn't have cable TV in his home, and the show he worships is The X-Files.

But virtually everyone agrees that Podesta, 49, possesses a rare skill at scandal management. He is a lawyer with a fine ear for how things will play politically, which gives him an entree with the two main factions (the legal team and the spinners) that have riven the White House since the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. The lawyer in him can gather the facts; the political hand knows how to spin them.

His original post at the White House was staff secretary, a job that involves managing the flow of paperwork leading to the President, thus forcing decisions and conferring enormous power. He was hired for his command of policy. Says brother Tony: "John is the only person in Washington who knows everything there is to know about encryption and price supports, dairy farming and the FBI." But the peculiar nature of the Clinton presidency quickly demanded another type of talent, something not mentioned in a typical job description. Podesta's own description of it was "Secretary of S___." First, there was the travel-office fiasco, in which he wrote a postmortem report that put an unwelcome focus on Hillary's role (and by some accounts, put him on her bad side for a while). He later made amends when he defended the First Lady on Whitewater and on her controversial investment in cattle futures. She is now a big fan.

Podesta left the White House in 1995, in part, people say, because chief of staff Leon Panetta never gave him the respect he felt he deserved. He worked for Senate Democratic minority leader Tom Daschle and taught a law course on, appropriately enough, congressional investigations. He was lured back by Bowles just in time for the campaign-finance scandal. In that one, says Counsellor to the President Douglas Sosnik, Podesta wielded "the invisible hand that drove the process," pushing the lawyers to be more forthcoming but also reigning in the dump-everything-we-have strategy of Special Counsel to the President Lanny Davis. In Monicagate, Podesta played not only a backstage role but an onstage one as well: he was the person who arranged, at his old friend Betty Currie's urging, for Lewinsky to have a job interview with U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson. That later won him three appearances before Ken Starr's grand jury. But backstage, his arguments tipped the balance in favor of the decision to issue a response to Starr's charges ahead of time, a move that blunted the political impact.

His brother says politics did not run in the Greek-Italian Podesta family, even though it was based in Chicago. Their father was a factory worker for 50 years. "Bowles, blue blood; Podesta, blue collar," Podesta joked when Clinton announced his appointment. "No one ever got confused about which one of us had a passion for golf and which one had a passion for amusement parks," an allusion to his fascination with roller coasters.

Some argued that with Clinton facing possible impeachment, the replacement for Bowles should be a wise man who could deal with the major powers in Congress, much as Ronald Reagan picked former Senate majority leader Howard Baker to run things during the Iran-contra scandal. "But there are very few pooh-bahs left on the Hill," says Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, a former Podesta boss. "And John is known and respected by both Republicans and Democrats." In a White House often said to be short on grownups, Clinton's three previous staff chiefs--Bowles, Panetta and boyhood chum and businessman Mack McLarty--have invariably been described as Clinton's "peers." As a product of campaigns and of Washington's legal bureaucracy, Podesta doesn't fit that mold. But like his predecessors, he does have the peerlike ability to deliver bad news and stand up to the President. "He ain't a yes man," Leahy says. Adds a former White House insider: "He's got a hide of steel with a strong sense of self-confidence. He knows how to speak truth to power."

Podesta, married and a father of three, attended public school in Chicago and Knox College in Illinois before getting a law degree from Georgetown. He met Clinton in 1970, when both worked on a U.S. Senate campaign. He served as a trial attorney in the Justice Department and later gained policy expertise as a counsel to the Senate Agriculture and Judiciary committees. He and his brother formed a political-consulting business in 1988, melding their different styles. Tony, large and large-living, vacations on the Amalfi coast, while John, the ascetic one, drives the unpretentious Geo Tracker.

When he's not managing the scandal, Podesta's main role will be to rescue the Clinton legacy of policy achievement. The White House is planning a major long-term national debate on Social Security for next year, and Clinton has vowed to tackle the "unfinished business" of health care, campaign finance, trade, tobacco and education. That would be a vigorous undertaking even for a lame-duck Administration that wasn't wounded. It should contain enough thrills to satisfy even a lover of roller coasters.

--With reporting by Karen Tumulty/Washington

With reporting by Karen Tumulty/Washington