He was there during the Iran-contra hearings, a spritely figure at the side of Robert McFarlane, offering legal advice and moral support as the former national security adviser faced a panel of congressional inquisitors.
He has been in the forefront of the controversy surrounding Robert Bork, as well, speaking on behalf of the embattled Supreme Court nominee and attacking his critics in a vehement yet quotable fashion.
In fact, Leonard Garment has been on the scene during any number of major stories of the last two decades. Among other things, he was counsel to the White House during Watergate (it has been suggested, and he vigorously denies, that he was ”Deep Throat,” the source that fed information to the Washington Post), and his clients have included Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese and United States Information Agency head Charles Wick.
As adviser to the powerful and prominent, the 63-year-old Garment has taken on that same patina himself. At the same time, his availability to reporters, as well as his deftness with language-and one-liners-has made him a favorite news source.
Sometimes Garment even initiates contacts with the press when it works to his client`s advantage. After McFarlane`s suicide attempt last February, it was Garment who set up several newspaper and television interviews that engendered sympathetic support for his troubled client.
Earlier this month, as the congressional tide appeared to be turning against Bork, it was Garment who phoned the New York Times to say he was authorized by Bork to say he would not ask the President to withdraw his name prior to a full Senate vote on his nomination.
In Washington this sort of deft manipulation is what`s known as ”spin control”-the delicate art of making others, specifically the press, see things the way you would like them seen.
Garment, a white-haired, almost elfish figure, laughs at suggestions that he is a ”spin master” or ”spin doctor,” the title bestowed on him in a recent cover story in Regardie`s, a glossy Washington magazine aimed at a business audience.
”I see my role as convincing people of the correctness of an argument,” Garment said in a recent interview. ”And that`s called lawyering.”
He also sidesteps questions about his power-perceived, real or otherwise. ”I consider real power the ability to do what you do well all the time,” Garment says, ”and free from a lot of interferences. That to me is power, whether it means being a silversmith or making shoes . . . power over your own environment.
”Besides, Washington power is illusory, most of its artifacts are illusory: big cars, big offices and names for offices in the government that have no power, like the World Diplomatic Corps.”
Some acquaintances, such as Mel Elfin, director of planning for U.S. News and World Report magazine and former Washington bureau chief for Newsweek, say that Garment is ”genuinely powerful.” But critics suggest that he chiefly has a keen sense for news and knows how to attach himself to a major story and more a superb lobbyist than a brilliant lawyer.
One of those critics, a longtime acquaintance who asked that his name not be used, compared Garment`s role in the waning days of the Reagan administration to that of Rabbi Baruch Korff, who was perhaps Richard Nixon`s most visible defender in the last days of his presidency: a figure who engendered publicity but did not especially influence the course of events.
But he also allows that that Garment is a ”nice, affable, bright fellow.”
Garment himself says, ”Just say I`m good old lovable Len.”
Garment, who was born in Brooklyn and who helped put himself through Brooklyn College and Brooklyn Law School by playing clarinet in jazz bands, including Woody Herman`s, was a fairly late arrival to Washington.
For 20 years he was a member of the New York law firm of Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander, the same firm Richard Nixon joined after his defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial race.
The somewhat unlikely pair-Garment, then described as a liberal, had, after all, voted for Kennedy in 1960-became fast friends. Garment worked on Nixon`s 1968 presidential campaign and then followed him to Washington. His job in the Nixon administration was, in broad terms, to oversee minority rights and museums, a mandate he succinctly described to Regardie`s as ”arts and riots.”
In the early 1970s, Garment says, he helped introduce Robert Bork to members of the Nixon administration after a mutual friend suggested that he and Garment meet. Bork went on to serve as Solicitor General during the Nixon administration and was the one who fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the ”Saturday Night Massacre.”
In 1973, as the Watergate scandal began claiming White House bodies, Garment was tapped by Nixon for the job of White House counsel, replacing John Dean III, who had been dismissed.
Garment says he was instrumental in helping persuade Nixon not to destroy the incriminating White House tapes. ”There was a discussion,” he said,
”among (White House chief of staff Gen. Alexander) Haig, (special White House counsel J. Fred) Buzhardt, myself and the President about what to do with the tapes. I said (to destroy them) would be an obstruction of justice.” However, others tend to downplay his role then, suggesting that Garment`s service to the Nixon administration actually was of far less importance than Garment and others suggest.
There has been considerable speculation, in light of Garment`s proclivity for talking to journalists, that he may, in fact, have been ”Deep Throat”-that mysterious source (or composite of sources, according to another theory) who provided Post reporter Bob Woodward with crucial information from inside the Nixon administration.
”I think that`s very unflattering,” Garment snaps. ”The last thing I`d do is go creeping around in garages, giving away secrets of the president I was working for.”
Elfin says he is convinced that Garment ”honestly believed Nixon was not going down.”
He describes walking into Garment`s White House office the day Nixon resigned ”and everything was white, including Len`s face. He was silent for a while, and I said, `What`s it feel like?` and he said, `It`s like the feeling of flying across the country in a jet, having a drink before dinner and 30 seconds later the only thing left is someone`s underwear hanging from a wheat stalk in Kansas.` ”
Garment moved back to New York in 1974. In 1976 his first wife, Grace, committed suicide in a Boston hotel, an event one friend describes as ”a real psychic blow. . . . the man went through hell.”
Garment, who reportedly suffered a long depression, took time off from work to raise his two then-teenaged children. In 1980 he returned to Washington with his second wife, Suzanne, a political science professor at Yale University who until recently wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal. Garment joined the firm of Dickstein, Shapiro & Morin and settled back into the Washington infrastructure. He represented Wick, director of the U.S. Information Agency, who in 1984 touched off a congressional firestorm when it was disclosed that he had secretly taped telephone calls. Wick skillfully helped defuse the controversy, and the inquiry went no further.
When questions were raised in 1984 and 1985 during Edwin Meese`s confirmation hearings about whether Meese had improperly awarded jobs in exchange for loans, it was Garment to whom Meese turned. A special prosecutor ultimately cleared Meese of wrongdoing, and he was confirmed.
Meese`s old friend, E. Robert Wallach, who helped Garment defend Meese during the criminal investigation, recently surfaced in the news, this time as a subject of a federal inquiry into whether he improperly influenced Meese to help Wedtech Corp., a Bronx defense contractor, obtain millions of dollars in government business. Garment has vigorously defended Wallach`s reputation to reporters working on the Wedtech story.
Recently, Garment, whose customary hourly rate is $250, has taken on Toshiba Corp. as a client, seeking to calm congressional anger over the Japanese firm`s role in providing the Soviets with military technology.
He says about half of his time is devoted to pro bono work, a category into which he places McFarlane. ”I haven`t charged him (for my services),”
Garment says, ”and don`t plan to unless things move to another stage,”
presumably meaning unless he`s indicted.
Asked how McFarlane is doing lately, Garment shakes his head and says,
”He`s trying hard, he`s a good man. (But) this is a town that kills people. It`s a psychic battlefield.”
As for Bork, Garment maintains, ”I`m not his adviser or his lawyer, I`m just a friend.”
When he`s not lawyering, Garment says, he ”plays the saxophone, pulls up weeds” and devotes himself to his 5-year-old daughter.
He also belongs to a monthly poker group whose members include Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; Chief Justice William Rehnquist; Bork; Secretary of Education William Bennett; Richard Moore, a lawyer and television consultant; and federal district Judge George Revercomb. Garment gives a
”Friday night out with the boys” cast to these gatherings, describing how they take turns playing host and munch on ”cold salads and deli” while playing for ”penny ante stakes, adjusted for inflation.”
No longer a liberal, Garment describes his political philosophy today as
”conservative moderate. But the truth is, I`m formally registered as an independent, and I think of myself as independent in my view, in the way I approach decisions in the political world.”
And as for the future, he says, ”By choice I`m doing exactly what I want to do now. I love it.”
