Few Americans have had as prosperous a life as Clark Clifford. That makes his fall from grace all the more puzzling, as a legal monthly underscores in an absorbing tale of multibillion-dollar intrigue.
”From Statesman to Front Man: How Clark Clifford`s Career Crashed” is the cover of November American Lawyer. It offers the most detailed look at the financial maze that is the well-publicized, if generally little-understood, international banking scandal involving the Arab-owned Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
Clifford, 85 and long the quintessential Washington power broker attorney, stands indicted on charges of defrauding federal regulators and hugely enriching himself by concealing BCCI`s actual control over a Washington bank he nominally ran and through multimillion-dollar sweetheart stock deals financed by BCCI for him and a chum.
It`s likely that Clifford won`t come to trial because of ill health. But Robert Altman, his young chum, protege and law partner (and husband of Lynda
”Wonder Woman” Carter), will. Still, a meticulously researched, 26-page effort by Gay Jervey and Stuart Taylor Jr. notes the central intrigue involving the aging protagonist:
”Could Clark Clifford really be a criminal-this aging Apollo who sat at Harry Truman`s right hand, who stopped the bombing of Hanoi as Lyndon Johnson`s defense secretary, who became the first million-dollar-a-year Washington superlawyer, who practiced political law for decades without ever getting caught at the seamier forms of influence peddling, who won the admiration of many of the nation`s leading citizens?”
”How could Clifford ever have gotten himself into such a fix? Did he really embark-well past the age of 70 and a millionaire many times over-on a bribery conspiracy with a bunch of Arabs he hardly knew?”
The magazine`s analysis concludes that Clifford and Altman aren`t
”blatant crooks” but, at the same time, are nowhere close to the
”wronged innocents” they portray themselves to be. Yet they may personify our most suspicion-laden image of lawyers: people who can let ego, greed, ambition and a willingness to tread a thin line between the lawful and unlawful corrupt objectivity.
The piece is replete with nifty tidbits, including disclosure that Clifford and Altman have already paid defense attorneys a staggering $7.9 million in pretrial fees, and profiles of key players, such as John Moscow, a somewhat odd, cerebral New York-based prosecutor who`s characterized as ”a Harvard Law, New York version of Columbo.”
The piece concludes that the prosecution case has loads of weaknesses and may be too complicated for a jury to buy. Yet it`s an unflattering portrait of long-revered Clifford, who once boasted of having charged a client $10,000 for a brief phone conversation.
Still, the question of motive remains: Why, so late in his career, might Clifford, who had riches and respect, feel so compelled to get involved in such sleaze?
Quickly: Time and Newsweek, marshaling their ample resources in a post-election race to the printer, each surface with a special issue within 48 hours of Bill Clinton`s victory. Both do well but Newsweek is sharper, with more inside poop, especially on internal White House squabbling over Dan Quayle and mid-course remarketing of Clinton`s basic economic message that seemed to pay total homage to focus group testing. . . . ”Poor George” was Texas Gov. Ann Richard`s famous 1988 dismissal of George Bush, but it could be used as the headline of the Nov. 19 New York Review of Books, in which Garry Wills rhetorically decapitates pundit George Will for the latter`s new book, in which he argues that the Founding Fathers wanted term limits on members of Congress. Wills, whose hold on primary sources is ample, shows Will`s book to be rife with poor scholarship and ”bad or irrelevant arguments,” resulting in a thesis that ”is false through and through.” . . . The world`s most
”successful-but-picked-on-musician”? November Down Beat contends that it`s saxophonist Kenny Gorelick, who has sold more than 14 million albums but is chided by critics as producing ”mere cotton candy for the ears.”
. . . Nov. 16 New Yorker offers the latest galling postscript to the liberation of Kuwait as Raymond Bonner details gross financial and physical abuse by Kuwaitis of foreign female domestics, mostly from the Philippines, with no small help from corrupt immigration officials in the Philippines, another U.S. ally.
