The Four Cent Stamp That Led To A Career
Fielding, a native Philadelphian, graduated from Gettysburg College in 1961 and headed off to the University of Virginia Law School. His reason for pursuing a course of legal studies was one shared by many: “I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do.” Securing a needed scholarship, Fielding chose Virginia, from among similar schools, because “you actually got money back to buy your books. It tipped the deal.”
Fielding didn’t dislike law school after the first year, he explained, but wasn’t enamored by it either. He decided that he would go back only if he made the law review. “I was down [in Long Beach Island, New Jersey] tending bar and waiting on tables and lifeguarding . . . and I got the letter. So I went back and I loved law school the last two years. But I really loved practicing law. It’s so much different than the academic side.”
From UVA, Fielding went to Morgan Lewis in Philadelphia. It was a short stay. After a year he was called to active duty in the Army where he spent two years in the Office of Security at the National Security Agency and left as a captain. He returned to Morgan Lewis. In 1970 the call came from the Nixon White House.
Watergate and Deep Throat
Fielding, at 31, went to work for White House counsel John Dean. Remarkably, Dean was just a year older and had come to the job from the Justice Department. How could the President’s top lawyer have so little experience? Fielding can only speculate: “The first counsel to President Nixon was John Ehrlichman. Ehrlichman then decided he was going to be the domestic counsel. . . . All of his lawyers and all his staff people plus others became the domestic counsel so they had to appoint somebody to be counsel to the President. . . . I can only surmise Ehrlichman didn’t want any real heavy competition.”
Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice for his role in Watergate. Fielding’s proximity, to all that was going on, led some to believe that he was “Deep Throat.” Indeed, the speculation was serious. The Wikipedia page on the subject devotes more words to Fielding than any other candidate. “What started that was Haldeman,” Fielding explains. [H.R. Haldeman -- Nixon’s Chief of Staff.] “He wrote a book and in it he named me as his candidate to be Deep Throat.” Fielding finds the whole affair strange, telling me that he could demonstrate, at the time of certain critical meetings between Woodward and Bernstein and Deep Throat, that he was not in Washington. “But after a while it just got silly because people don’t listen.”
Adding to the speculation was a four-year project, undertaken by a University of Illinois journalism professor and his students, that concluded, in 2003, that Fielding was Woodward and Bernstein’s source. Speaking of the professor, “he tried to woo me first. ‘You’re a great American. We should award you.’ And I just wouldn’t respond. It drove him nuts. It drove him nuts.” [In 2005, Mark Felt, former Associate Director of the FBI, came out as Deep Throat. It was confirmed by Woodward.]
Fielding was unaware of the Watergate activities going on around him. But what if he had been. Could he have stopped it? “Let me put it this way,” Fielding tells me. “I know there are things that I prevented from happening and I am sorry that Watergate happened. Now whether I could have stopped it, I don’t know. I don’t know.”
There is no class in law school to prepare a lawyer to serve as White House counsel. But that’s not to say Fielding didn’t bring an education to the job. Hardly. His experience in Nixon’s counsel’s office, during one of the nation’s greatest scandals, served him well for things to come. “I would say I don’t recommend it,” Fielding says, chuckling. “But it’s the best training.”
White House Counsel
Fielding left the Nixon White House in 1974 and returned to Morgan Lewis, now its Washington office. In 1981 he went to work as White House counsel for President Reagan at the start of his administration. Fielding held the position for over five years before returning to private practice -- adding his name to Washington’s Wiley, Rein & Fielding. Twenty years later Fielding would reprise his role as White House counsel, serving a two year stint for President George W. Bush.
White House counsel is not an official government position. It is one of several assistants that the President is entitled to have, such a press secretary or chief of staff. Without a statutory description, Fielding explains, “each president defines it.”
Fielding worked on Reagan’s transition team but didn’t know him well. “The first serious conversation I ever had with him was when he asked me to be counsel to the President.” Describing his relationship with Reagan, “you had access but you had a very powerful Chief of Staff [James Baker] and it was a staff system.” “Then the confidence with the President and me grew. By the time I left I had been the only remaining original assistant to the President and so we had a very nice rapport.” Bush had a different management style, Fielding recounts. “He had me going to every meeting in the world.”
Certain aspects of the White House counsel job are fixed, such as addressing executive privilege, pardons, ethics compliance (the President has several roles that cannot mix), judicial selection, clearance of executive branch officials (“You have to have a nice conversation to see what the FBI may have missed.”), arbiter of disputes between department and agency general counsels, gifts to the President, political versus non-political travel and first family issues.
But in addition to these anticipated functions, Fielding explains, “there is this category of ‘other’ and the other you don’t know what it is.” The job calls for “expect[ing] the unexpected, because you never know what’s coming in when you walk in that day.” “It is a Lithuanian seaman jumping off and asking for asylum in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.” At its core, as Fielding describes the job, it calls for “marshal[ling] the forces of the government and the tools of the government to deal with problems.” At one time he described the it as a legal air traffic controller. But then Reagan fired the air traffic controllers.
Fielding contrasts the job of White House counsel to working in private practice: “You’re a lawyer, you know, if you get a legal problem, you look at it, you mull it over, you talk to people, you do a little research, consult with other people, you give a tentative and then a final conclusion to the client. . . . Here, something happens you have to make a decision. There are no books to turn to -- how to be a counsel to the President. You make your decision and then you watch it on television that night. And you may not recognize the story because it’s somebody’s interpretation. So that’s something you have to get accustomed to. But you have to do it instantly. You have to have the judgment to understand and assimilate what the issue is and deal with it right away, unlike you and me in our daily practice. We’re fortunate not to be called on [like] that every day.”
While the job of White House counsel differs with each President, and brings a barrage of unique situations, there is one constant. “You have to be able to say no [to the President],” Fielding explains. “And you have to be able to be willing to say no even if you think you will be, not literally, executed. You still have to say no. That’s your job and somebody has to do it.”
Fielding’s staff in the Reagan White House included John Roberts, the future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Fielding turned paternal when I asked him about Roberts: “I have been really blessed in both the Bush and Reagan years. I could assemble a staff with great people. . . . One of the nicest things about doing private practice, but especially government service, is to watch your people and how they make you very proud.”
The Reagan Assassination Attempt: Setting Al Haig Straight
On the afternoon of March 30, 1981, just two months after entering office, President Reagan was shot in the chest while exiting the Washington Hilton following a luncheon speech to a labor union. [Three others were shot and survived.] The President had discussed the speech with his senior staff earlier that day. There wasn’t enthusiasm amongst the lot to attend. “There are some events that people want to go to. This was not one of them,” Fielding explaines, chuckling. He didn’t attend and was in his office when the call came – “Rawhide is down.” [Rawhide was Reagan’s Secret Service code name.] From there it was off to the Situation Room.
Of all the stories to come out of that day, none is as well-known as Secretary of State Alexander Haig telling the press corps, and a nationally televised audience, that he was “in control” of the White House. But he wasn’t. It would be Fielding who set Haig straight.
The situation grew out of confusion over who was in charge of the government. The President was getting ready for life-saving surgery and the Vice-President was on an airplane headed back to D.C. from Texas. Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speakes was in the White House Briefing Room -- floundering in his attempt to explain who was running the government to the assembled press. Haig, watching the fiasco unfold on television, rushed to the Briefing Room, stepped to the microphone and pronounced: “Constitutionally gentlemen, you have the President, the Vice-President and the Secretary of State, in that order, and should the President decide he wants to transfer the helm to the Vice-President, he will do so. As for now, I’m in control here, in the White House, pending the return of the Vice-President and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course.”
But Haig, the four star general and former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, had it wrong. And it was Fielding who broke the news to him. Following Haig’s pronouncement a debate emerged, between Haig and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, over the question of control. Fielding recounted the story: Haig turned to Weinberger and said, “You’d better learn your Constitution, buddy.” Haig then turned to Fielding and asked “Isn’t that right, Fred?” Fielding’s response: “No, it’s not.” As Fielding described it to me, the issue was not a Constitutional one. It was tied to crisis management and contingency plans, under which “the authority to do certain things doesn’t devolve to the Secretary of State. It devolves to the Secretary of Defense.”
The 9-11 Commission
From 2002 to 2004, Fielding served as one of ten commissioners on The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States -- the so-called “9-11 Commission.” It was authorized by Congress to examine the circumstances surrounding the terrorist attacks, preparedness and the immediate response. The Commission was also mandated to provide recommendations for guarding against future attacks. It interviewed over 1,200 people and reviewed over two and a half million pages of documents before issuing a 500-plus page report.
Fielding described the experience as very significant and challenging, but the frustration in his voice is obvious: “It was designed to fail like all commissions. You know nobody reads them, nobody cares about them. There was really a design to make sure that wasn’t so, but we still had, if you recall the hearings, they were sometimes pretty contentious, they were also pretty partisan. When we got down to writing it we debated every sentence in that damn book. The thing that finally decided it was that we would footnote everything and we’d take out the adjectives. Viola. Unanimity. How can you fight that?”
Reagan And The Jelly Beans
President Reagan’s love for jelly beans was no state secret buried at Langley. I asked Fielding to describe the protocol for partaking in the President’s Oval Office stash. Could you simply help yourself? Or did you have to wait for the Gipper to start eating them first? Sadly, my hopes of breaking an inside the Beltway story were crushed. “I never had a jelly bean in the Oval,” Fielding tells me. But that’s not to say they weren’t a perk of the job. “We had senior staff meetings where he would invite us for lunch and of course there would be jars all over the place.”
The Washington Insider
Since leaving the Bush White House in 2009 Fielding is back where he started. His work at Morgan Lewis includes government relations, internal investigations, crisis management, white collar litigation, mediator and strategic advisor.
Stories about Fred Fielding almost invariably describe him as the quintessential Washington insider lawyer. His tremendous gravitas, experiences and earned respect of others have made him the proverbial man to see. In a town with a lot of secrets, Fielding surely knows as many as anyone. I wouldn’t be surprised if he knows if Oswald acted alone. But despite all this, he has a regular guy way about him. He’s solicitous, quick with a laugh and tells stories involving himself -- but without making them about himself. You get the sense that he treats those of tremendous power and a teenage barista with the same respect.
So just what does it mean to be a Washington insider? Fielding chuckles at the question. “I know they say that,” he acknowledges. “The magic is in relationships but it’s not in devious relationships. It’s building a reputation so that people rely on your judgment, number one, on one side, and people rely on your word. If that makes you a quintessential insider, maybe it does. But I think it means all things to all people. It’s whatever you think it’s going to be.” But it’s out of Fielding’s control. “You can’t help what people call you.”
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