Bernard Nussbaum, who as President Bill Clinton’s first White House adviser became a lightning rod in a string of bitter disputes that dogged Clinton’s early years in office, died Sunday at his Manhattan home. He was 84 years old.
According to his son Frank, the cause was heart disease.
Mr. Nussbaum was a corporate lawyer in New York and an old friend of First Lady Hillary Clinton when her husband appointed him as an adviser after being elected as a Democrat to his first term in 1992.
Mr. Nussbaum served for 14 months, resigning at the request of Mr. Clinton amid a relentless attack on the Clintons over a series of troubles, beginning with a failed Arkansas land gamble in which they participated in the years before they reached White House – an episode known as the Whitewater Affair. Then came the suicide of Deputy Attorney Vincent W. Foster, Jr., sparking official investigations and feverish conspiracy theories. And finally, there was the FBI’s consent to the White House’s request for files on dozens of Republicans the bureau had vetted for White House employment in past administrations.
The episodes sparked allegations of wrongdoing by Republican critics and right-wing enemies of the Clintons, as well as expressions of dismay from many without a partisan or ideological agenda. And Mr. Nussbaum’s aggressive attempts to protect the president and first lady have only added fuel to the fire of attacks and doubts.
His critics accused him of obstructing justice. His supporters backed his argument that he was doing what any good lawyer would do when fighting for a client’s defense.
But even some of his supporters said that Mr. Nussbaum — the garrulous New Yorker whose tough legal tactics have made him highly regarded by corporate clients in high-stakes lawsuits — failed to grasp a key reality: to vehemently insist on privacy rights. life and privacy privileges can be short-sighted if the client is a high-ranking elected official seeking to win the trust of the public.
After leaving the White House, Mr. Nussbaum agreed that the legal field he faced in Washington was very different from the one he flourished in his hometown of New York.
There, he said, lawyers were focused on fighting hard for their clients, but in Washington, what was most worrying was how things were going. And in Washington, according to him, the opponents wanted to “drive you into the ground, destroy you, suck your blood.”
Bernard William Nussbaum was born in Manhattan on March 23, 1937 to Feivel and Molly (Weintraub) Nussbaum, immigrants from Poland. He grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His father was a tailor who became a union manager and he met Molly, who worked in another garment factory, through the labor movement.
Mr. Nussbaum graduated from Columbia University Stuyvesant High School in 1958 and Harvard Law School in 1961.
In 1963 he married Toby Sheinfeld, who died in 2006. He married Nancy Kuhn in 2008. She died last year. In addition to his son Frank, Mr. Nussbaum had another son, Peter; daughter, Emily Nussbaum; stepson Bill Kuhn; brother Martin; and six grandchildren.
After graduating from law school, Mr. Nussbaum worked for several years as an Assistant US Attorney in Manhattan before joining the New York law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in 1966.
He briefly returned to the public arena in 1974 while serving as a senior counsel on the House Judiciary Committee investigating the Watergate scandal. He recommended to the House of Representatives the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon, but Nixon resigned before the House of Representatives could act. While serving on the committee, Mr. Nussbaum befriended one of the young lawyers who helped him, Hillary Rodham, the future first lady.
After serving on the committee, he returned to his New York law firm and continued in private practice until nearly 20 years later, Bill Clinton brought him to the White House.
The Whitewater controversy arose from the ultimately unsuccessful land development partnership that the Clintons entered into in 1979, when Mr. Clinton was governor of Arkansas, with Savings and Loan Association owner James B. McDougal and his wife, Susan McDougal. .
Since Mr. Clinton became president, the Clintons’ role in this enterprise has come under scrutiny and recrimination. Among the questions was whether they were involved in their partners illegally transferring money to a financially failing enterprise, and whether Mr. Clinton personally benefited from these steps. The Clintons denied any involvement in the fraud or any knowledge of it at the time it was committed; they said they lost tens of thousands of dollars in the project.
Mr. Nussbaum was criticized for suggesting that the Clintons resist handing over documents related to Whitewater to investigators. Critics also argued that the private meetings Mr. Nussbaum had with Treasury officials during the Savings and Loan investigation amounted to White House interference in the investigation out of fear, critics say, that investigators might find out about Clinton. connections with S&L.
Mr. Nussbaum said the meetings were simply meant to let his client know what the status of the investigation was. Mr. Clinton publicly stated in March 1994 that Mr. Nussbaum had done nothing wrong in this matter, although he admitted that the meetings might have left an impression of inappropriateness. The next day he asked Mr. Nussbaum to resign.
Mr. Clinton “asked me to resign in response to media pressure and political pressure,” Mr. Nussbaum told The New York Times in 2001. According to him, there were “a lot of insinuations” and “phantom scandals” in the press.
The Whitewater investigation was initially conducted by a special prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Janet Reno and then principally by Kenneth W. Starr, a Republican appointed by a three-judge panel. The Clintons were never charged with any crimes, although Mr. Starr claimed that Mr. Clinton obstructed the investigation.
Ultimately, the MacDougals and 12 others were convicted in the case. President Clinton pardoned Ms. McDougal before he left office in 2001. Mr. McDougal died in a prison medical facility in 1998.
Mr. Foster was found shot dead with a gun in his hand in a suburban Virginia park in July 1993, and the Justice Department launched an investigation. Soon conspiracy theories began to surface.
Some of the most zealous claimed that Mr. Foster was killed and that his body was moved to the park to stage it as a suicide, because, according to the theory, Mrs. Clinton’s former partner in the Little Rock law firm did work for savings and loans, he had information that would link the Clintons to Whitewater crime.
The conspiracy theories only intensified when Mr. Nussbaum tried to restrict the Justice Department’s access to Mr. Foster’s office files. But, while testifying before one of the many congressional committees he faced during his tenure, he argued that he had an ethical duty to review the files before showing them to investigators and withhold any non-confidential White House material. death.
Of this and other “important calls” he made, Mr. Nussbaum told his often hostile interlocutors, “I have drawn the right conclusions.”
Mr. Starr and his predecessor as Special Counsel, Robert B. Fiske, Jr., after separate investigations, discovered that Mr. Foster killed himself in the park because he was deeply depressed due to the increasing pressure at work.
Resentment over the FBI’s personal files arose when the White House Personnel Security Office successfully requested confidential biographical information about individuals who then worked in the White House, as well as dozens of figures who had held positions there in previous Republican administrations. The request forms were printed with Mr. Nussbaum’s name.
The White House said it was an innocent mistake for the security service to receive the files, and Mr. Nussbaum said he didn’t know the service was doing it. But the chairman of the House committee accused him of lying to the commission about the circumstances surrounding the hiring of the office director. In 2000, Robert W. Ray, who succeeded Mr. Starr as special counsel, announced that no crimes had been found in the file request and that Mr. Nussbaum had not perjured himself.
Mr. Nussbaum long ago left the White House and returned to the New York law firm of Wachtell, Lipton when Mr. Clinton was impeached and acquitted in his second term scandal involving his affair with a White intern. Houses.
In an interview with The Times in 2001, Mr. Nussbaum said he did not regret his turbulent time in Washington. “It was,” he said, “a great adventure.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.