Harold Ickes News, Blogs, Audio and Videos

Let the Leg-Biting Begin
Howard Fineman 2/20/2008 12:00:00 AM
In the Democratic presidential race this is "Ickes Time"—as in Harold Ickes.
WHITE HOUSE
No Return

BILL CLINTON MAY FEEL nostalgic for prickly former deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, but other White House officials don't miss him. After watching replays of Ickes's stand-up testimony during the Senate campaign-finance hearings, aides say Clinton mused about asking Ickes to return. ""Half the White House staff would throw up their hands and walk out,'' said one official. While there's little chance Ickes will come back in a formal capacity, aides say Clinton will try to end their estrangement by inviting him to some social events. The front runner for the job Ickes didn't get, chief of staff to succeed the departing Erskine Bowles, is national-security adviser Sandy Berger.
SCANDALS
Ickes's Turn To Talk

AFTER MORE THAN A DOZEN PRIVATE SESSIONS WITH investigators, former White House deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes will finally testify this week before the Senate campaign fund-raising hearings. Republicans hope to get Ickes to link White House and Democratic National Committee fund-raising efforts, stripping White House officials of the excuse that DNC abuses occurred without their knowledge. Ickes, for his part, will stress that he modeled Clinton-Gore fund-raising efforts on previous Republican presidential campaigns. Early GOP expectations that Ickes, bitter over Clinton's failure to name him chief of staff, would turn on the Democrats have been unfounded. ""He's a consultant now,'' says a Democratic aide. ""He can't afford to turn on Democrats, even if he were so inclined.''
POLITICS
The White House Shell Game
Michael Isikoff
What happened next, as reconstructed by NEWSWEEK, shows how close to the line Clintonites were willing to go in their frantic efforts to funnel money into the president's re-election campaign. It is a glimpse into a White House shell game that may have skirted tax and campaign-contribution laws--and Hill Republicans and the Justice Department are now investigating just what the Democrats did. Judging from both the skill of the players and their anxiety about getting caught, it was a game at which the White House was well practiced.
BETWEEN THE LINES
With Friends Like Bill...
Jonathan Alter
When people who know and admire Clinton speak of his character flaws, they don't mean Gennifer Flowers or flip-flops on policy. They mean the way he treats old friends like Harold Ickes, the deputy chief of staff who ran much of Clinton's campaign, then learned from the newspapers two days after the election that he was to be fired. The president's treatment of Ickes, a profane, eccentric but highly effective liberal lawyer from New York, deeply upset Hillary Clinton (who is far more sensitive than her husband toward staff) and threw a pall over what should have been a happy time for the administration. Clinton's so-called ""friends'' (quote marks are now required) bust their fannies working for him--in Ickes's case, from 6 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., daily--and in exchange they get to hear a self-pitying Clinton brag, as he did again last week, about how hard he works. His ""friends'' still think he can still be a great president, but first he has to stop being an ungrateful one.

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