No one had ever asked me directly if I would accept the director’s job. Nor, of course, had I officially said yes. But as I walked by myself down the path to the West Gate, I knew the job was mine and felt I could do it well. Now I had to find a way home. I passed through the gate, stepped out on Pennsylvania Avenue, and threw my hand up for a cab. Hobnobbing with the president at the epicenter of power didn’t count for much when it came to public transportation.
Three days later, on July 19, 1993, Bill Clinton fired Judge Sessions. The next day, July 20, I was back at the White House with my entire family, this time to be nominated as the fifth director in the post-Hoover history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Thanks to Bernie’s clandestine operation, the announcement had been kept secret nearly to the last moment.
In 1991, when I appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on my nomination to become a federal judge, Marilyn and I had balked at bringing our then three sons along. Finally, we had caved in, at the insistence of my Justice Department “handler,” but with the oldest then only seven, the potential for disaster seemed enormous. This time, of course, there was no question about not including the four boys at the Rose Garden ceremony. What’s more, they were all two years older. Justin had almost hit double digits, Brendan was now seven and Sean three. To be sure, Connor was only a year old, but with my parents, brothers, and other family members on hand, along with some dear friends from New York (including Bob Fiske, an extraordinary lawyer and distinguished Southern District U.S. attorney and later the first Whitewater prosecutor), we had all the backup we needed. Surely they couldn’t get in that much trouble!
The boys, in fact, looked like angels as we walked into the West Wing that morning. Janet Reno and Floyd Clarke were there to greet us with smiles and plenty of warmth. Bernie Nussbaum was no less welcoming when we stopped in to his corner office. So was Vince Foster, who was waiting on Bernie’s couch and who later would sit just behind Bernie and my family.
Marilyn had taken the boys outside, leaving the president and me alone in the Oval Office just before the nominating ceremony was to get under way. We were standing by the famous Resolute desk that had been a gift from Queen Victoria. (The desk is made from the timbers of a British vessel of that name aided by American sailors when it became lost in Arctic waters back in 1855. In one of the most famous of all White House photos, John-John Kennedy is curled up in its kneehole, peering out from a secret door.) I was silently rehearsing my remarks when I detected out the window one of those slight shifts of field that happen when a crowd starts doing some serious rubbernecking. I had no idea what might have caused the disruption, but some combination of parental instinct and detective hunch told me that one or more of my sons was at the center of it. Before I had time to give the matter any more thought, an aide signaled that it was time, and I followed the president into the Rose Garden as the press cameras exploded and the television cameras began to roll.
The president gave me one of those flattering introductions that I knew my fellow FBI agents wouldn’t soon let me forget. I was just wondering how I would ever escape being called a “law enforcement legend” when I looked at Brendan sitting in the first row in his best church suit and realized he was soaking wet—not perspiration wet, although it was another hot July day, but swimming-pool wet, through and through. The president had also noticed my son’s condition and leaned over to ask if he was okay. By then, I had made eye contact with Marilyn, and she had silently informed me that, yes, the boys had not behaved themselves, that we should have left them in the hotel, and that Brendan’s wetness was not weather related. I was struck even in that instant with the calm and studied pique that a mother of four boys can communicate so professionally without uttering a single word. Brendan was fine, I assured the president … but I wasn’t so sure about my wife.
I didn’t get the back story until the ceremony was almost at an end and Marilyn and the boys had joined us on the podium. Marilyn, it seemed, had just about managed to herd the boys to their seats when a flurry of music announced that the proceedings were about to get under way. At that moment, Brendan broke ranks and ran over to a little pool that sits in the Rose Garden. He was peering curiously into its shallow depth, leaning forward just enough to be a bit off balance, when three-year-old Sean noticed the target-rich environment, went barreling off in Brendan’s direction, and before anyone could intervene, launched his brother into the water. Marilyn and a bevy of shocked aides had just managed to pull Brendan out of the drink and get both boys to their seats when Clinton and I made our appearance.
Marilyn was just finishing a hurried recitation of this sad tale when the president picked up Connor, our one-year-old, and held him up for the cameras. Thank God, I remember thinking, at least he was dry, or dry for all anyone could see. Even my parents, who like me didn’t want to be asked that morning which box they had checked for president ten months earlier, became instant Clinton supporters as they watched the forty-second president hoisting up their number-four grandson.
The Rose Garden incident, by the way, didn’t end in the Rose Garden. Back in the Oval Office, after Marilyn had filled Clinton in on the details, he asked that Sean be brought before him for questioning. As the White House photographer clicked off a series of memorable stills, the tall and handsome president stood over a remarkably calm Sean and asked: “Did you push your brother into the pond?” Without betraying any evidence of guilt, Sean looked up at the president and shook his head no. Although I was now in the uncomfortable position of observing my three-year-old son lying to the chief law enforcement officer of the United States—and my soon-to-be boss—I couldn’t help but feel as a lawyer that Sean was simply stating what’s known in the trade as an exculpatory no. After all, according to Title 18, Section 1001 of the U.S. Code, a simple denial of guilt doesn’t constitute a “false statement.”
The president seemed to realize something of the same because he improved his prosecutor’s technique considerably with the next question: “Were you happy when your brother went into the water?” An ever-so-slight smile started to curl the end of Sean’s mouth and the crowd began to sense that he was breaking! Finally, and to my professional admiration, the president took one last run at it. “Did you feel good when you pushed your brother into the pond?” At that point Sean gave it up and, smiling broadly, silently nodded his head yes as we all breathed a happy sigh of relief. Sweet as the day’s outcome was, though, the event could not have had a more bitter ending.
The two-and-a-half-column photo that appeared upper left on page one of The Washington Post the next day shows me giving a thumbs-up sign and holding Connor as a beaming president bends over to greet Marilyn. “Federal Judge Nominated as New FBI Head,” the headline reads. A third of the way down the front page on the right-hand side is a headline of a much different order: “Clinton Aide Vincent Foster Dies in an Apparent Suicide.”
Marilyn and I were at the Key Bridge Marriott across the Potomac from Georgetown when I got the news, sometime after 10:00 that evening. Floyd Clarke, who had been made acting director of the FBI the day before, called to say that Vince had driven to Fort Marcy Park off the George Washington Parkway in Virginia and there, overlooking the Potomac, had killed himself. The body had been positively identified and the White House notified about 9:55, Floyd said. I was stunned as he gave me the details.
Vince Foster was forty-eight years old, the father of three, one of the golden boys from Hope, Arkansas. A photo of the three of them was on prominent display in his office: Bill Clinton, Mack McLarty, and Foster, taken at some birthday party back in Hope when they were all just kids. Like Hillary Clinton, he had been part of the Rose law firm before joining his old friends in Washington. I could still see Vince’s face from the ceremony, sitting behind Marilyn and the kids, circulating around the crowd afterward. Bernie Nussbaum said later that he and Vince had gone back to Bernie’s office once the festivities broke up. Bernie was in high spirits, not just about my nominati
on but about the ease with which Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s nomination was moving through the Senate Judiciary Committee. “We hit two home runs!” Bernie crowed. Vince, he said, just smiled and said, “I’ll see you later.” He didn’t.
For the already growing legion of Clinton haters and conspiracy theorists, Foster’s death was, of course, a huge chunk of red meat thrown into the cage. They would feed off it for years to come. To me, whatever Vince’s motivation or demons, his death was simply the horrible end to a life that deserved so much better.
Six weeks later, on September 1, 1993, I was officially sworn in as director at FBI headquarters and began my almost eight-year tenure in office, the second longest of any director in the post-Hoover era. Marilyn held the Bible that day, while Frank Johnson, the courageous federal judge from Alabama, administered the oath.
I’d known Frank personally for only a few years by then, but he had been a hero to me ever since my law school days. Frank was once ostracized by much of the society he lived in. He’d had a cross burned on his lawn, and his own mother’s house had been firebombed. But none of it deterred him. In the dark days of the civil-rights struggle, no jurist in America did more to break down the barriers of segregation in the Deep South. George Wallace, Alabama’s black-baiting governor, once proposed giving Frank a “barbed-wire enema.” Martin Luther King Jr. called him a man who gave “true meaning to the word justice.” Wallace’s enmity and King’s praise both speak volumes about the man, but I wanted Frank there with me for another reason. He himself had been nominated to be FBI director in 1977 by Jimmy Carter and almost certainly would have been confirmed by the Senate, but a previously undetected heart condition caused him to withdraw his name.
In my own way, I thought that having Frank swear me in might close the circle, for him and for me, but I was far from alone in revering Judge Johnson deeply. Janet Reno and Bill Clinton were both thrilled to have him on hand. His participation gave the event a historical resonance that had everything to do with him and very little to do with me. Goodwill filled the FBI courtyard that day.
After I had resigned as FBI director and many years after Bernie Nussbaum had stepped down as White House counsel, we ran into each other at an event sponsored by the Federal Bar Council.
“I spoke to your friend today,” Bernie said with a laugh.
“I’ve got lots of friends, Bernie,” I told him, already suspicious. “Which one?”
“President Clinton,” he answered, now in full good humor.
Bernie went on to tell me that Bill Clinton had told him: “The best piece of advice you gave me that I didn’t follow was to oppose a special prosecutor for Whitewater, and the worst piece of advice you gave me that I did follow was to appoint Freeh as FBI director.”
“It’ll probably be in his book,” Bernie added.
I’ll leave the special prosecutor comment for legal scholars. As for the president’s comment on me, I wear it as a badge of honor. All the agreements Bill Clinton and I had come to on the day I interviewed for the director’s job, everything that I thought had been made clear between the two of us, I finally came to realize, was clear only to me.
CHAPTER 3
“You’re Not Really College Material”
Even if Bill Clinton hadn’t given me the answers I wanted to hear, I’m not sure I could have said no when he asked me to take the director’s job. By then, my parents had gotten involved, and for them, answering the call to duty was not an optional activity. As I wrote earlier, part of that was politics. My mom and dad were old-school Democrats, from a time when the party’s patriotism was never questioned. The former Arkansas governor might not have been their ideal president, but to them, the Democrats represented the working stiffs; the Republicans, the bosses in silk hats, and there was never any question which side of that divide they stood on. They did more than talk politics, too. Both had worked for the party in Hudson County, New Jersey, where I was born, knocking on doors, walking the wards to get out the vote and make sure the election went the right way.
But the call to duty went deeper than politics. My father, William Freeh, is a World War II veteran, and he always told my two brothers and me that we were to serve our nation no matter how difficult or inconvenient or even dangerous the task. When I visited my parents the day before I went down to Washington to interview with Clinton, Dad informed me in no uncertain terms that I was to do whatever the president asked of me.
My parents were still close enough to their own hardscrabble roots and immigrant histories to remember just how much America had done for them, and for all of us. Back when I was a kid in grade school, the history books would always describe the nation as a melting pot, a place where people from different backgrounds blended together in search of a better life. I never had any trouble understanding that because my family was practically a trans-European melting pot all of its own. But it was as Americans and loving parents that they gave us their most precious gifts: reverence for God and country, the difference between right and wrong, and kindness.
My paternal great-grandfather, Frederich Fruh, emigrated to America from Sasbaach, in the far west of Germany, in the very early 1870s. Why he left his homeland is lost to family history, but geopolitics is a safe bet. Sasbaach lies in Alsace-Lorraine, not far from Strasbourg and the famous spa at Baden-Baden in the Rhine Valley, an area of almost constant tension between the Germans and the French. In 1675, the Viscount of Turenne, among the most famous of all French military leaders, drove the Germans from the region only to be killed by a cannonball at the Battle of Sasbaach. Another two centuries on, in 1871, the French capitulated to end the Franco-German War, and all of Alsace along with the better part of Lorraine became part of the newly formed German empire. That’s just about when Fred took off for the New World, which must have seemed a haven of stability even with the Civil War still fresh in America memory.
The one marketable skill my great-grandfather seems to have brought with him from Germany was music. He settled in New York and got a part-time job with a U.S. Army band that had him playing in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Governor’s Island, and elsewhere. Between that and other odd jobs, he managed to marry and raise a family in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, a round bulge of land that sticks out under lower Manhattan, across the Hudson River from the Statue of Liberty.
One of his sons—my grandfather, William Freeh—landed a job with the New York City Department of Sanitation, and at last someone in the family had a steady income, at least until the Great Depression intervened. On the side, he also held a part-time job that might be the most enviable position any Freeh has ever laid claim to: an usher at Ebbett’s Field, erstwhile home of the late, great Brooklyn Dodgers.
If William Freeh couldn’t have told you precisely why his ancestors emigrated to America, his wife, Jenny McGee, knew beyond a shadow of a doubt why hers had crossed the Atlantic. The McGees were living in County Cork, in the southeast of Ireland, when the potato blight first struck in 1846. For the impoverished Irish—and that included just about everyone—potatoes were the absolutely essential crop. Without them, the Great Famine followed, aided by typhus and other diseases. To escape death, the people fled in almost unbelievable numbers. By 1851, Ireland’s population had collapsed by 25 percent, to about 6.5 million. To achieve a population shift of similar proportion, the United States of today would have to lose on the order of 70 million people in a scant half decade.
Like so many other Irish immigrants, my paternal grandmother’s forebears washed up in New York City, where several generations later, Jenny McGee met and married William Freeh. I had never given a moment’s thought to how they might have met until I visited Sasbaach for the first time, back in 1991. My position as a federal judge must have impressed the locals because the mayor turned out and introduced me to a very distant cousin named Ernst Fruh, while the police pitched in by making photocopies of some old family birth and marriage records that had been stored in the local church. What really struck me, though, was
the church itself—St. Bridgette’s, founded by an order of Irish nuns in this little town right in the middle of Alsace-Lorraine. That’s when I knew: fate had brought the German Freehs and Irish McGees together.
I doubt that my grandmother finished more than sixth grade, and my grandfather certainly didn’t go a lot higher, but they had the immigrant’s determination to succeed. The two of them settled in an apartment on Baltic Street in Red Hook, just like the cheap street in the Monopoly game; and there they had two sons—my father the oldest, born in 1916, and his younger brother, Edward. Both boys not only attended but graduated from St. Francis High School, another big step up the ladder of social mobility.
Dad was working for a Brooklyn trucking company, loading and unloading at the dock, when World War II broke out. He joined the army almost immediately after Pearl Harbor and eventually ended up a combat engineer in England, helping to lengthen runways so American bombers could use them. Once or twice a day for many months, German planes would come droning over the English Channel, spotting and reconnoitering. At the first sound of their engines, Dad says, all the men would drop whatever they were doing and rush off to the parade ground, where they would drill furiously with make-believe rifles—in some cases, nothing more than crooked sticks—until the Luftwaffe had flown by. Dad says the men in his unit laughed uproariously every time they staged their charade.
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