Down to the last detail (a VERY interesting profile of Harriet Miers)

In an administration that makes a virtue -- for its staffers, at least -- of anonymity and self-effacement, Harriet Miers could well be considered a saint.

Miers, 59, tapped to replace Attorney General-designate Alberto Gonzales as White House counsel, has long been one of the most discreet, most private and most protective members of George W. Bush's inner circle.

Now Miers, the White House deputy chief of staff, is poised to become one of its most prominent as well.

The first female president of the State Bar of Texas and a Dallas native, Miers has known Bush since 1993, when she became counsel to his successful gubernatorial campaign. In 2001, she moved to Washington with the newly elected president. She has worked there -- as White House staff secretary and now deputy chief -- ever since.

She has also earned a reputation as exacting, detail-oriented, and meticulous -- to a fault, her critics say.

"She can't separate the forest from the trees," says one former White House staffer.

But Miers' supporters say her emphasis on detail and procedure are exactly what the Office of the White House Counsel requires.

"She is very thorough and very hard-working and very conscientious and very careful, which is why she was a good choice for staff secretary and why she's a good choice as counsel," notes Brett Kavanaugh, a former White House associate counsel who replaced Miers as staff secretary in the summer of 2003.

White House spokesman Allen Abney says Miers will not be granting interviews until she begins her new job.

Of course, there is no inherent contradiction in being able to provide the big-picture advice, both legal and political, usually required of a White House counsel and possessing a rigorous attention to detail.

And Miers clearly enjoys the most important prerequisite for any successful White House counsel: the absolute confidence of her client.

"Harriet Miers is a trusted adviser, on whom I have long relied for straightforward advice," Bush said in a statement released on Nov. 17, the day he announced his intention to appoint Miers to the counsel post.

"They are very close professionally," adds Kavanaugh, who has been nominated for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. "Personally, the president has great confidence in her judgment, experience, and care."

Yet it's not at all clear how Miers will fare in a job that includes a substantial amount of policy work. As staff secretary, she held the critical and demanding job of vetting every piece of paper that landed on Bush's desk or ended up in his nightly briefing book.

By all accounts, Miers' thoroughness and her reputation as an "honest broker," eager to allow all viewpoints to be heard, stood her in good stead as staff secretary.

"People understand winning or losing. What they don't understand is that they didn't have a fair hearing," Miers said in a 2003 interview with Texas Lawyer, a sister publication of Legal Times.

She did raise some eyebrows early in Bush's first term by arguing against eliminating the American Bar Association's 50-year-old role of vetting potential federal judiciary nominations, a move led by Gonzales. (The ABA was removed from the vetting process in March 2001.)

"She drilled down on everything so it was perfect, on every single thing," says one former associate White House counsel.

Yet her tenure in the Office of the Chief of Staff, where she is a top domestic policy adviser, has been more problematic. She had to fill the shoes of Joshua Bolten, a former Senate trade counsel and Goldman Sachs executive in London. Bolten, who left to become head of the Office of Management and Budget, had been steeped in policy arcana for years.

"I would take clients in to see Josh," says one Washington lobbyist. "But nobody in my world knew who Harriet was. They would see [Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy Margaret] Spellings and [Assistant to the President for Economic Policy Steven] Friedman instead."

Her critics say the problem goes beyond what Miers does or doesn't know about policy -- and right back to a near-obsession with detail and process.

"There's a stalemate there," says one person familiar with the chief of staff's office. "The process can't move forward because you have to get every conceivable piece of background before you can move onto the next level. People are talking about a focus on process that is so intense it gets in the way of substance."

One former White House official familiar with both the counsel's office and Miers is more blunt.

"She failed in Card's office for two reasons," the official says. "First, because she can't make a decision, and second, because she can't delegate, she can't let anything go. And having failed for those two reasons, they move her to be the counsel for the president, which requires exactly those two talents."

Responds White House Deputy Counsel David Leitch: "She certainly delegates. She couldn't possibly dream of doing any of these jobs, this job or the job she has now, without delegating."

There is no precise job description for the White House counsel. As the president's lawyer, the counsel's responsibilities can be narrowly construed --- checking for legal problems on any White House policy, speech or proclamation -- or broadened to include substantive policy guidance.

Since Watergate, the office has also taken a major role in making sure ethics rules are followed and financial disclosure forms properly completed.

The job, says former White House Counsel A.B. Culvahouse, ranges from "vetting a declaration that this is National Dairy Goat Week to whether there's a policy on allowing the use of the White House or Old [Executive Office Building] for meetings by outside groups, and if it is permissible, whether it's something you'd discourage."

There were also frequent clashes with the speechwriters, recalls Culvahouse, who was President Ronald Reagan's counsel from 1987 to 1989 and is now chairman of O'Melveny & Myers.

"They always wanted to say something provocative and interesting and press-worthy. The counsel's office would modulate it to be less provocative."

However the job is handled, though, it is tough to remain out of the spotlight for long.

The office is now the principal vetter for judicial nominations, always a highly charged area and one that, in the next four years, will almost certainly have to approve a Supreme Court nominee or two.

Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary during Bush's first two years, says he occasionally found it useful to let Gonzales speak for the administration.

"Whenever I needed Al to go out and talk, he would. He'd make phone calls," Fleischer recalls. "He wasn't a publicity hound, but he understood the role of the press."

"There are major public reverberations to the most private, sensitive internal deliberations. That means Harriet will need to think about the public hat that she wears even though her strengths lie in the private-advice category," says Fleischer, who now runs his own consulting shop.

"In my view, she's a lawyer's lawyer [who] grasps facts very quickly, in terms of sizing up a situation," says James Francis, who was chairman of Bush's 1994 gubernatorial campaign and suggested that Miers become campaign counsel.

"She doesn't make careless mistakes and doesn't tolerate careless mistakes in others," adds Francis, who runs his own investment company.

At her new job, Miers won't be working alone. The counsel's office, which in the Bush administration has operated with fewer than a dozen associate counsel, will always draw on the much larger resources of the Department of Justice and its Office of Legal Counsel and Office of Legal Policy.

More important, the man Miers is replacing, Alberto Gonzales, will be right down the street, a big change from the situation of most White House counsel, whose predecessors disappear into the private sector.

That could heighten the already ambiguous relationship between the Justice Department and the White House over which one takes the lead on various matters, including judicial selection.

"If you know you have Gonzales at Justice, does it matter who you have in the White House counsel's office?" muses the Washington lobbyist.

"Right now, the White House counsel and the White House generally control a large part of the judicial selection process," explains John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy during the first Bush term. "But there's no natural reason that has to be the case," says Yoo, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. "Over time, the lead of picking justices has been in different places. Much of the function the White House counsel currently performs has been in the DOJ."

Still, there will always be issues that lead directly back to the counsel's office, no matter how many other agencies were involved in making a particular decision -- issues like those involving the legal conduct of U.S. soldiers.

Gonzales, for example, was vilified over his Jan. 25, 2002, memorandum that provided a legal basis for not applying the Geneva Conventions to Taliban prisoners captured by the United States in Afghanistan.

It was the counsel's office that had to provide a constitutional argument supporting Vice President Dick Cheney's right to keep details of his National Energy Policy Development Group secret, and prevent General Accounting Office chief David Walker from reviewing its internal deliberations.

"To litigate Walker v. Cheney, that took some guts and some judgment [as to] why the stakes in the litigation are worth the risks politically," says the former White House staffer.

Ditto for the White House decision not to go ahead and launch an internal investigation into whether the White House had provided special favors for the collapsed energy giant Enron Corp.

"The conventional wisdom was to investigate," says the former staffer. "But Gonzales opted for a more-passive approach -- that we not investigate ourselves -- and that turned out to be the right decision, contrary to a lot of the advice he was getting."

Until Gonzales actually assumes his new job, and Miers replaces him, it is impossible to know how the two will share their overlapping responsibilities. And it is far from clear which members of the counsel's office will move with Gonzales, who will stay, and who will move into the private sector.

According to the former White House official familiar with both Miers and the counsel's office, Miers has already begun meeting privately with the current associate counsel. The former official was told by one associate counsel who had met with Miers that the conversation was both "awkward and uncertain."

Miers comes to the counsel's job with an impressive resume and a number of firsts.

Born in 1945, she grew up in Dallas and, until moving to Washington with Bush, spent almost her entire life there.

She went to Southern Methodist University for both her undergraduate degree (in mathematics) and her J.D. She spent one summer working for plaintiffs lawyer Melvin Belli in San Francisco.

After law school, Miers clerked for U.S. District Judge Joe Estes (also in Dallas). In 1972, she became the first woman hired by Locke Purnell Boren Laney & Neely, a venerable Dallas firm that traces its roots back to the 1890s.

She became president of the Dallas Bar Association in 1985, and in 1989 was elected to a two-year term as an at-large candidate on the Dallas City Council.

After Bush was elected governor, she represented him in a title dispute over his East Texas fishing house. In 1995, Bush appointed Miers to a six-year term on the Texas Lottery Commission when it was mired in scandal. She was a driving force behind its cleanup.

Miers was elected president of Locke Purnell in 1996, by then a 225-lawyer firm. Three years later, it merged, and she became co-manager of Locke Liddell & Sapp.

Miers, president of the State Bar of Texas from 1992 to 1993, played an active role in the American Bar Association. She was one of two candidates for the No. 2 position at the ABA, chair of the House of Delegates, before withdrawing her candidacy to move to Washington.

A commercial litigator, Miers represented such clients as Microsoft Corp., Walt Disney Co., and Republic National Bank.

In 1996, at an Anti-Defamation League Jurisprudence Award ceremony, Bush introduced Miers as a "pit bull in Size 6 shoes," a tag line that has persisted through the years, in part because colorful anecdotes or descriptions about Miers are notoriously difficult to find.

"She's not a back-slapper. She's very businesslike," says Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht, who has dated Miers over the years and has known her since he first became a lawyer at Locke Purnell in 1975.

"She's also very kind. She always remembers everybody's birthday, and has a present for them. She'll be finding a present for somebody in the middle of the night," he says. "'Can't it wait until next week?' 'No,' she'd say, 'It has to be done now.'"

Miers, who turns 60 in August, is single, a devout churchgoer, and very close to her family: two brothers and her mother in Dallas and a third brother in Houston.

Even people who know her well note that she is extremely private, good at eliciting opinions from others, but not generally revealing of her own.

And she seems genuinely honored to work in the White House, they add. In her 2003 interview with Texas Lawyer, she talked about her job of taking the nightly briefing book to the president.

"Sometimes when we are carting it over there, we think, 'My goodness,'" Miers said.

"There are a lot of colorful characters in the Texas legal market, and I could probably come up with lots of stories about other folks, flattering and unflattering," says Connop, a Locke Liddell partner.

"Harriet is a hard worker, personable, a client-oriented attorney who is extremely thorough and not flamboyant. And I don't think I'd be hurting her feelings by saying that."

Miers said in a 2003 interview with Texas Lawyer, a sister publication of Legal Times.

Bush's Gatekeeper Harriet Miers Walks Softly and Carries a Big Stick in the West Wing
By Miriam Rozen
Texas Lawyer
Monday, March 24, 2003
Even by the dramatic standards of these times, the president's schedule on Friday, March 14, stood out as a portentous one. That morning, President George W. Bush, flanked by Secretary of State Colin Powell, announced that he intended to re-start peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis. In the mid-afternoon, Bush met with three people affected by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's past use of chemical weapons. Then shortly before 3:30 p.m., when the president and first lady Laura Bush strode to the awaiting helicopter bound for Camp David, the White House press office unveiled that Bush would attend an emergency summit in the Azores with the prime ministers of England and Spain. The meeting would be the precursor for Bush's Monday night get-out-in-48-hours-or-we're-coming-to-get-you ultimatum to Hussein that put the United States on the brink of war.
Despite the pace and import of those March 14 events, Harriet Miers appeared unflustered in her basement office at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as the sun began to set.
The petite, soft-spoken former State Bar of Texas president personified tranquility and decorum shortly after the president's helicopter lifted off. During an interview, the Dallasite drawled careful answers to questions about her White House responsibilities, which give her more one-on-one contact with the president than nearly any other staff member in the West Wing.
As staff secretary, Miers - who Bush once referred to as a "pit bull in size 6 shoes" - acts as the ultimate gatekeeper for what crosses the desk of the nation's commander in chief. At 57, the former co-managing partner of Locke Liddell & Sapp personally controls the flow of written information into the Oval Office. Without Miers' stamp of approval, no piece of paper gets forwarded to the president or included in his nightly briefing books.
Asked about the changes in her White House duties in the weeks leading up to the war against Hussein, Miers says such challenges make her job "very rewarding. You know you are managing issues that are of the utmost importance to the presidency and to the country."
Miers' unflappable demeanor, forthright approach and sharp legal eye have earned her the respect of White House staffers as one of the president's fairest aides. Appointed to the staff secretary post on Jan. 5, 2001, Miers is regarded in the top quarters of the administration as a person Bush trusts to protect his interests.
"I've worked with many staff secretaries and she is the best," says White House chief of staff Andrew Card, who has served in the White House on and off since 1983 with the Reagan administration and as deputy White House chief of staff in the previous Bush administration. "She's a quiet, highly respected force and someone who is seen as not having any agenda other than the president's," says Card about Miers.
"There would be no way that the White House would run as effectively, deftly, authoritatively and with as much collegiality without Harriet Miers. It's amazing how she has navigated these shoals," says Karl Rove, the president's powerful and high-profile chief political adviser. "The president has complete and utter confidence in her."
Although largely unseen by the public and the press, Miers' job as staff secretary - a position that typically has been filled by a lawyer - is a powerful one.
"She is the hub of all that goes in or out of the Oval Office," Card says.
"No piece of paper flows through to the president without going through her first. She ensures that they are in the form and fashion for the president. Since the most valuable thing a president has is his time, she checks that everything is complete and thorough," says Rove.
In an academic study published in Presidential Studies Quarterly on June 1, 2001, authors Karen M. Hult, a professor of political science and adjunct faculty member at the Center for Public Administration and Policy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, an associate director of the University of Pennsylvania's Washington Semester Program, described the staff secretary's position as historically "political" and "the last substantive control point before papers reach the Oval Office."
In addition to managing the Office of the Staff Secretary, Miers, like others in that role since the Eisenhower administration, supervises the executive clerk, the records management and the correspondence departments in the White House - totaling more than 60 employees in the four departments.
The voluminous list of materials passing through the staff secretary to the president includes presidential decision memos, bills passed by Congress and associated signing or veto recommendations, drafts of presidential speeches, standard forms requiring the president's signature, White House guest lists and personal mail. Under Miers, the staff secretary also makes sure every adviser who needs to gets a chance to comment on presidential speeches.
Then there are those voluminous nightly briefing books. "Sometimes when we are carting it over there [to the Oval Office], we think, "My goodness," Miers says.
Charged with making sure the president's reading time is well spent, Miers holds the power to prevent policy initiatives from reaching Bush.
"The job of the staff secretary is to kill ideas. I know that sounds awful, but the problem with the White House is people come in with great ideas and they don't understand the consequences of this brilliant genius idea. And you have to send the genius idea to its natural enemies and test it and see if the natural enemy can kill it. If the natural enemy can't kill it, then it's worth going with," Jerry H. Jones, who served as staff secretary to President Richard M. Nixon for four months in 1974, told the authors of the academic study.
But, unlike Jones and some of Miers' other predecessors, Miers does not use her position to exercise bias, Card says. "She is an honest broker," he says. "If you are trying to sneak a decision by her, she is kind of a police person. She makes sure the president has the breadth of counsel. She doesn't allow him to be ignorant of something that would prevent him from making a decision. She also makes sure that people don't run out the clock."
Even he, Card says, gets equal treatment. "She frequently disciplines all of us, telling us, 'Get your papers in on time' or 'That wasn't as efficient as it could be' or 'You wrote a wonderful paper but there was no bottom line.' "
Miers says the president demands a high level of competence in his written material, something she learned about him when she represented Bush while she practiced at Locke Liddell. She recalls a consultant gave her advice about Bush years ago that she follows to this day: "She told me, 'Never hand him anything that you didn't expect him to read.' And she was right. If you give him something, he's going to read it carefully." The president, Miers says, "wants [reading material] to be in good shape, and he is aware when it is not." She says he particularly dislikes typographical errors and misreferences.
Self-deferentially, Miers contends, the accord she has helped achieve among presidential advisers was possible because of the White House staff's overall team approach. But she also appeals to advisers' own interests when she returns material as unacceptable for the president to see, Miers says.
"If people are presenting things that are not ready for him then that doesn't advance the interest of the staff member," Miers says.
She takes steps to reduce any potential strife among advisers who might feel slighted. "Everyone is kept up to speed, so there are no surprises," she says. She also lets advisers know that each one of them will have an opportunity to be heard. "People understand winning or losing. What they don't understand is that they didn't have a fair hearing," Miers says.
Her background as a lawyer, whose clients have included Microsoft Inc. among others, aids Miers in the staff secretary role.
Famous Firsts
A well-known, tough commercial litigator, Miers has held numerous pioneering legal positions, almost all of them in her hometown Dallas - with the exception of her current post and a short stint as a clerk in legendary plaintiffs lawyer Melvin Belli's San Francisco office.
A graduate of Southern Methodist University School of Law, Miers became the first woman hired in 1972 at Dallas' Locke Purnell Rain Harrell, a predecessor to Locke Liddell. She became the first woman president of the Dallas Bar Association in 1985 and, in 1992, the first female president of the State Bar. In 1994, then-Texas Gov. Bush appointed Miers, who served on his gubernatorial transition team, as chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission at a time when the agency was fodder for negative headlines. During her five years as chairwoman of the commission, the Texas Lottery dropped from first to fourth in the nation in sales and two of its directors were fired in controversial and litigious episodes. In March 1996, her law partners elected Miers as the first woman president of Locke Purnell Rain Harrell, one of the two large Texas firms that merged in 1998 to create Locke Liddell & Sapp.
Throughout her career, Miers earned a reputation as a steady, even-keel adviser. "Harriet is not a person that gets frustrated easily. She doesn't lose her temper. She is very cool and calm in a storm," says R. Bruce LaBoon, her former partner at Locke Liddell.
U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade of Dallas, whose appointment to the federal bench became official last month, says Miers' low-key approach can startle even those, such as himself, who have known her for a long time. He recalls reaching her on the phone a few years back and having her say, "Ed, can you give me just a minute? I've got Mr. Gates on the line. I'm doing a little work for Microsoft." Kinkeade says he told her that he could call her back rather than put one of America's most celebrated corporate chieftains on hold.
Kinkeade says Miers accepts responsibility even when it doesn't come with glory. "She truly believes in doing right," he says. Her role with the Texas Lottery supports that contention, Kinkeade says. "No one can say she took the lottery position because it was fun. It was something that was honorable, and she did a great job."
But as chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission at a time of turmoil, Miers had her detractors. Charles Soechting, who represented former Lottery executive director Nora Linares - whom Miers ultimately helped fire from her post, says: "I learned from Harriet that someone can be stone cold and at the same time act like they care."
Soechting, a partner in O'Quinn Laminack & Pirtle in Houston, contends that Miers ignored his and his co-counsel's efforts to help Linares exit the Lottery post gracefully when questions arose in 1996 about her possible conflicts of interest related to her then-boyfriend's contract with the Lottery operator. Linares contended she did not know about her boyfriend's contract. "Resignation wasn't an option. The manner in which it was handled made no sense at all," Soechting says.
As commissioner, Miers oversaw a public hearing at which Linares was allowed to respond to questions by the agency's overseers. "It was the most piss-poor example of a fair hearing run by Harriet that I've ever seen," Soechting says. "Nora wanted to get out of there with some degree of dignity. And Miers didn't let her."
Asked about it, Miers has no comment, but in a Nov. 26, 1996, article, Miers was quoted in the San Antonio Express-News, saying, "Ms. Linares has been consistently an advocate of Gtech [the Lottery operator] and its performance. I would hope it has been based on objective criteria and performance, but that obviously is an issue the commission has to look at."
One-on-One Time
Those in the White House who admire Miers do not deny that she evaluates situations with a coolness and collectiveness that distinguishes her. "I would not put her as stone cold, but I would say she is objective and does not allow emotions to get in the way of her job," Card says.
But her fans also suspect Miers' ability to have just a plain good ol' time endears her to the president and his staff.
"Harriet is one of the favorite people in the White House," Card says. He notes that Miers is invited to Camp David, "a privilege that is not enjoyed by a lot of the staff." Her athletic prowess helps, too, Card says. She plays tennis and once played a game called Wally Ball and goes bowling at the White House. "She beats you quietly," Card says.
Kinkeade says Miers withstands ribbing as graciously as she does everything else. For example, Kinkeade says he sometimes refers to Miers as "double-wide Harriet" to reflect the accommodations she gets when she stays at the president's ranch in Crawford. Miers responded that the residences are not trailers but rather "manufactured housing," and that "they are very nice," Kinkeade says.
While she has some fun, exhaustion and exertion best describe Miers' days in Washington, says White House domestic policy adviser and fellow Texan Margaret Spellings. "She is here before dawn and after dusk and on most weekends," Spellings says. "No one works harder." Unlike most staff members, who see the president with others in the room, Miers spends one-on-one time with Bush everyday, Spellings says.
During the 2000 presidential campaign and in the controversial Florida-ballot aftermath, Miers served as Bush's adviser and helped with the ensuing litigation. As a result, Texas-driven speculation swirled about the Dallas lawyer's prospective opportunities with the incoming Bush administration. "I pretty much knew the president and Mrs. Bush wanted me to be part of the administration," recalls Miers. News articles at the time mentioned her as a possible candidate for U.S. attorney general.
But Miers says she did not hesitate when Bush offered her the staff secretary job - even though she didn't know at that point exactly what responsibilities the post entailed. "Once I was offered the position, the decision was made right away," Miers recalls. Her only hesitation involved moving to Washington for a post farther away from the seat of power. "I wasn't interested in coming to Washington to have some position in some department somewhere," Miers says. She also regretted leaving her family. Miers, who is single, had her mother living with her in her Dallas residence.
Once she knew her assignment by name, Miers says, she began researching the position by talking to her immediate predecessor in the Clinton administration, Lisel Loy, and reading the academic study. She also talked to the career staff members in the White House.
She had some of her own ideas, too, she says. "One thing that has been important to me in creating the office was we needed to conform to the president. It was not going to be that we were doing things because things had always been done that way," Miers say. Her president, she says, wants to hear from a broad number of people and she makes sure that happens.
Miers' close ties to the Bushes distinguish her in the West Wing, other staff members say. "They have a long relationship. They go way back. It speaks to the way they relate to each other," says Spellings, who has served Bush since he was governor. Having been Bush's personal lawyer, Miers has been privy to information about the president that few others have seen, Spellings says.
In the past, staff secretaries - most recently John Podesta, who served during the Clinton administration - have been promoted to White House chiefs of staff. Such a promotion is not out of the question for Miers, says Card.
"I think it would be wrong to speculate," Card says when asked about such a promotion. But he notes, "She has 100 percent of the president's confidence."
Meanwhile, Miers still talks about returning to Texas someday. "It goes without saying, I hope, that I love my practice and my partners," she says, noting that she doesn't want to speculate about her future. "I am a Texan through and through."

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