The Shadow Party: Part II Continued 3
By David Horowitz and Richard Poe
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 7, 2004
Joint Victory Campaign 2004
Launched November 5, 2003
Harold McEwan Ickes keeps a low profile. However, as the Shadow Party’s unofficial chief executive, his growing power is obvious to Washington insiders. “[H]e is the most important person in the Democratic Party today,” outside the official Kerry campaign, says Democrat strategist Howard Wolfson.[1]
Like most Shadow Party leaders, Ickes rose from the New Left. A Freedom Rider in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, Ickes subsequently traveled to the Dominican Republic, where he involved himself in a coup attempt by a junta of leftwing colonels in 1965.[2] He worked on the 1968 Eugene McCarthy campaign and the 1972 George McGovern campaign. Ickes met Bill Clinton in 1972, while both were working on Operation Pursestrings, a grassroots lobbying effort aimed at cutting off aid to South Vietnam. Ickes later spent fourteen years as a partner in the Mineola, Long Island law firm Meyer, Suozzi, English & Klein, notorious for the long list of violent, mob-run labor unions it has represented.[3]
Ickes left the firm to join the Clinton White House as deputy chief of staff from January 1994 through January 1997. One of his key duties in the White House was suppressing Clinton scandals and defusing federal investigations. “Whenever there was something that [Bill Clinton] thought required ruthlessness or vengeance or sharp elbows and sharp knees or, frankly, skulduggery, he would give it to Harold,” former Clinton advisor Dick Morris told Vanity Fair.[4]
Ickes’ true loyalty is to Hillary, however. The Boston Globe called him “a special favorite of the president's wife.”[5] During his stint at the White House, Ickes headed a secret unit for Hillary, dedicated to suppressing Clinton scandals. It operated, in effect, as a Counsel’s office within the White House Counsel’s office. In his book The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, David Brock refers to Ickes’ special unit as the “Shadow Counsel’s Office.”[6] Its operatives included Mark Fabiani, Chris Lehane, Jane Sherburne and perhaps others. Ickes reported directly to Hillary Clinton on all matters related to the work of this special unit. In time, Ickes would graduate from running Hillary’s Shadow Counsel’s Office to running an entire Shadow Party.
Hillary recruited Ickes as chief campaign advisor for her 2000 Senate run. According to Ickes, he accepted the job after a four-hour meeting with Hillary on February 12, 1999 -- the same day that the U.S. Senate voted on Bill Clinton's impeachment. “I’m really doing this out of my friendship for Hillary, pure and simple,” Ickes told the Associated Press on June 17, 1999. “She called and there was no way I was going to say no to Hillary.” [7]... </snip>
That left out the part about his nasty, DIRTY father, who worked for FDR. He learned dirty tricks at his father's knee.