New York Times
Bill Clinton's Garbage Man
By Michael Lewis
September 21, 1997, Sunday
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Ickes has been caught up in so many of Clinton's scandals and crises that he came to describe his function in the White House as "director of the sanitation department."
As campaign manager of Clinton's '92 New York campaign, he persuaded the state's Democrats to stick with Clinton while Gennifer Flowers strutted luridly through the national imagination. (His persuasion saved Clinton's candidacy.)
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When he was 25, Ickes had entered Columbia University Law School and promptly contracted -- if that is the right word - narcolepsy. For 10 years or so Ickes took massive doses of Dexedrine. Five milligrams of the stuff would wire a normal person for 48 hours; Ickes swallowed 60 milligrams a day to keep himself awake. At the White House Ickes had a special terror of falling asleep in the Oval Office. He imagined a day when a pride of Cabinet members would be sitting around the yellow sofas, Al Gore would be going on about the ozone layer and whoosh ... he'd be nodding off on his feet like some giant flamingo. He says: "It's hard to fall asleep on your feet but it can be done.Just give me a nice, dark cozy corner."
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Ickes and Clinton got to know each other in the early 1970's, and when they'd meet, they were often joined by their mutual friend Susan Thomases. The ghost of Harold Ickes Sr. was ever present. He had long been one of Thomases' heroes; she worshiped him," she says. It was for that reason, in part, that she knew who Ickes was when he was protesting the Vietnam War at Columbia. (Their friendship was born during Eugene McCarthy's 1968 campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination; they both worked for him.)
Ickes graduated from high school functionally illiterate, and didn't finish his undergraduate work at Stanford until he was 24. He was, to put it mildly, a loner. "I don't remember having a single close friend before age of 25," he says.
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As best as he can recall the first sign he had that his friendship with Clinton had changed was the first time he visited the President in the Oval Office: "The first time I went to brief Clinton I knew him as my friend. He's my friend, I'm thinking. He's the President but he's my friend. And I'm standing there waiting for him to acknowledge me, but. .. he's...doing a crossword puzzle."
The crossword puzzle isn't what's unusual; everywhere the President goes he carries a crossword puzzle, a deck of cards and a book. What's unusual is his new attitude. "I am standing in front of his desk," Ickes says, "waiting for him to give me his undivided attention. I mean he's sitting there like there is no one else in the room. This guy is now the President. But he's also my friend. I'm thinking: 'Hey Pal. I'm here. Let's go.' Without looking up he finally says, 'Yeah, what do you want?'
http://tinyurl.com/frnsb