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HAROLD ICKES

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"The most important person in the Democratic Party today."
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Co-founder and unofficial director of the Democrat Shadow Party
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Sought chairmanship of the Democratic Party in February 2005
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Ran Hillary's successful Senate campaign in 1999-2000
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Former Deputy Chief of Staff for the Clinton White House
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Freedom Rider and antiwar activist of the New Left. Worked on Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern campaigns.
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Met Bill Clinton through the anti-Vietnam War movement in 1972
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In his law practice, represented Mob-run labor unions, with ties to the Lucchese, Colombo, Genovese, Gambino and other major crime families.

Harold McEwan Ickes is a long-time Democrat operative widely recognized as the chief organizer of the Shadow Party. During the 2004 presidential race, Democrat strategist Howard Wolfson told New York Magazine that - outside the Kerry campaign - Ickes was "the most important person in the Democratic Party today." (Michael Crowley, "Shadow Warriors," New York Magazine, 28 June 2004)

Ickes was a serious contender to succeed Terry McAuliffe as chairman of the Democratic Party in February 2005, though Howard Dean ended up getting the position.

"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 in 1997. (Judy Bachrach, "Seduced and Abandoned," Vanity Fair, September 1997)

If Ickes evinces skill in "skulduggery," it comes from long experience working in the dim-lit underworld where politics meets labor racketeering and organized crime.

Recruited by New Left icon Allard Lowenstein in 1964, Ickes turned up on every major battlefront of leftwing activism during the Sixties and early Seventies. He registered black voters in the Deep South for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); assisted Castro-ite rebels in the Dominican Republic; organized resistance to the Vietnam War and campaigned for "peace-at-any-price" candidates Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern.

Ickes subsequently began practicing labor law, representing a long list of gangsters, labor racketeers and Mob-run unions, many with ties to major New York crime families, among them the Lucchese, Colombo, Genovese and Gambino organizations. In his Mob law practice, Ickes often went beyond the call of duty, skirting if not actually crossing the line from attorney to accomplice.

New York Post columnist Mike McAlary wrote in 1993, "There are more than a couple of prosecutors in this city who believe that the only thing separating Harold Ickes and a jail cell is his ability to go strong and silent in the face of tough questions." (Todd S. Purdum, "A Political Whodunit: Suspects Abound in the Downfall of Harold M. Ickes," The New York Times, 14 February 1993, p. 41)

Bill and Hillary Clinton found many uses for Ickes' peculiar talents. By the mid-1990s, he was heading their fundraising machine, collecting record-breaking quantities of soft money - much of it through such unsavory means as labor racketeering; soliciting pay-offs from U.S. businessmen seeking inside access to overseas trade missions; and - as Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett II document in their book Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton and Al Gore Compromised U.S. Security for Chinese Cash - cutting deals with Chinese intelligence agents eager to loosen up U.S. export controls on military technology. (Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett II, Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton and Al Gore Compromised U.S. Security for Chinese Cash [Washington, DC; Regnery Publishing; 2000] )

By 1996, federal investigators had begun zeroing in on Ickes' involvement in numerous Clinton scandals including Filegate (the illegal commandeering of more than a thousand secret FBI background files on potential Clinton foes) and Chinagate (the selling of military secrets to Red China in exchange for campaign contributions).

Ickes had become a liability. Immediately after Bill Clinton's re-election in November 1996, the President fired him.

The firing was only temporary, however. In 1999, Ickes became Hillary's chief campaign advisor in her 2000 run for the Senate. Following Hillary's successful election, Ickes played a central role in creating the Democrat Shadow Party.

Biography

Harold McEwan Ickes comes from a prominent political family. His father Harold LeClair Ickes served as Secretary of the Interior from 1933 to 1946, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

The elder Ickes lost his first wife in an automobile accident in 1935. At age 64, he married 25-year-old Jane Dahlman. She gave birth to Harold on September 4, 1939. The younger Ickes hardly knew his famous father, who died when he was only twelve.

Harold Ickes attended the prestigious Sidwell Friends School along with other children of Washington's elite. But young Ickes rebelled against his privileged background. After high school, he eschewed college, choosing instead to fulfill a boyhood dream of working as a cowboy on ranches, which he did for three years, acquiring sufficient skill in roping steer and busting broncos to appear in rodeos. (Daniel Wise, "Veteran `Point Man' Ickes Gets New Battle Assignment," New York Law Journal, 28 December 1993, p. 1)

Ickes enrolled in Stanford University in 1961. There he fell under the influence of Professor Allard Kenneth Lowenstein, known as the "Pied Piper" for his ability to seduce idealistic young students into the New Left.

At Lowenstein's urging, Ickes spent the summers of 1964 and 1965 registering black voters in Mississippi and Louisiana respectively, for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Vicksburg, Mississippi and for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Tallulah, Louisiana. White vigilantes in Louisiana beat Ickes so badly in 1965 that he lost a kidney.

Undaunted, Ickes went that same year to the Dominican Republic, where — according to the Boston Globe — he sought to "help deposed leftist president Juan Bosch return to office." After spending two years in Communist Cuba, the socialist Bosch had returned to the Dominican Republic and won the support of a group of leftwing colonels, who sought to place Bosch in power through an armed coup. (John Aloysius Farrell, "The President's Get-It-Done Guy," The Boston Globe, 15 October 1995, p. 14)

Only the arrival of 22,000 U.S. Marines stopped the Bosch coup. According to the Boston Globe, Ickes was present on the island when the Marines landed, on April 29, 1965. He subsequently left the country and began "touring Latin America," until his mentor Lowenstein summoned Ickes back to New York to begin work on the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Shadow Man

Returning to the USA in 1966, Ickes joined Allard Lowenstein in New York. Lowenstein was then running for Congress. He introduced Ickes to the rough-and-tumble world of New York politics. (David Saltonstall, "Harold Ickes Knows All the Secrets But Won't Tell Any," Daily News [New York], 10 October 2000, p. 30)

Ickes became a political operative for the Democrats, working on various campaigns, including the 1968 and 1972 presidential runs of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern respectively. He met Bill Clinton while both were working on Operation Pursestrings, a grassroots lobbying effort aimed at pushing through the Hatfield-McGovern Amendment to cut off all military aid to South Vietnam.

Hatfield-McGovern was defeated, but subsequent measures promoted by Senator Ted Kennedy succeeded in slashing U.S. aid to South Vietnam by 80 percent in the next three years. By 1975, South Vietnam and Cambodia could no longer afford to defend themselves. They fell to the Communists, who promptly slaughtered 2-3 million people in Indochina.

In 1977, Ickes joined the Mineola, Long Island law firm Meyer, Suozzi, English & Klein, taking charge of its labor practice. Among the crooked unions Ickes represented for the firm were Local 100 of HERE - the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union - which was jointly controlled by the Colombo and Gambino crime families; the New York City District Council of Carpenters, then controlled by the Genovese crime family; and Teamsters Local 851, which ran the air freight rackets at JFK airport for the Lucchese crime family. (Micah Morrison, "Who is Harold Ickes?", The Wall Street Journal, 26 October 2000; Jerry Seper, "U.S. to Probe White House Aide's Former Law Firm for Mob Ties," The Washington Times, p. A1)

"The Firm"

Ickes has always denied complicity in any of the criminal activities of his mob clients. Faced with an avalanche of bad press in 1993, Ickes argued, "It is very important that law firms such as mine, which are known for their integrity, provide honest and competent legal representation to unions and their memberships. If we abandoned our clients in the face of allegations of corruption, it would leave union members at the mercy of only corrupt lawyers." (Charles R. Babcock, "Ickes Law Firm is Fighting Release of Investigator's Report," The Washington Post, 16 October 1994, p. A25)

However, Ickes' clients have faced more than mere "allegations of corruption." Several have been convicted and jailed for mob activity. Moreover, Meyer, Suozzi's reputation is considerably more controversial than Ickes admits. Among many New York attorneys, Meyer, Suozzi bears the humorous nickname, "The Firm" - after the 1993 film by the same name, starring Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman as attorneys trapped in a white-shoe law office serving the Mafia. (William G. McGowan, "The Mob and the Deputy Chief of Staff; Harold Ickes, Jr.," Washington Monthly, July 1994, p. 9)

Ickes joined the Clinton White House on January 4, 1994, serving as Assistant to President Bill Clinton and Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Political Affairs and Policy from January 1994 through January 1997.

Ickes brought his mob connections with him to the White House. He would later surface at the center of the so-called "Teamstergate" scandal - a complex money-laundering scheme in which several high-level Democrat leaders and union bosses who were directly implicated in the case mysteriously escaped prosecution. Among the big fish who slipped the net were Service Employees International Union (SEIU) head Andrew Stern; American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) chief Gerald McEntee ; Terry McAuliffe - who then headed the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign - and, of course, Harold Ickes himself. ("Cleaning up the Unions," The Wall Street Journal, January 30, 2001; John Bacon, "Hoffa Demands Congress Investigate Teamsters Vote," USA Today, 20 December 1994, p. 3A)

For more on Teamstergate and Ickes' ties to organized crime, see the entry for Meyer, Suozzi, English and Klein.

Hillary's Man

Insiders have long noted Ickes' special loyalty toward Hillary Clinton. The Boston Globe called him "a special favorite of the president's wife." (John Aloysius Farrell, "The President's Get-It-Done Guy," The Boston Globe, October 15, 1995, p. 14)

In the Clinton White House, Ickes quickly gravitated to Hillary's end of the operation. He served initially as "health care czar," charged with rescuing Hillary's floundering Health Security Act. (Robin Toner, "New Health Care Czar Preparing for Long Leap," The New York Times, 24 January 1994, A12) Hillary later placed Ickes in charge of a special unit within the White House Counsel's office, dedicated to suppressing Clinton scandals. It operated, in effect, as a Counsel's office within the Counsel's office. In his book The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, David Brock refers to Ickes' special unit as the "Shadow Counsel's Office." Its operatives included Mark Fabiani, Chris Lehane and Jane Sherburne. Ickes reported directly to Hillary Clinton on all matters related to the work of this special unit. (David Brock, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham (New York; The Free Press; 1996), 406-07; Jane Sherburne, interviewed by Chris Bury, Frontline, PBS, August 2000)

In time, Ickes would graduate from running a 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." (Marc Humbert, "Ickes, a Tenacious Operative, Mrs. Clinton's `Oak Tree' in New York," The Associated Press State & Local Wire, June 17, 1999)

As Hillary's unofficial campaign chief, Ickes brought to bear all the clout and connections he had accumulated through thirty-three-years of bare-knuckled power struggles in the Empire State - most of them fought in dark, smoke-filled rooms beyond the prying eyes of the law. A statewide get-out-the-vote drive conducted by canvassers from the radical cult ACORN and its front group The Working Families Party proved pivotal in Hillary's Senate victory, as did massive assistance from Ickes' old union allies.

Family:

Harold Ickes married attorney Laura Rose Handman on December 5, 1983. She practices media law in New York, but Ickes works in Washington DC. Ickes and Handman have a daughter named Charlotte.

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