The Currie Riddle
Is she too loyal to say anything damaging, or too honest
to say anything but the truth?
By Nancy Gibbs
(TIME, April 27) -- Because she is such a calming presence, always a kind word,
always a candy bowl on her desk, a cold cloth for the forehead,
Betty Currie has been painted through this winter of scandal as
a simple, sanctified sister of mercy. But she is also a puzzle,
with a resume and reflexes that speak to lessons learned in 40
years of bureaucratic trench warfare. Is she too loyal ever to
betray the President? Is she too honest ever to shade the truth?
Kenneth Starr and Bill Clinton are each hoping that they know
which side she will come down on--and the two sides couldn't be
farther apart.
In the weeks since mid-January, when she spent four days holed
up in a hotel room with Starr's team, answering questions about
the President's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, Currie has
gone to work every day and tended to her ailing mother after
hours. She sits right outside the Oval Office, answering
Clinton's phones, opening his mail, greeting his visitors,
gauging his mood for nervous guests, correcting his spelling,
telling him when he's behind schedule and bringing him all sorts
of other news, good and bad. In coming days she'll face Starr's
team for another grilling under oath about her boss, which could
yield the most crucial testimony yet against the President. She
alone can say whether he tried to enlist her in covering up an
alleged affair with Lewinsky by helping find the intern a job
and by retrieving several gifts Clinton purchased for her.
Currie has a record of squeezing through tight spots, which
makes her a much more nimble character than the snapshots
suggest. She is so modest she neglected to tell her classmates
at a high school reunion what she does for a living. "You almost
had to drag it out of her that she worked at the White House,"
says Waukegan Township High School classmate Chandra Sefton. She
is so reserved that she often uses only facial expressions to
reveal her opinions. She keeps her private life so private that
some of her co-workers were not really aware of her divorce, her
courtship with the man who became her second husband, or the
deaths last year of her brother and her sister. She is regarded
by nearly everyone as apolitical and nonpartisan, but over 10
years and three elections she became a minor franchise player on
Democratic presidential campaigns. "For a woman who's been
around politics as long as she has, it does not appear that
aggression has kept her in the game," says a Clinton White House
veteran. "Being nice and observant and being savvy have kept her
in the game."
In a city where people make a career of being overestimated,
Currie understood the value of doing exactly the opposite. A
modest upbringing and innate humility helped. Being a black
woman in a white-male power structure did too, to the point that
to this day all the faintly patronizing descriptions of her vast
maternal instincts ignore the considerable influence she has
exerted over the years. More than one White House veteran will
say without prompting that Currie got her job in part to bring
some diversity to the West Wing. That dismissive attitude just
helped Currie fly below the radar.
Her first break came from a Republican boss, Joseph Blatchford,
who took over the Peace Corps in 1969 and needed a new
secretary. "The job was a crucial one. I had 10,000 people
spread out over 68 countries, and I needed a reliable, efficient
person," he says. "I didn't ask if she was a Republican or
Democrat. I wasn't interested because she was so good." She
stuck with Blatchford when he moved to ACTION, the federal
agency that ran the Peace Corps, and stayed there through three
directors, building her own network among the people who sit
just outside the big corner offices. According to Sam Brown,
another boss at ACTION, "Betty is not just an exceptional
assistant who is smart and nice; she is well connected in that
network of savvy career senior secretaries across Washington.
She knows exactly who to call to get something done, or is at
most two calls away from knowing."
Her political and personal life took a dramatic turn in the late
1970s. At that time, an action official named Robert Currie
effectively took over the agency, and Betty began dating him.
They married in 1988, and some colleagues perceived a shift in
Betty Currie's political guidance system. "I cannot help
thinking that Bob, who is very liberal politically, has had an
influence on Betty and her decisions to become more partisan
over the years," says a former co-worker.
By the time Ronald Reagan became President, Currie was so well
entrenched that she and a handful of career bureaucrats all but
controlled an agency that he had vowed to padlock. When he
appointed a conservative Dallas lawyer named Thomas Pauken to
head ACTION and "de-radicalize" the place, Pauken found he had
to topple Currie first. "As long as she was sitting outside my
office, I wasn't running the agency," he declares. So he demoted
her. "Betty was surprised," he recalls. "She thought she had the
place wired."
It was John Podesta, now Clinton's deputy chief of staff, who
helped usher Currie into campaign politics. They met at ACTION
in the 1970s, and eventually worked together on the Mondale
campaign in 1984 and for Dukakis in 1988. After that hard,
dispiriting race she swore to her husband that she'd never work
on another one. That vow lasted until the next one, when she got
a call to come work for strategist James Carville at Clinton
headquarters in Little Rock, Ark. Currie told high school friend
Sefton that she was working for this guy Clinton because after
years of backing losers, she thought he really had a chance.
Before the race was over, she was working in the Governor's
mansion.
Once in the White House, Currie became an expert at making small
talk with visiting dignitaries, members of Congress, Cabinet
Secretaries and other Administration officials as they cooled
their heels waiting for the ever tardy Clinton. In a tense
atmosphere, where any information about the President's mood is
vital, she was a great early-warning system. "She would never
say, 'He's in a bad mood,'" says Chip Blacker, a National
Security Council official, "but if things weren't going well,
she'd open her eyes dramatically and pronounce, 'Well, it has
been an interesting day.'"
Currie has faced the grand jury before--back in January, when
the sight of her fighting her way through a crush of cameras put
an end once and for all to her anonymity. She admitted to a
friend, in a note written on White House stationery, "I'm aging
fast!" But that was, in Monica years, ages ago, and since then
much has happened. For one, she's recently back from a grand
tour of Africa, where Clinton toasted her in several speeches.
Old friends who have spoken with her in the past week say she
sounds calm and unfazed about Round 2 with the independent
counsel. But Starr has been closing in on her too. To sketch a
clearer arc of Clinton's relationship with Monica, Starr has had
the benefit of obtaining phone and pager logs, White House entry
records, interviews with White House aides and E-mails. On her
return trip to the grand jury, Currie is likely to be shown
specific dates and times to refresh her memory of Monica visits.
Was the President expecting Monica, or did she come to see
Currie and seize the moment to see Clinton? Did the President
and Monica meet alone? If the records indicate that Currie was
in the middle of something she did not remember earlier, will
her memory of key events be rekindled? And is it just a
coincidence or one of those perfectly weird ironies of the whole
Monicalendar that Currie might be appearing before the grand
jury during National Secretaries Week?
--Reported by James Carney, Sally B. Donnelly, Mark Thompson and
Michael Weisskopf/Washington
CURRIE'S RESUME
Personal: Married to Bob Currie, a retired government official,
for 10 years. One daughter from earlier marriage
Professional: Climbed the ranks of civil service from typist to
top secretary for three directors of ACTION, the agency that ran
the Peace Corps. After "retiring," was lured back to work on
presidential campaigns of Mondale, Dukakis and Clinton. Now she
sits just outside the Oval Office
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