CHARLES C. RUFF, ESQ., R.I.P.

Charles Frederick Carson Ruff's memorial service on December 16th was more than a remembrance of the life of the late White House Counsel who had defended President Clinton against impeachment. The occasion also served, in some strange and moving way, as a memorial service for the eight years of the Clinton Administration.

No novelist could have invented the spectacle which unfolded on that cold, gray, and rainy Saturday morning.

Gathered in the nave of Washington's National Cathedral, like performers at the final curtain call of a tragic opera, were a cast of characters Americans had come to know as a result of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Their drama had come to a sudden end with the surprise decision of the Supreme Court against Vice-President Al Gore on December 12th. (Ruff had reportedly been an advisor to Al Gore's legal team). As the assembled were mourning Ruff, they appeared also to be mourning their own fate.

While Douglas Major performed Wagner's "Liebestodt" (the "Love-Death" overture from Tristan and Isolde) on the cathedral's enormous organ, friends and family of Charles Ruff slowly filled the nave.

Each made an entrance, taking a final bow before the assembled crowd, filling the seats at the front of the assembly.

In filed members of the Cabinet: Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services; Rodney Slater, Secretary of Transportation; Dan Glickman, Secretary of Agriculture; and Alexis Herman, Secretary of Labor.

All the President's Men were there as well: loyal advisors Bruce Lindsey and John Podesta, press spokesman Joe Lockhart, former White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler, deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, and -- in a black leather jacket resembling something the Gestapo might wear in a World War II movie --Sidney Blumenthal.

The Mayor of Washington DC was in attendance. Anthony Williams sat right up front, near the White House delegation. So too did former Mayor Marion Barry, who had hired Ruff as his corporation counsel in 1995.

Even Bob Woodward was present, the legendary Washington Post newspaperman who had covered every scandal from Watergate to Whitewater, and had quoted Ruff in a number of his books and articles.

Then, following a brief commotion as Secret Service agents entered the Crossing, President William Jefferson Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton took their places in reserved front row center seats, while the press corps in the balcony trained their cameras on the First Couple. The notes of Wagner's overture died down, their echo reverberating through the Cathedral, and the Dean of Washington Cathedral, the Very Reverend Nathan D. Baxter began his invocation: "God alone is my rock and my salvation..."

It must have been difficult for Ruff's daughter and son-in-law, Christina Ruff Wagner and Nathaniel Wagner, to face the large crowd of politicians and lawyers, who outnumbered the family members present, as official "Greeters."

For what Christina Ruff Wagner said was strangely disturbing. Her late father never talked about his work with his family. And he told his children they could be anything they wanted to be -- so long as they did not become lawyers.

An uneasy chuckle filled the nave. A weary cynicism, mingled with guilt perhaps, from a crowd being reprimanded from the pulpit. For it was clear that what Ruff's family valued about Ruff were his family values -- time spent playing with his children and grandchildren, his interest in their academic studies, and so forth. Ruff clearly loved his children, and they loved him.

About Ruff's work as a criminal lawyer, defending the President of the United States until the day he died, it appeared there was a deep and perhaps tragic sense of shame.

After speaking her piece, a brave and admirable Christina Ruff Wagner broke down in tears in front of the President of the United States and First Lady, and left the pulpit.

Personal tributes to Ruff from old friends David E. Matz and Robert E. Stein likewise stressed other attributes than his work. He was remembered as a good husband to his wife Sue, as a dedicated Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia, as a fighter against disabling paralysis, as someone who tried to help troubled youths in the District of Columbia, as a lover of history, a member of an Anglo-American study group, as a bookworm, and as a dedicated alumnus of Swarthmore College, where a scholarship had been named after him. What Ruff truly valued, they said, was helping the powerless.

Charles A. Miller, partner at Ruff's firm of Covington and Burling, waxed Shakespearean, protesting almost too much about Ruff's integrity, painting a word picture of the late White House Counsel as an "honorable man." But to those who had brushed up their Shakespeare, the phrase conveyed something disturbing.

And Ruff's daughter's attitude appeared to be echoed, very subtly once more, in Stein's remarks. For he mentioned in his eulogy a senior thesis by a University of Vermont student posted on the internet, Charles Ruff: The Privacy Defense by Bethany Fuller, ostensibly.to explain Ruff's desire for privacy in his personal life.

Here is one of Fuller's conclusions regarding the impact of Ruff's defense of President Clinton:

At one point in time, character had a lot to do with being the president. The candidate elected may not have been the best at being president, but they had character that the country could look up to. They were men who had personally helped to defend the freedom and beliefs of the country by fighting in wars, or serving in armed services. It was evident that times had changed when Clinton was re-elected. He had run against Bob Dole who had helped fight for our country. It became obvious to many that the job of president no longer relied mainly on character. We as a country had re-elected a draft-dodger, possibly former pot smoker as president. Many were probably appalled at this. (They had probably supported Dole for these same reasons.) This opened the eyes of many people who realized that character is no longer the issue...

Although Stein did not directly quote the above passage in front of the President and First Lady, he made it possible for those at the service to find it for themselves. Again, a sense of shame was palpable in the nave of the Cathedral.

After Stein's tribute, the assembly sang two verses of "America, The Beautiful," ending with:

America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
confirm thy soul in self-control,
thy liberty in law.

The next tribute was from the President of the United States, who did not hesitate to talk about Ruff's job as White House Counsel, a eulogy which was in some measure an odd tribute to himself, overtly political where others had carefully avoided the subject.

President Clinton's carefully rehearsed opening joke seemed somehow unsettling from the start. He began: "I was sitting in this service listening to Chuck's family members, friends, partner speak about him, and I was thinking, he'd fairly embarrassed by all these attempts to canonize him. So they put one client on the program."

The laughter which followed could not erase a sense of guilt which hung in the air, especially when the President moved from celebrating the life of Charles Ruff -- a man whom he extolled for having the courage to tell him what he did not want to hear -- to attacking "a particular wing of the Republican Party," for "attempts of Congress to turn every political difference into a legal issue," and "attempts to prove that our policy on climate change, for example, was actually a secret socialist plot to destroy the free enterprise system."

Odder still was the President inviting the shade of Vince Foster into the event, lambasting an unnamed but recognizable Congressman Dan Burton as "a person who believed that a good form of criminal investigation was shooting bullets into a watermelon in his backyard."

Delving further into politics, President Clinton characterized his impeachment crisis as "a patently absurd situation," adding a pitch for D.C. statehood, quoting Ruff's advocacy of that cause.

President Clinton finished his eulogy with this remarkable statement: "The reason I was proud to have him as my White House Counsel is that he was not a power lawyer -- he was a powerful lawyer for people who had no power."

What almost everyone in the audience knew, as did President Clinton, was that Ruff had been the last Watergate prosecutor, served as District of Columbia Corporation Counsel, as well as having represented Senators John Glenn and Chuck Robb, the Teamsters Union, the Tobacco Institute, and Anita Hill, among others.

The printed program In Memory & Thanksgiving For The Life Of Charles Frederick Carlson Ruff concludes with these words:

"The People are requested to remain standing until the President of the United States has departed."

(Swarthmore College has named a fund in memory of Charles Ruff to provide scholarships to needy students from the Washington, DC area. Contributions to the Charles F.C. Ruff '60 District of Columbia Scholarship may be sent to Ms. Susan Levin, c/o Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania 19081.)