As she pushed through the throng of reporters outside the federal courthouse Tuesday, President Clinton’s personal secretary was a reminder of how, in public dramas, it is often the smallest players who pay the largest price.
Betty Currie, 57, hunched her shoulders as the media horde closed in to record her arrival to testify before Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s grand jury. Starr is investigating whether Clinton had an affair with a White House intern and asked her to lie about it, a charge Clinton has denied.
It was Currie, a native of Waukegan, Ill., who reportedly cleared intern Monica Lewinsky to enter the White House several times, and Currie who also received packages Lewinsky sent the president.
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In addition, Washington powerbroker and Clinton friend Vernon Jordan has portrayed Currie as a central player in the attempt to find a job for Lewinsky after she left the White House.
Jordan said he arranged private-sector job interviews for Lewinsky at Currie’s request; Starr is examining whether that help was part of an effort to keep Lewinsky from making claims about her relationship with Clinton when she testified in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case.
Jordan has denied any impropriety and said he has helped many young people get jobs over the years.
For the past five years, Currie has been Clinton’s gatekeeper and fierce protector. Typically wearing a crisp blazer and pearls, her hair pulled back into a chignon, she sat directly outside the Oval Office in a tiny room decorated with figurines of Socks the cat and glass doors that opened onto the Rose Garden.
No one got past her without an appointment, according to White House officials. She made even Cabinet secretaries wait.
But during the last several days, as scandal swirled through the White House and Clinton’s lawyers defended him on talk shows, Currie and her husband have remained in their suburban Virginia home, reluctant to answer the telephone and unsure whether she will be allowed to return to the White House.
In the meantime, her legal meter is running. One White House colleague said he fears Currie may quickly accrue legal bills that wipe out her earnings of roughly $60,000 a year. For now, all she can do is sit home and wait.
“We’re waiting” for word from White House officials, said Currie’s husband, Robert, in a brief telephone interview. “It’s day by day.”
A senior White House official said Currie had “total support here, there is no question that we want her back,” but added that Clinton aides were cautious about contacting her for fear they would be accused of tampering with a grand jury witness.
Just a month ago, the president stood by Currie’s side during the funeral services for her brother, Theodore Williams Jr., who had been killed in a car accident. Clinton held open a hymnal while together they sang “Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross.”
On Tuesday, while Clinton practiced his State of the Union speech in the White House, Washington lawyer Lawrence Wechsler guided Currie out of the courthouse and brushed aside shouted questions. “I have no comment,” Wechsler said.
Currie won the White House post with a combination of graciousness and grace under fire, and won the loyalty of those who worked above and below her, from the president to intern Monica Lewinsky.
Currie’s mother was a housekeeper for a family in Highland Park, Ill., and two years after graduating from Waukegan Township High School in 1957, Currie won a job as a clerk typist at Great Lakes Naval Training Center.
In 1961, she was offered a typing job with the Navy Department in Washington, D.C., where she quickly scaled the civil service ladder.
During 1979, when she was confidential assistant to the director of the Peace Corps, her boss and agency were rocked by political controversy. In hearings that stretched through the spring, Ohio Republican Rep. John Ashbrook accused the Peace Corps director of improperly steering grants to organizations that would advance a liberal ideology, a charge that Democrats angrily rejected.
During the hearings, Currie kept the department running. “People above her in the food chain were destabilized, but she was unflappable,” recalled Washington lobbyist Anthony T. Podesta, who was hired as a consultant to help deal with the mess.
In 1990, Podesta and his brother, now-White House deputy chief of staff John D. Podesta, enlisted Currie to be an unpaid co-director of Washington’s massive Earth Day ceremonies.
During the hectic preparations, Currie soothed the egos of rock stars and politicians and coordinated thousands of young volunteers. When the festivities were over, Podesta said, it was Currie who kept in touch with the youths.
“She proceeded to help them all figure out what they were going to do afterward. She counseled them and assisted them and that was never a job she had–to be in charge of intern placement. It is the way she is,” Podesta said.
In 1984, after 23 years in the Beltway bureaucracy, Currie took early retirement from government. But she stayed involved in Democratic Party politics.
She volunteered that year as office manager for Walter Mondale’s running mate, Geraldine Ferraro. Four years later, after a friend asked Currie to join the staff of presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis and running mate Lloyd Bentsen, she was back at the heart of the Democratic run for the office, this time as a paid office manager.
When another Democratic try for the presidency rolled around in 1992, Currie had little heart for the challenge.
“I said, `No way,’ ” she told the Tribune in 1996. “It was too hard to take: They lost the two elections I worked on. But a friend said, `Come on, we need you.’ “
Currie became office manager in the “War Room,” Clinton’s storied Little Rock campaign headquarters, and then served as secretary to the new president-elect’s transition team.
“I was flabbergasted about her knowledge of Washington,” said Currie’s boss at the time, Warren Christopher, in the Tribune interview. “I felt like I was the luckiest man in town. I was struck by how dedicated and calm Betty remained even in the dislocation of `Campaign Little Rock.’ “
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Currie wanted to return home after the transition. Her second husband recently had retired as a planning director of the Environmental Protection Agency, and they wanted to spend their retirement traveling. But Clinton aide Nancy Hernreich, now director of Oval Office Operations, wanted Currie back, and so did Hernreich’s boss.
“The office can get hectic on certain days, and Betty is always a calm, reassuring voice,” Clinton told the Tribune in 1996. “She has a kind spirit and is a constant example of efficiency and professionalism.”
Currie typically arrives at the White House by about 7:45 a.m. and leaves at about 8 p.m. Often she stays much later.
During one week in early October, Currie’s mother, Vivian Williams, was hospitalized. Currie visited her every night after leaving the White House at 10 p.m., according to Waukegan High classmate Chandra Simpson Sefton.
Despite the ordeal, Currie was in the White House at 6:30 a.m. to clear Sefton through the guard post on Oct. 7, Sefton said.
`She was fresh and continually upbeat” that morning, said Sefton, 57. “You would never know that her life was confused. She said, `It all comes with the job.’ “
“I don’t think Betty would ever make you feel like she didn’t have time,” said retired medical secretary Marilynn Moisio, 58, another classmate who was given a personal grand tour on a busy day. “She is just a very gracious person.”
Currie and her family “take wonderful care of each and of their friends. They reach out,” said Highland Park travel agent Cookie Anspach Kohn, whose parents employed Currie’s mother as a housekeeper, and who has kept contact with the family.