Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [427]
Without forewarning, his lapel microphone fell to the floor. The senators fell silent as the paraplegic lawyer waved off assistance, hanging over his wheelchair to reattach himself to the sound system. Chuck Ruff was no stranger to important cases. He had represented senators John McCain and John Glenn in the “Keating Five” scandal. He had handled major criminal prosecutions as U.S. attorney in Washington. He never allowed his physical handicap to interfere with his quest for excellence. The senators now listened with attentiveness.
Ruff, who had graduated from Columbia Law School in the early 1960s and joined the Peace Corps as part of an idealistic crop of volunteers, had served in an underdeveloped area of Africa where he had contracted type 2 polio that left him paralyzed for life. After lying in a hospital bed for six months and learning that his wife, Sue, was pregnant, Chuck told her, “This is it. I’m not going to ever walk.” He got fitted with braces that would allow him to stand upright and began the long process of therapy. By the time their first daughter, Carin, was born in 1965, Chuck was in the hospital room rolling back and forth like any other expectant father, using his wheelchair to do his pacing.
Chuck Ruff quickly found his professional niche in Washington, distinguishing himself in a series of government posts, working as a private attorney at the firm of Covington & Burling, and then serving as White House counsel to President Clinton after Bernie Nussbaum’s forced resignation. Ruff brought a steadiness to the West Wing. He knew and respected Ken Starr. He had a positive working relationship with Henry Hyde. This serious-minded lawyer, who dressed in conservative Brooks Brothers suits, belted himself into his wheelchair each morning and, with grim-faced determination, handling whatever crisis awaited him.
Sue Ruff was glued to her husband’s opening remarks on television in the privacy of their living room. “Listening to Chuck argue was always an incredible turn-on,” she said later. Sue feared that if she attended the Senate proceedings in person, she might stand up and shout insults at the managers, like the spectator who had been hauled away days earlier by the Capitol Police after yelling, “Good God Almighty, take the vote and get it over with!” Sue concluded, “I was much better off here, pacing and shouting at the TV.”
As her husband worked day and night preparing for this grueling assignment, Sue Ruff played an all-important “chicken soup role.” If Chuck was scheduled to get home at 11:00 at night, “I would be at home on the couch sleeping, with some hot chicken soup on the stove.” She recalled, after her husband’s untimely death in 2000, “I just tried to be supportive and keep him going.”
The team of Chuck Ruff and David Kendall, representing the president, was a formidable one. Both veterans of white-collar criminal defense work in Washington, they shared “a surgeon’s sense of humor” about the grim profession of pulling clients out of legal train wrecks.
Ruff was in charge of representing the “official president.” Kendall represented the “private president.” This meant that Ruff would give opening and closing statements at the trial. Kendall focused on “possible criminal exposure,” which included the distinct likelihood that Starr might try to prosecute Clinton, before or after the president left office.
Each morning, Kendall and Ruff would get outfitted with special electronic buttons on their lapels, allowing them to enter the Capitol without setting off a hundred security alarms. Inside, they would make their way to their cramped office behind the Senate chamber, to continue the unending cycle of preparation. One day Ruff turned the corner and nearly collided with another man in a wheelchair—it was Senator Jesse Helms, the archconservative