Rush to Judgment

By Jill Smolowe

HIS TIME THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION WAS DETERmined to get it right. Haunted by the Zoe Baird debacle, officials vowed there would be no premature announcement, no surprise about illegal aliens, no misreading of public sentiment. So, while staff members completed their check of candidates for the post of Attorney General, the White House floated the name of New York Federal District Judge Kimba Wood to coax any opposition out into the open. When none emerged, word leaked from the White House that the Wood nomination was almost a sure thing. Then last Friday night came the awful deja vu. Again, a woman withdrew her name from consideration for the post. Again, the conflict involved an illegal alien. Again, an acute embarrassment for the Clinton Administration.

For the second time in two weeks, a respected woman with a high-profile career watched her reputation shredded by a brutal vetting process. Unlike Baird, Wood had broken no laws; the dilemma for the Clinton Administration was that the circumstances faintly echoed the previous case. While Baird admitted flouting the law by hiring two illegal immigrants and failing to pay taxes for them, Wood insisted she was innocent of any wrongdoing. When she had first employed an undocumented Trinidadian baby-sitter in 1986 for her son Ben, the law allowed citizens to hire illegal aliens. Moreover, Wood said she had paid all the requisite taxes and filed all the required papers. What spooked the Clinton Administration was the fear that the public would fail to see the difference between the two cases. After Wood withdrew her name last week, her supporters and the Clinton Adminstration offered two distinctly different accounts of what had gone wrong, and when.

The White House version portrays Wood as failing to disclose all the details early in the process. Officials claim that when she was first reached by phone while vacationing in Colorado, she was asked, "Do you have an illegal-alien or tax problem?" She answered no. She was then summoned to Washington. In separate meetings on Jan. 29 with White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum and President Clinton, the illegal-alien issue was pressed a second and third time. In each instance, Wood denied any problem. Six days later, the vetting process began in earnest. Wood sent her household-employment records by overnight express to Washington, at which point Administration lawyers say they learned about the baby-sitter. They feared that while her hiring in 1986 was legal, it might pose problems during the confirmation hearings. The information was passed to Nussbaum, who asked Wood for details. On Friday, Nussbaum met with Wood. After their meeting, she decided to withdraw her name.

"I understand and respect Judge Wood's decision not to proceed further," Clinton said hours later. "I wish her well." Privately, White House officials said they didn't want to risk another failed confirmation hearing. They feared that the legal distinction between Wood's nanny situation and Baird's might be too subtle for the tabloids and radio talk shows. Wood, like Baird, had been a highly paid lawyer at the time she hired someone to help care for her child. "We could just see some Senator saying, 'Are you telling me that on $400,000 a year there was no red-blooded American to take care of little Ben?' " said one official. Commenting on Wood's answer to the Zoe Baird question, White House spokesman George Stephanopoulos said, "I suppose she must have taken the question in narrow legalistic fashion."

Wood's supporters tell a different story. The judge, they say, was forthcoming from the first phone contact in Colorado. Asked about a "Zoe Baird problem," she answered that in regard to her baby-sitter, she had complied with all laws and paid all taxes. At the time, Wood was not asked, , and she did not offer, that the baby-sitter had once been an illegal alien. On Friday, Wood released a statement that offered her side of the story. It said that employment of an illegal alien was within the law as it stood at the time and that even when the law was changed eight months later to forbid such hirings, it excluded employees hired prior to its passage. Through a subsequent government amnesty program, the baby-sitter obtained legal residency in December 1987. She is still employed in the Manhattan apartment Wood shares with husband Michael Kramer, who is a political columnist for TIME.

Based on Wood's initial reply, the Clinton people at first perceived no potential problem. Wood's supporters say she was later told that after White House officials learned of the baby-sitter's history, the main heat came from Capitol Hill. Administration officials counter that they hardly needed Senators to tell them that they had a political time bomb on their hands.

That still left the possibility that Clinton might look like he was shying away from Wood for insufficient cause. Wood's sympathizers claim that the White House tended to this problem with a press leak. When Wood had been asked by the White House if there was anything in her background that might be embarrassing to the President, she answered that while pursuing a master's degree at the London School of Economics, she trained for five days, without pay, as a Playboy Club bunny croupier. That information surfaced Saturday in the New York Times.

The Clinton Administration, still laboring with an incomplete Cabinet, now risks a fresh round of bickering. Late last week White House officials were chastising Nussbaum for not pressing his would-be nominee hard enough for information. The two other top candidates for the Attorney General's post seemed to lose favor. Washington lawyer Charles Ruff was said to have illegal- alien problems of his own, while former Virginia Governor Gerald Baliles lacked enthusiastic support. If so, Clinton will have to send out his search party one more time.

With reporting by Margaret Carlson and Michael Duffy/Washington