Little Rock, Arkansas, these days is a sump of brazen supplication. Members of Bill Clinton's transition staff report that a lawyer from Wyoming called to say he should be made a federal judge; a businessman from Arkansas wrote a five-page letter explaining why he should be named ambassador to the Court of St. James's; and people with the remotest connection to the President-elect say they have not paid for a lunch or dinner in weeks. But there is one man who is so close to power that he does not need to ask for any. He is Bruce Lindsey, a 44-year-old lawyer from Little Rock who is Clinton's closest friend and most trusted adviser, the first to see him in the morning and the last to see him at night, the only person in Clinton's entourage to sit in on all the meetings.
Lindsey's virtue is that he understands the centripetal nature of power -- that to get to the core of it, you have to almost disappear. Lindsey is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. "He's like oxygen," says Clinton strategist Paul Begala. "You can't see him, and you can't live without him." After years of his being at Clinton's side -- Lindsey was the presidential candidate's first traveling companion when the two trekked anonymously through airports, carrying their own bags -- there is practically nothing in print about him. He shuns interviews and does not do the morning shows, and it wasn't until the last six weeks of the campaign that he left his seat next to Clinton to walk to the back of the plane and converse with reporters. Even then, he didn't say much. "We believe we have a legitimate shot in these states" was a typically innocuous Lindseyism.
Unlike his late father Robert, a patrician Little Rock lawyer with a lanky frame, Lindsey is short (he looks like a miniature version of British Prime Minister John Major) and so unassuming that even journalists in Little Rock misunderstood his role. "I thought for a long time that he was just Clinton's gofer, but it's obvious he's much more than that," says John Brummett, political editor at the Arkansas Times. In fact, Lindsey is the outside, practical manifestation of Clinton's political anima, a campaign unto himself: he took the competing opinions of the staff to Clinton to extract decisions from him, and then he applied his own prosecutorial mind to the candidate to make sure that decision was the best one. He reads everything and remembers what everyone said and when they said it. "He's the tape recorder running when the deal is being cut," says an aide. On the campaign plane, he was known as "the Enforcer" for gently policing the quotes from staff members in the morning papers. When Begala once referred to President Bush's rear end ("If he wants to debate, he can get his butt up to Michigan"), it was Lindsey who told him to get out of macho overdrive.
Lindsey is also the official worrier, often pacing in the back of the room, not easily contented. Last week it was he who fretted to associates that the vacuum created by the Governor's lack of activity in the early days of the transition had created a number of not fully favorable stories. "Bruce isn't satisfied if the Governor just hits the ball out of the park," George Stephanopoulos, the campaign's communications director, is fond of saying. "That ball has to go out of the park, over the river and through an apartment window."