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Lindsey is both the genie and the detail man. The candidate and the campaign counted on him to divine when Clinton could be approached with bad news, and they also counted on him to be the lawyer's eye that would catch a mistake fatal to his client. He pored over the daily 100-page briefing book on the plane, pointing out when a local politician was erroneously omitted from the list of introductions or when a history of, say, Tyler, Texas, failed to mention a recent racial incident there. When just before midnight on July 8 it came time for Clinton to pick up the phone and tell Senator Al Gore that he was the choice for Vice President, only Lindsey was in the room, and he knew what was missing -- a camera. He made Clinton wait while he rummaged around the Governor's mansion to find one, an Instamatic, and then he took the historic shot. He prodded the campaign headquarters every day into producing a reasonable schedule, and he prodded the candidate every day into moving along.
Above all, Lindsey commands respect because he knows his limitations. He declined to be the campaign manager, choosing for himself the meaningless designation of campaign director, because he knew he was not a pro. He put pressure on Clinton to make two of his early and best hires -- Stephanopoulos as the communications chief and Bruce Reed as the on-the-road issues director. Then he let them, and the campaign staff hired later, do their jobs. "He's the guy who doesn't have to say something at every meeting and won't unless things are going the wrong way," says Reed. Lindsey knows he is a candidate's ultimate noncandidate. Says his wife Bev, a longtime Democratic activist: "Bruce takes facts, absorbs facts and spits out facts. Bill Clinton takes facts and dreams with them."
Lindsey's sense of security comes from his family's Midwestern Presbyterianism. "Presbyterians have a sense of predestination, and that's what makes Bruce easy about who he is," says Mack McLarty, the chairman of Arkla, a natural-gas company, and a close friend of Lindsey's and Clinton's. Presbyterians, especially wealthy ones, also impart a sense of noblesse oblige: young Lindsey got that, but with a rebellious twist. His father, who moved from St. Louis, Missouri, to Little Rock to become a founding member of a prestigious law firm, was a moderate Republican with a white-shoe lawyer's distaste for politics. Lindsey was barely 18 when, on leave from a summer job in a bicycle factory, he got involved in the gubernatorial campaign of liberal Congressman Brooks Hayes and got the bug. He went off that fall to Southwestern at Memphis, a small liberal arts college now known as Rhodes, to , study history and became so active in the civil rights movement that he was at the Memphis rally on the night Martin Luther King delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech on the eve of his assassination.