When Erskine Bowles first arrived at the White House as deputy chief of staff, he had a problem with one of his subordinates. Actually, the problem was that John Podesta refused to be his subordinate, even though the President had ordered it. "John's the kind of guy--you've got to earn his respect," says Bowles, laughing. "He damn well wasn't going to give it to me."
Not a particularly good start. But when the two were thrown together to salvage the doomed nomination of Henry Foster for Surgeon General ("It was pretty well screwed up by then," Bowles says), Bowles noticed something about the prickly, rail-thin Podesta. "Every time this guy said something, it was acerbic, but it was always on target," Bowles told TIME. Both of them eventually left the White House to do other work, and both returned--but this time Bowles had recruited Podesta back to be his deputy. And when Bowles was ready to leave as chief of staff, he was the one lobbying hardest for Podesta to replace him.
Podesta is tightly coiled. He's moody. When word spreads around the White House that he's in one of his frequent foul humors, people like to say "Skippy" (as in evil twin) is in that day. He's allergic to the spotlight in a city where most people crave it. "I'm into the cult of nonpersonality," he once told the Washington Post, via a spokeswoman. His brother Tony, an outside adviser to Vice President Al Gore, says his brother's "real ambition is to open up a T-shirt store in Maui." All these traits would seem to make Podesta an odd choice for a job that consists of keeping peace in the brawling White House and selling its products to the outside world. Until now, Podesta rarely showed up on Washington's two big power circuits: on TV or at cocktail parties. He doesn't have cable TV in his home, and the show he worships is The X-Files.
But virtually everyone agrees that Podesta, 49, possesses a rare skill at scandal management. He is a lawyer with a fine ear for how things will play politically, which gives him an entree with the two main factions (the legal team and the spinners) that have riven the White House since the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. The lawyer in him can gather the facts; the political hand knows how to spin them.
His original post at the White House was staff secretary, a job that involves managing the flow of paperwork leading to the President, thus forcing decisions and conferring enormous power. He was hired for his command of policy. Says brother Tony: "John is the only person in Washington who knows everything there is to know about encryption and price supports, dairy farming and the FBI." But the peculiar nature of the Clinton presidency quickly demanded another type of talent, something not mentioned in a typical job description. Podesta's own description of it was "Secretary of S___." First, there was the travel-office fiasco, in which he wrote a postmortem report that put an unwelcome focus on Hillary's role (and by some accounts, put him on her bad side for a while). He later made amends when he defended the First Lady on Whitewater and on her controversial investment in cattle futures. She is now a big fan.