Cliffhanging; how the consummate counsel came to need a lawyer.

• Author: Alter, Jonathan

In the drawing rooms of Georgetown, the conversations now take a particularly predictable path. How sad, how terribly sad, the hostesses say, almost in unison, as their guests nod and cluck. After such a distinguished career, how could Clark Clifford get himself into such dreadful trouble? After all, until this year, Clifford was the personification of the shrewd Washington insider, the last of the wise men, confidante of Democratic presidents, blah, blah, blah.

It's mostly true, actually, as his long-awaited memoirs suggest. Clifford played at least a walk-on role in almost everything that was compelling about Washington from the late forties to the end of the seventies. During the Truman administration, when more momentous events occurred in a month's time than might now take place in five or 10 years, he was central, as he was during the debate over Vietnam. There are some genuine historical insights in this book, some fascinating accounts of how government really works. But these days, Clifford's role in Washington history isn't half as interesting as his role on a single bank board. Now the search is on for some answers to the Clark Clifford riddle.

For Clifford (who spoke into a tape recorder) and Richard Holbrooke, a former assistant secretary of state under Jimmy Carter (who wrote the book and gets almost a co-byline), the timing is horrendous. But the coincidence of the scandal and the memoir may help provide some clues to Clifford's motives-and to why it took the rest of us so long to be suspicious of them.

For those who missed "60 Minutes" and the rest of the coverage (The New York Times has been especially skimpy with the details), Clifford's troubles involve the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a sleazy Arab-owned bank that has been accused of laundering drug money, among myriad smelly practices. In the early eighties, BCCI couldn't get regulatory approval to operate in the United States, so the owners secretly bought First American Bank and installed Clifford and one of his law partners, Robert Altman, as chairman and president, granting them loans to buy hugely lucrative stock. Clifford now claims that he presided over First American for nearly a decade without knowing that it was really controlled by BCCI. Nobody, of course, believes this. Reduced to admitting he played either the crook or the fool, Clifford is opting for the latter.

He recently hired a criminal lawyer; an indictment has to be considered at least a fair possibility. In the book, Clifford mentions his bank activities in only one sentence. But understanding that the scandal could not go completely unaddressed, Random House recently sent out a hastily added footnote. In it, Clifford writes of the pain the episode is causing him and puts a predictable and wholly inadequate gloss of innocence over it. Midway through the addition...