Charles Ruff, who, as White House counsel, presented President Bill Clinton's defence at last year's impeachment hearing, has died in an accident at his Washington home at the age of 61. His fearsome legal reputation and his unrivalled contacts across the political spectrum made him the favourite choice for almost any prominent American politician running into serious trouble.
Ruff's past clients included Senator John Glenn, accused of political corruption, Senator Charles Robb, caught dallying with a young beauty queen, and Professor Anita Hall, who stunned the Senate judiciary committee by charging a Supreme Court nominee with sexual harassment. Ruff also fought a long and eventually successful court action for the American Tobacco Institute against claims that it had deliberately misled cigarette smokers about the risk to their health.
Ruff's remarkable professional rise had been achieved in the face of what could have been a personal disaster. After graduating from Columbia law school in 1963, he received a grant from the Ford Foundation to run a law course in Liberia. Shortly after arriving in the country, he contracted a viral paralysis similar to poliomyelitis, which confined him to a wheelchair.
Ruff did not, however, allow this disability to affect his career. From 1967 he gained valuable experience and contacts in the criminal division of the Justice Department. After five years there, however, he returned to teaching. He had barely settled at Georgetown University before Archibald Cox, the newly appointed Watergate special prosecutor, approached him to become a senior member of the team investigating President Richard Nixon and his White House staff. A colleague there was Hillary Rodham, who later married Bill Clinton.
Ruff's personal role in the investigations focused on the vast range of illegal financial contributions made to Nixon's 1972 campaign. The evidence he amassed was so incontrovertible that most of those responsible, including the oil tycoon Armand Hammer, pleaded guilty.
In 1975, with most of the key defendants convicted, Ruff took over as special prosecutor and found himself in the middle of a political storm, investigating charges that President Gerald Ford had diverted political donations to his personal use. In the highly charged final days of the 1976 presidential campaign, Ruff (well known as a Democrat) stuck firmly to his legal last, dismissed the charges and wrote finis to the special prosecution report.
He returned to the Justice Department for a time, but was then hired by one of the most prominent Washington law firms, then acting for the tobacco institute. Its most threatening case came from the family of Rose Cipollone, who had died of lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking.
Ruff tackled it head on. In one legal conference he told the opposing lawyer: "You've tried the front door, the back door, the side door, and now you're trying the trap door. It isn't going to work." And, after years of litigation, Ruff ensured that it did not, a success he later tended to omit from his biography.
Such courtroom successes put him near the top of the Washington ladder. His argument to the Senate ethics committee got John Glenn off the hook in 1989 after he was accused of influence-peddling in return for campaign contributions. Even more remarkably, Ruff persuaded the Federal Election Commission to grant Glenn an unprecedented waiver from its stringent fundraising rules.
Ruff's initial involvement with the Clinton White House came from defending one of Hillary Clinton's principal assistants, Ira Magaziner, who helped to prepare her ill-fated healthcare plan. Magaziner was accused of perjury, but in a complex presentation to the US attorney's office in Washington, Ruff managed to shift the blame to some unspecified White House officials and Magaziner was never charged.
It was against this background that Ruff became President Clinton's fifth White House counsel within four years. As the ripples of the Whitewater affair widened and allegations about the president's sexual behaviour proliferated, insiders joked that Clinton needed a lawyer smart enough to do the job and dumb enough to take it. Ruff defended his recruitment with the comment: "When the president of the United States asks you to do something, you don't say, 'Let me think about it.' You say, 'How can I help you, Mr President?' "
The eruption of Monica Lewinsky on to the scene and the soaring political temperature in Congress eventually left even a practised operator like Ruff with little room for manoeuvre. Impeachment by the Republican-controlled House became a virtual certainty, and the principal article, charging Clinton with lying to the grand jury about his relationship with Ms Lewinsky, sailed through.
Ruff put up the best moral arguments he could find in his statement at the Senate hearing. He accused the prosecution of having "a vision too little attuned to the people ... more focused on retribution, more designed to achieve partisan ends". After 14 days of hearings he did, indeed, win his case - by a margin of nine votes on the perjury charge and by a single vote on the obstruction of justice count. But Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania could only bring himself to vote "not proven".
Ruff is survived by his wife, Sue, and two daughters.