Charles Ruff, who as White House counsel presented President Bill Clinton's defence at last year's impeachment hearing, died on November 19th aged 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.
His clients included Senator John Glenn, accused of political corruption, Senator Charles Robb, caught dallying with a young beauty queen, and Prof Anita Hall, who stunned the Senate judiciary committee by charged ing a Supreme Court nominee with sexual harassment.
Charles 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.
His 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, he contracted a viral paralysis similar to polio, which confined him to a wheelchair.
Charles Ruff did not allow this disability to affect his career. After five years in the Justice Department, he returned to teaching. However, he had barely settled at Georgetown University before Archibald Cox, the newly appointed Watergate special prosecutor, asked 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.
Chareles 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, Charles 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, Charles 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.
Charles 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, Charles Ruff ensured that it did not, a success he later tended to omit from his biography.
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, Charles Ruff persuaded the Federal Election Commission to grant Glenn an unprecedented waiver from its stringent fundraising rules.
His initial involvement with the Clinton White House administration 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, Charles Ruff managed to shift the blame to some unspecified White House officials and Magaziner was never charged.
It was against this background that Charles 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. Charles Ruff commented: "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 Charles 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.
Charles 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.
Charles Ruff is survived by his wife, Sue, and two daughters, Carin and Christina (Wagner).
Charles Frederick Carson Ruff: born 1939; died, November 2000