ARE WE TO CONCLUDE CLARK CLIFFORD'S AN AMIABLE DUNCE?

I note with interest that Washington superlawyer Clark Clifford, who has known and advised every Democratic President since Harry Truman, resigned Tuesday as chairman of the board of First American Bankshares. First American, an $11 billion holding company based in the nation's capital, is the American banking outfit that was secretly bought in the early '80s by scandal-plagued, and foreign-owned, BCCI.

Clifford is a St. Louis native who began his legal career in the Gateway City. He was Harry Truman's personal naval aide and later a principal architect of Truman's brilliant upset win in the '48 campaign, legendary for its whistlestops and harsh attacks on the Republicans' "Do-Nothing", "Eighty-worst" Congress. He was present at the creation of the newly reorganized, post-World War II Pentagon, before serving as Jack Kennedy's personal lawyer, LBJ's Secretary of Defense, and Jimmy Carter's adviser. He's long been the gray eminence of the national Democratic Party, the peerless master of D.C. superlawyers and inside fixers.

Earlier this year, The New Yorker serialized Clifford's newly published memoirs. The Clifford book is an important historical contribution, and makes for fascinating, albeit somewhat self-serving, reading.

Especially absorbing is Clifford's account of the special Truman presidential rail car, as it made its way out from D.C. to Fulton, Missouri in 1946. Aboard that train were such precious cargo as the bourbon-sipping, poker-playing Missouri Democrat and his White House entourage. Those aboard included special guest Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, on his way into the history books with the Iron Curtain speech at Westminster College. Clifford reports that Churchill proved a lousy poker player, and nursed a warm scotch (no ice) for hours. Churchill's lack of skill at poker left the Truman entourage with the sticky problem of displaying proper hospitality to their distinguished guest by refraining from completely fleecing the greatest statesman of the 20th Century. This thoroughly gossipy chapter is simply a delight.

The octagenarian Clifford, now raking in millions with his fancy law firm and cushy bank job, resurfaced during the '80s, which his ideological soulmates piously labelled with an accusation: The Decade of Greed. Clifford resurfaced with an oft-repeated evaluation of Ronald Reagan that typified the elite Washington Establishment's contempt for the most successful president in decades. Asked his opinion of President Reagan, the august Mr. Clifford adopted the caricature of a Reagan who didn't know what was going on in his own administration. Clifford's opinion of Mr. Reagan was a brutal, three-word dismissal: "An amiable dunce."

No one should be surprised that this went over big with the Georgetown salon crowd. For years it has been repeated by liberal commentators, both print and electronic, eager as always to discredit Mr. Reagan, his movement, his decade.

I take no pleasure from Mr. Clifford's current problems, which may yet include his indictment after a long and as-yet unblemished career. I further accept on its face Mr. Clifford's sincere explanation: That he didn't know the bank he chaired had been grabbed, root and branch, by drugrunning, gunrunning, international crooks and money launderers, associates of the likes of Manuel Noriega, among other rogues. Anyone who's ever headed up a large and complex operation should understand, and sympathize with, such an explanation.

Recall that what we're talking about here ("I didn't know") is not an accusation against Mr. Clifford we're talking about his defense. His defense to the charge he allowed his bank to be bought by a bunch of crooks, and misled the Federal Reserve and other regulators is simple: "I didn't know who they were."

Interesting, don't you think, from this learned and urbane attorney, so long comfortable at the pinnacle of national power, who made it his life's work to know how things really worked, from the inside? The same attorney/banker/fixer who dismissed the chief executive of the sprawling federal government for not knowing what was going on in every last department?

One might even observe that Clifford's approach is reminiscent of that taken by one of the most effective liberals in Congress. It's called The Barney Frank Defense. Recall it was witty, acerbic, brilliantly articulate Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts who spent years savaging President Reagan for not knowing what was going on down at HUD (Housing and Urban Development).

Then, a couple of years ago, it transpired that Rep. Frank had gone and hired himself a male lover, by answering a "hot, horny" ad in a homosexual magazine. He then moved the guy into his Capitol Hill townhouse, where for 80 bucks a throw, it's reported, they had a real good time. Congressman Frank proceeded to use his congressional office to fix his lover's parking tickets and mislead a Virginia court about the whore's employment status, thus giving a new meaning to the term "constituent service."

When it further transpired that Barney Frank's lover had been running a sodomites-for-hire operation out of the congressman's townhouse basement and got busted, Barney Frank was ready, as always, with an answer. "I didn't know what was going on down there ..." said this Harvard Law graduate and champion congressional debater.

Messrs. Frank and Clifford have explanations, and they're good enough for me. (Especially if you put aside, for the moment, what these guys admit to.) Why won't they, and their friends, give old Dutch Reagan a break?