Politics

Clinton Packing It In

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 5, 2001 / 3:23 PM EST / CBS

Though some may scoff at the notion, President Clinton really is doing his best to make way for his successor, George W. Bush. But on Friday, the elements wouldn't let him.

Mr. Clinton tried to go to the presidential retreat of Camp David to do some packing, but his helicopter was unable to land due to inclement weather.

A Marine One helicopter carried the president away from the White House and toward the secluded hideaway atop the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland but had to come back without landing.

"Pure housekeeping," was how Mr. Clinton described the objective of his morning trip to pack up some of his things ahead of the Jan. 20 inauguration of President-elect Bush.

And Mr. Clinton has a lot of packing to do. Hundreds of thousands of pages of his personal papers plus assorted paraphernalia from his eight years in the White House must be shipped to a warehouse in Little Rock, Ark., site of his yet-to-be-built presidential library.

It's part of a process mandated by federal law. When a president leaves office, the White House is swept clean. File drawers are emptied. Hard drives are yanked from computers. Office furniture is piled in the hallways. Institutional memory disappears.

"The White House they enter is whistle clean. It contains empty desks, no files from their predecessors," says Martha Kumar, one of several presidential scholars working to smooth the 10-week presidential transition, which is even shorter this year because of the post-election ballot drama.

"When I walked in, there was not a piece of paper in the drawers. I think the only thing I found was a paper clip in one drawer," said Edwin Meese, counselor to President Reagan in the early 1980s and later attorney general.

"You kind of expect that the old administration is going to have cleared out, but you're a little bit surprised that the place is as bare as it is," said Meese.

The official records of the president and his staff are the property of the United States, not the chief executive. The National Archives takes custody of them and preserves them for eventual public release.

"The most surprising thing to many people is that the computers are not functioning," said Alvin Felzenberg, executive director of the President's Commission on the Federal Appointments Process in the Bush administration.

Kumar, a political scientist at Towson State University in Maryland, and others who have studied presidential hand-offs, think some material could be given to newcomers to help them get started. Kumar's White House 2001 Project has interviewed White House staff members from the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations. The project is sharing the materials with President-elect Bush's transition team.

Help from old White House hands, however, hasn't always been welcome.

Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, who worked there during the Ford-to-Carter transition and now is Bush' transition chief, recalls: "The basic attitude is 'If you're so smart, how come we beat you? Why do we need to take your advice? You guys lost."