What are friends for?
In Tommy Caplan's case, they're for asking questions. You'd do the same for your friends.
And if one of those friends happens to be John Fife Symington III, a man seeking a presidential pardon, and the other a man in a position to provide the pardon, that's the luck of the draw.
In any case, both Symington, a conservative Republican, and Bill Clinton, a pragmatic Democrat, should consider themselves lucky to count Baltimorean Caplan a loyal friend. When he gets together with chums from Gilman, where he met Symington, and Georgetown University, where he met Clinton, the chatter is about other friends, their children and the mundane matters of which long-term relationships are spun and cultivated.
When it comes to friends, Caplan's strictly nonpartisan. "I am not a politician," says Caplan, 54, a novelist born into the Baltimore-based Oscar Caplan family of jewelers.
He just happens to know a few politicians.
"I went to Gilman with Fife. Even then we were great friends," Caplan says. "He was editor of the Gilman News, and I was the features editor."
When Caplan matriculated at Georgetown in 1964, alphabetical fluke placed him on the same hallway as the man from Hope, the future president of the United States.
Symington attended Harvard, but the three occasionally found themselves together at parties or the beach. Symington and Clinton attended Caplan's 21st birthday celebration. And, there was "that famous swimming story," when Symington came to Clinton's aid when he was injured while swimming.
Caplan and Clinton have remained buddies through thick and thin and Monica. At times, the novelist even added rhetorical flourish to Clinton's speeches and traveled with him as a self-described "sidekick." In George magazine, the president attested, "He'd be my friend if I filed for bankruptcy and spent the rest of my life running a filling station."
Whether or not Clinton will ever have to don coveralls with "Bill" stitched across the pocket remains to be seen.
But before his conviction for bank fraud forced him out of the Arizona governor's office in 1997, Symington, a developer, did declare bankruptcy. Loyal friend Caplan didn't flinch.
The conviction was overturned by a federal appeals court in 1999. But the whole affair left Symington and his family in emotional tatters, Caplan says.
