Robert S. Bennett, a premier Washington lawyer known for getting his white-collar clients out of a jam – whether as an attorney for President Bill Clinton, who leaned on. Bennett during the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, or as a legal shield for two former defense secretaries, Clark Clifford and Caspar Weinberger – died Sept. 10 at his home in Washington, DC. He was 84.

The cause was kidney failure, said his daughter Peggy Bennett.

For decades. Bennett was one of Washington’s most sought-after defense lawyers, known for steering companies, executives, and political figures of both parties through moments of legal peril, often under the glare of the media spotlight. A onetime amateur boxer from Brooklyn, he occasionally likened himself to a street fighter, hectoring opponents and verbally sparring with lawyers in the courtroom. More often, he described himself as a kind of legal physician, one who asked his clients “to put their lives in my hands.”

“Bob is totally in command, both legally and politically,” Weinberger told the New York Times in 1994. “He knows a lot of people, in the press and elsewhere whom he’s able to talk to. He is a holistic physician. He treats the whole patient.”

Colleagues called. Bennett is an heir to Edward Bennett Williams, the Washington super-lawyer known for his adroit defense of celebrities and politicians. Both men were skilled at winning over juries and judges, although. Bennett was notably less dapper – “The only thing he needs is a good tailor,” his friend and former law partner Plato Cacheris once quipped – and far more amenable to talking to the press.

While other lawyers were tight-lipped about their cases, offering little more than a “no comment” to reporters. Bennett gleefully argued in the court of public opinion, appearing on Don Imus’s nationally syndicated radio show or on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to advocate on behalf of clients including World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz, who had been accused of ethics violations, and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the subject of a 2008 New York Times article that detailed rumors of an improper relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman.

Bennett, who was hired to defend McCain’s reputation, dismissed the piece as “a smear job,” likening the article to “a big piece of cotton candy” during an appearance on CNN. “You bite into it,” he said, “and there’s not much there.”

His legal talents were on full display in the fall of 1992, when he simultaneously defended Clifford, a Democrat embroiled in a bank fraud scandal, and Weinberger, a Republican tied to the Iran-contra affair, at times appearing in federal court with one client in the morning and the other in the afternoon.

Bennett had been hired by Clifford to defend the former Johnson administration official from charges that he had lied to regulators, falsified records, and accepted bribes on behalf of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a foreign bank known as BCCI, which illegally took over First American Bankshares of Washington and was described by prosecutors as a vehicle for money laundering.

Away from the courtroom, Bennett cast Clifford as a victim of prosecutorial abuses, condemning Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau for trying to have Clifford’s assets frozen. He ultimately succeeded in having the criminal charges against Clifford dropped, after arguing that the 86-year-old was too frail to stand trial.

Bennett was similarly effective for Weinberger, who was accused of lying to investigators about his knowledge of a scheme in which Reagan administration officials secretly sold arms to Iran, ostensibly to help free Western hostages in Lebanon, and used the proceeds to support right-wing rebels in Nicaragua.

Working with his legal partner Carl Rauh, . Bennett helped procure a presidential pardon for Weinberger, weeks before President George H.W. Bush left office and shortly before a trial was scheduled to begin.

As Bennett told it, he was staunchly nonpartisan. “My only politics,” he liked to say, “is getting the best results for my clients.”

Yet his political views remained an object of fascination for many, in part because his younger brother, William J. Bennett, rose to become a prominent conservative voice while serving as education secretary under Ronald Reagan and federal drug czar under Bush. While. Bennett spent more than four years representing Clinton, his brother aimed at the president, accusing Clinton of having “defiled the office of the presidency of the United States” through the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Bennett would later say that his selection as Clinton’s lawyer, despite his brother’s partisanship, was “the biggest professional compliment ever paid me.”

He was hired by Clinton in 1994 after the president was accused of sexual harassment by Jones, who had worked as an Arkansas state employee when Clinton was governor. The lawsuit erupted into a political crisis for Clinton, leading to the discovery of the president’s improper sexual relationship with Lewinsky, a White House intern, and eventually to Clinton’s impeachment, which ended with his acquittal in a Senate trial.

In Bennett’s telling, the president was undermined by “partisan bomb throwers” looking for any chance to undermine his administration. He dismissed the lawsuit as “tabloid trash with a legal caption,” insisting on Clinton’s innocence, and called for the trial to be delayed until after the president left office, deeming it a distraction. He succeeded in delaying the trial until after Clinton’s reelection in 1996 but was less persuasive in front of the Supreme Court; in 1997, the justices ruled unanimously that the case could go forward and that the president was not immune from a lawsuit.

Detractors blamed. Bennett for allowing the president to give a sworn deposition about his sex life and accused him of diminishing the odds of a settlement with his criticism of Jones and her supporters. But both sides reached an out-of-court settlement in November 1998, when Clinton agreed to pay Jones $850,000 without acknowledging wrongdoing or offering an apology.

“When you do what I do, you are a kind of orchestra leader, bringing all the instruments together,”. Bennett once said. “And the final piece comes out pretty well.”

Robert Stephen Bennett was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 2, 1939. His father was a banker, his mother a homemaker, and his parents divorced when he was about 7. Bennett and his brother were raised by their mother, who went on to work as a medical receptionist and remarried several times.

In a 2008 memoir, “In the Ring,”. Bennett wrote that one of his stepfathers was “so physically intimidating and so violent when he got drunk that I slept with a baseball bat under my bed in case I needed it to protect my mother.” Still, he added, the man “was not all bad,” giving him a book about lawyer Clarence Darrow that “probably planted the seed for my future work.”

An uncle, William Walsh, was a prominent physician who became a father figure. Bennett, helping him gain admittance to Brooklyn Preparatory School, an exclusive Jesuit institution. He played football before being sidelined by an ankle injury that led him to join the debate team, a formative experience that he credited with teaching him how to argue logically, think critically, and cross-examine opponents.

Bennett said he was “drawn to the action – the intellectual combat and the human drama – that took place in the courtroom,” and “probably sat through fifty trials during my undergraduate years.” He received a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University in 1961, graduated from its law school in 1964, and received a master of laws degree from Harvard University in 1965.

While at Georgetown Law, he worked as a part-time aide to Thomas G. “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran, a lawyer and lobbyist who had worked on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Corcoran introduced. Bennett to the city’s legal establishment and Bennett later paid him back, successfully defending his old mentor from a legal ethics charge, according to a Washington Post report.

Bennett clerked for Corcoran’s brother Howard F. Corcoran, a federal judge in Washington, and spent three years as a federal prosecutor in the city before joining the law firm of Hogan & Hartson in 1970. He went on to help found a new firm, Dunnells, Duvall, Bennett & Porter, to focus on white-collar criminal cases that, he said, had long been “looked down upon and farmed out” by established firms.

His practice gained further prominence in 1989 when he was recruited by the Senate Ethics Committee to work as a special counsel during an investigation into the Keating Five, a group of senators accused of corruption in connection with savings-and-loan executive Charles H. Keating Jr. Bennett was credited with applying pressure on the committee, encouraging it to take the accusations seriously. One of the senators, Alan Cranston, D-Calif., was formally rebuked while others were given milder reprimands.

In 1990, while still working on the Keating case, Bennett joined the Washington office of New York mega-firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. With his partner Rauh, he led the firm’s white-collar group while taking on clients including Enron, which he helped guide through criminal investigations and congressional hearings after the energy company’s collapse in 2001.

His other clients included New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who was jailed in 2005 for refusing to divulge the name of a confidential source related to the disclosure of CIA officer Valerie Plame’s identity, and DC. Mayor Vincent C. Gray faced a years-long investigation into the financing of his 2010 campaign. The probe ended without charges against Gray, now a member of the DC. Council.

Bennett was married for 54 years to the former Ellen Gilbert, a schoolteacher turned photographer. In addition to his wife and his daughter Peggy, both of Washington, survivors include two other daughters, Catherine Bennett of Palm Beach, Fla., and Sarah Bennett of Washington; his brother, of Chevy Chase, Md.; and six grandchildren.

“I believe very strongly that a lawyer must live a balanced life,” Bennett wrote in his memoir, advising young lawyers to resist the temptations of an all-consuming career. He spent his free time with family, his daughter said and was also a devoted angler, fishing in the Yellowstone River outside his summer home in Montana.

One of his catches, a speckled brown trout, was mounted on his office wall. It offered a lesson to clients, hanging above a small plaque that read, “If I kept my mouth shut, I wouldn’t be here.”

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