Christopher Pledges to Avoid Issues Related to His Law Firm

WASHINGTON —  Secretary of State-designate Warren Christopher pledged Thursday to avoid working on issues in his new job relating to his Los Angeles law firm but said that he would be “foolish” to recuse himself from every case involving the firm’s several thousand clients.

In a sometimes testy exchange with conservative Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), Christopher acknowledged that the law firm, O’Melveny & Myers, had represented dozens of Japanese companies. But he said he had not worked on those cases and promised that they would not influence him as secretary of state.

“The first experience I had in foreign policy was to negotiate trade treaties for the United States against Japan in the 1960s,” Christopher told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the second day of hearings on his nomination. “. . . So I’m quite familiar with taking positions against the Japanese and have never represented any Japanese companies here in the United States.

“Emotionally, I don’t have any sense that I’ll feel some special obligation to the Japanese arising out of the fact that they were O’Melveny & Myers’ clients,” he said.

Helms, who displayed a large placard listing some of the firm’s clients, seemed unconvinced.

“I think the Japanese must have been doing handsprings of joy” at President-elect Clinton’s nomination of Christopher and others who have had business links with Japan, he said.

But other members of the panel praised Christopher for going well beyond legal or customary requirements.

“You (are) setting a very high standard here--certainly higher than is required under existing laws and regulations and certainly higher than many, if not most, nominees . . . have done,” said Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D-Md.).

The firm’s clients have included Japan Air Lines; Sumitomo Bank; Sanwa Bank; Deutsche Bundespost Telecomm, Germany’s state telecommunications corporation; Olympia & York, the troubled Canadian real estate giant; and Santa Fe International Corp., which is owned by the government of Kuwait.

Christopher said that he will also sell a long list of stocks and bonds and will sever his relationships with Lockheed Corp. and First Interstate Bancorp., where he was a director, by exchanging deferred compensation and pension rights in exchange for cash.

But he said he plans to retain his pension at O’Melveny & Myers.