The cause was heart disease, said his son Frank Nussbaum.

Before he became a specialist in the legal intricacies of corporate mergers and takeovers, Nussbaum was selected in 1974 by the U.S. House of Representatives to help lead an investigation of President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. He reviewed thousands of hours of secretly recorded White House tapes.

One of the young lawyers helping him with the investigation was Hillary Rodham, who later married Clinton. Although Nussbaum initially scoffed at Rodham’s suggestion that her future husband might one day be president, he became a supporter of the Clintons and was named White House counsel after Bill Clinton was elected in 1992.

By all accounts, Nussbaum was an astute lawyer, well liked and an affable raconteur. From the beginning, however, there were questions about how his combative New York legal style would fit in Washington, where statements are often couched in platitudes and weighed for their political implications.

“This is not a person who believes in the Washington maxim of don’t let your true feelings show, be super-conscious of every conversation you have,” Ron Klain, then an associate White House counsel and now President Joe Biden’s chief of staff, told The Washington Post in 1993. “In a city of bland characters, Bernie Nussbaum is not a bland character. He’s lox and bagels in a turkey-on-wheat-bread town.”

Nussbaum was credited with helping Clinton choose Janet Reno as attorney general, Louis Freeh as FBI director and Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a justice for the Supreme Court. But his detractors noted that Nussbaum sometimes overlooked the political liabilities of proposed nominees.

A federal judge he had recommended as attorney general, Kimba Wood, had to withdraw when it was learned that she had hired an undocumented immigrant to provide child care. The nomination of Lani Guinier to lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division was scuttled after conservatives lambasted her writings on voting rights and racial matters.

Clinton had promised to run an ethical, transparent White House, but early in his administration he came under scrutiny over an investment he and his wife had made in an Arkansas real estate development company called Whitewater. Two of their partners in the venture, James and Susan McDougal, were later convicted of conspiracy and fraud over a failed savings and loan they operated, called Madison Guaranty. The Clintons sold their interest in Whitewater after the 1992 election and were never linked to the savings and loan, but some Republican lawmakers sought to keep the matter before the public.

Nussbaum, meanwhile, faced criticism for acting more like the president’s personal attorney than as an independent adviser on ethics and the law. He came under increasing fire after his deputy counsel, Vincent Foster Jr., was found dead from a gunshot wound on July 20, 1993.

Park Police investigators determined that Foster had died by his own hand, but Nussbaum blocked officers from searching Foster’s office. It wasn’t until two days later that Nussbaum allowed FBI agents and Justice Department lawyers into the office – but even then, he insisted on personally examining Foster’s documents without showing them to the other officials.

He created three piles of Foster’s records: private family files; personal papers related to the Clintons; and official White House documents. He turned Foster’s briefcase upside down, declaring it empty, but days later the White House announced that a suicide note, torn into 27 pieces, had been found in the briefcase.

Journalists and Clinton’s opponents accused the White House of concealing information. The Park Police later issued a report suggesting that Nussbaum had impeded the investigation into Foster’s death but did not charge him with breaking any laws.

“I did the proper thing,” Nussbaum told the New York Times in 1994. “This was a time of great personal tragedy at the White House, particularly for people who worked closely with Vince Foster. Under difficult circumstances, we cooperated fully with all law-enforcement officials, including the Park Police. These criticisms were not raised with us at the time and for very good reason – they are totally unjustified.”

Nussbaum maintained that he was acting in the best interests of the presidency as an institution, but the whiff of controversy surrounding the Clintons, often fueled by partisan score-settling, has never completely dissipated.

At the same time, the Treasury Department was investigating Madison Guaranty, the failed Arkansas S&L. In March 1994, soon after it was revealed that Nussbaum had met Treasury officials three times to discuss the case, he was forced to resign.

The next year, in a Senate committee hearing about the Whitewater affair and Foster’s death, Nussbaum defended his decision to go through Foster’s papers before turning them over to authorities.

“It was my ethical duty as a lawyer and as White House counsel,” he testified, “to protect a client’s information and confidences, and not to disclose them without a prior review by me.”

Bernard William Nussbaum was born March 23, 1937, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His parents, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, worked in the garment industry, and his father became a labor organizer.

Nussbaum grew up speaking Yiddish and learned English when he went to school. At Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1958, he edited the campus newspaper and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1961 and served on the law review. One of his classmates was future Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Nussbaum worked as an assistant U.S. attorney before joining the firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in 1966. He helped build the small practice into one of New York’s premier corporate law firms. While he was probing the Watergate scandal, he listened to Nixon’s Oval Office tapes with then-White House counsel John Dean, whose dramatic testimony before a Senate committee helped lead to Nixon’s resignation.

“I saw a president destroyed by his own paranoia and by assistants who fed that paranoia rather than resisted,” Nussbaum said of Nixon in 1993, soon after becoming White House counsel. “That’s a strong memory. … I am the lawyer for a totally different kind of president, but I think about Watergate.”

Over the years, Nussbaum handled several high-profile cases, including a jury trial in which World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein received a multibillion-dollar payout from insurance companies after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He also won a 2008 case that awarded higher salaries to judges in New York after their pay was frozen by the state legislature.

Nussbaum’s first wife, the former Toby Sheinfeld, died in 2006 after 42 years of marriage. He was married in 2008 to Nancy Kuhn, who died in 2021. Survivors include three children from his first marriage, Emily Nussbaum, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her TV criticism at the New Yorker, of Brooklyn, Peter Nussbaum of Chappaqua, N.Y., and Frank Nussbaum of Weston, Conn.; a stepson, Bill Kuhn of New York; a brother; and six grandchildren.

In his 1995 congressional testimony, Nussbaum made no apologies for his tenure as White House counsel.

“Looking back,” he said, “despite the hue and cry, despite the media frenzy, despite this hearing, if I had it to do over again, facing the same circumstances, I would do it essentially the same way.”