Robert B. Fiske Jr., a distinguished federal prosecutor in New York and the first independent counsel to investigate the role of Bill and Hillary Clinton in a failed land development venture before Mr. Clinton became president, the legacy of which bedeviled his administration as the Whitewater affair, died on Thursday at his home in Darien, Conn. He was 94.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Elkan Abramowitz, a close friend who was the first chief of the criminal division of the Southern District of New York when Mr. Fiske ran the office as the United States attorney in the late 1970s.
A moderate Republican, Mr. Fiske had also been a partner in a white-shoe New York law firm when Attorney General Janet Reno appointed him independent counsel in the Whitewater matter in January 1994.
By then he had gained a reputation as a tenacious prosecutor during two stints with the Southern District of New York, first as an assistant U.S. attorney, from 1957 to 1961, and then as the U.S. attorney, from 1976 to 1980. One of the Justice Department’s flagship regional offices, the district covers Manhattan, the Bronx and several Hudson Valley counties.
Mary Jo White, a former U.S. attorney in Manhattan who had worked as a prosecutor under Mr. Fiske and was a co-counsel with him in private-practice cases, said Mr. Fiske’s legal skills were not the only qualities that enabled him to succeed at the highest levels in both the public and private sectors.
“He was just so cleareyed about what the right thing to do is, but also what’s going to be persuasive,” she said in an interview. “He had a deep understanding of his audiences — judges, juries, the Justice Department, arguing to whomever, and he adapted to them.”
Mr. Fiske developed a reputation early on for winning tough cases against organized crime, starting with the 1960 trial of John Dioguardi, a labor racketeer known as Johnny Dio. After repeated failed attempts by the government to make a conviction against Mr. Dio stick, Mr. Fiske, then just 28 years old, managed to get him sentenced to four years in prison on tax evasion charges.
Later, as the top federal prosecutor in the Southern District, he won a number of high-profile cases that restored a measure of trust in the justice system during an era of skyrocketing crime rates.
In an unusual move for a U.S. attorney in a busy district, he personally led his courtroom team in winning two major jury convictions.
One, in 1977, capped the prosecution of Nicky Barnes, a Harlem drug kingpin who had been known as “Mr. Untouchable” for having eluded conviction in four earlier cases.
President Jimmy Carter called Mr. Fiske’s prosecution of him “the most important in the country” because of the way Mr. Barnes had seemed to flout the law.
The other, in 1979, took down Anthony M. Scotto, a powerful and politically connected leader of the longshoremen’s union. He was found guilty of extorting payoffs from waterfront businessmen.
As counsel in the Whitewater case, Mr. Fiske had to determine whether the Clintons had committed crimes as partners in the Whitewater Development Corporation, an Arkansas real estate venture, when Mr. Clinton was governor of Arkansas in the 1980s.
Mr. Fiske’s selection was met with bipartisan praise.
“The choice is one that you simply can’t argue with,” former Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady, who had attended Yale with Mr. Fiske, told The New York Times in 1994. “He’s one of those guys who’s always conducted himself with integrity.”
But less than seven months after his appointment, a three-judge panel replaced him with Kenneth W. Starr. Mr. Starr’s multiyear inquiry evolved into an investigation of Mr. Clinton’s sexual encounters with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky and led to the president’s impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges.
Mr. Fiske’s brief time as the Whitewater special counsel did produce a few noteworthy results.
Weeks before he was replaced, he issued his first and only report on the progress of his investigation. It included his finding that Vincent W. Foster Jr. — the deputy White House counsel and a former partner with Mrs. Clinton in a law firm that had represented a savings and loan institution that was later implicated in a Whitewater-related fraud — had died by suicide and had not been murdered, as some were contending.
The finding infuriated the Clintons’ most vocal opponents, who asserted that Mr. Foster was more likely killed to keep him from telling investigators what he knew.
Mr. Fiske, in a 2014 interview with Yahoo News, said that aside from his own disappointment after his ouster at being unable to bring the charges he had been working on, the F.B.I. and Internal Revenue Service agents assigned to the investigation were also “totally demoralized.”
In his book “Prosecutor Defender Counselor: The Memoirs of Robert B. Fiske Jr.” (2014), Mr. Fiske said that at the time he was replaced, he had been preparing to seek fraud indictments, including against the Clintons’ Whitewater partners, James B. McDougal and his wife, Susan, for illegally channeling money to the venture. (Mr. Starr later obtained those indictments and won convictions.)
Neither Mr. Fiske nor Mr. Starr sought indictments against the Clintons in the Whitewater affair. The Clintons denied any knowledge that crimes were being committed.
Mr. Fiske did relish one memory of his independent counsel stint. He recalled in a 2014 radio interview that he had spent three weeks thoroughly preparing to depose the president and Mrs. Clinton under oath at the White House, but hadn’t thought at all about what the very first question would be.
So, when the deposition began, he recounted, “I looked at him, and my first question was, ‘You are the president of the United States?’ And the answer was ‘Yes.’” Mr. Fiske said he placed a framed copy of the question and answer in his law office when he returned to private practice, “because I thought there are not too many depositions in the United States that start with that question and answer.”
Robert Bishop Fiske Jr. was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 28, 1930. His mother was Lenore (Seymour) Fiske. Robert Sr. was a lawyer and corporate executive who went on to serve as an assistant secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The younger Mr. Fiske graduated from Yale in 1952. During his junior year, he decided to go into law because, he told The Times in 1994, “it seemed to me that law had the greatest influence on how government functioned.”
He attended the University of Michigan Law School. Intent on a career in government, he took a summer internship with the Southern District, where, he told the then-current U.S. attorney, J. Edward Lumbard, he wanted to return after graduation.
Mr. Lumbard recommended that he get some private-sector experience first. And so, after receiving his law degree in 1955, he joined Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York (now Davis Polk), an affiliation he maintained for the rest of his career, always returning after his stints in government.
Mr. Fiske’s experience as a prosecutor placed him in high demand as a private lawyer.
His high-profile clients included the manufacturer of the reactor that failed in 1979 at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, the most serious accident at a commercial nuclear power plant in U.S. history. The plant’s operator had sued the company for $4 billion in damages but settled for $37 million.
He represented the National Football League when it was ordered to pay just $1 in damages in a 1980s antitrust lawsuit in which the upstart United States Football League had sought up to $1.7 billion.
And he defended tobacco company executives who had been investigated for possible perjury when testifying at a 1994 congressional hearing that cigarettes were not addictive. Charges were not brought against them.
Mr. Fiske married Janet Tinsley in 1954. She survives him, as do their children, Linda Fiske, Sue Williams and Robert Fiske Jr.; five grandsons; and one great-grandson.
After leaving the Whitewater investigation, Mr. Fiske spent the rest of his career in private practice, though he occasionally served on government-appointed investigations.
In 2008, Andrew Cuomo, then the New York attorney general, appointed him and another lawyer, Michael Armstrong, to lead an investigation into potential political interference with the State Police.
During a speech at the University of Michigan in 2015, Mr. Fiske said that working in both public and private roles made him better at each.
“Government lawyers who have been in private practice have a better understanding of the industries they’re supposed to regulate,” he said. “Conversely, lawyers in private practice who have worked in the government benefit from the increased responsibilities government service provides at an early age.”
Benjamin Weiser and Ash Wu contributed reporting.
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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