The most popular man in America was alone.
The president wanted his approval ratings. The White House wrote a speech for him to give, forty-eight single-spaced pages. He had a week to get rid of all the lies, and that wasn’t enough time, and there never could have been enough time, for he didn’t stop to challenge its premise.
On February 5, 2003, the secretary went to the United Nations building on the East River, twenty minutes away from 952 Kelly Street, which had long ago been burned out and demolished. He sat down at the Security Council table with audiotapes, photographs, drawings, and a vial of white powder, and while the world watched on live TV, he spoke for seventy-five minutes about the threats posed by Saddam’s regime. He spoke with all the authority and self-control of a lifetime, and a great many Americans were convinced, for this was the man who showed that America still worked.
Then he stood and walked out with the erect bearing of a soldier.
He had hurt himself far more than any punji stick or Southern bigot could hurt him.
When the war began, the president said that he was sleeping like a baby. “I’m sleeping like a baby, too,” the secretary said. “Every two hours, I wake up screaming.”
JEFF CONNAUGHTON
Connaughton’s timing in politics hadn’t been great, but in lobbying it was nearly perfect. When he first got into the business in 1997, companies were spending around $1.25 billion a year exercising their First Amendment right to petition the United States government for redress of grievances. Twelve years later, when he left, the amount had almost tripled. (This was just the fees paid directly to lobbyists—public relations fees added unreported billions more.) This pot of cash drew a horde of politicians: between 1998 and 2004, 42 percent of the congresspersons and half the senators who left office went on to lobby their former colleagues. Thousands of congressional aides also decamped for K Street, as did several hundred of Connaughton’s ex-colleagues in the Clinton administration. When he first passed through the revolving door in 1997 and joined Washington’s permanent class, the practice was still called “selling out.” By the time he pushed through the other way in 2009, it had acquired the air of something enviable, possibly admirable, certainly inevitable—it was known as “cashing in.”
In January 2000, Connaughton’s boss Jack Quinn left Arnold & Porter—partly at Connaughton’s urging—to set up a new firm. The moment was right: Quinn was known in Washington as an Al Gore guy, and Gore had a good chance to win the presidency in the fall. Quinn’s political career went back to Eugene McCarthy’s campaign plane in 1968, plus five years at the highest levels in the Clinton White House, where he’d kept his head in all the crises. When clients sat down with him, they believed this was how the White House thought about the big issues. The surprise was Quinn’s new partner: Ed Gillespie, a Karl Rove guy. Gillespie had worked for Dick Armey in the House and helped draft the Contract with America, and he was positioned to be one of the Republican Party’s main fixers if George W. Bush won the White House.
Quinn Gillespie & Associates rented elegant fifth-floor offices on Connecticut Avenue between M and N, up the street from Morton’s, where the firm did its drinking. Connaughton came on board as principal and vice chairman, with a corner office and a 7.5 percent equity stake on top of his salary. Quinn and Gillespie divided the rest.
Other lobbying firms were either Democratic or Republican, and they lost clients when the wrong party took power. At QGA, the lobbyists were all strong partisans—Quinn and Gillespie first met as combatants on Fox News—but when they got off the elevator in the morning their loyalty was directed exclusively toward the firm and its clients. Congress was fracturing on ideological lines, voters were growing more polarized with every election, and states were turning red or blue, but at QGA they liked to say that they were all members of the Green Party, even though the division of labor was clear: the Republicans at the firm wrote checks to Republican politicians and hosted fundraising events for them; the firm’s Democrats did the same on their side. As the 2000 election drew near, Connaughton realized that he wasn’t quite as passionate as usual about his team winning—Bush or Gore, Quinn Gillespie would come out all right. On election night, Quinn was in Nashville with the Gore team and Gillespie in Austin with the Bush team, and as the Florida vote tipped back and forth, the two partners shared the latest news by BlackBerry. Gillespie played a major role for the Republicans during the Florida recount, and after the Supreme Court made Bush president, he became one of the hottest insiders in Washington. The firm now had ties to every power center in government.
Connaughton couldn’t provide access to the top people in Washington. He wasn’t a deal-making D.C. lawyer or party power broker. His highest rank in government had been special assistant to the White House counsel. What he brought was a capacity for hard, skillful work, a few years’ experience in the Senate and White House (staff would return his calls), cable news exposure on behalf of Clinton during impeachment, and the cachet of being a Biden guy, though in truth he was more of a Kaufman guy and was becoming a Quinn guy. Soon he was making more than half a million dollars a year. A wave of cash came pouring in over a retaining wall and hit him in the face every two weeks. In Washington there were plenty of other people no one had heard of who were making more than a million a year.
Quinn and Gillespie considered themselves the smart guys in the business. Lobbying was no longer about opening one door for a client—power in Washington had become too diffuse for that. It was about waging a broad strategic campaign, hitting different audiences through different channels, shaping the media’s view of an issue, building pressure on legislators in their home districts. Quinn Gillespie was expert at forming temporary “grasstop” coalitions—enlisting local citizens in a cause as if there had been organic grassroots support. The firm didn’t flinch from controversy. When Quinn’s legal client Marc Rich, a billionaire fugitive living in Switzerland, received a presidential pardon on Clinton’s last day in office, the uproar consumed Quinn for weeks. But an alternative view of the affair was available: Quinn had gotten a tough thing done for a client. Old Washington—the press, the social establishment, the upholders of high standards—pretended that its moral sensibilities had been scandalized. New Washington understood that the Marc Rich pardon was good for business.
The firm’s clients included the American Petroleum Institute, the nursing home industry, the British Columbia Lumber Trade Council, Verizon, Bank of America, Hewlett-Packard, and Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of the World Trade Center. Quinn Gillespie helped Enron beat back attempts to regulate the electricity markets in California shortly before the company went bankrupt, and it represented the families of Pan Am Flight 103 in their effort to collect reparations from Libya. Connaughton had one of his biggest successes with online advertisers. He became the spokesman for a grasstop group called the Network Advertising Initiative, spent half a year working up a self-regulatory system for the industry, met with all five commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission and the attorneys general of seven states, and headed off a bill in Congress that would have helped consumers prevent websites from collecting data on their Internet spending habits. This was the kind of complex work that partners at big-time law firms did—and Joe Biden had never cared to know his opinion about anything.
At Arnold & Porter, Connaughton had drawn the line at representing Allianz, a German insurance company that had been accused of cheating Jewish policyholders after World War II. Quinn had helped negotiate the tobacco settlement under Clinton and wouldn’t work for the cigarette companies. But Quinn Gillespie represented (for a reputation-hit premium) the Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb entity spawned at the end of the Balkan War, and Ivory Coast, which was enmeshed in its own civil war and whose government was rumored to be operating death squads. Connaughton found international work fascinating, and he believed that the firm was trying to get the Ivorian regime to do the right thing by holding elections (anyway, France and Poland never w
anted to sign you up, only the bad boys). In 2005 he flew to Abidjan and was driven through terrifying checkpoints to the presidential palace, where he was seated in a chair next to President Laurent Gbagbo. But the president paid no attention to what his lobbyist had to say and showed no interest in democracy—he just wanted good PR. Connaughton bought a large carved elephant from a beachfront vendor and lugged it back to Washington for Gillespie, the firm’s top Republican. Six months later the Ivory Coast account was terminated.
A colleague at the firm once said that when Quinn Gillespie hired a new lobbyist, only two things mattered: “One, is he comfortable asking his friends to do favors for him? And two, is he willing to do this?” The colleague made a show of spreading his legs. “Does he understand that we’re here to make money? If he’s not hungry to make money, he’s not going to come to work every day doing what he needs to do.”
After so many years in Washington, Connaughton was hungry, and not just to make money. He wanted to get things done and play at high levels. He’d never made it there with Biden—public service seemed to bring more humiliation than triumph—but the private sector was closer to a meritocracy: you got rewarded according to what you produced, not the whims and flaws of the boss. The job came with tremendous pressure—the heads of trade associations were particularly demanding—but no one was “dumb fuck.” Quinn, Gillespie, and Connaughton were three Irish guys from modest backgrounds who believed in hard work and loyalty. They weren’t crooks like Jack Abramoff. Connaughton loved his partners and what they built together, and his years at Quinn Gillespie were the happiest he spent in Washington. So he got a little defensive when people talked about lobbying as if it were something dirty. Hell, almost all of Washington was suckling at the corporate tit (he had seen that at Covington & Burling), most of them doing the exact same thing as the few thousand registered lobbyists who got slammed for everyone’s sins.
He opened a brokerage account and lived in a few custom-made suits. After a few years he bought his first house, a town house in Georgetown, then a condo in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, right on the Gulf, for $420,000, then a beautiful thirty-nine-foot Italian powerboat that cost him $175,000 secondhand. But he kept his shitty American car.
A friend of Connaughton’s, whom he’d met on the Biden presidential campaign, once told him, “This would sound strange to ninety-nine percent of Americans, but four hundred thousand a year doesn’t go as far as it used to. I’ve got my mortgage on the house in Great Falls, two kids in private school”—everyone in Washington sent their kids to private school—“and I’m lucky if I save any money on four hundred grand.” Connaughton had met his best Washington friends on that campaign, and some of them had made it like him, but the ones who stayed in public service longest painted themselves into a corner financially. In Washington there were no crosscurrents, no career opportunities that came along other than the one business of the company town. It was the capital of the planet and unimaginably richer than at any time in American history, but still an isolated town, a world apart.
In a certain way, lobbying was based on the web of Washington friendships. This was one reason congressional aides were in such demand on K Street. A senator’s chief of staff would return a lobbyist’s phone call if he knew and liked the guy, thinking: “I kind of want to help him. If I need him to do an event he’ll do one for me, and I get good poop from him.” Lobbying provided a valuable flow of information and analysis back and forth between corporations and government officials. If a senator was a sort of judge, a lobbyist was an advocate giving him the best arguments on one side of a case.
There was a problem, of course, which was that usually no one made it into the room to argue the other side—and never anyone able to put up anything like the kind of money the corporations paid to lobbyists and campaigns. Anyway, a senator wasn’t a sort of judge. Maybe once, maybe Proxmire or Javits. But now senators were looking beyond the briefs—to the cash as well as the politics—to decide the case. The lobbyists were just intermediaries, hired guns. Blame the special interests, with all their money and the access that came with it, and beyond them the campaign finance laws that allowed cash to flood elections. “I’m in the room because I’ve raised money for you, and I can help you find positions that are going to raise more money,” Connaughton said. “If that were stopped, then you get back to what Jack and I believe we are: smart guys who were good advocates.”
Connaughton later developed a “universal theory” of money in American life since the 1980s: “When the benefits exploded on both Wall Street and Washington, when it became possible to make millions of dollars in corporate booty—I’m a living example of it, no one’s ever heard of me and I walked out of Washington with millions of dollars—when the cost of certain behaviors diminished, when norms began to erode and disappear that had held people back at least from being garish about the way they made money, the culture changed. It changed on Wall Street and it changed in Washington.”
Without meaning to, Connaughton had become a Professional Democrat. This was what he called the class of Washingtonians—lobbyists, lawyers, advisers, consultants, pundits, consiglieres, fixers—who shuttled between the shower of corporate cash ever falling on the capital and a series of increasingly prominent positions in Democratic Party politics. (There were Professional Republicans, too, of course—Ed Gillespie was one—who moved through Washington at least as easily as the Professional Democrats, because their party affiliation didn’t require them to pretend that they disapproved of corporations and big-money politics.) Wealth added to their power, power swelled their wealth. They connected special interests to party officials using the adhesive of fundraising. They ate breakfast with politicians, lunch with the heads of trade associations, and dinner with other Professional Democrats. Behind their desks were “power walls”—photo galleries showing them smiling next to the highest-ranking politicians they knew. Their loyalty was to the firm first, then their former boss in politics, then their party, and then—if he was a Democrat—the president.
Washington was a small town where everyone was one or two degrees away, and you had better be nice to whomever you met at the telecom happy hour or the financial services get-to-know-you function, because if you weren’t, it would get back fast. Quinn Gillespie encouraged its lobbyists to go out every night—the information generated through networking was valuable. Connaughton did his share, less over time—he disliked big parties, and eventually he had done so many events that he would valet-park his car, walk in, break out in a rash, and decide to leave. After a couple of questions, he and someone new would have each other sized up in the city’s hierarchy—Biden guy, Clinton White House, works for Jack Quinn, telecom accounts—which determined how much they wanted to know each other. With the Alabama chip still on his shoulder, he was incapable of bullshitting about his own importance.
He remained single, though he came close to marrying a couple of times. If he had, his lobbying business might have increased exponentially. Power couples could switch off between government and the private sector, one spouse bringing in money while the other climbed the rungs of government, sharing whatever intelligence they picked up along the way. Connaughton dealt with a Senate chief of staff on a whole series of financial issues before finding out that he was married to a high-level banking executive. In Washington, pillow talk could be worth millions.
Certain couples belonged to the subset of Washington’s permanent class having to do with the financial sector, the Wall Street–Washington axis—Treasury officials, Banking Committee staffers, regulators. Connaughton called it the Blob. (There were other blobs—for example, in defense, the military-industrial complex—that he never got to know.) Members of the financial blob were unusually tight with one another. In the case of one couple, the husband was an ex-lobbyist who worked on a key Senate committee, the wife an ex-Treasury official who went over to the SEC. They networked night and day, playing the long game, and when the two of them decided to cash in for
good, they would be worth a lot of money.
* * *
Quinn Gillespie set out to do as little fundraising for politicians as possible. Hosting events downtown was the second-rate way of bringing in business—the firm thought it could win by being smart and strategic. But the politicians wouldn’t leave it alone. Connaughton would secure a meeting for a client with a senator through the chief of staff. A few days later, he would get a call from the senator asking him to attend a thousand-dollar-a-head fundraiser. There was nothing to say except “I’d be delighted.” Before long, the partners were maxing out on their fifty-thousand-dollar limit in contributions per election cycle, and Quinn Gillespie was bundling its share of campaign money, though never as much as the biggest players, like Patton Boggs and the Podesta Group, which did events almost every week.
A Quinn Gillespie fundraising event was typically a breakfast in the firm’s conference room, a bacon-and-eggs buffet on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, the only mornings when senators were reliably in Washington. It would start around eight, but Connaughton couldn’t count the times a senator would come in at 7:45 and he would think, “Oh shit, we’re both half awake and I have to entertain him for fifteen minutes.” As host, he or Quinn would give the senator an over-the-top introduction: “One of the great public servants of our time and personally a wonderful human being, he called me when my child was sick…” Over to the senator, who would tell a couple of lame jokes, the clients would laugh, and then they’d get down to business. When Connaughton started out in lobbying, it was considered unseemly to combine raising money with discussing issues, but that line eroded over time like everything else, and eventually a pro like Chris Dodd, who was always loose and fun, with his red face and dark eyebrows and thick white senatorial hair, would just go around the conference table and ask each donor, “What do you care about?” Three weeks after an event, Connaughton would call the senator’s chief of staff, who would say, “Hold on, the senator wants to talk to you directly”—for he was now part of the senator’s political family. After a year without an event, it would become almost impossible to get the senator on the phone, and Connaughton would have to schedule another breakfast.
The Unwinding Page 19
