There is nothing partisan about the right way to get things done politically. As the great mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, used to say, “There is no Republican way to collect garbage.” What we are discussing here is not political philosophy but practical method, not why but how.
When President Richard Nixon faced the imminent prospect of impeachment in late 1973, he took a careful reading of the situation in Congress. The House of Representatives, he realized to his sorrow, was controlled by a Democratic majority leader whom Nixon had come to recognize as a fierce adversary. “I knew I was in trouble,” the fallen President said from the ruins of his career, “when I saw that Tip O’Neill was calling the shots up there. That man plays hardball. He doesn’t know what a softball is.”
Hardball is not a collection of political pinups. You will find some of the masters immediately appealing: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan. It is easy to figure out how the debonair Jack Kennedy succeeded. He had only one handicap, his religion, and managed to turn even that to his advantage. It is harder to discern how Richard Nixon remained at the center stage of American politics for three decades or to explain how Lyndon Baines Johnson, a man with no apparent public charm, could so effectively dominate the United States Senate for eight years. Here it took more than good fortune to offset the awkwardnesses, the odd appearance, the strange temperament; it took a master’s passion for strategy and tactic.
Bill Clinton is another intriguing case. Watching his rise to the presidency it is easy to spot the craft. Whenever he stumbled, he was quickly back on his feet. When he gave that terribly overlong speech at the ’88 convention, he fixed the problem with a breezy turn on The Tonight Show. He showed himself a bigger man than his snafu.
In 1992, Clinton proved he could spin with the best of them. By crowning himself “the Comeback Kid” he converted a second-place showing in the New Hampshire primary into a triumph! In 1994, he salvaged his presidency by positioning himself as a third force in American politics, tied neither to the diehard Democratic liberals on Capitol Hill or the conservative Republicans who’d just beaten them.
As this new edition shows, the rules of Hardball continue to govern. Followed carefully, the code pays dividends. Violated, it makes the politician pay.
Say what you will about how “politicians” score low in polls of public esteem. There is a Big Casino flavor to their lives that interests even the most disapproving observer. Perhaps it arises from the crackling clarity when the count comes in, when dreams are made and humiliation is dispensed with mathematical exactness. I have known the simple, clear elation of victorious election nights when political careers were born. But I remember as well the bleak, claustrophobic feeling on President Jimmy Carter’s helicopter as it flew him to Plains, Georgia, that morning of November 2, 1980: it was like being on the inside of a huge, lumbering bird that was dying.
There’s a magnetism to this world of make-or-break. I don’t know how many times I have stood in the back of a grand hotel ballroom and watched a roomful of adult business executives sit in rapt attention to what some politician had to say. When the time for questions arrives, the crowd dutifully asks about upcoming legislation or the next presidential campaign. But what’s really on their minds is what they smell: power. What’s this guy’s story? How did he get where he is?
Those are good questions. This book is filled with the surprising answers.
PART I
Alliances
1
* * *
It’s Not Who You Know; It’s Who You Get to Know
They never take the time to think about what really goes on in those one-to-one sessions. They see it as rape instead of seduction; they miss the elaborate preparation that goes on before the act is finally done.
—Lyndon B. Johnson
Bobby Baker was the last fellow you would expect a young idealist of the 1960s to want to meet. An old crony of President Lyndon Johnson, he personified the worst of Washington politics. Had the dictionary contained a picture next to the word “corruption,” it would have been his. Baker had exploited his well-placed friendships and insider’s status as Secretary of the Senate to amass quiet ownership in motels, vending machine companies, housing developments and insurance companies. But by the autumn of ’68, his house of cards fallen on him, the crafty Capitol Hill aide was headed for prison on charges of tax evasion, theft and conspiracy.
True to form, Baker chose to travel first-class. With his days of freedom dwindling, he booked himself that fall on an Atlantic cruise on the luxury liner United States. Once aboard, he and his motley crew of pals and unexplained women commandeered the ship’s bar. There he comfortably assumed the role he had long played for his Senate patrons: director of entertainment.
But Bobby Baker was first and foremost a political wiseguy cynically aware of how things worked, someone who knew, on land or sea, where the bodies were buried.
Nor was he the only passenger on that crossing who valued such moxie. Elsewhere on the ship’s manifest was an impressive list of young Rhodes scholars headed for their first semester at Oxford. All knew Baker by his sordid reputation. Just one wanted to meet him. If his classmates saw Baker as the walking relic of a bygone political era, young Bill Clinton saw that and more. The boy proud to have shaken the hand of President Kennedy in the Rose Garden was by now the adult political practitioner. To the dismay of his future chums, he would spend hours in Baker’s shipboard company. Here was a political buccaneer who could steer him on his way just as Baker had once done for another ambitious young southerner of humble roots.
The story of that earlier man’s rise to power is instructive in how the world works and not just in Washington.
When I arrived in Washington, Capitol Hill was one of the most dangerous places in town. There was a dirty old map hanging in the Capitol police station marked with little X’s for all the corners, sidewalks and alleys where people had been murdered.
Life on the Hill had become so precarious that a fleabag hotel near Union Station offered a special cafeteria price to all local policemen: all they could eat for a dollar. With the constant threat of holdups, the management of the Dodge Hotel liked having the view from its cash register blotted with blue uniforms.
By the spring of ’71, the Dodge had already been targeted by the wrecking ball. It was ending its days as a cheap place for buses to stop, an affordable overnight for the senior-class trip. In the tourist guide, its one remaining star was for location.
As I would come to learn, the Dodge deserved at least one more star for history. What happened there one winter more than half a century ago belongs in the first lesson of any political education.
In the Depression days of 1931, the Dodge had become a boarding hotel, accommodating several U.S. senators and at least one Supreme Court justice. It also housed a less glittering tenantry. Two floors below the lobby level, there stretched a long corridor of cubicles, all sharing a common bath. At night this dank underworld came alive, percolating with the dreams of young bright-eyed men lucky to be working for the Congress of the United States.
One of the subterranean residents was a gawky twenty-two-year-old giant with elephantine ears who had just become secretary to Congressman Richard M. Kleberg, Democrat of Texas. Just two weeks earlier he had been teaching high school in Houston. Now, his first night at the Dodge, he did something strange, something he would admit to biographer and intimate Doris Kearns in the months just before he died. That night, Lyndon Baines Johnson took four showers. Four times he walked towel-draped to the communal bathroom down along the hall. Four times he turned on the water and lathered up. The next morning he got up early to brush his teeth five times, with five-minute intervals in between.
The young man from Texas had a mission. There were seventy-five other congressional secretaries living in the building. He wanted to meet as many of them as possible as fast as possible.
The strategy worked. Within three months
of arriving in Washington, the newcomer got himself elected Speaker of the “Little Congress,” the organization of all House staff assistants.
In this, his Washington debut, Johnson was displaying his basic political method. He was proving that getting ahead is just a matter of getting to know people. In fact, it is the exact same thing.
Before I came to understand the workings of Capitol Hill, I had a hard time comprehending how someone like Lyndon Johnson could rise to such heights. The man was hopeless on TV, sweating and squinting at the TelePrompTer with those ridiculous granddaddy glasses. His notorious personal behavior—flashing his appendectomy scar, picking his beagles up by their ears, conducting business enthroned on the john—did nothing to improve the image. Yet there he was in the turbulent 1960s telling us, his “fellow Americans,” of the grand plans he had for us. Like many a college student of the era, I was stymied by the riddle: How in a functioning democracy could this figure have climbed over dozens of appealing, able and engaging men to make war and shape peace?
In the years ahead I would come to appreciate how Johnson’s mastery of person-to-person dealings, what professionals refer to as retail politics, worked so well in the world of Congress and why it works so well in other organizations.
Lyndon Johnson grabbed and wielded power not in the bright glare of TV lights but in the personal glow of one-to-one communication. We will see later how Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan won power through radio and television. The Texan made his most important sales at the retail level, one customer at a time.
Those who pray for power have no greater role model than the towering, towel-draped figure standing and kibitzing in the Dodge Hotel bathroom back in ’31.
For Lyndon Johnson, Capitol Hill would be a wonderland of retail politics. The critical factor was the small number of people he had to deal with. In this sense it resembled the politics of any institution, whether it be a business corporation or a university faculty. Where FDR made his mark giving “fireside chats” to millions of radio listeners, LBJ worked his magic in the flesh. The smaller the group, the better. Though he spent a decade in the House of Representatives, Johnson did not become a powerhouse until reaching the Senate. It is easier to retail a hundred senators than 435 congressmen.
“From the first day on, it was obvious that it was his place—just the right size,” his longtime aide Walter Jenkins remembered.
To clock Johnson’s political ground speed in that body it is necessary to mark only two dates. He joined the Senate in 1949. He had won the job of top Democratic leader by the end of 1952.
Johnson’s march to power in the Senate began just as it had in the basement shower room back at the Dodge: he went directly to the source. To succeed at staff-level politics, he had checked into the hotel with the biggest block of votes. His grab for Senate leadership began the same way: getting a hard sense of where the power lay. As Theodore White put it, LBJ displayed an instinct for power “as primordial as a salmon’s going upstream to spawn.”
Brains as well as instinct were at work. While the minds of other newly elected senators in 1948 were awhirl with the cosmic issues they would soon be addressing in debate, Lyndon Johnson concentrated on the politics of the place. After all, the Senate was just like any other organization he had joined. There were the “whales” who ran the place, and there were the “minnows” who got swept along in their wake.
One of the lessons Johnson had learned during his apprenticeship years in the House was the importance of party cloakrooms.
The word “cloakroom” is in fact a misnomer. Members have had offices, where they can presumably leave their coats, since the early part of the last century. The contemporary function of the cloakrooms, which are closed to all but members and a few trusted staffers, is that of daytime hangout. In addition to the snack bars and the well-worn couches, the cloakrooms house a vital set of congressional switchboards and the trusty “manager of phones.” Despite his title, this person is far more than a functionary. Better than anyone else, he knows the answer to that relentless question of Capitol life: What’s going on? He knows when the day’s business will end, what’s coming up tomorrow and whether the scheduled Friday session is worth staying in town for. If you want the scuttlebutt, or simply to read the mood of Congress, you know where to go. What gas stations are to small southern towns, cloakrooms are to the Capitol. In every business there are such spots, where people forced to play roles in the workplace stand at ease and discuss the well-recognized realities.
The cloakroom is Congress’s water cooler. Lyndon Johnson, the country boy from Texas, knew the importance of such hideaways. The first thing he did after his election to the Senate was summon to his congressional office the twenty-year-old page who answered the phones in the Senate Democratic cloakroom. His name was Robert G. “Bobby” Baker, and Johnson knew this particular young man’s talent for sizing up the strengths and weaknesses of those who relied so much on him. Baker would know which senators liked to work hard and which ones wanted to get home or somewhere else. He knew the habits, the schedules, the interests, the social demands and the political priorities. That first meeting, which Johnson convened even before he was sworn in as senator, lasted two hours. “I want to know who’s the power over there,” he demanded of the page, “how you get things done, the best committees, the works.”
Years later, by then an aide to Johnson, “Bobby” Baker would make a name for himself as the premier Washington wheeler-dealer. Though scandal would later lead Johnson to disown him, Baker—a man who knew the good, the bad and the ugly in senators’ lives—was a huge and valued asset on LBJ’s rise to the top.
What Johnson learned from his new young friend was not far from what he expected: that all senators are not created equal, that within the world’s most exclusive club there existed an “Inner Club” of southern senators led indisputably by Richard B. Russell of Georgia. Jealous of its influence, this Inner Club would smash anyone or any group that challenged it. Lyndon Johnson decided then and there to “marry” Richard Russell.
He could not, of course, be too obvious in his courtship; there were other men of ambition who had tried that and learned the pain of unrequited love. Johnson would be more discreet. His first move was to get appointed to Russell’s committee, Armed Services. This would give him the excuse he needed to spend a lot of time around the senior senator without appearing to be currying favor.
That first gambit proved to be enormously successful. He soon managed to make a name for himself on Russell’s committee by going after waste and inefficiency in the Pentagon. He had found a way to be both a supporter of a strong national defense and a critic of the military establishment.
Johnson pursued his relationship with the powerful Georgian beyond the professional level. Russell, a bachelor, would have both breakfast and supper at the Capitol dining room. “I made sure that there was always one companion, one senator, who worked as hard and as long as he, and that was me, Lyndon Johnson,” he reminisced at the end. “On Sundays the House and Senate were empty, quiet and still, the streets outside were bare. It’s a tough day for a politician, especially if, like Russell, he’s all alone. I knew how he felt, for I, too, counted the hours till Monday would come again, and, knowing that, I made sure to invite Russell over for breakfast, lunch, brunch or just to read the Sunday papers. He was my mentor and I wanted to take care of him.”
It was not merely a friendship of utility. Johnson came to develop a tremendous respect for his patron. Years later he would say that the Senator from Georgia should have been president.
But Johnson clearly had his own agenda. While still a freshman senator, he was perfecting a brand of politics still celebrated among political veterans as the “Johnson treatment.”
Where the modern, wholesale politician has a tendency to broadcast to those he is addressing, as if each human being were a particle of some great undifferentiated mass, Johnson kept close track of the differences among people. He always ma
de a point to know exactly whom he was talking to. Like the future Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill and others of the old breed, he tried to be a kind of political traffic controller, always aware of the direction not only of his own vector but of all the other little dots on the screen. It may seem all the more surprising that a man with his towering ego should have climbed to such heights by studying the inner as well as the outer needs of others. Yet it was his willingness to focus on other people and their concerns, no matter how small, that contributed to the near total communication Johnson enjoyed with those he sought to influence.
Jack Brooks, a Texas congressman who had been a close friend of LBJ and knew the “Johnson treatment” firsthand, told me that it came down to an extraordinary ability to concentrate the entire mind on his target’s immediate situation. “Lyndon Johnson would convince you that your concern, no matter how small it might seem to other people, was the most important thing in the world to Lyndon Johnson.”
Playwright Larry King, author of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, remembers his own experience with Johnson in 1959. At the time, King was working as an aide to Texas Congressman J. T. “Slick” Rutherford, who was very much in LBJ’s sphere of influence. One night Johnson came through the Congressman’s district as part of a tour to lock up the state for his reelection to the Senate in 1960. He planned to run for president that year and he didn’t want to have any distractions at home.
King was less than exultant when assigned to care for the visiting dignitary, and Johnson himself quickly lived up to his reputation as a demanding s.o.b. Standing over a hotel toilet, with the door wide open, the Senate Majority Leader barked out against a background of biological noises a long list of people around the country whom he wanted King to telephone “in the order I’m giving them to you!”
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 88
