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

by Matthews, Chris

  For a long time Sully was like many people you meet in politics, their lives obsessively focused on a single bad break. Sully went further. If “Herbie” had a fund-raiser, his old campaign manager would organize some sort of demonstration to disrupt it. He even switched political parties. Elections and candidates would come and go, but his presence in the Republican camp was a certainty.

  Finally, after six years, Sully saw his chance. Reading through the local weekly, he came upon an advertisement for a fringe candidate for U.S. Congress running against Herbie. For Pat Sullivan, the long, dreary march was coming to an end.

  The candidate’s cause was the liberalization of marijuana laws. Sully offered his expertise. It was not the issue that mattered, but the cause. Here was a candidate who would attract votes from the young, single people who lived in the district’s high-rise apartments.

  It was 1980, a year when larger issues loomed in the land, but Sully knew his district. There would be thousands of people who usually voted for the liberal Democrat but who would just as soon throw their vote to a colorful antiestablishment type.

  Without his help, the “marijuana candidate” would not have been what politicians call a “factor.” She knew nothing of politics. When Sully found her, she was collecting signatures for her filing petition from voters outside the district!

  Her new ally made her candidacy a reality. She won a spot on the ballot, and she garnered six thousand votes—not enough to win, but just enough to doom “Herbie,” who lost to someone else by ninety-four votes. But Sully had yet to drive the last nail into the coffin.

  When the next congressional election came around and with it “Herbie’s” anticipated comeback bid, Sully was there to administer the coup de grâce.

  Other things being equal, it should have been a good year for a Democrat. The country was plunging into recession. The President was being attacked for tampering with Social Security. In most parts of the United States the results reflected the voters’ mood, and the Democrats picked up twenty-six House seats. Unfortunately for “Herbie,” his old district was not among them. His nemesis had again found himself a spoiler to skim off the youthful, liberal votes that the Democrats consider theirs.

  Keeping up with current tastes, Sully this time found an anti-nuclear activist, a real earth-shoe-wearing, whale-saving one-worlder. Sully’s new pawn wasn’t as successful as the pro-drug candidate—he won only three thousand votes—but he did well enough to cost “Herbie” the race by five hundred votes. The earth pattered down on “Herbie’s” coffin lid.

  To the very end, Sullivan’s increasingly desperate ingrate tried to deny what was happening to him. Only on election eve did the strain become too much. With polling a matter of hours away, “Herbie” was invited to participate in a debate sponsored by an important civic group. To his dismay, he arrived to find that it was a three-way debate: he, the Republican Congressman (whom “Herbie” had beaten eight years earlier with Sully’s help) and Sully’s antinuker.

  “I demand to know if Pat Sullivan is working for you,” shrieked “Herbie.” “If he is, you’re sick!”

  But Sully’s mission was close to accomplished: the political eradication of his betrayer. On election night 1982, when other Democrats in the country were basking in victory, Sully penned one last letter to his victim:

  “Dear Former Congressman . . .”

  There is a downside to the story of F. Patrick Sullivan’s revenge. Though he has harpooned his great white whale and put his drinking behind him, Sully is the first to admit the all-too-measurable damage to himself. “Herbie lived rent-free in my head for eight years,” he later said.

  Sully’s story shows the pains to which people will go for vengeance, sadly paralleling the genius we see in those great criminal minds whose schemes to rob banks so often exceed in originality the planning of those who own them.

  Ask anyone in a congressional cloakroom what he thinks of the old “Don’t get mad; get even” line (it is traceable to Illinois Senator Everett M. Dirksen), and you get the same hard-bitten assessment: “Not worth it.” “Too expensive.” “Waste of time.” “Takes too damned long.” As Maryland’s former Governor Marvin Mandel put it, “Don’t spend your life looking through a rearview mirror.”

  Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois, who would later claim the chairmanship of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was once the victim of a little fellow with a mighty memory. In 1968, Rosty was on his way to becoming Speaker. He was only forty but already had a decade’s seniority and a secure seat from Chicago’s North Side. A political hot property, “one of the boys,” he was the kind of congressman who moves upward as if by a law of nature.

  Rostenkowski’s express lane to the Speaker’s chair hit a major detour in 1968 when the Democrats went to Chicago for that summer’s infamous national convention. Vietnam was dominating the country’s attention. Outside, in Grant Park and on the streets, students were rallying to the antiwar cause. The Chicago police were bashing their brains in.

  Inside Convention Hall, Mayor Richard J. Daley, the “Boss,” was trying to act as if nothing was happening. His business was politics, not foreign policy. He was concerned that the proceedings reflect well on the city.

  He never counted on the impact of television. No police-shielded hall could be insulated from the violence in the streets. Delegates began to raise their voices against Daley and his harsh methods. Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff of Connecticut stood at the podium and condemned “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.”

  At this point, the mayor and a phalanx of his people down on the floor began yelling. With the chaos outside now filtering into the hall like tear gas through a wet handkerchief, Daley tried to scream Ribicoff down, running his hand hard across his neck in the cut-’em-off gesture. His televised lips, analyzed later, distilled the Boss’s views in all their ethnic rage: “Fuck you, you Jew sonofabitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!”

  Hizzoner was not the only man infuriated by what he saw. Watching the carnage on television, Lyndon Johnson put through a call from the White House. It was clear that the convention’s dwarfish chairman, House Majority Leader Carl Albert of Oklahoma, was not the man to restore order. The lame-duck President wanted someone tougher wielding the gavel.

  Rosty remembers the phone call well. “He started screaming his head off at me.” The President wanted him to do something. Passing a sanitized version of the word to Albert, Rostenkowski assumed the chair. The price would be a much more coveted chair.

  Three years later, Albert became Speaker of the House and took his revenge. When the new Majority Leader, Hale Boggs of Louisiana, recommended Rostenkowski as whip, the party’s third-ranking position, Speaker Albert turned him down cold, despite the fact that Rosty was the next man in line. He put the call through to Tip O’Neill instead.

  Albert was not finished with Rosty. A few days later, Rostenkowski ran for reelection to his job as chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and was rolled over by a surprise late entrant into the race: Olin E. “Tiger” Teague of Texas, Carl Albert’s candidate.

  That’s how Dan Rostenkowski lost his position on the House leadership ladder. Thinking back on that memorable moment at the ’68 convention years later, one friend of the Illinois Congressman muttered, “Danny would be Speaker right now if he had kept his mouth shut.”

  Observing the “get ahead” rule, some others have scored far higher. Consider one case where a personal slight, handled professionally, became a spur to advancement.

  In 1948, Democrat Chester Bowles, like the head of the ticket, Harry Truman, came from behind to win, in his case the governorship of Connecticut. No one was more thrilled than his state chairman, John Bailey. The candidate had run the election just the way Bailey had planned, and that night an exhausted chairman said, “It’s something I’ve worked for for two years.”

  Victory was to be followed by humiliation. The following year, one of Connecticut’s U.S. senators resigned. Bailey made k
nown his interest in being appointed to the vacancy. All he wanted was to have the seat until the election was held in 1950. He would gladly step aside when it came time to select the candidate; he sought the honor, not the career. Bailey’s claims on the Governor’s gratitude were immense; nevertheless, Bowles chose William Benton, who had made a fortune as Bowles’s partner in the advertising business and who could trace his family to the Mayflower—but who had done nothing for the Connecticut Democratic Party.

  Bailey, an Irish Catholic, was deeply upset at the Governor’s rebuff but refused to let his disappointment show. Years later he said, “I guess he was worried about what the people out in Michigan and Washington would think about him appointing a small-time politician to the U.S. Senate.” Though it was presumed he had the power to deny Bowles renomination, Bailey did not want to hurt the party he had built. Instead, he went to work making peace, quelling the opposition to Benton’s appointment among party regulars. When the new Senator visited Hartford, Bailey invited him to stay at his home, a practice that he continued thereafter. The two families became friends.

  In 1954, the time came again for Connecticut Democrats to pick a candidate for governor. Bowles, who had been defeated for a four-year term in 1950, was seeking a comeback. Chairman Bailey toured the state, asking party officials to record their preference by dropping a ballot into a black shoebox he carried with him. Finally, Bailey signaled his choice: Abe Ribicoff. Asked about the ballots years later, Bailey simply said, “Oh, Abe had a lot of votes.” Ribicoff went on to a smashing political career as governor, Cabinet secretary and U.S. senator. What he may have lacked in Pilgrim ancestry he made up for with a certain Irishman’s friendship.

  Four years later, Bowles attempted one last race and was defeated for the Senate, this time by Thomas J. Dodd, whose campaign went over the top with the convention vote of a fresh new ally of Bailey’s, Mrs. Ella Grasso. As a liberal, the future Governor would have been expected to go with Bowles. Her vote for Dodd let everyone know, once and for all, where the party chairman stood. Three years later, in 1961, John Bailey moved to Washington with the new President, John F. Kennedy, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

  Asked about the effect of his early setback, those close to Bailey say that losing that Senate seat was the best thing that ever happened to him. “If he had received that honor in the 1940s, he would have quit,” one relative now says. “Instead, he set a higher goal and it gave purpose to his whole life.”

  Rule: Always keep your eye on the goal. Accumulate power, and the opportunities to render justice will fall onto your plate. It takes brains and, most important, time.

  John Bailey, who was too fine a man to ever engage in single-minded vengeance, has a lesson to teach on how to deal with an adversary. Rather than be diminished by the slight, he was raised by it. Instead of bad-mouthing his rival, he simply outdistanced and outgrew him. Jack Kennedy also knew the difference between political justice and peevishness. When he ran for office the first time, he carried a looseleaf book of quotations around with him. One of them was from his father. “More men die of jealousy than of cancer,” it read.

  The son learned from the father’s hard-won wisdom. “He would reward his opponents,” Ted Sorensen recalls with irony, “but he would never forget which department store wouldn’t put his posters in its windows back in ’48.”

  Kennedy’s successor in Congress, Tip O’Neill, was of the same school. In 1980, a wealthy socialite named John LeBoutillier was elected to the Congress to represent the Great Gatsby area of Long Island, New York. He won with the help of two considerable assets: the full backing of the local Republican machine, and a sizable campaign war chest (his Vanderbilt and Whitney relatives had pitched in grandly). LeBoutillier seemed headed toward a substantial career.

  But early in his tenure he made a wee mistake. He gave a speech at a New York Republican state convention in which he said that House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill was “fat, bloated and out of control—just like the federal budget.” It was a Saturday, always a slow day for news. The wires picked it up. Bob Schieffer read it on CBS News.

  Many people were indignant at the contempt shown for the Speaker, his office and for the House of Representatives over which he presided. The Speaker himself had little to say. When he was asked what he thought of the man who had so viciously lampooned him, his words were dry and cold: “I wouldn’t know him from a cord of wood.”

  Two years later, Democrats were holding a fund-raiser to “roast” Tip O’Neill. One of the speakers was Congressman Robert J. Mrazek, who had defeated LeBoutillier in the recently held election. “For a while there, I had no idea where we would get the money we needed to run a decent campaign,” he said. “Then, out of nowhere, three weeks before election day, the money started pouring in, from Chicago, from everywhere.” Many of these contributors had obviously never heard of Bob Mrazek. They didn’t know him from a cord of wood. They just wanted to shut an impudent mouth.

  Some time thereafter, a certain rich young man found himself dining in a Washington restaurant. Seeing the Speaker at another table, he sent over a bottle of wine and a few minutes later went over himself. “I just wanted to say hello,” he said. “I’m John LeBoutillier. I guess you were more popular than I thought you were.”

  A successor to O’Neill would get a tougher lesson in the use and misuse of anger.

  In late 1995, Bill Clinton engaged himself in a nasty tug-of-war with the new Republican majority in Congress. The Democratic president wanted to protect the social “safety net” his party had spent a half-century enacting. The newly-elected Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, had other ideas.

  The result was the notorious “government shutdown.” Federal workers were sent home. Museums and other public buildings were closed. Retirees fretted that their Social Security checks wouldn’t get through. The big question for the American people was who to blame: the budget-cutting Republicans or the “I feel your pain” president wielding the veto pen.

  At a breakfast meeting with reporters, Gingrich ended the mystery. He confessed a personal motive for his recalcitrance. During a recent flight to Israel for the funeral of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Bill Clinton had barely spoken to him. Worse yet, the president had made him, the Speaker of the House, leave Air Force One from the rear.

  “Where’s their sense of manners?” Gingrich railed to the seasoned journalists over their bacon and eggs. “Where’s their sense of courtesy?”

  Thanks to Gingrich, the next day’s newspapers had a ready explanation for the government shutdown. The most vital government in the world had been crunched to a standstill not by a conflict of ideology or fiscal policy, but by one man’s ego.

  “Cry Baby,” screamed the headline of the New York Daily News above a picture of Newt in diapers. “Newt’s tantrum: He closed down the government because Clinton made him sit at the back of the plane.”

  Don’t get mad. Don’t get even. Get ahead.

  7

  * * *

  Leave No Shot Unanswered

  If you don’t have something good to say about someone, come sit next to me.

  —Alice Roosevelt Longworth

  In 1992, Bill Clinton introduced a new weapon to presidential politics: the war room. Its mission was to meet and repel each incoming salvo whether it targeted the candidate’s Vietnam draft record, his non-inhaling experiments with marijuana, or the latest “bimbo eruption” from his sexual past.

  The war room’s youthful commandant was George Stephanopoulos, who had learned the tragic vulnerability of a presidential candidate who sits by and lets his enemies say terrible things about him.

  Four years earlier, Stephanopoulos had been a mid-level campaign aide to Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis. His fellow Greek-American had begun that topsy-turvey summer of 1988 with one of the most pristine images in American politics. His fellow governors, who judged him the best among them, saw him as a solid, pragmatic centrist
who left the philosophizing—liberal as well as conservative—to others. At home, he was seen as a fiscal cheapskate, someone Bostonians say “throws half dollars around as if they were manhole covers.” His hardheaded approach to social spending was a key contributor, in fact, to his defeat for renomination as governor in 1978.

  To the shock of George Bush’s advisers, Dukakis’s solid reputation as a can-do executive was winning him a strong national following in 1988. He was helped in this by the competition he faced for the Democratic presidential nomination. Each Tuesday that he defeated Jesse Jackson in yet another primary campaign, the second-generation Greek-American looked better and better to those most vital of American voters: middle-class Democratic voters who had voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984.

  Undaunted, the Bush people dissected the Dukakis phenomenon the way a high-school biology student attacks a frog. They pulled together a group of socially conservative Democratic voters in Paramus, New Jersey, to ask why they had voted for Ronald Reagan but were now planning to vote for Michael Dukakis. What the GOP aides heard was staggering. These “Reagan Democrats” not only liked Michael Dukakis, they thought he was more conservative than the Republican George Bush. From everything they had heard and seen, the Massachusetts governor would be much tougher than the Vice President in battling the drug epidemic festering in their neighborhoods.

  Confronted with this verdict, the Bush people probed for opportunity. They asked the same group of New Jersey voters if they were familiar with the Massachusetts policy of awarding weekend “furloughs” to its prison inmates, including first-degree murderers. And did they know that Michael Dukakis, as governor, had refused to sign legislation requiring teachers to lead their students in the Pledge of Allegiance?

  After being fed these little sugarplums from Dukakis’s past, half the people in the Paramus “focus groups” abruptly changed their minds. They could no longer support the Massachusetts governor they had just minutes before viewed as a nuts-and-bolts centrist. As one woman exclaimed, “He’s a liberal!”