When Bush himself was shown videotapes of the New Jersey focus groups, he lost all squeamishness and became an instant and zealous convert to hardball. Immediately he began sprinkling his speeches with searing shots at his rival, ridiculing him as the governor who stood at the prison gates telling his departing murderers to “have a nice weekend.”
It worked. Employing the furlough and Pledge of Allegiance issues, the Bush forces converted Dukakis’s public image from that of dead-center pragmatist to far-out liberal. People who had never heard of prison furloughs became intimately familiar with the person of Willie Horton, the Massachusetts first-degree murderer who used his prison “furlough” to rape and assault a terrified couple in Maryland.
The Bush forces exploited the furlough issue to make Dukakis look weak on crime, the Pledge of Allegiance issue to paint him as weak and unreliable on national defense. Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater and media strategist Roger Ailes had achieved their goal: to position the Democratic presidential nominee as a “frost-belt, big spending, big taxing liberal who comes from the state that brings you Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neill.”
The Bush attack had an even more subversive undercurrent. Michael Dukakis was made to look not only like a far-out liberal but a political alien. He was portrayed as someone with different values than those Americans in the political mainstream. Newsweek would refer to this negative positioning of the Democratic candidate as the “un-Americanization of Mike Dukakis.”
Speaking at a high school assembly in suburban Philadelphia five days before the 1988 presidential election, Michael Dukakis was asked to render some political advice. His questioner was a nine-year-old student who said he’d been assigned to play Dukakis in an upcoming debate. Did the candidate have any pointers?
“Respond to the attacks immediately,” the desperate candidate responded sourly. “Don’t let them get away with anything.”
It was a valuable and revealing bit of counsel that told much about Dukakis’s failed strategy of the months before.
In June, a right-wing critic spread the rumor that Dukakis had been treated for depression. Dukakis’s instinct was to invoke the doctor-patient privilege, making it appear he had something to hide. When the Republicans hit him with the prison furlough issue, he sought feebly to place the blame on a Republican predecessor who had left office fourteen years earlier. When the Bush people let fly with the Pledge of Allegiance issue, Dukakis responded with legalisms, what one aide called “a first-year law school recitation.”
Mike Dukakis failed to understand the emotional power of the charges being made against him. Only afterwards did the Dukakis forces fully recognize their failure. John Sasso, the governor’s trusted aide, realized that the campaign’s failure went beyond tactics. Their real mistake, he admitted months later, was in not understanding the role that values played in the Bush assault. “Certain issues pack more weight than only the substance of the issues themselves. They carry a message about personal values, of deep belief and strength, of character, and even the aura of leadership. Our candidate was hurt badly on the subject of values. Who would have dreamed that Mike Dukakis—whose own father used to cry in his love for country—would be judged as short on patriotism?”
Leave no shot unanswered. The price Dukakis paid for breaking this hardball rule was staggering. “In this crazy business, at least in our times, a lie unanswered becomes the truth within twenty-four hours,” noted Willie Brown, who was then Speaker of the California Assembly and later the mayor of San Francisco.
To finish off Dukakis, Republican media strategist Roger Ailes, who worked for both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, aired a series of unforgettable TV ads. One commercial featured a ludicrous, real-life video of the helmeted Democratic presidential candidate taking a demonstration ride in a U.S. Army tank. It reminded viewers of Snoopy pretending to be the Red Baron.
A second Ailes ad was far less jocular. Produced in grainy black-and-white film meant to simulate a news documentary, it showed prisoners passing again and again through a revolving door.
“Governor Michael Dukakis vetoed mandatory sentences for drug dealers,” was the grim indictment heard by voters. “He vetoed the death penalty. His revolving-door prison policy gave weekend furloughs to first-degree murderers not eligible for parole. Two hundred and sixty-eight escaped. Many are still at large. While out, many committed other crimes like kidnapping and rape, and many are still at large. Now Michael Dukakis says he wants to do for America what he has done for Massachusetts. America can’t afford that risk.”
Dukakis refused to counter the image of a bleeding heart liberal. Asked in his final TV debate with George Bush if he would back the death penalty for someone who raped and killed his wife, the Democratic presidential candidate answered in the negative and left it at that. Before a huge American audience, he confirmed his image as someone too bloodlessly elite, too educated, to punish the bad guys. Indeed, he sounded like someone who might very well let murderers out for the weekend.
George Stephanopoulos took notice of what had been done to Dukakis, what his man allowed be done to him that nasty summer and fall of 1988. “When I arrived, we had a seventeen point lead. Then came the summer assault. The Bush campaign, led by Lee Atwater, opened up a disciplined, ruthless and sustained series of attacks on Governor Dukakis’s record and character. Flags, furloughs, the Pledge of Allegiance. By August’s Republican convention, our lead was gone, our candidate was a caricature and our campaign was effectively over.” On November 8, 1988, Bush defeated Dukakis 54 percent to 46 percent—an 8 point edge. A quarter of the American electorate had changed its mind about who it wanted as its next president.
Stephanopoulos went to work for Bill Clinton four years later fully alert to the lethal nature of an unanswered charge. “The purpose of the war room was not just to respond to Republican attacks,” he later explained. “It was to respond to them fast, even before they were broadcast or published, when the lead of the story was still rolling around in the reporter’s mind. Our main goal was to ensure that no unanswered attack reached the people.”
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Claude Pepper was born the first year of the twentieth century and served in Congress nearly until its end. The oldest member of the U.S. Congress also had some of the best stories to tell. Unfortunately for Pepper, his most startling tale was a lesson he had learned the hard way. He is another politician who discovered to his lasting regret the folly of letting false shots go unanswered.
Most people recall Pepper as a late-in-life crusader for the nation’s senior citizens. He became a familiar weathered face at Gray Panther rallies and other senior citizen events excoriating anyone who dared think of tampering with Social Security. An aide to President Reagan once commented to Time that there were only two people who really got under Reagan’s skin, “Tip O’Neill and that Congressman from Florida who keeps talking about Social Security.”
I remember standing at a reception in 1982 for the newly elected members of the House. As the bright-eyed new representatives and their spouses hobnobbed and rubbernecked their way around the Capitol’s Rayburn Room, some paused to listen to the one member greeting them who had served in the U.S. Congress back in the years before Rayburn was even Speaker. Claude Pepper was telling a new member from Long Island about the efforts to bring America into World War II. He spoke from experience. It was the “Pepper Resolution” that compromised U.S. neutrality and allowed our country to provide direct aid to Great Britain.
Claude Pepper’s career in the House spanned three decades. Actually he was in his second career in the Congress, a sequel to a political lifetime that began in the New Deal days of 1936 and ended with apparent finality in 1950 when Pepper lost his Senate seat.
A lot of politicians look back at that 1950 Senate Democratic primary in Florida as the dirtiest in history. This was the infamous “Red Pepper” campaign in which the incumbent Senator was painted as a dupe of Stalin and an enemy of free enterprise. Nor did the attack stop wit
h red-baiting. Absurd but sinister-sounding charges—“Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert!” “Pepper has a sister who was once a thespian!” “Pepper practiced celibacy before his marriage!”—were pumped into the cracker back country.
That year, seven U.S. senators were defeated for reelection. None of them seemed even remotely prepared for the paintbrush that would leave them crimson red, their careers and reputations devastated. Pepper, the first of them to go down—he lost in a May primary—had refused to fire back. That is one of the things he remembers most vividly. He was the first victim of the red-baiting and the one least prepared.
Sitting in his chandeliered office on the third floor of the Capitol, Pepper told me about the “Red Pepper campaign.” He recalled his adversary, George A. Smathers, and the tactics he used. And he reworked what his response should have been to the charges. “I’ve thought very often about that campaign and what I could have done,” he said thirty-six years later like Sherlock Holmes still trying to crack an old and difficult case.
Part of the problem was timing. It was the first use in a party primary of what would be called McCarthyism. All the other senators defeated that year were challenged in the general election. The “Red Pepper” campaign would serve, in fact, as a model for these later debacles.
Pepper’s opponent was another surprise. George Smathers had managed Pepper’s 1938 campaign. Afterwards Pepper had helped him become assistant U.S. attorney for the district. Then, in 1945, Pepper had asked Attorney General Tom Clark to make Smathers one of his assistants, an appointment that won him early discharge from the Marine Corps.
Smathers’s campaign for this second appointment was not one of the things he would brag about. Pepper remembers how the younger man had come to him in June 1945, with World War II still raging in the Pacific. “For three weeks he importuned me. He wanted to get out of the service so that Tom Clark could make him an assistant attorney general. When Smathers finally succeeded in getting his discharge, his mother wrote, ‘Thank God for men like Claude Pepper.’ ”
Pepper’s role as Smathers’s mentor did not end there. When Smathers ran for Congress in 1946, he was characterized by the conservative opposition as “the Pepper candidate.” When he asked the Senator how to handle the charge, Pepper advised his young colleague to say, “They’re trying to throw pepper in folks’ eyes.” Smathers eagerly took the advice.
While Pepper was pushing Smathers’s career, the state’s powerful business interests, increasingly angered by the Senator’s support for minimum-wage legislation and national health insurance and his opposition to a Republican tax-relief bill, were amassing a huge campaign war chest to defeat Pepper for renomination in 1950, and they found the man to spend it on: George Smathers.
Smathers went immediately on the attack. Announcing his candidacy in January, he said he “would not tolerate traitors.” The implication was overpowering. He was red-baiting his patron, the man who had helped build his career.
Pepper failed to deflect the personal attacks. “They caught me by surprise,” he said almost four decades later. “I never dreamed of the nature of the campaign, the persuasiveness of it.” Even after he began his own campaign two months before the primary, he failed to recognize the damage being done. “I still didn’t realize the magnitude of the thing.”
Eventually, Pepper himself was unwittingly made an accomplice in the dirty-tricks campaign. In the South at that time, there existed an ultimate weapon—and it was only a question of how and when it would be armed and detonated.
One night in Leesburg, after the Senator had completed a speech and was stepping down from an outdoor platform his supporters had built, he was approached by a man who reached out to clasp his hand. The picture filled a half page in the next day’s Orlando Sentinel, for the man was black. In segregationist Florida, the picture of a major white politician glad-handing for black support was a political death warrant. “That hurt,” Pepper recalls. Only later would affidavits confirm that the man, a janitor at a local theater, had been paid to stand there, grab the Senator’s hand when he came down and hold it “until the light flashes.”
But it was the Bolshevik charge that cut deepest. On Sunday, three days before the primary, the incumbent felt its full enormity. As he came out of church, a woman showed him a pamphlet she had just been handed that morning. Its title was “The Red Record of Senator Pepper.” In the hours that followed, tens of thousands of these booklets were trucked throughout the state. By the time the Pepper campaign realized what had happened, it was too late to do anything about it.
Looking back, Pepper believes that his whole strategy had been flawed, that his campaign “made every mistake in the book.”
The first was to let the charges against him pass unchallenged. “I had always followed the rule of not mentioning my opponent’s name. I would always run on the theory I was applying for a job. I would always tell the people what I thought I was qualified to do and not mention the other applicants.” The problem with speaking no evil was that people were getting some far more lurid information on Pepper from his enemies. By refusing to counter the charges or attack the credibility of those making them, he gave his longtime supporters the wrong idea.
Pepper now realizes that his best tactic would have been to start early and hit Smathers with everything he had. When his opponent leveled the “traitor” charge, he should have hit his former protégé as a liar and an ingrate. “I should have said, ‘If he’ll double-cross a friend, he’ll double-cross you.’ ” Pepper believes that he could have destroyed Smathers’s credibility had he released the story of his superpatriot challenger’s shameless efforts to win release from the Marines so that he could get a head start in postwar politics.
If the Senator had fought back with any degree of ferocity, the “Red Pepper” campaign might have lost its bite. Instead, the campaign became a model, especially for an ambitious candidate at the other end of the continent.
In the later months of 1950, it became clear that a young California congressman had studied the Smathers campaign in some detail. Richard Nixon dubbed his opponent, Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, the “pink lady.” Nixon’s agents printed a campaign leaflet pairing Douglas’s voting record with that of the radical Congressman Vito Marcantonio of New York City. Years later, the document known as the “pink sheet” made Nixon the pariah of the nation’s liberals. But as in Florida six months earlier, the charges stuck. Thus began Nixon’s Senate career.
When someone makes an unfair attack, the onus is on the victim to set the record straight. In these days of twenty-four-hour cable news reporting, a damaging wire story can be on the air within the hour. Any story, particularly a negative one, travels at the speed of light, creating an electronic paperstorm flying in every direction. A sad rule of thumb is that most people believe that if any shot goes unanswered it must be true.
Fortunately, there are as many good defenses as there are good offenses. With daring and a good bit of humor you can leave your critic wishing he had kept his powder dry.
Method No. 1: Catch ’Em in a Lie.
Some of the most memorable campaigns in history have been won by the victims of slanders. In each case, what swept the election was the successful counterattack, the cleverness in calling “Foul!”
In 1970, Senator Frank Moss of Utah was charged by his Republican opponent with supporting violent demonstrations by students against the war in Vietnam. Moss destroyed the man by running full-page newspaper ads displaying a letter he had sent to the young demonstrators supporting their objective but urging them to avoid violence. Across the top of the page the headline read: “Here’s the Famous Letter.” It won the election.
Another case in point was the 1982 senatorial campaign in New York.
Earlier that year, the electoral prospects of the incumbent, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were not promising. The Republicans, fresh from their 1980 landslide, were planning to nominate an extremely attractive young oppo
nent who had made a reputation in the House of Representatives as a tough critic of the liberal establishment, Speaker O’Neill in particular. Disrespectful of seniority, this young Republican firebrand seemed to relish hitting those who were highest on the political ladder. They made good targets for a political gunslinger trying to make his mark.
Moynihan, the erudite academic, was the best target of all. His inflection came from Harvard Yard, his liberalism from Hell’s Kitchen. To Republicans, he was the worst of all worlds: liberal, intellectual and a big-city Democrat ever alert to his party’s demanding constituencies.
But Moynihan did have certain political assets. One of them was his chief of staff and press secretary, Timothy Russert, who recognized that an effective way to counter one assertion, in this case that the Senator was too soft toward the Soviets, was to catch him lying in another. Scouting the opposition for the ’82 campaign, Russert began noticing that the hotshot Republican challenger, so schooled in political attack, was a little fuzzy defining his own past. The problem revolved around his war record.
Certain discrepancies began to surface in the young hero’s account of his service. As a congressional candidate in the late 1970s, he had emphasized his desk jockey job at the Pentagon as a whiz-kid planner in the nation’s conversion to a peacetime economy. Identifying with the post-Vietnam transition, he seemed to be making himself an agent in the winding down of the war itself.
In the more hawkish 1980s, a different color began to glow in the self-portrait. Now the nation was reeling from the Iranian hostage-taking. The country was in a Rambo mood, and the young “veteran” was riding the Zeitgeist. Suddenly his literature began portraying him not as a Pentagon pencil pusher but as a real-life soldier, who might actually have gotten his hands dirty in ’Nam.
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 98
