Russert began sorting through the candidate’s speeches, press releases and news clips. Working with a yellow legal pad, he systematically marked down every fact put out about the other fellow’s record until a blatant pattern emerged. The Pentagon intellectual had been purely a paper John Wayne. The truth was actually closer to the earlier portrait. Far from being a commissioned officer, the born-again combat vet had been deferred for work as a Defense Department civilian technocrat.
Russert’s campaign press releases began hammering on the inconsistencies. “Even his description of his military record varies from article to article.” Finally, the consolidated clippings were passed to some reporters who were scheduled to have lunch with the young GOP challenger.
As the reporters sat down to a luncheon interview, the first thing the candidate referred to was his Vietnam service. The reporters, programmed for action by Russert, reported the candidate’s false boasts along with the facts of his real-life record. The candidate pulled out of the race. Moynihan ended up scoring the largest plurality of any New York Senate candidate in history.
In September 1986, Joseph P. Kennedy III took his opponent out of a Massachusetts congressional primary with a similar riposte. During a televised debate, his hard-charging rival asserted that the nonprofit oil-importing company run by young Kennedy was doing business with the terrorist government of Libya. “Let me ask you a straight question: Are you in hock to Muammar Qaddafi?” Kennedy looked at his aggressive opponent and replied with an icy calm that won a lot more points than red-faced anger, “Let me just explain to you something about Libya. Libya offered Sirhan Sirhan asylum after he killed my father, and for you to think for a second that Citizens Energy or Citizens Research Corporation would have anything to do with any oil coming out of Libya is just totally off base.” As they say in Boston, end of story.
Method No. 2: Ridicule.
In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt was running for a fourth term against the extremely aggressive Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, who had made his reputation as a throw-the-book-at-’em prosecutor. But even in the last months of his life, FDR knew how to turn the tables. Abandoning his above-the-battle stance to focus on just one of the charges against him, he sent Dewey flying.
The Republicans were claiming that Roosevelt had abused his office, that he had, among other things, dispatched a destroyer to retrieve his dog, allegedly left behind on a tour of Alaska. Speaking at a Washington black-tie dinner given by the Teamsters’ Union, the President rose to make a few truly classic remarks. Instead of showing righteous indignation, he delivered a one-man burlesque of the whole affair.
“Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me or my wife or on my sons,” he said. “No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala.” The chuckles began to rise from the audience.
“Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them,” FDR continued as the laughter crested. “You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the tax payers of two or three or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious.” His voice heavy with mock mournfulness, the President concluded, “He has not been the same dog since.”
By attacking Roosevelt, the Republicans had hoped to draw him out of the White House into a head-to-head with Dewey. With the President’s tongue-in-cheek rejoinder, their strategy withered. As the Democratic National Committee announced in the aftermath of what became quickly known as the “Fala speech,” “The race is now between the President’s dog and Dewey’s goat.”
A letter that FDR sent to Congresswoman-elect Helen Gahagan Douglas in the weeks just after the 1944 election gives a vivid portrait both of how Roosevelt viewed the brooding Dewey and how satisfied he was with his hardball political tactic:
Things here settled down immediately into the usual routine, though I am still mad at the little black man and will continue to be so. I think it is good for me. It was the rottenest, dirtiest campaign I have ever taken part in in thirty-four years—but my strategy worked. At the Teamsters dinner on September twenty-fifth, I deliberately wrote out a speech with the objective in mind of making Governor Dewey angry. It worked. He got angrier and angrier and in this part of the country lost thousands of votes by doing so.
Do come East and see us soon.
Method No. 3: Jujitsu.
This technique, where you use the force of the opponent’s own attack to bring him down, was named by Jeff Greenfield, the top CNN correspondent who was once a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy.
My favorite example is the 1975 reelection campaign of a Virginia state senator, Joseph Gartlan.
Gartlan’s opponent that year was making a big issue of busing, nailing Gartlan hard for failing to support a constitutional amendment that would end the busing of schoolchildren to achieve racial integration. The measure, if adopted by enough states, would have written into the U.S. Constitution a specific ban on the busing of schoolchildren from one district to another.
In an area where most children were white and attended public school, the busing issue began to cut. The people of northern Virginia were not all enthusiastic about having their kids bused off to the mean streets of downtown D.C. Polls showed that the incumbent was getting killed, particularly in the normally Democratic working-class areas. Just a few days from election, it seemed to be all over for him.
Then, the Friday before the election, his consultant Arnold Bennett created a campaign flyer that was a true work of art. It was a simple offset sheet that contained a picture of the Washington Monument with a school bus aimed directly at it. The text hit the Republican opponent right between the eyes: “John Watkins believes it is constitutional to bus your children into Washington.”
The literature was staggeringly effective and, in an odd way, accurate. Watkins had indeed argued the need for a constitutional amendment to prevent interdistrict busing. He had said that without such an amendment the courts could not prevent such busing. He had in fact implied that it might be judged constitutional to “bus your children into Washington.”
With this audacious reversal, the incumbent was able to seize a highly explosive charge and redirect the blast to the man who had lit the fuse. By distributing the material only to working-class neighborhoods, where the busing issue was cutting politically, he avoided upsetting his more liberal constituents who drove Volvos and sent their children to private school. By striking just three days before election, he made counterattack impossible.
Sometimes the more direct approach is best.
In 1952, a young East Texan named Jack Brooks was in his first race for the U.S. House of Representatives. Not yet thirty, he, too, found himself the target of red-baiting. Pepper-like charges were raised against him, but unlike Pepper he had no intention of pretending that the attacks had not occurred. Speaking to a large meeting of voters, he aired the charges and his response. “I fought the fascists for five years in World War Two; I own a shotgun back at home and I’ll shoot any man who calls me a Communist.”
It had a certain Texas ring to it. It also ended the bogus charges. Brooks went on to serve his district in Washington through four decades.
PART III
Deals
8
* * *
“Only Talk When It Improves the Silence”
Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.
—Charles deGaulle
“Whaddaya hear?”
For a good part of the 1980s, that was the first thing I’d hear from Tip O’Neill in the morning.
If I called him up at home, it would be “Morning, Chris. Whaddaya hear?” It would be the same if I caught him on the car phone heading to the Capitol to preside over a full-dress debate on Nicaragua or on his way to National Airport to give a fund-raising speech in Cleve
land.
He’d switch on the vacuum cleaner whenever I entered his back-room office. “Whaddaya hear? Anything special out there?”
Then would come the silence, the long impatient pause lying heavy in the morning air.
That would be the cue. People who worked for him would sit there, edgy as prizefighters, ready to punch that silence to death. We would throw everything we had at it: every mental clip from the newspapers, that morning and all through the weekend. I would hit the interesting points made on the interview and talk shows, what the national columnists had said. If the President had done anything or I had heard that the White House might be intending anything, that, too, would come rushing out.
Then there was the internal news, the scuttlebutt, the complaints in the cloakroom, the shots taken at “the leadership” at meetings, every possible tidbit about what “the Republicans” were up to. After this short history of the world, what was there to say?
Then more relentless silence. Finally I would feel the pull of one last great inhalation of facts, figures and gossip. “Anything else I ought to know?”
When another aide, whether the general counsel or the rawest intern, entered the room, the challenge would be thrown up anew: “Anything special, Kirk?” “Whaddaya hear out there, Jack?”
This was how Tip O’Neill, victor in fifty straight local political ballotings, unchallenged Speaker of the Massachusetts legislature and unchallenged Speaker for ten years of the U.S. House of Representatives, began his day. In a world where information is money in the bank, the tough old Speaker had begun the daylong negotiation for every cent he could get his giant hands on.
Tip O’Neill loved information and dismissed those who lacked it. “That guy would ask me how to vote on a quorum call,” he said of one hopelessly unaware former member. And while O’Neill respected his staff, even bragged about us, there was one failing he would not suffer: being out of the know. For a leader and his lieutenants not to know what “the members” were up to was the national equivalent of that worst political sin, losing touch with the people back home in the district. For the leadership, the House is the district.
To watch Tip O’Neill listening in a meeting or quietly intimidating his staff was to understand silence as an art form. The few syllables emitted from this huge and demanding presence would bring a flood tide of words rushing desperately to fill the void.
Men and women who rise to power in large organizations, whether public or private, political or corporate, succeed through a keen understanding of the institution and its members, gained not by speaking but by listening, not by barking commands but by asking the right questions.
During my years of working with all stripes of politicians, the good and the bad, the gentlemen and the ogres, I’ve seen the varied uses of silence. A profession that advertises itself with words often performs its most critical deeds in crafty silence. Each working morning, Tip O’Neill would intimidate his staff into playing Gracie Allen to his George Burns, complete with cigar. “Tell ’em about your brother, Gracie,” Burns would say, and the rest of the show would be Allen’s, with long-suffering George puffing his accompaniment.
For years, I thought my old boss’s refusal to permit television coverage of those colorful events represented both a stubborn resistance to change and a foolish abdication of a powerful daily opportunity. Had he let the electronic media into those regular morning briefings, Tip O’Neill could have grabbed a bigger part of the daily Washington coverage, become an even grander figure in the capital’s passing political scene.
It took the suicidal experience of a successor to teach me how sage the old boss was. When Newt Gingrich came to power in 1995, I thought him the state-of-the-art Speaker. All press conferences would henceforth be open to TV coverage. Instead of hiding his daily brilliance under a bushel basket, Gingrich would be heard each time he opened his mouth.
Then came the inevitable catastrophe. Each day the network cameras would descend on the Speaker’s press conference armed with the daily story. Whatever had happened earlier in the day—a hurricane, an unfortunate remark by a colleague, a scandal—Speaker Gingrich would be asked for his reaction. Before long, Gingrich would be associated in the public’s mind with bad news. Eventually, given his penchant for the attention grabbing remark—“Men like to hunt giraffes”—Newt Gingrich would be the bad news. Finally, because of his vast unpopularity, he would be gone from the news and the Speaker’s chair altogether. “To the degree I was too brash, too self-confident or too pushy,” he told the House of Representatives the year he left it, “I apologize.”
Dick Gephardt is a House leader who, like Tip O’Neill and unlike Newt Gingrich, knows the value of letting others do the talking. He rose to power over his fellow House Democrats largely on his willingness to be an audience for them. While other Congressmen did the preaching, the ribbing and the towel-snapping, Gephardt listened and laughed. He became an expert on his colleagues, knowing how they thought, what they cared about, what made them tick. He also became the best head-counter in the House, able to call the yeas and the nays within three votes of the final result.
“I ain’t never learned nothin’ talkin’,” Lyndon Johnson used to say, and this old-breed political motto still guides even such young-men-in-a-hurry as Dick Gephardt. More than courtesy is at work. The Missouri Congressman listens to his colleagues with a power that most politicians cannot command at the top of their lungs.
Silence doesn’t just win you hard intelligence; it can make things happen. Real power on Capitol Hill is wielded by men who know that silence can be a sharper tool than rhetoric and that noise is rarely tantamount to action. Don’t let the high ceilings and the chandeliers fool you. There are only two businesses conducted on green felt tables: pool-sharking and lawmaking.
It is in this realm of sharp elbows and deceptive quiet that Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine established his great reputation as a legislator.
Muskie is famous for his failure as a presidential candidate in 1972. First there was his stubbornness. He refused to commit himself on how a Muskie Administration would bring an end to the Vietnam War. That permitted George McGovern to move to his left and thereby outflank him on the issue that mattered most to Democratic voters in that election year. Second, he had a table-thumping temper that could boil to the point of tears, as it did that snowy February afternoon in New Hampshire when a right-wing newspaper editor, William Loeb of the Manchester Union Leader, ridiculed his wife’s demeanor.
Yet the two traits that proved so detrimental to his presidential ambitions were his best assets as a deal-making senator.
Most senators look forward to committee markup sessions, when the laws are actually written, with resignation. The hours pass slowly. There are lots of numbers and nuts-and-bolts stuff to diddle with, and few if any obvious prizes to be won. The Washington press corps has flashier items to cover than sixteen middle-aged legislators arguing over spending estimates. Muskie was different. He began a markup with the quiet determination of a young boy unpacking his Lionel train layout in preparation for Christmas. He had a sure sense that a little work and a little time would bring a solid, predictable measure of accomplishment.
The record shows that Muskie’s penchant for the legislative nitty-gritty, tortoiselike pace and attentiveness to colleagues paid off. The Senator from Maine was personally responsible for the last great round of positive, landmark federal legislation: the Clean Water Act of 1972, which required that every industry end pollution of the country’s rivers and lakes; the Budget Control Act of 1974, which gave Congress the means if not the will to control the federal budget; and the Clean Air Act of 1977, which challenged the mighty auto industry.
As an assistant to the Senate Budget Committee, I was for two years an eyewitness to the Muskie method of operation. I saw at close range how a pol can get his way not with the violence of a street mugger but with the stealth of a veteran pickpocket.
Here’s the M.O. On days when the committ
ee sat, Muskie would arrive a few minutes before ten and take his seat at the head of the table. One at a time, his colleagues arrived. Senatorial pleasantries were exchanged. Photos were taken for The Washington Post, The New York Times and the wire services.
“Are there any statements?” the chairman would ask.
The other senators would then seize the opportunity to put their thoughts on the record. Statements were read. Cameras whirred. Positions were espoused. This was the part that Muskie’s colleagues liked. Handsome Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings of South Carolina would shoot a colorful barb at one target or another. His rich baritone would bring titters even before the punch line. Senator Walter “Fritz” Mondale of Minnesota would make a high-toned statement about the importance of “full funding” for a child development program. California’s Alan Cranston, his mien severe, would take a shot at CIA spending and reiterate the need for “accountability.” Senator Bob Dole would arrive last and needle a vulnerable liberal, Mondale being the usual target. Delaware’s Joseph R. Biden, Jr., would repeat without blinking an eye a joke heard in the same committee room and in front of the same audience the day before.
Eventually there was a sea change. The camera tripods were collapsed. Then, just as predictably, the senators began to drift off, to meet constituents, to address a downtown luncheon they had “gotten themselves committed to” or to attend another committee session.
Throughout the markup session, Muskie never left his chair. Hours passed as the work of the committee proceeded. The stomachs of his colleagues would begin to growl, but the chairman would hold to his seat.
“Anyone else want to speak?” he would say, looking with conscious patience from one straggler to the other. Slowly, as the short hand moved past one o’clock, he accumulated a small handful of slips beside his left hand. Those were the proxies of his departed colleagues. Each slip was a little different, expressing the Senator’s own priorities, but all of them reflected, one way or another, the chairman’s as well. “Anyone else?” he would say, slowly shuffling the tiny folded papers. “Does anyone else have anything to say?” As the room emptied, the chairman’s pockets filled with proxies.
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 99
