The senator who wins at legislative deal-making is rarely the man with “new ideas.” Far more frequently he is the one tough enough to endure the process. Edmund Muskie won not because he was the smartest man in the room—although he may well have been—but because he was willing to be the last man in the room.
Muskie’s rule was as dry as leaves: Only talk when it improves the silence. Getting legislation passed his way, not just the titles but line by line, was Muskie’s obsession. While others postured, he listened, speaking up only when a favorite program was threatened. When his colleagues became restless, he waited. His waiting was legendary; his staff nicknamed him “Iron Pants.” For him it was not the debating points or the statements of conscience and position or the media attention, but the bill itself.
Time was Muskie’s soul brother. Where his counterpart in the House would draft a budget plan in three days, Muskie’s committee would take that many weeks. Each of his great environmental bills took two years, an entire Congress, to be enacted. The Clean Water Act took forty-five days of markups and forty-four sessions of the House-Senate conference.
Once, in a battle over the Clean Air Act, Muskie seemed ready to let the U.S. auto industry shut down. Under an existing statute, the assembly lines would be halted on environmental grounds unless Congress passed remedial legislation. His adversary at the time was Congressman John D. Dingell of Michigan, a legislator known for his avid support of the auto industry. When told that failure to reach agreement with the House would mean a shutdown, Muskie gave a brief but classic response: “There aren’t any auto works in Maine.”
Muskie’s celebrated temper added a barometric factor to his conferences with the House. A conferee’s greatest asset is a reputation for being “difficult.” Normally, Muskie wore a Mount Rush-more countenance. But when he wished to feel goaded, his temper would erupt in stages: first, a minor tremor, then a greater burst, then progressing up the Richter scale to a full, shattering explosion. Few people wanted to see it run its course. Three centuries ago, La Rochefoucauld wrote an assessment that fits Muskie precisely. “Fortune sometimes uses our faults for our advancement,” he wrote. “Some people are so tiresome that their merits would go unrewarded were it not that we want to get them out of the way.”
One morning I was returning with Senator Muskie from a 7 A.M. live interview with CBS. Riding through the morning rush hour up to Capitol Hill, I was made to feel personally responsible for the traffic. I had an overwhelming urge to bolt from the car, shrieking at each car ahead, “Hey, please pull over, won’t you! You’re upsetting SENATOR MUSKIE!”
Imagine spending weeks sitting with that sort of man in a small room in the Capitol caverns. No wonder men were willing to make concessions to him. No wonder they set their sights low when going into those potentially endless meetings and took anything they could get, unreasonably rating each modest success a major triumph. Some walked away happy that they had achieved roughly—very roughly—what they set out to achieve; others were simply glad they could walk away.
Edmund Sixtus Muskie was a man who judged his success very coldly. On my last day on his staff, I told him that if ours were a parliamentary form of government he would have become prime minister. Like Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, he was a great legislator. In a system where the legislative leader was also the head of government, the hugely productive Senator from Maine would have eventually taken his place at the top.
Listening patiently, Muskie looked at me and then said in a voice as dry as the rocky crags of Maine, “But we don’t, do we?”
Refusing to speculate, Muskie remained fastened to the real world of the U.S. Senate and his own strengths in contending with it. For him, even his volcanic temper was an “element of style.” When the crunch came on an issue, he possessed an unlimited vat of righteous indignation. “Why should I compromise?” he would yell. “I don’t need a bill that bad.”
As politicians go, Muskie was a heavyweight, if a flawed one. He became a “senators’ senator” because of a maddening degree of concentration and an awesome inner rage that he found a way to make productive.
Alexis de Tocqueville, that great French chronicler of American democracy, observed the power that men such as Muskie have in wielding political influence. “We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess, but we excel at those which also make use of our defects.”
That is a substantial lesson. In any negotiating situation, the race is rarely to the swift. Congress rarely completes its annual business on schedule, because as in any other deal some key members recognize that they can wait out their opponents. The negotiator who keeps his powder dry usually enjoys a decisive edge.
The “Only talk when it improves the silence” rule played a major part in this century’s history.
Two of the great orators of our language were Winston Churchill and the younger, less seasoned John F. Kennedy. Still, in the lives of both these men who used words as a path to deeds, the critical turn of fate came when they held their tongues.
May 9, 1940, was a terrible day in British history. Hitler had just invaded Holland and Belgium. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement lay in ruins. Summoned to the Cabinet Room at eleven o’clock that night, Winston Churchill listened to Chamberlain trying to make his fateful decision on the succession. His shattered government could no longer retain the confidence of Parliament or the British people. Chamberlain was now admitting the inevitable. The choice had come down to Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, who had warned for a decade of the need to challenge Hitler, and Lord Halifax, the appeasing Foreign Secretary, a peer and therefore a member of the House of Lords.
The three were now seated in the Cabinet Room. Later that night, Chamberlain would have to present to King George VI—who liked Halifax—his resignation and perhaps his recommendation for a successor.
“Can you see any reason, Winston,” the Prime Minister asked, “why in these days a peer should not be prime minister?”
Usually I talk a great deal, but on this occasion I was silent [Churchill wrote later]. As I remained silent, a very long pause ensued. Then, at length, Halifax spoke. He said that his position as a Peer, out of the House of Commons, would make it very difficult for him to discharge the duties of Prime Minister in a war like this. He spoke for some minutes. By the time it was finished, it was clear that the duty would fall upon me—had in fact fallen upon me. On this, the momentous conversation came to an end.
Winston Churchill, whose voice would provide the wartime roar for the British lion, said absolutely nothing. He simply gazed silently out the window, onto the street below. The next day, Britain had its greatest prime minister.
—
John F. Kennedy made similar use of silence a generation later.
In October 1962, the United States received confirmation that the Soviet Union was in the process of deploying intermediate-range nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba. The discovery placed the two great superpowers on what appeared to be the slippery slope to World War III.
During the final, unnerving days of that Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy received two conflicting messages from Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the U.S.S.R. The first was conciliatory. It offered to remove the Il-28 missiles from the island if the United States would simply promise not to support another invasion attempt like the one attempted the year before in the Bay of Pigs. The second cable, received a half day later, was belligerent. It demanded a public quid pro quo: the Soviets would remove their missiles from Cuba if we, the United States, removed ours from Turkey.
With American planes poised for attack on the Cuban missile sites, JFK considered his final strategy. Acting upon the advice of his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, he decided to ignore the second Khrushchev message and respond to the first cable, finessing the question of the Turkish bases.
The gambit worked. The next morning word came from the Kremlin that the missile
s would be crated and returned to the Soviet Union. The world’s first nuclear standoff was resolved. The man whose words are now engraved in the granite of Arlington National Cemetery performed his greatest service at the moment he and his advisers had the brazen self-control to say nothing at all.
I have seen the same tactic used on the street corner.
In February 1974, a wealthy young congressional candidate had just returned from his big meeting with Meade Esposito, then the Democratic chief of Brooklyn. “It was dynamite,” he said, buoyantly slamming the door behind him. “I can’t believe how well it went.”
Across the room, the old political operative Paul Corbin sat bare-chested at the telephone. He was staying at the St. Regis, working the phones. Corbin had taught the young Robert Kennedy to be wary of New York politicians, and he was still wary.
“What did he say, Sam?”
“It was just unbelievable. Esposito was friendly right from the start. He said he’d heard good things about me. His people say it’s good having me in the district. Paul, he was so darn . . . supportive!”
The first question mark was beginning to form on the candidate’s account. “Sam, what did he say, goddammit? What did he say about an endorsement?”
The neophyte’s enthusiasm was faltering. “It wasn’t what he said, exactly, but how he said it. You just had to be there. I can’t tell you how positive it was.”
“What’d he say, Sam?”
“He didn’t say anything.”
“That’s right, Sam. He didn’t say anything.”
In 1974, when I was making my long-shot race for Congress in Pennsylvania, I asked the congressman from the adjoining district whether he would endorse me. He looked me sincerely in the face and said, “Not publicly.”
Now, what he said did not hurt my feelings. On the contrary, I felt that it was just another way of saying, “Well, sure, privately.” But “Not publicly” is hardly the sort of ringing endorsement that would move large numbers of voters to my camp. In terms of political currency, it was not something you took to the bank. Still, at the time, the Congressman’s noncommittal statement meant a great deal to me. It suggested that he was rooting for me. Those words didn’t cost him anything. If I won, he could say he had been plugging for me—I believe he was. If I lost, he could offer solace—“not publicly,” of course.
The more you practice, the better you get. Ask a pro for a favor and he’ll return the question: “Why didn’t you ask me sooner?” The implication is benign. The retort implies not only a certain congeniality but also a mild slap of rebuke. You were the one who blew it, not he. One of the biggest mistakes you can make when dealing with a pol is attaching significance to words he does not actually say, to commitments he does not actually make.
Senator Warren Magnuson, the man who spent all those poker evenings at the Roosevelt White House, had a delightful method for fielding difficult questions from constituents back home. As he wandered through a crowd, people would be calling out to him, “What about the tax bill?” “What about that consumer protection agency?” “How do you stand on gun control?” To each and all he had the same masterly response, “Don’t worry about me. I’m all right on that one.”
9
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Always Concede on Principle
If fascism comes to America, it’ll be called antifascism.
—Huey Long
Swaziland is a small independent kingdom in southern Africa. As a Peace Corps volunteer in that country, I sat in a government office late one morning waiting for our monthly meeting with the minister of commerce, Simon Xhumalo. Around the table sat a tense group—government officials, United Nations advisers and a handful of American volunteers, all involved in the country’s program to encourage small business.
Morale was low: the ministry seemed disappointed with the progress being made, and some of us were frustrated by the enormous job, made more difficult by cultural differences and lack of realistic communication from the top. Something was ready to blow.
Finally, the Minister took his place at the head of the conference table, his eyes sharply scanning the assembled English, Americans and Swazis. As usual, his pudgy neck was constricted by a bright white shirt, its collar a full size too tight.
Then he spoke, in words which proved that the politician’s craft knows no cultural boundaries. “All the people in this room have one thing in common,” he said, the whites of his eyes flashing from one testy face to the next—just enough pause to mature the moment.
“We are all dissatisfied.”
He then embarked on a long agenda of frustrations, sprinkled lightly, then more heavily, with the thwarted ambitions his people had for their country.
It was brilliant politics. Rather than deny the anger that filled the room, he had saluted it. Rather than deflect criticism, he joined in the protest. In a situation that seemed to demand he play defense, he rushed blithely to the attack. Yes, we are dissatisfied. Yes, we are frustrated, because, yes, all of us are united in our ambitions for this country of his.
That grandly eloquent final point was the kicker. For if we were not frustrated by our inability to get something done for the Swazi people, then we must be moved by concerns about our own interests and convenience—something none of us would or could be willing to acknowledge.
Simon Xhumalo, minister of commerce, industry and mines of the kingdom of Swaziland, was teaching a vital political lesson to those who had come to show him some tricks of economic development. In a surprising number of circumstances, the best way to achieve the goal is to concede the argument. Okay, he was saying, you are all upset with the way things are going around here. Guess what? I agree with you.
Like the drab architecture of their government buildings, the concession on principle was a hand-me-down of late British imperial policy. The maneuver was executed as follows: Faced with unruly Asian or African colonials dead set on independence, the defenders of the Empire would delay until the pressure for freedom was irreversible. Then, a few minutes before midnight, Whitehall would offer the colony its independence in exchange for a few concessions. The nationalists would get to have their own flag; the British would retain control of the port and the power plant.
“Yield to a man’s tastes,” Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote in 1835, “and he will yield to your interests.” There has been no slicker practitioner of this old Tory bargaining tactic than Ronald Reagan. There is no better teacher of how to get exactly what you want by telling the other guy exactly what he wants to hear.
His most virtuoso turn of this trick was displayed in selling Congress on the MX missile in the spring of ’83. Like a weather-beaten old skipper, Reagan used the gale force of his opponents’ arguments to tack across the wind, selling the MX by making the case against it.
To appreciate the scope of this achievement, imagine for a moment all the bombs dropped by both sides on Europe in World War II. Think of all the newsreel footage beginning with the Blitz: the assault on Normandy and the race through France, the brutal terror of the Eastern front, the carpet-bombing of Germany, the destruction of Cologne and Dresden. Now combine all these mental pictures into one giant explosion, the combined destructive power of all the bombs dropped by the U.S. Army Air Forces, the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe in one convulsion.
That was the force of one MX missile.
Yet the weapon was fatally flawed. At 200,000 pounds, it was impossible to hide. By the time it was deployed, Soviet satellites would have already have each one in their cross hairs.
This dangerous vulnerability gave the MX its use-it-or-lose-it aspect. If fired first, its ten warheads would strike ten targets. Undischarged, it would become a choice target: a ten-strike in the game of nuclear terror. One Soviet silo-buster could zap ten American warheads in a single strike.
What results from the deployment of such a weapon is a Dr. Strangelove mind-set: to be useful, missiles like the MX had to be launched and on their way within minutes of first warning or
else be smothered in their underground cribs. As they used to say in the old West, this makes for an itchy trigger finger.
The early and decisive critics of the MX were not moralists of the far left, but moderates who believed that the country should be building its strategic capability on a sounder basis. Instead of gigantic, immobile systems like the MX, they argued, the United States should deploy smaller, lighter missiles that could be placed on mobile launchers, thereby evading detection. Rather than inviting a first strike, these “Midgetmen” missiles would make it impractical by miniaturizing, multiplying and moving the targets. A nation armed with a large number of these weapons dispersed secretly throughout its territory could deter attack by threatening retaliation with much of its nuclear firepower still intact.
In the face of these arguments, President Reagan launched a major campaign for the MX. Congressmen and senators were brought to the White House for hi-tech briefings. The President made a prime-time TV address to pitch the product, using state-of-the-art video graphics. He told the people sitting in their living rooms that they should not worry about the MX’s appalling vulnerability. His experts had solved that problem. To avoid being cornered into “using or losing,” he would place all one hundred MX missiles so close together that an attack on one would create such an explosion that it would destroy any other Soviet missile entering the area. He called it “dense pack.”
The speech was a clinker. People began referring to “dunce pack.” All the Soviets would have to do, some critics said, was equip their missiles with a timer: the warheads would converge over the MXs and detonate simultaneously. In an effort to make the MX less of a sitting duck, he was simply offering the enemy a flock of sitting ducks in one nest.
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 100
