The Kennedy family would soon put the rule to another use. When Edward Moore Kennedy, the President’s youngest brother, ran for the Senate in 1962, he was attacked by his opponent in a televised debate as a man who “never worked a day in his life,” a shot that went to the heart of his candidacy. “If your name were Edward Moore, you would not even be a candidate,” his opponent said just as the debate went off the air. Kennedy had had a silver spoon forced down his throat.
The next morning, fate—or strategy—intervened. Kennedy would spend the rest of the campaign telling the story of the hardworking fellow who approached him as he was making the rounds of factory gates and asked, “Hey, Kennedy, are you the one they said last night never worked a day in his life?”
On being assured that he was correct, the veteran dockworker had something to say to the bright-faced young candidate: “Well, let me tell you something, young man, you haven’t missed a thing.”
This story was identical to one that Kennedy people circulated when JFK was running in the West Virginia primary two years earlier and that always drew a chuckle and knowing looks of agreement from working-class audiences. The little tale drew attention away from the candidate’s qualifications—which were thin at the time—to the far less vulnerable matter of wealth. Why should anyone be blamed for being rich? Wouldn’t everyone like to be? By facing up to the question, Kennedy had claimed the right to frame it his way. He had pulled the silver spoon from his mouth and held it up for appreciation.
The same ploy was pulled a generation later by another name-brand American.
John D. “Jay” Rockefeller, heir to a far greater fortune than the Kennedys’, faced a more advanced case of the poor-little-rich-kid problem. Not only was he loaded, he had also demonstrated a proclivity for hitting the family treasury for every dime it took to get elected. His quadrennial splurges in nearby West Virginia had become a scandal among Washington reporters.
In 1985, Rockefeller arrived in Washington fresh from a closely contested Senate race. Every journalist in the capital press corps knew exactly how he had won. His television commercials had been running steadily the previous autumn on Washington television stations, simply to pick up the small panhandle of West Virginia that was in the D.C. media area. To win the small town of Harper’s Ferry, he was willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in an expensive media market. Washingtonians could only imagine what he had spent to capture the larger television audiences in his adopted state. Here was a man who had already been elected secretary of state and governor twice and still needed millions to win a Senate seat by a squeaker.
So when the elegant young Senator arrived before the annual black-tie dinner of the Washington Press Foundation, he was not exactly the hometown favorite. The average print reporter in the ballroom was lucky to be making $40,000 a year—and hoping to end his career making $60,000. Yet on that evening Jay Rockefeller, squire of Charleston and Georgetown, managed to squash much of the antipathy. In fact, he left them liking him.
Rising to make his remarks, he dropped an icebreaker that will probably be remembered for as long as he stays in Washington: “To those of you who had to fork over seventy-five bucks for your tickets, don’t feel so bad. It cost me twelve million to get here tonight.”
Rockefeller proved the old rule. The press corps simply wanted the swell standing up before them to admit that he hadn’t gotten the job through hard work or any gift of intellect. He didn’t claim to be any better than they were. That said, he was accepted into the club. Such performances have a way of defining careers in Washington.
Another West Virginian showed a tougher use of the tactic in 1958. As a U.S. congressman who had always supported the United Mine Workers, Robert C. Byrd felt he had a right to the union’s endorsement when he decided to run for the Senate. To his alarm, he received word that a representative of the mighty UMW president, John L. Lewis, wanted to see him. It was clear to him that the news would be bad, and it was. Meeting the deputy at a hotel, he got it hard across the chin. Lewis and his powerful organization were going to support former Governor William Marlin for the Senate seat. They would support Byrd for reelection to the House.
Byrd listened and the next day held a press conference to make his announcements. First, that he would be a candidate for the United States Senate. Second, that William Marlin would also be a candidate. Third, that John L. Lewis was going to endorse Marlin.
The effect was memorable. Had he remained silent on Lewis’s impending endorsement, he would have been trumped by it. His own announcement would have been vastly overshadowed by Marlin’s declaration. By making the announcement for Marlin and Lewis, he stole his opponents’ thunder. Marlin decided to skip that particular race. John L. Lewis ended up endorsing Byrd.
The “Hang a lantern on your problem” rule doesn’t work only in the world of elective politics. When applying for any high-powered job, you might want to consider the extraordinary successes of another somewhat less prominent Washingtonian.
In the 1970s, Douglas Bennet served as top aide to Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri and later to Connecticut Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff. Bennet had the ability to showcase his liabilities so magnificently that they backlit his assets, which he rightly believed to be far more germane.
When the Senate Budget Committee was created in 1974, Bennet applied for the position of staff director. In his letter of application to the chairman, Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, he brazenly admitted that he lacked a degree in economics and possessed no experience whatever in budgeting. He went on to explain that the central challenge facing the new committee, and particularly its chairman, was to convince other senators to accept the committee’s somewhat unpopular mandate to eliminate unnecessary spending. The committee could no doubt hire plenty of economists and number-crunchers from the Office of Management and Budget. What the Muskie panel needed most, however, was a chief of staff with a clear idea of how to enlist and cultivate a constituency within the Senate. The committee needed a man who knew senators and their concerns firsthand, someone who had been a top personal aide, for example.
Bennet got the job and performed masterfully.
Several years later, after a period of uncertain fiscal management, National Public Radio announced it had hired a new president. The Washington Post ran an interview with the man selected. Douglas Bennet explained the probable reasons for his appointment.
He admitted that he had no background in either broadcasting or journalism. He said he knew that NPR already had plenty of people with broadcast experience and a number of top-flight journalists. The president of National Public Radio needed to be someone experienced in budget matters and someone who could work with Congress in obtaining adequate funding.
The applications of “Hang a lantern on your problem” are abundant. Someone with an obvious physical handicap can put you at ease with a matter-of-fact or even lighthearted reference to it. The mere mention of the problem deflates its relevance, removing it as an unspoken barrier.
In 1986, Barbara A. Mikulski became the first Democratic woman elected to the Senate in her own right, not as someone’s widow or daughter. The feisty former city councilwoman from Baltimore won despite questions her opponent raised about her senatorial “stature.” The reference was not only to her political pedigree but to her size. Mikulski is four feet, eleven inches tall.
Her standard prop at campaign stump appearances was a small ripple-sided aluminum suitcase. She used it as a platform. When someone introduced her to an audience by offering little more than her name, she was quick as a pistol: “That introduction was as short as I am.”
Anyone who has ever worked in public relations will certify that it is better to take the initiative in acknowledging problems, whether they involve your client or a product. The makers of Tylenol discovered the wisdom of this argument after being victimized by bottle-tampering. They gained public sympathy and respect by dealing with the problem openly; stock values were hardly affected. Man
agement gained tremendous goodwill for their product by being open with the consumer even when it hurt. When in doubt, put it out.
“It goes against human nature,” Jimmy Carter’s press secretary Jody Powell wrote after his White House years, “to stand up of your own free will and volunteer information that is bound to cause nothing but trouble.” But as Powell learned in the Iranian hostage-taking and other crises, it is also the only proven means of minimizing the situation. “No matter how smelly it seems to be at first, it always gets worse as it ages.”
This is one rule that Ronald Reagan failed to learn from his predecessors. When his own Iranian arms scandal broke in late 1986, with the disclosure that his agents had been selling arms to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Reagan attempted a cover-up; then he blamed it on his national security staff; then on his chief of staff, Donald T. Regan. Finally, four months later and twenty points lower in the polls, he admitted to a mistake.
This is one case where he should have learned from history. John F. Kennedy never stood higher in the nation’s opinion polls than in the days and weeks after he took sole responsibility for the Bay of Pigs. Where Reagan’s refusal to step forward caused months of bad press and congressional investigations, Kennedy’s decision to cut his losses made him more popular than ever. “By taking full blame upon himself,” wrote his aide Ted Sorensen, “he was winning the admiration of both career servants and the public, avoiding partisan investigations and attacks, and discouraging further attempts by those involved to leak their versions and accusations.”
By waffling on who was responsible for selling arms to Iran, Ronald Reagan created his own Chinese water torture. Drip by drip, the story leaked out. Point by point, the President’s credibility dropped. To get a reading on his slow, humiliating retreat to honesty, compare the following public statements, both of which Reagan made on prime-time national television.
November 13, 1986: “The charge has been made that the United States has shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, that the United States undercut its allies and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with terrorists. Those charges are totally false.”
March 4, 1987: “A few months ago I told the American people that I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. Now, what should happen when you make a mistake is this: you take your knocks, you learn your lessons, and then you move on.”
Five months late, the President got it right. Interestingly, his second speech was written by Landon Parvin. Six years earlier this same speechwriter had helped Nancy Reagan solve a serious PR problem.
During her first year in the White House, Mrs. Reagan had been portrayed by the press as a Marie Antoinette figure, someone more concerned with designer clothes than with the condition of her country.
Mrs. Reagan cracked through that image in one glorious night when she appeared before a white-tie dinner of Washington’s most powerful journalists and sang, with self-parodying lyrics provided by Landon Parvin, her own showstopping version of “Secondhand Rose.” The woman who had been lambasted for complaining about the state of White House china, the lady with the taste for designer clothing, proved that she was not the aloof Queen of Beverly Hills she’d been depicted.
For the rest of the Reagan presidency, her popularity continued to rise even as her husband’s peaked.
Like the late Robert F. Kennedy who used to disarm campaign audiences by referring to himself as “ruthless,” Nancy Reagan had learned to hang a lantern on her problem.
A few years later, a Democratic presidential hopeful did just what Nancy did. The keynote speaker at the 1988 national convention had arrived in Atlanta on a red carpet of publicity. When he strolled to the podium, the band was playing the uplifting theme from Chariots of Fire. For Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas it was downhill from there. From the first few minutes he knew no one was listening. It took him thirty-two dreadful minutes to garner his first applause—with the magic words: “In conclusion . . .”
The next night Johnny Carson used those two incredibly evocative words to open his monologue. He went on to note that the Surgeon General had approved the Clinton speech in Atlanta as an “over-the-counter sleeping aid.”
The next week Clinton hung a lantern on his problem. Pals Harry Thomason and wife Linda Bloodworth Thomason wangled him a guest shot on The Tonight Show. He played the saxophone, told some jokes on himself, and proved himself a pro. As biographer David Maraniss would note, and Clinton himself would come to appreciate, more people caught his act on Carson than heard the speech.
11
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Spin!
You’re going to have lunch with the President. The menu is humble pie. You’re going to eat every last motherfucking spoonful of it. You’re going to be the most contrite sonof-abitch this world has ever seen.
—James A. Baker III
The morning after the 1992 New Hampshire presidential primary, I sat with my Good Morning America debating partner Bill Bennett in the ABC green room. Suddenly, a flash of blue suits appeared before us, a jaunty Bill Clinton in the lead. Having grabbed a doughnut, he began talking with confident animation to Bennett, apparently an old pal. Some time later, a meek man appeared from the same entrance. Approaching, he asked my advice on whether it would be okay for him to take a doughnut from the tray that had just served Bill Clinton. A college kid’s book bag slung over his shoulder, he did not look like the man who had just won the New Hampshire presidential primary.
Nor did Bill Clinton carry himself like a fellow who had just lost that primary. Why should he? By acting as if he’d won, Clinton got everyone else to act the same way, brutally forgetting that Paul Tsongas, the guy with the book bag, had beaten him by a full eight percentage points. By anointing himself the “Comeback Kid,” he’d converted his second-place showing into a daunting triumph. By hanging a lantern on his problem—evidence of draft avoidance and a public claim by songstress Gennifer Flowers, of a long-term affair had threatened to keep him out of the money in New Hampshire—he confected himself into a winner.
Talk to any Wall Street analyst and you will hear plenty of stories about how much time, effort and creativity companies spend managing expectations and the reaction to their performance. When their stock moves up, it’s good news; when it drops, it’s “profit-taking”—good news again!
Politicians call that spin.
In 1984, Walter Mondale was the early front-runner for the Democratic nomination. His people had pursued a cautious campaign, keyed to winning powerful endorsements and making his nomination seem inevitable. Even in the Iowa caucuses, the first real test of strength, Mondale led with 49 percent to 16 percent for Colorado Senator Gary Hart.
But the strategy fell apart in New Hampshire, where Hart, the young, outdoorsy, “new breed” candidate, won a smashing upset. A week later, Hart upset Mondale again, in the Maine caucuses.
It was now two days before Super Tuesday, the big Democratic primary day of 1984, the day Mondale’s plan had called for having the nomination wrapped up. But Hart was now eating him for breakfast, on his way to overwhelming wins in Massachusetts and Florida. Even Dade County was about to vote against Hubert Humphrey’s Minnesota protégé. Mondale would be lucky if he could survive the big March primary day with a win in Alabama and Georgia.
Robert Beckel, Mondale’s campaign manager, knew that defeat in Georgia would be disastrous. There could be no explaining away Jimmy Carter’s Vice President losing Jimmy Carter’s home state.
Beckel applied spin, a sophisticated, media-wise extension of “Hang a lantern on your problem.” First, you admit you have a crisis. Second, while the public is buying your act, you quickly exploit the situation to turn the heat on your opponent.
Here’s the spin that Beckel put on Super Tuesday: If a defeat in Georgia spelled defeat nationally, victory in Georgia could be read as v
ictory nationally. If Mondale took Georgia, then he was on his way to the White House.
For the thirty-six hours before the primary, Beckel talked to every reporter who would listen. The message: Mondale needed to win in Georgia to keep his campaign alive. If he lost, he was dead; but if he won, he would survive and Hart would have failed.
Beckel had a second plan for primary night. Maybe Mondale was fizzling on the road. Maybe he lacked support in the states that were holding that day’s primaries. The networks would still want pictures on primary night. NBC in particular had planned a special hour-long program for 10 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on the early results of Super Tuesday.
Beckel wanted to be sure that the pictures looked damned good for Mondale. His candidate might not pull out the voters in the big primary states, but Beckel could still create a crowd for the cameras in the nation’s capital. He put out a call to every known Mondale supporter in greater Washington to make sure they were at the Capitol Hilton on primary night. “You’ve been with Fritz,” he told them. “This is one night he needs you. Be there. The whole campaign depends on it.”
A respectable “Mondale crowd” gathered. Every paid campaign worker, every Washington lawyer looking for an appointment, every Democratic regular anyone could dig up assembled before the network cameras in the ballroom.
The Mondale rearguard then followed with a tactic that Jerry Bruno had made famous advancing Jack Kennedy in 1960. Partitions were used to make the room as small as possible. “We just packed the joint,” Beckel said later. “We threw up a partition that made the room a third the size of the ballroom. You couldn’t move in the fuckin’ place.”
The video stage was set for what may have been the greatest election-night postmortem con job in history. Mondale lost seven contests out of nine. But that was just the arithmetic. At a few minutes past ten, campaign director Robert Beckel walked into what looked like a crowded ballroom to tell the faithful that Mondale had just carried Georgia. To the NBC viewing audience, the event played like a victory statement.
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 102
