C Street

by Jeff Sharlet

  That’s not all it does. Christian college girls provide maid service, turning down the sheets for the congressmen, and young men from Ivanwald are dispatched on occasion for “discipling” by the politicians. There’s a chef and a house mother and, in one of the several common areas, a giant-screen TV around which the politicians and their friends—besides Sheldon, Colonel Oliver North is a regular—gather to watch sports and talk policy. The TV replaced a grand piano left behind by former residents, but signs of the building’s earlier identity—it was a convent—remain. There is a little-used chapel, and in the formal dining room there is a stained-glass window, two large frames of snowy white bordered in blue, with a medallion of Jesus and a lamb in the middle. But it’s not about piety, declared the congressmen, when pressed to explain their residence in a “church” after the scandals broke; it’s about relationships—the polite word for politics.

  That much seems true: money flows freely from one man’s political action committee to another, often across party lines. Stupak, for instance, contributed $2,500 to the gubernatorial campaign of ultra-right Zach Wamp. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO), one of the few women to spend time at the house in a capacity other than cleaning or cooking, forged such a happy bond with another visitor, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), that Cleaver refused to support her Democratic challenger. And when two C Streeters—Rep. Jerry Moran (R-KS), a resident, and Rep. Tiahrt, a visitor—squared off in a Republican primary to succeed yet another C Streeter, Sam Brownback, as Kansas’s next senator, Moran racked up powerful endorsements and financial support from housemates Ensign, DeMint, Coburn, and Thune, and from former C Streeters Pickering and Rep. Tom Osborne (R-NE)—even though Tiahrt is a closer political match. “The fact that everyone that lived in the same house,” said Sen. Inhofe, commenting on the endorsements, “that can’t just be a coincidence.”

  Tiahrt felt double-crossed. A “family values” man, he’d moved his small-f family to Washington rather than spend most of his days away from them in politics and prayer at the C Street house, as Moran did. “My roommate endorsed me,” he squeaked. “I’ve been married to her for thirty-three years.”

  Tiahrt had misunderstood capital-f Family values. “I’m always third,” the wife of a Family man told Ben Daniel, a Presbyterian pastor who as a young man was a member himself until he realized that some “brothers” mattered more than others. “The Fellowship comes first in my husband’s life. Then the children. Then me.” Anne Ryun, the wife of former representative Jim Ryun of Kansas, kept her husband out of C Street for that very reason. “It appears that the Fellowship discourages congressmen to move their families to DC for the express purpose of keeping the wives out of the loop. It’s a very, very separated world.”

  The Ryuns are hardly liberal critics of C Street; they’re conservative Christians, and Anne spoke out only at the request of World, a fundamentalist magazine that has come to see C Street as home to the opposite of the family values it espouses. “It’s not really about family values,” another political wife told me of her own husband’s decision to decline an invitation to join. “It’s about who you know, your so-called brothers.” The point isn’t friendship, it’s power. “In order for God to do His mighty works,” writes Coe, “He doesn’t demand the majority, but a committed minority who are absolutely centered on Jesus Christ and the love of one another.”

  Love—the miracle by which the Family understands itself, religion, politics, and power subsumed into the blurry affection of a “worldwide family of friends.” “It’s a very wide vision,” declares the second of “The Eight Core Aspects,” the 2010 draft of the vision first dreamed by Abram amid 1930s labor wars. Wide, but so shallow it can’t be said to have depth at all. Rather, the vision is two-dimensional, a screen; a veil; a cloth thrown over religion, politics, and power.

  Or, not religion, really, since Suharto was a Muslim, Papa Doc practiced Vodun, Ensign depends on Holy Ghost power, and Sanford is an Episcopalian, a member of God’s frozen chosen, as they say.

  And not politics, really, not in the sense we speak of politics in America, electoral contests, control of Congress, Democrats versus Republicans. Consider Kansas: heads, the Family wins; tails, they win. Consider C Street, Democrats and Republicans united for the sake of—what?

  Power. But even that word is a euphemism, inasmuch as it suggests purpose. At its core, the Family lacks even that: it is conservative by default, the result of its conflation of worldly power with divine will. I asked Tim Kreutter, author of “The Eight Core Aspects,” why “the kings” of this world the Family has sought as brothers are so often not just conservative but also corrupt. “Because that’s what’s there,” he answered—an honest man, in his way, seemingly puzzled by the implication of the question: the simple idea that the fact of power is not its justification. Kreutter wasn’t interested in “power,” he was interested in “love,” the Family veil—“the main thing,” he wrote in the penultimate Core Aspect, the one that comes before serving kings. “And the main thing”—emphasis his—“[is] to keep the main thing the main thing.” Because that’s what’s there.

  2

  THE LOVERS

  THE SENATOR, the governor, and the congressman. If John Ensign’s was the most banal of the three affairs covered up at C Street during the summer of 2009, and Sanford’s the most tragic, the third, that of former congressman Chip Pickering, offers perhaps the perfect distillation of the ethos of C Street. It’s not a story so much as a synecdoche, a part that can stand for the whole. Throughout its history, the Family, the Fellowship, ICL—the many incarnations of C Street—has built power not through mass movements or unstoppable voter blocs, not by rallying around a singular demagogue, but by working the margins; lining up the back benchers; recruiting men with the kind of influence that doesn’t depend on cameras. Who remembers Sen. Frank Carlson, Eisenhower’s “ ‘No Deal’ Dealer” from Kansas, the general’s behind-the-scenes man? Or Sen. Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, not so much an oilman as oil’s man, recruited by Carlson for the sake of bipartisanship, Carlson’s kind of Democrat, “chief of the wheelers-and-dealers,” one journalist called him? Who remembers Sen. James B. Allen, a George Wallace Democrat from Alabama who used his mastery of Senate rules to thwart his own party on civil rights; or even Ed Meese, famous once as Reagan’s strong-arm attorney general, more quietly influential now as the middleman between big business and religious conservatism, the shepherd who led Supreme Court justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito to their benches?

  One of the earliest documents to be found in the Family’s archive is a note Abram wrote to himself on a church program in 1935. Imagine the preacher, sitting bored in another minister’s pews, preparing to leave the bricks and mortar of church behind. He’s a big man with a broad, severely handsome face and ice-blue eyes, wearing one of his fabulous suits, double-breasted with a polka-dot bow tie—he was always a beautifully dressed man, even other men said so. Ignoring the sermon, he scribbles on his program. He’s making a list of departments for his new movement, and next to each heading he writes the name of a man who will be responsible for it: for finances, for organization. Next to his own name, Abram writes power. Then he crosses it out. Power, Abram would teach, resides in that which is not seen—politically as well as spiritually. “Our prayer,” declared the Prayer Breakfast programs of Abram’s successor, Coe, “is ‘He shall have dominion from Sea to Sea,’ ” a statement of ambition matched only by the subtlety with which it’s pursued. “We try to be nearly invisible,” Family leader Rev. Richard Halverson demurred in 1981, the year he assumed the chaplaincy of the U.S. Senate, with no formal recognition of the Family affiliation that made him a pastor to the elite. Dominion, suggests David Coe, Doug’s son, is “an invisible Kingdom,” won not by conquest but through substitution, the replacement of democratic vistas with “His vision.” Not through revival but through relationships, man by man. Such power isn’t bold, it’s bureaucratic, a machine built of many small parts. We might call these l
ittle units “Pickerings.”

  The actual Pickering is mostly an inoffensive entity, toothy and boyish, with reddish-brown hair and watery blue eyes set a little too close together. Cute, not handsome. Up to the revelation of his C Street affair, Charles “Chip” Pickering was best known outside Mississippi as “that congressman from Borat”—and, really, that’s how he’s been known ever since. In the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 farce of a Kazakh journalist exploring America, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Baron Cohen, as the idiot-reporter Borat, makes his way to a revival meeting where Pickering takes to the pulpit to proclaim himself a loyalist of the gathering and its truths: creationism and religious nationalism, America the Christian. Such was his reputation within the Magnolia State, too. “I told Chip often, if he ever wants to stop being a politician he can be a preacher,” says Carol Mabry, a Pickering staffer who retired in 2007 after ten years in Chip’s service to take care of her grandchildren. “If I get to heaven, I’ll see him there.”

  But Pickering, sadly, is not the hero of even his own story. Central to every account of the man—“a good-looking boy,” says Bill Crawford, an old Mississippi hand who got beat by young Chip for the House in 1996—is the status, the weight, the influence of his father, Charles Pickering Sr. Originally a segregationist Dixiecrat, he switched parties in 1964. That was the year the Democratic Party began its historic (and incomplete) break with its record of race hatred, the year the long-hidebound political organization agreed to seat two African American delegates of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at its convention in Atlantic City. Pickering declared the people of Mississippi (the white people, that is) “heaped with embarrassment and humiliation.” In response he turned his considerable talents over to the GOP. He became one of its chief activists in Mississippi and a man on the national scene, chair of the committee that in 1976 rolled over the party’s moderate wing to add an anti-abortion plank to the platform for the first time.

  But his fame, even now greater than that of his only son, rests on the racial fault line. The Pickering men, senior and junior, see themselves as progressives on this matter. And indeed, Senior bravely fought the Ku Klux Klan as a young lawyer. In his most famous case as a federal judge in the 1990s, he called the actions of a man who’d helped burn a cross on an interracial couple’s front lawn “heinous, reprehensible, despicable, dastardly.” He also called it a “drunken prank” and turned down the prosecutor’s request for a seven-and-a-half-year sentence, dismissed the federal mandatory five-year sentence, and sent the dastardly fellow to prison for two and a half years, a decision that would lead Senate Democrats to filibuster his 2003 nomination to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. “Pickering has a prewar mentality,” says a legal analyst who has followed Pickering’s decisions as a judge. “Pre–Civil War.”

  Such antebellum attitudes are more complex than they might at first seem. In 1965, Pickering Sr. signed a segregationist declaration in favor of “our Southern way of life,” and he bemoaned “racial hatred”—that of civil rights activists. But by all accounts he truly loathes the Klan; hates racial violence; and is proud of his black friends. Is he a racist? That’s not a question easily answered. The old ways he clings to are those of the paternalist. The white man or the rich man or simply the powerful man who believes he knows better. The Good Father.

  And his son, Chip? If he’s something of an afterthought, he’s also an embodiment of that paternalism, filtered through modern fundamentalism, dedicated to the new southern order, which is to say the old southern order got up in reconciliation drag; a libertarian with authoritarian tendencies. “He’s a glowing example of Mississippi politicians,” says the Reverend Eugene Bryant, a Mississippi civil rights activist. “Of what they’ve always been.”

  Chip followed his father to Ole Miss and then went to Hungary in the late eighties as a Southern Baptist missionary. Quite an assignment for a boy right out of college; his father, coincidentally, had just completed a term as president of the state Baptist convention. Chip had another advantage not enjoyed by most evangelists. President George H. W. Bush appointed Charles Pickering’s son agricultural liaison to Eastern Europe, making him a representative of the U.S. government as well as a missionary. But Pickering’s passion wasn’t in the soil, it was in the air: telecommunications. Upon his return from the heathen East, Pickering worked as an aide to Mississippi senator Trent Lott, proving himself possessed of a particular talent for the intricacies of telecommunications regulation. Or, more precisely, deregulation, the gutting of laws. It was Pickering, as an aide to Lott, who negotiated into existence the 1996 Telecommunications Act—the culmination of a privatization of the public airwaves begun years before. Once, federal law forbade a single company from owning more than fourteen radio stations. The principle was that any more than that would amount to the transfer of public property—the airwaves—to monopoly power. By the 1990s, that cap had crept up to forty stations. The law Chip helped write removed all limits. Within a month of its passage in 1996, more than a thousand mergers occurred, eventually resulting in the media empire Clear Channel.

  That same year, Pickering ran for Congress with more than $1 million in the bank, most of it from out-of-state contributors. Lott’s name helped, but Pickering’s wasn’t too shabby on its own. “I don’t support Chip Pickering because of Senator Lott,” said Bernard J. Ebbers, the WorldCom CEO who’d be convicted in 2005 of the then-largest accounting fraud in U.S. history. “I support Chip Pickering because of who he is.”

  Who he really was, Pickering told the people of Mississippi’s Third Congressional District, was a missionary. He ran on his record not as a free marketeer in America but as a bearer of the cross to communist lands. That his two vocations amounted to the same thing in his mind hardly needed to be said. He promised Mississippians Christian legislation: the privatization of resources and the public regulation of morality are the twin pillars of American fundamentalism. As a congressman he introduced the Children’s Internet Protection Act, requiring schools and libraries to filter computers. When a federal court struck it down as unconstitutional, he declared the court “pornographic-friendly.” He tried again with the Protecting Children from Indecent Programming Act, joining forces with two other Family men, Rep. Joe Pitts and Rep. Mike McIntyre, to demand that the federal government cinch its indecency regulations so tight that a broadcaster could be declared a threat to children on the basis of a single naughty word.

  The bill didn’t pass, but that didn’t matter. The truth was that such initiatives were a sideshow. Pickering, by then a Washingtonian and a C Streeter, labored for a different kind of invisible kingdom. Pickering’s real work was building on the great sell-off of public airwaves and bandwidth he’d helped orchestrate in 1996. And in this effort he joined forces with Family men, most notably Steve Largent, a fellow C Streeter and another example of C Street’s paradoxical politics: authoritarian libertarianism: free-market fundamentalism under God.

  Elected from Oklahoma in 1994 after determining that God wanted him in Washington, Largent organized a C Street club that continues to this day. Its members have included Sen. Tom Coburn, Rep. Zach Wamp, Mike Doyle (D-PA), and Bart Stupak. The “M.O.” as Largent put it, “is to work behind the scenes.” But Largent couldn’t resist playing the showman. The press loved him. People magazine put the oversized blue-eyed blond with puppy-dog brows on its “Most Beautiful People” list. He was the big man of C Street, literally an NFL Hall of Fame wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks in the 1980s. And a deeply religious man: when he abandoned his teammates to cross an NFL picket line, he cited the Gospel of Matthew as justification. But he wasn’t a scold. A reporter for the New York Times, noting his “male model” good looks, gushed that the congressman was “so friendly he might be mistaken for a flirt.” Even Largent’s unusual living arrangements—C Street—came in for praise, presented to the public as his own special idea, a social club for guys try
ing to enjoy the capital without straying from their wives. “There are too many people in Congress who don’t know how to have fun,” said Largent, “and I’ve taken them on as my responsibility.”

  He also took responsibility for the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, protecting straight people from the ever-present danger of being forced into gay marriage. He overreached only when he proposed the 1996 Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act, a law so extreme that even some Christian conservatives rallied against its project of tearing down what supporters called “government schools”—public education—piece by piece through parental challenges to any item in the curriculum they found objectionable. Largent denied that tying up school districts in endless losing court battles was intended to destroy them. Rather, he wanted to purify them.

  Most of all, Largent was a telecommunications man. Along with Pickering, Stupak, and Doyle, he served on the House telecommunications subcommittee. After a failed gubernatorial bid in 2002, he took a job with Washington law firm Wiley Rein, joining a longtime Family associate and former congressman named Jim Slattery, head of the firm’s public policy branch. Largent left after less than a year to become president of an industry organization called the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, which contracted for $200,000 of Wiley Rein’s finesse. Pickering, still sitting on the subcommittee that regulated Largent’s new industry, proved an even more valuable friend: while Pickering was in Congress, Largent appealed to him directly and paid for travel by Pickering’s staff.