The Briefing

by Sean Spicer

  “Why don’t you go see him?” she said.

  Her father was Ted Kratovil, one of the biggest lobbyists of the day. At that time, he was the head of government relations for U.S. Tobacco. When I got to D.C., I took Lindley up on her offer and scheduled a day to have lunch with her father. I met him at Mr. K’s, a posh Chinese restaurant that used to be a high-end lunch spot frequented by lobbyists in Washington. It was conveniently located for the lunching crowd, right on K Street, famously home to many of the top lobbying firms in the nation’s capital. I walked in and asked the hostess for Mr. Kratovil’s table. She led me through a sea of tables covered with white linens and surrounded by men (and a few women) in dark power suits. Somehow, I felt underdressed in my navy blazer and khaki pants.

  He was already seated—I presumed at his “usual” spot. He graciously welcomed me, and I took a seat. After we made some small talk, we started discussing my career aspirations. I told Mr. Kratovil about all the work I had done trying to get a job in D.C. I had made countless phone calls (from landlines). I had mailed dozens and dozens of resumes and cover letters. (Remember, this was in the days before email.) And I had been busy networking.

  “But what do you want to do?”

  “I’ll do anything,” I said.

  “There are no jobs for anything. You need to figure out what you want to do, and then I can I help you.”

  Ted was a well-connected Washington player, not a guidance counselor. His time was valuable. I needed to figure out quickly what I wanted to do. And by quickly, I meant then and there.

  “I want to get into Republican politics,” I blurted out.

  He nodded affirmatively, and a polite smile crossed his face as if to say, “I approve of your decision.”

  After we left Mr. K’s, he tasked one his deputies, Chris Swonger, to help me. Chris was up for the challenge. He made calls around Washington on my behalf.

  While I waited for some political position to find me, I picked up some work at a temp agency called Career Blazers. I was sent to answer phones at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (better known as just “OECD”) bookstore in downtown D.C. I was making minimum wage, and I was thrilled to be earning a paycheck. I made just enough money to cover my share of the rent in a group house where I lived with other political hopefuls.

  And then my dream job landed in my lap! Thanks to Chris Swonger’s efforts, I got my first job offer in the D.C. political world. It was a position with the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), which had informed me it had no openings just weeks earlier. At the time, the NRSC was chaired by Senator Alfonse D’Amato from New York. Every day, I looked forward to walking into the NRSC building on Capitol Hill and proceeding to my desk, which actually was a shared workspace located in the windowless basement.

  The NRSC exists to provide resources to senatorial candidates and win seats in the Senate. My specific job was to type quotes from Democratic senators who were up for re-election into a database; I later learned that is called opposition research. I showed up each day at 4:00 p.m. and worked until midnight, which meant there was still time to grab a beer with other young, aspiring political operatives after work. I made some of the best friends of my life in that job—people like Joe Grogan, who is still one of my closest and most loyal friends.

  Not long after my start date, Joe and I joined some other guys from the NRSC and moved into a house on Capitol Hill. As Christmas time approached, the higher-ups at the committee decided that every staffer would be asked to pay ten dollars for the holiday party to help defray costs. For those of us who were making four dollars an hour, we looked at the ten-dollar “cover charge” as two-and-half beers we wouldn’t be able to afford at a local bar.

  Joe is one of the most gifted writers I’ve ever met, and he also has never been known for being short on opinion. He took to the internal “cc mail” system (remember, this was before email existed) to express his frustration over the ten-dollar fee. In some of the funniest language I’ve ever read, he described the audacity of having to pay ten dollars to attend an office holiday party that he considered to be “forced fun.” It’s no surprise that his rant made its way to Executive Director John Heubusch (who is now the executive director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute). He called Joe into his office to discuss the appropriateness of his note. After Joe had been read the Riot Act, Phil Smith, the finance director, was waiting right outside the door—also wanting to talk to Joe about what he had written. This time, however, the conversation was quite different.

  “I want to talk to you about your writing,” Phil said.

  “Yes,” Joe responded, anticipating a second reprimand.

  “Do you always write like this? Because if you do, I want to put your talents to use. I want you to write for us. I want to promote you.”

  Joe was stunned—not knowing if this was some kind of revenge for his office-wide note, or if he really was getting a promotion.

  “This is some of the best writing I’ve ever read, and we need someone like you to write compelling fundraising letters for the finance team,” Phil added.

  Needless to say, Joe took the promotion and started writing some of the most effective letters the NRSC has ever sent to donors. His first piece yielded the highest response rate the NRSC had seen until that point.

  A lot of top operatives have walked through the NRSC over the years, and it was a huge accomplishment to call it the home of my first political job in D.C. It was also home to my first political lesson: relationships matter. It really is who you know that makes all the difference in Washington. I never would have gotten that job without the help of Ted Kratovil and Chris Swonger.

  When I wasn’t at the NRSC, I interned at the House Committee on Ways and Means. During the day, I made photocopies, answered phones, and acted as a gofer—running errands of all kinds.

  It really didn’t matter if I was making copies or entering quotes into a database, I was thrilled to be dipping my toe into politics. I was swept up in the excitement of the political moment—and what a moment it was. I arrived in Washington in 1994, just after Newt Gingrich’s landmark Contract with America made history and Republicans had won both the House and the Senate. There was an air of hope and optimism unlike anything I would experience again until Donald Trump’s win in 2016.

  I had been working those two jobs for about eight months when I got a call from David Griswold, Senator Chafee’s chief of staff. He wanted me to know a full-time position had opened up and it might be of interest to me. It was a staff assistant position for the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which Senator Chafee chaired. The position paid $18,500 a year, and it came with benefits, including health care—which made my mother very happy. I took the job, excited that I was going to be earning a real salary—with benefits—for doing something that I wanted to do.

  In our committee office, there was a pool of staff assistants, and we each got promoted based on seniority. Johnna Rozen was the young woman who was the “senior” staff assistant. She had been tapped to move up, entitling her to a better desk and a small pay raise. Johnna had been waiting patiently for a couple of weeks for her promotion and wasn’t sure when it would happen. So, one day, when the administrative supervisor stepped away from her desk, I walked over to it, sat in her chair, and started typing an email. The note was addressed to Johnna, and it thanked her for her patience but informed her that she would have to wait a few more weeks to receive her pay raise and new desk. I finished the email and hit send. Off it went to Johnna, and off I went to her desk to chuckle with her. But when I got to her desk, Johnna was gone. I asked staffers sitting near her where she was. I was informed, “She’s gone to lunch. We don’t know when she will return.”

  This was in the days before BlackBerrys and iPhones, so she wouldn’t see the email until she returned to her desk. I needed to be there to make sure she knew it was a joke. I was trying to linger so that I could catch her, but m
y supervisor told me, “You need to take your lunch now.”

  While I was taking my mandatory lunch hour, Johnna returned to her desk, read the email, and fired off a flurry of messages to senior staff in several Senate offices.

  When I got back from lunch, Johnna informed me of the email that she had received. Exasperated, she said to me, “Can you believe I have to wait even longer?!” Clearly, she had no idea that I was the one behind the email. I thought it was probably a good time to inform her that the email was from me. As I told her about my prank, she informed me that she had fired off an angry email to several staff members of Senate offices whose members and staff were part of the committee. My joke had clearly backfired.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon walking through Senate buildings, going office to office, apologizing to senior staff. I received several stern lectures about the proper use of government emails. And unlike my friend Joe Grogan, I wasn’t offered a promotion for my writing capabilities.

  A Hill career can mean climbing the ladder from staff assistant to legislative correspondent to legislative assistant to legislative director. I, however, let it be known that I wanted to become a press secretary.

  I had been interviewing for months for press jobs in congressional offices. One interview after another, I was told, “You’re a nice guy, but you don’t have any communications experience.” It’s hard to get experience when you don’t have experience.

  Then, one day in 1995, I got the break I wanted.

  “I hear you want to get into press, so I’ve got a deal for you,” a Republican pollster told me over the phone. “There’s a guy who’s going to run for Congress in western Pennsylvania. It’s a primary, and there’s a good chance he’ll lose the primary. Even if he wins this round, it’s pretty certain he will lose the general. But you’ll get a lot of good experience. You interested?”

  Without any hesitation, I replied, “Absolutely!”

  I packed everything I owned into the back of my two-toned Chevy Astro van (yes it had been my mom’s) and moved to Washington County, Pennsylvania—in the western part of the state near Pittsburgh.

  Two days after I arrived in Pennsylvania, I was driving down a four-lane highway when another vehicle crossed the median and plowed right into me. To this day, I don’t know how I walked away from that accident without a scratch. But my two-toned van (and its burgundy captain’s chairs) was totaled, leaving me with no car. I learned just how accommodating USAA insurance can be, and they helped me rent a car for the remainder of my time in Pennsylvania.

  I worked tirelessly on that primary campaign. We had to build a campaign from the ground up—quickly. I walked from door to door, asking for signatures to get the candidate on the ballot, and I created a database of potential supporters. I gave it my all.

  Ten weeks later, the candidate dropped out of the race.

  I didn’t get to see that campaign to election day. But I had been promised “experience,” and I now had “experience” under my belt. I updated my resume; it now read, “campaign manager and press secretary.”

  That was just what I needed to open more doors.

  A few weeks later, I got another call. Congressman Frank LoBiondo was looking for a campaign manager and press secretary “with experience.” Frank represented southern New Jersey and was facing his first re-election race. I packed up everything—not in my Chevy Astro van, but instead in my new-to-me, 1991, dark-grey Honda Accord—and moved to New Jersey. He was an established candidate, so I was able to focus on running public events, speeches, debate preparations, opposition research, and returning press calls. On election day, Frank won with nearly 60 percent of the vote, a solid showing for a freshman re-election campaign.

  It was then that I learned another important lesson: you can be on a winning political team one day and unemployed the day after the election.

  But now I had two jobs with “experience”—even if they only amounted to several months combined. I also had been building relationships along the way.

  One of the people I met during my weeks campaigning in New Jersey was another congressional candidate named Mike Pappas. He was running for the first time—and he won. After election day, he had to start building a staff to take to Washington with him. He reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in joining him as his communications director.

  This was my first, full-time, political press job. It was filled with opportunities—and I seized every single one. When it was time for him to think about his first re-election, I offered to move back to New Jersey to handle the press for the campaign.

  In the fall of 1994, I once again packed up my Honda Accord and drove north on I-95. I found a place to live—an RV parked in a constituent’s yard. I tried to ignore the fact that it had no heat or running water because it was going to be my home for eight weeks. I also found a local gym where I could work out. An added selling point: the locker room had running water, so I could even get a shower there. And in the crisp fall nights, I just tossed an extra blanket on my bed. I never slowed down enough to worry about my less-than-ideal living conditions. I was working day in, day out, trying to pull out a victory for Mike.

  We lost.

  Campaign managers are like head coaches. You win some, you lose some. If you’re good, you win more than you lose. After the election, I had an even record. And once again, I was out of a job.

  I moved back to Washington where I started another job search. After a few desperate months, I was asked to be the communications director for Representative Mark Foley of Florida.

  At the time, Mark was one of the most well-liked members in the House. He was smart and ambitious, and working for him was a great opportunity for a young press secretary. He was hungry for good press, understood how to get it, and knew how to manage the news cycle. And on top of all that, he was good to staff and fun to be around.

  It was a heady time to be in Washington; the media environment was morphing. The news days of MacNeil/Lehrer on PBS, Peter Jennings on ABC, Tom Brokaw on NBC, and Dan Rather on CBS were giving way to cable networks that thrived on the lurid and sensational. Respectful debates gave way to contentious arguments as cable news networks began to adopt partisan leanings (though they were not yet as partisan as newspapers in the time of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson). Then there was this new thing, the Internet. When I started running campaigns, we had to ask a supporter to set his or her VCR to record the news so that we could watch news coverage of the race or the latest campaign commercials. If the supporter remembered to record, we would drive to his or her house, pop the VHS tape into the VCR, and hit play (if the supporter had kindly already rewound the tape before we arrived).

  But there was still room for good, old-fashioned retail politics.

  After working for Mark Foley for nearly two years, I was hired by Dan Burton of Indiana to be the communications director for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which had been at the forefront of investigating the Clinton administration. After only a few months in that role, I got another call. This time it was from the National Republican Congressional Committee (known across D.C. as the NRCC). It’s the House counterpart to the NRSC where I had worked several years earlier.

  The caller was asking me to help Representative Clay Shaw’s re-election campaign. Clay was a long-serving member of Congress who was in the fight of his political life. The NRCC wanted me to head to Florida to help him hold onto his ninety-three-mile-long district—stretching from Fort Lauderdale to Miami-Dade County. Clay was a great gentleman and a good congressman, but he was in deep trouble.

  He suffered from a problem common among many members of congress who have served for years—political atrophy. Clay hadn’t exercised his political muscles in so long that he had almost forgotten what to do. I discussed this with him as we were driving down I-95 towards Miami, Florida, several weeks before the 2000 election.

  “See that federal building there?” Clay said. “I got the funding to build tha
t.”

  “Great, but most people who know that are dead now,” I retorted.

  I was serious about that. Clay’s South Florida district had a significant number of elderly voters, but for the younger ones, federal construction projects were not exactly a priority at the time. The night before election day, I glanced at Clay’s schedule and saw that he was planning to go shopping for a new car. When I saw that, I did two things. I called our campaign scheduler, Suzann Guimond, and asked her for a list of every diner—along with addresses—in the Fort Lauderdale area. Then his campaign manager, Eric Eikenberg, and I told Clay that he could buy a new car any day after election day. “Tomorrow, we will be visiting diners across your district and meeting your voters,” I informed him.

  “Sean, I won my first election before you were born. This isn’t how I campaign.”

  “Try it my way,” I said. “We’ll do it once, and if you don’t like it, we’ll stop.”

  “I don’t want to bother people while they’re eating.”

  “Just once, okay?”

  “Fine,” he agreed.

  I had won the battle and didn’t feel it was appropriate to also note that, actually, I had been one year old when he had won his first election.

  The next morning, we went to the first diner. Clay walked up to a couple eating breakfast and introduced himself. Their faces lit up, and they had a great conversation. Clay went from table to table and got the same reaction.

  “When’s the next one?” he asked.

  That afternoon I got a call from Richard Hunt, a top operative at the NRCC in Washington. The team there thought we were going to lose.

  “Thanks man, you did your best. We appreciate everything you did,” he said. “We know you worked really hard, and it’s really appreciated.”

  “It’s not over,” I said. “We’re going to pull this out.”

  “Whatever. Next beer is on me when you get back to Washington.”