Slowly recovering from his anguish, Corbin looked to get back into politics. In the 1970s he made a run at doing business with Tennessee governor Ray Blanton but was rebuffed.135 Blanton's tenure was marked by charges of corruption. He was accused of selling pardons, in particular to a double murderer whose father was a political supporter. Once he left office, Blanton was pursued by the FBI for illegally selling liquor licenses.136 He was convicted and sentenced to federal prison, although the conviction was later overturned on a technicality.137
Corbin was also an early organizer in a string of Minnie Pearl fast-food restaurants, but only made more enemies, including former Republican congressman Robin Beard, who lost his shirt in Corbin's scheme when it went belly-up. In another caper, Corbin became close to Lafayette C. “Fate” Thomas, a sheriff in the Volunteer State who went to federal prison for, among other crimes, having prisoners work on his summer home.138 Thomas and Corbin had once traveled to Moscow together and Thomas said that “Corbin almost got him thrown into a Russian prison.”139
A Corbin crony claimed that Corbin helped out with Lamar Alexander's gubernatorial campaign by spreading disinformation about Alexander's primary opponent, Jake Butcher.140 Corbin himself later bragged to some poker friends that he had the goods on Democrat Al Gore. Joseph Sweat, one of Corbin's associates in Tennessee, remembered that Corbin accused Gore, then a young congressman, of renting rooms in a motel in Cookeville to watch pornography. “That god-damn Gore, he is up there in a motel … watching those dirty movies!” Corbin exclaimed. Asked how he knew, Corbin replied, “The desk clerk, I paid him a little bit and he gave me the receipt.”141
In the late 1970s Corbin went back to Washington. But he was held at arm's length by the Carterites, because they didn't know him or, even worse, because they did know of him, at least his reputation of being a Kennedy man. Naturally he supported Ted Kennedy's presidential bid in 1980. The senator himself, however, was dubious about Corbin, despite his long history with the family. Corbin had no formal role in the 1980 Kennedy campaign except to “stir up trouble,” according to Walinsky. Walinsky did not take a role but left no doubt as to his loyalties. When asked about supporting Carter, he simply replied, “Fuck him.”142
Some others in the Kennedy family, including Kennedy brother-in-law Steve Smith, who was running the campaign, were happy to have Corbin's help. Corbin hated Carter and his people. According to Seigenthaler, Corbin once got a hold of a phone bank and “screw[ed] up the Carter campaign headquarters telephones.”143 Corbin claimed that his prank took out all the Carter campaign's phones in New York City.
JUST BEFORE TEDDY KENNEDY officially jumped into the campaign in the fall of 1979, President Carter's ambassador to Mexico, Pat Lucey, abruptly quit his post and took a position in the Kennedy campaign. When he resigned, Lucey bluntly told reporters about his loyalty to the Kennedy family and his intentions to help Teddy.144 It struck at least a few in Washington as odd that Lucey's loyalty to Carter was so tenuous. He had been given a plum diplomatic assignment and enjoyed a close friendship with Vice President Walter Mondale. Years later Mondale said of Lucey's resignation, “We were pissed at that.”145 On the other hand, the Carter White House had been leaking stories dumping on Lucey's work since the previous summer. Lucey was steamed. The Carter team was good at making unnecessary enemies.
Lucey's daughter, Laurie, had been working in the Carter White House at the time as a confidential assistant to Landon Butler, deputy to Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan.146 But just days before her father quit his post in Mexico, she resigned from her White House job.147
Around the same time that Laurie Lucey was leaving the White House, Bob Dunn was coming in. Dunn went to work for Carter's head of scheduling, Phil Wise. Dunn was Pat Lucey's longtime aide, having worked for the governor in Wisconsin and then having accompanied Lucey to Mexico when he was appointed ambassador.148 And Dunn was Corbin's friend. Their friendship went back to 1971, according to Dunn.149
“Dunn's new job has attracted some attention since Lucey joined the campaign for Sen. Kennedy,” National Journal reported at the time.150 But it should have done more than attracted “some attention”; Corbin's close relationships with Dunn, Laurie Lucey, and Pat Lucey should have set off alarm bells in the Carter White House. The Carter team took no action.
In 1980 Corbin should have been enjoying retirement and grandchildren, like most other men his age. Not Corbin. He hated kids. Instead, he was still plotting shadowy deals, still scheming against his enemies. In fact, the old man orchestrated the biggest heist of his life: stealing—and delivering to the Reagan campaign—President Carter's secret debate briefing books.
IT WAS AT THE 1980 Democratic convention in New York, as Ted Kennedy gave the best speech of his life, that Corbin yelled to his friend Bill Schulz, “I'm going to go work for Reagan!”
Schulz's friendship with Corbin was odd, but that was the way Washington often worked. Schulz, a friendly bear of a man, had been a founding member of Young Americans for Freedom, had worked for syndicated conservative columnist Fulton Lewis, and by 1980 was the Washington editor of Reader's Digest, often derided by liberals because of its conservative content. (Reagan was one of its most ardent readers.)
Way back in 1961, material on Corbin's Communist affiliations had been leaked to Schulz. He called Corbin at the Democratic National Committee and said, “Mr. Corbin, I am an assistant to Fulton Lewis, the columnist and radio commentator. I wanted to get your reaction to a report that I have.… Individuals have identified you in closed-door testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities as a one-time member of the Communist Party USA.” Corbin growled back, “Mr. Schulz, you can kiss my fucking ass!” Then he hung up.151
Sixteen years later, in 1977, they were reintroduced at a poker game at GOP operative Dave Keene's home in Alexandria, Virginia. Keene said, “You might not know Paul Corbin.” Corbin replied cryptically, “I know Mr. Schulz. We had a conversation once.”152 Keene's father, a labor organizer in Wisconsin, had also had a run-in with Corbin, like everybody else, it seemed. “Didn't my father once have you beaten up and thrown into a ditch?” Keene asked the grizzled little man. Corbin replied, “Yeah, but the son of a bitch is dead!”153
Just after the Democratic convention in 1980, syndicated columnist Charles Bartlett, a fixture on the Washington social scene, introduced Corbin to Bill Casey. Bartlett was great company, up on all the latest gossip, and knew everybody in Washington. He had famously introduced John Kennedy to Jacqueline Bouvier at a dinner party in 1951.154 Bartlett called Casey and told him Corbin could help Reagan.155
In August, Corbin contacted Casey and proposed to assist Reagan, ostensibly with organized labor. Casey agreed, putting Corbin on retainer to the Reagan campaign. Thus the former Communist organizer Paul Corbin (and former business partner of Joe McCarthy) began to work for the ardently anti-Communist Ronald Reagan.
Corbin was not the only old RFK retainer who wanted to help Reagan defeat Carter. Adam Walinsky wrote a six-page memo to Casey on how Reagan could score points in a debate with the president.156 Walinsky later met with Casey to discuss the campaign.
A later news report said that Jim Baker had a hand in bringing Corbin into the Reagan campaign.157 But the fact was that Baker never liked Corbin. Keene had introduced the two in 1979 after a lunch in which Corbin and Bartlett gave Keene “advice” for his candidate, George Bush. “In Kennedy's case, we just put a girl on the plane,” the two men told Keene. “That gives us a much better candidate. And we think you need to do this with Bush.” Keene told them, “I made a deal with Jim Baker that he's in charge of the campaign and I'm in charge of the political organization. And it seems to me that this would fall within his domain rather than mine.” So Keene, who liked a good joke, called Baker and suggested he meet with Corbin and Bartlett. Baker agreed to the meeting, and shortly after the two men departed, he yelled at Keene, “You son of a bitch, you could have at least told me!”158 Keene was proud of
his little prank.
According to Keene as well as Adam Walinsky, it was also Corbin's idea to convince Pat Lucey, once Ted Kennedy was out of the race, to go on the ticket with John Anderson so as to bleed more liberal votes away from Carter.159 Lucey didn't need much convincing, as he loved Kennedy and despised Carter and his aides.160 This approach fit the two-step plan that Corbin was formulating: The first step was to defeat Carter to exact revenge. The second was to mount a second campaign by Ted Kennedy in 1984 as a way to restore Camelot.
Corbin's work for the Reagan campaign was, of course, crucial to ensuring that the first step of the plan was achieved. Corbin first visited the Reagan-Bush headquarters in Arlington on September 29, meeting with Jim Baker and then with Bill Casey. He would make at least three more visits, signing in on October 11, October 25, and November 3.161
On October 25, Corbin signed in at 9:35 A.M., gave his destination as “Casey,” and picked up a check for $1,500. It was just three days before the big debate between Reagan and Carter.162
On November 3, the day before the election, Corbin picked up a second and final check from the Reagan campaign, this time in the amount of $1,360.163 He also spent nearly two hours meeting with Casey. The report that the campaign filed with the Federal Election Commission said that Corbin received this check for “professional services and telephone” (with $160 of the final $1,360 covering reimbursement of phone expenses).
Corbin's invoices claimed that he produced research reports on Florida for the Reagan campaign. He did go to the state, but no evidence of his doing any work there for the Gipper surfaced. No one at the campaign recalled ever seeing a report from him. The idea that Corbin would put anything in writing was absurd. He certainly wasn't breaking a sweat for Reagan while in Florida. In the back of his rental car were several boxes filled with Reagan-Bush campaign materials, but he asked a friend to throw them in the trash as a favor.164
PRESIDENT CARTER'S DEBATE BRIEFING books had been assembled and copied in the White House starting the night of October 23 and finishing around 11 o'clock the next morning. A White House aide, James Rowland, stood at a copying machine to prepare the briefing books for Carter and his debate-prep team.165 There were actually three books: one on domestic policy, one on foreign policy, and a third for Vice President Mondale's perusal.166
Jerry Rafshoon, in charge of President Carter's media, recalled seeing Corbin around the Carter White House late in the 1980 campaign and thought it odd that this Kennedy man and Carter hater would be there.167 He had no idea at the time that Corbin was covertly working for Reagan.
Copies of the Carter briefing books arrived at the Reagan campaign's headquarters not long after the White House had put them together. Reagan adviser David Gergen later recalled a package arriving at the Reagan-Bush campaign on a rainy Saturday, “probably October 25.”168 October 25 was indeed a rainy Saturday in Washington.169 It was also the same day that Corbin met with Bill Casey at Reagan campaign headquarters.
Within a short period of time, everybody in the Reagan-Bush campaign knew about the purloined Carter briefing books. Jim Baker knew about them. Stef Halper, the Bush research aide who by the fall was working for Ed Meese, knew about them.170 So apparently did the campaign's national political director, Bill Timmons.171 So did Gergen, a former Bush aide (although he first denied and then later admitted to Congress that he knew of the books).172 So did Congressman David Stockman of Michigan, who in Reagan's practice debates stood in for John Anderson and then Carter.173 So did Francis Hodsoll, who was coordinating papers for the debate prep with Reagan.174 Wayne Valis, a staffer at the American Enterprise Institute who was volunteering at the Reagan campaign, later recalled that pretty much everybody knew about the material through the grapevine.175
Nevertheless, the story of the pinched Carter briefing books did not go public during the 1980 campaign. On the day of the debate, October 28, David Stockman did make reference in a speech to the “pilfered” briefing books.176 Later, after Reagan's victory, a “collector of campaign memorabilia” searching for souvenirs found Carter campaign memos among the Reagan campaign's trash.177 But it would be another three years before the stolen-briefing-books story made national news, when Laurence Barrett of Time reported on the episode in a mostly harsh book about Reagan, Gambling with History. In a small item tucked inside the book, Barrett said that someone in the Reagan camp had “filched” Carter's briefing material, and insinuated that Jim Baker had an ethical problem because he had “looked the other way.”178
Right after publication of Barrett's book, former Carter press secretary Jody Powell wrote a column flaying the national media for showing so little interest in the story. Within days, Washington was engulfed in a “Debategate” inferno. A congressional committee was duly appointed to investigate the theft in the late spring of 1983.179
The congressional investigation headed by Don Albosta took ten months and cost $500,000.180 A number of figures came under suspicion but were never charged. The FBI accused Wayne Valis under questioning of sleeping with women in the Carter White House in order to get sensitive documents, to which Valis responded, “Gentlemen, when I sleep with women, it's not to get papers. Why do you sleep with women?”181 Reagan's national security adviser, Richard Allen, told the Albosta committee that after the 1980 election Jerry Jennings, a staffer at Carter's National Security Council, was “seen associating” with Tony Dolan, an aide to Ed Meese at the Reagan campaign who was also close to Bill Casey.182 Jim Rowland, the White House aide who had photocopied the briefing books, came under suspicion because he had once worked for “the very conservative Human Events” and had been overheard criticizing the Carter administration, although the committee later cleared him.183
Of course, the committee could not fail to take note of Paul Corbin. With attention focused on the old Kennedy operator, the media began staking out Corbin's home. To avoid the press he would jump the back fence and walk into his neighbor's basement, and he would then put on a disguise and be sneaked out in a car. Corbin knew what it was to be stalked by federal investigators, as he'd once secreted accused GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone during the Watergate investigation.184 At the height of the investigation, Phil Gailey of the New York Times tracked down Corbin in Aruba, and Corbin denied knowing anything about the Carter briefing books. He did confirm that he had spoken with Casey about the matter, however. Casey ducked Gailey's repeated calls. The story revealed that Reagan White House counsel Fred Fielding had given the FBI a list of “secretaries and low-level employees who had worked in the Nixon and Ford Administrations and were held over by the Carter White House.”185
Corbin submitted a sworn statement to the Albosta committee, and in his interviews with the committee and with the FBI he was again full of denials.186 Frustrated, Congressman Albosta acknowledged his committee's inability to pin Corbin down, saying, “He denies everything … doesn't even know his own name. This leads people to suspect he had some effort and involvement.”187
Furthering suspicion was the fact that, as phone logs revealed, Corbin had called Bill Timmons at the Reagan campaign “on several occasions.”188 The Albosta committee reported that Corbin was informing Timmons of Carter's travel in advance, and noted that a memo by Reagan aide Jerry Carmen to a field staffer “proceeded to discuss President Carter's scheduled stops for two dates a week-and-a-half away.”189
The Albosta committee concluded that the Carter debate briefing books were most probably taken from either the National Security Council offices or the White House Situation Room, both in the West Wing and both with tightly controlled access.190 Albosta himself said in an interview years later that he thought the briefing books had been lifted from the office of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. “The papers were left on his desk,” Albosta recalled, “and this one night they … disappeared, and they became gone.”191
The Albosta committee's final report, in 1983, stated the committee's belief that there existed “organized efforts to o
btain from the Carter administration, and from the Carter-Mondale campaign, information and materials that were not publicly available.”192 The investigators could not come to more precise conclusions, in part because the Carter White House—featuring many holdovers from the Ford and Nixon administrations who didn't like the Carter gang—leaked like a sieve. According to the final report, the investigation found that thirteen Reagan staffers had either received or were aware of Carter material that had come into the possession of the Reagan campaign.193 With so many possible culprits, Corbin escaped the noose. The investigators were forced to admit their failure, saying that the committee “was unable to state how Corbin may have obtained those materials himself.”194
Years later Congressman Albosta said he felt that he'd been hoodwinked, especially by David Stockman, though he did not elaborate.195 He was also frustrated that when his committee interviewed Bill Casey, they couldn't understand a word he said. The only thing that was clear was that Casey denied giving Jim Baker the Carter briefing books, as Baker had claimed in the media and to the Albosta committee.196
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