Order, Order!

by Wright, Ben;

  In contrast to the bar crawl possibilities of the Houses of Parliament, the US Congress is as dry as a box of cigars. Its House and Senate restaurants do not serve alcohol and there are no taverns tucked away offering refreshment to thirsty Congressmen. For much of its history, drinking was instead done in secret cubbyholes and members’ rooms. Tip O’Neill, a Democrat Congressman and Speaker of the House of Representatives for a decade, describes a drinking den known for years as the ‘Board of Education’, a place where senior Democrats would ply junior members with drink to discover what they knew and what they could do.45 It was established in the 1940s by Speaker Nicholas Longworth and continued by his successors. Hidden on the first floor of the Capitol behind the members’ restaurant (Room H-128), its door was unmarked and a guard stood outside. On the table would be a bottle of Virginia Gentleman bourbon, water and a bucket of ice. It was a place where the Democrat leadership, committee chairmen and the occasional Republican would meet to drink, puff cigars, chew over politics, gossip, plot, play poker and discuss ways to push legislation along.

  The longest-serving Speaker, Sam Rayburn, loved his politics spiced with a slug of bourbon. It was while kicking back at one of Rayburn’s Board of Education gatherings that Vice-President Harry Truman received a phone call from the White House telling him FDR had died. Truman turned pale, hung up, told the room he had to go and was then heard running down the marble corridor towards the presidency.

  Sinking deeper into his sofa, Haley Barbour warily reveals the names of convivial Congressional drinkers he has known over the years such as Tip O’Neill, Senators Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd. He mentions Wilbur Mills, the Democrat Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee who was caught by police, drunk and in the company of a stripper, while driving past the Tidal Basin in the early hours of 9 October 1974. After a second scandal involving drink, Mills left politics and set up the Wilbur D. Mills Treatment Center for alcoholism in Arkansas. But the days when members of Congress room-hopped with bottles of whisky as the sun set over the Mall have largely gone. There are still nightly receptions, fundraisers and cocktail parties where politicos mingle over a drink, but the sort of clubby, cross-aisle glass clinking of Tip O’Neill’s day is no more. There are still certainly politicians on Capitol Hill who like a drink (the merlot-drinking former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner is one), but the fraternity has faded, along with the bipartisanship. ‘People aren’t around like they used to be,’ says Donald Ritchie, the Senate’s historian. ‘The arrival of the jet plane changed everything. And then in 1994 the Speaker encouraged members to spend time in their states and keep their families there so it concentrated the political week from Tuesday morning to Thursday evening. And when they do have an evening free they’re busy fundraising.’46

  It’s worse in the House, where politics has become a permanent election campaign. As district boundaries are gerrymandered to make them less competitive, for most members of Congress, particularly Republicans, the electoral threat is from their own party in primaries. There is neither the time nor the motivation to forge friendships over a drink with colleagues or political opponents. ‘Forty years ago they didn’t raise money all the time like they do now,’ Haley Barbour tells me. ‘There weren’t lots of special interest functions and fundraisers. They had more time to spend on the Hill, to talk, drink, get to know one another.’

  In October 2013 the first government shutdown for seventeen years took the US to the brink of a default. The stand-off between House Republicans and the Obama White House known as ‘the sequester’ was the latest flare-up of systemic political dysfunction and polarisation in Washington. Compromise is now a toxic concept in US politics. Haley Barbour contrasts this era with the 1980s, when Reagan got a conservative agenda passed although Democrats controlled the House. ‘When I was in the White House Tip O’Neill would come over and have a drink with Reagan. They both got it done because they figured out how to work with their opponents.’

  I wonder if a decline of bipartisan drinking is a small contributor to this polarisation or merely a symptom. Barbour reels off a long list of reasons for the current atmosphere, from electoral gerrymandering to the shrill, obnoxious commentary of rolling news, and says this can’t be blamed on a lack of booze. ‘But I regret that camaraderie is so diminished now,’ he muses. ‘If people drank more would it make them better members of Congress? No. But maybe having a drink together would help. We’d all be better off if they had that sort of relationship.’

  As a southern Governor, Barbour remembers hammering out the annual budget with members of the Mississippi legislature, Democrat and Republican, a bottle of Maker’s Mark on the table. ‘The drink was good lubrication. And sometimes lubrication is needed to get the process over the finishing line.’47 Of course it has been lucrative for Barbour to have friends throughout Washington’s web of politicians, wonks, lobbyists and hacks. But he’s a rare bon viveur in an increasingly sour and strait-laced town. The tweeters and bloggers who feed on the city’s gossip are poised to pounce on anything that smacks of indulgence or good living, demanding a puritanism they do not practise themselves.

  Governor Barbour leaves me with a copy of the ‘whisky speech’, delivered on the floor of the Mississippi state legislature in 1952 by Noah S. ‘Soggy’ Sweat. At the time, alcohol was still prohibited in Mississippi and remained so until 1966. The speech was a rousing argument both for and against the ban on booze. The young politician toiled over his argument for two months before delivering this passionate masterpiece of political equivocation:

  My friends,

  I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about whisky. All right, here is how I feel about whisky.

  If when you say whisky you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.

  But;

  If when you say whisky you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.

  This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.48

  CHAPTER 7

  From Canberra to the Kremlin

  A 2009 meeting of finance ministers from the G7 group of wealthy nations would not have merited a footnote in summit history if Shoichi Nakagawa had stuck to mineral water. But Japan’s then Finance Minister appeared to be drunk at a press conference in Rome and resigned days later, accused of embarrassing one of the world’s major economies. Mr Nakagawa claimed he had only had a sip of water during lunch and attributed his comatose appearance in front of the television cameras to cold medicine and jet lag. Japanese journalists knew about his fondness for alcohol and during that summer’s general election Mr Nakagawa said he had given up drinking for the ‘sake of Japan’. But the charismatic politic
ian, tipped as a future Prime Minister, died in October 2009 at the age of just fifty-six, a month after losing his seat in parliament.1

  This doleful story is a recent window into the drinking habits of politicians beyond the UK and the United States. Some, like Mr Nakagawa, were casualties. Others thrived with a drink in their hand. Which in the ritualistic world of diplomacy is a central part of the theatre, from toasts of sake to champagne. Alcohol runs through the chronicles of presidents, prime ministers and parliaments around the world.

  The frequent inebriation of Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Toby Barton, earned him the nickname ‘Tosspot Toby’ and provoked one politician, John Norton, to publish an open letter to the PM in 1902 concerning his ‘disgusting drinking habits’. But ask an Australian, Britain’s closest drinking cousin, for an example of political imbibing and they’ll probably mention Bob Hawke, one of the country’s longest serving and most liked leaders. His drinking was epic enough to win him an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1955, the young Hawke drained two and a half pints of beer (a yard of ale) in eleven seconds, a world speed drinking record at the time. The legions of beer drinking voters in Australia were appreciative of the accolade. As Hawke wrote in his memoir, ‘this feat was to endear me to some of my fellow Australians more than anything else I ever achieved’, even though he renounced drink for the duration of his time in office.2

  Another future Australian Prime Minister also gained a poll bounce from booze. In 2003, when he was the Opposition’s foreign affairs spokesman, a drunk Kevin Rudd visited a New York strip club. He said he was too inebriated to remember what happened inside the club, called Storms, but the revelation helped rather than harmed him during the general election campaign. One newspaper poll found 85 per cent of people thought the evening’s escapade showed the strait-laced Rudd to be a ‘normal bloke’ after all and he was voted into office.3

  The drinking binges of John Gorton, Prime Minister from 1968 to 1971, made him equally popular with the Australian public. Once, after a long drinking session in Melbourne, he was driven to the airport to fly back to Canberra. Soon after settling into his seat, Gorton felt queasy, leant over the side of the chair and threw up onto the floor. The stewardess appeared to mop up the mess and the twinkly, womanising old charmer said, ‘Well, my dear, I suppose you find it a bit strange that an old RAAF man like me can still get air sick.’ According to the journalist Mungo McCallum, the stewardess looked at him and said, ‘Yes, Prime Minister, I do actually because the plane hasn’t taken off yet.’4

  Occasionally, when Gorton was the worse for wear, his press secretary would announce the Prime Minister’s absence from Parliament by saying he was a feeling a ‘bit fluey’. ‘Gorton flu’ soon became a Canberra euphemism for a hangover. Eventually, his Liberal Party colleagues tired of his larking around and Gorton became the first and only Australian Prime Minister to vote himself out of office.

  In neighbouring New Zealand in 1984, Prime Minister Robert Muldoon called what’s still known as the Schnapps election, a reminder to political leaders everywhere not to roll the electoral dice when drunk. Muldoon had been the country’s belligerent, outspoken and polarising Prime Minister since 1975. But by 1984 his National Party was limping along with a majority of one in parliament and rebelliousness had erupted in its ranks. One member of his party, Marilyn Waring, had threatened to cross the floor and vote with the opposition Labour Party on nuclear policy. On the evening of 14 June, there was a fractious, drunken and abusive meeting between Muldoon, Waring and other leading members of the party. When Waring arrived, Muldoon barked, ‘You perverted little liar. What the fuck do you think you’re up to now?’5 At this stage in the evening the Prime Minister was draining tumblers of brandy and ginger ale. Through the fug of shouting, tears, drink and cigarette smoke, Muldoon was suddenly seized with clarity: a snap general election would catch the opposition unprepared and a win would crush his party rebels.

  The Prime Minister then headed off to Government House to tell the Governor General, Sir David Beattie, about his plan to go to the country. This was followed by an extraordinary appearance on New Zealand television which is preserved for posterity on YouTube. At 11.15 p.m. a glazed-looking Muldoon made a slurred, intoxicated statement to the TV cameras. After announcing the election date, the Prime Minister then went back to his office, said ‘I’m not going to drink coffee at this time of night,’ poured another glass of Scotch and started to plan the election campaign. That night several National MPs worried that their leader had made an irrational decision while drunk. Which he had. ‘In addition to the half-dozen whiskies and brandies he had consumed earlier in the evening he had consumed several more at Government House,’ recounted Muldoon’s biographer.6

  Muldoon was also exhausted, frustrated and taking tablets for diabetes. Had he not been plastered, he may have thought of another way to prolong the life of his government. But the sight of a clammy, drunk Prime Minister announcing the general election was not the smartest way for Robert Muldoon to convince New Zealanders he should be given another term. A month later Labour won the election and Muldoon’s political career was over.

  It’s not known what North Koreans made of their revered late leader’s drinking habits. As well as a penchant for shark’s fin soup and James Bond movies, Kim Jong-Il had a taste for the finest alcohol. He reportedly kept a cellar of over 10,000 bottles and spent $720,000 a year on Hennessy cognac. In the 1990s he was one of the company’s biggest single customers. Dictatorship underpinned by a fiercely enforced cult of personality, a state-run press and complete isolation from the outside world meant North Koreans would have had no idea about Kim’s drinking indulgences. In a country of relentless poverty and food shortages, where the average annual wage is $900, alcohol of any kind is an unimaginable luxury for nearly all North Koreans. Their despotic ruler’s spending on the world’s priciest alcohol is probably the most grotesque example of political drinking, a perfect symbol of Kim Jong-Il’s contempt for his millions of deluded disciples.

  Comrade Vodka

  In the Soviet Union at least, people could endure the miseries of totalitarian dictatorship with the help of a drink. According to legend, vodka was invented in 1503 by Kremlin monks, who used it first as an antiseptic. Then they started to swig it for pleasure. Some historians believe vodka production was under way in Moscow as early as the 1440s.7 In the words of the writer Victor Erofeyev, ‘more than by any political system, we are all held hostage by vodka. It menaces and it chastises; it demands sacrifices. It is both a catalyst of procreation and its scourge. It dictates who is born and who dies. In short, vodka is the Russian god.’8 Tasteless, colourless and flavourless, vodka has inspired, consoled, warmed and ruined Russians for centuries. And its presence in politics stretches back to the drunkenness of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. The latter was a prodigious drinker and insisted members of his court and visiting foreign dignitaries join him in guzzling vast amounts of alcohol at festive events.9 Tsar Nicholas II was a moderate supper of fine wines and realised that by the early twentieth century imperial Russia was in the grip of rampant alcoholism. With war approaching, it needed to sober up. As Russia mobilised in August 1914, Nicholas introduced prohibition, banning the sale of vodka anywhere except in first-class restaurants and clubs.

  After the Bolshevik Revolution three years later, Lenin, himself quite indifferent to alcohol, kept the prohibition of vodka in place until the mid-1920s. He said that ‘to permit the sale of vodka would mean one step back to capitalism’, and he might have hoped to keep the proletariat clear-headed for longer than he managed. But with the ban unpopular and tax revenues needing a lift, Lenin legalised vodka and established a new state monopoly which was in place by 1925, the year after his death. In the decades that followed, Russians clutched their vodka bottles even more tightly than they had before the Revolution. Throughout the twentieth century, the Soviet Union’s political elite wrestled with the country�
�s vodka addiction as well as their own. The production of spirits trebled between 1940 and 1980, an acceleration driven by Joseph Stalin.

  A megalomaniacal tyrant who ruled the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century, Stalin enforced the collectivisation of agriculture, industrialised the economy and terrorised and killed millions during the Great Terror of the 1930s. He led the Soviet Union through the Second World War, first in a pact with Germany and then in a brutal battle against Hitler’s armies on the Eastern Front. The savage four-year fight was unprecedented in its destruction and human cost. At least twenty-five million Soviet citizens died. In part, Russia’s post-war problem with alcohol germinated during that grinding military campaign. After the Russian victory at Stalingrad in 1943, a ration of 100 grams of vodka per day was given to Red Army soldiers. And since by 1945 nearly the whole active male population of the Soviet Union was in the army, by the end of the war they were all drinking vodka too.

  Throughout this period Stalin drank like a Russian and revelled in the toasting rituals of his native Georgia. His Kremlin was saturated in vodka. Memoirs catalogue stories of leading Communists being carried out legless, after which they were administered caviar, chopped onions and raw eggs in a traditional attempt to absorb the alcohol. The Kremlin was where leading officials indulged in loud parties, heavy eating and riotous drinking. And at the centre of the excess was Stalin himself. The Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas, at first a fan of Stalinism and then one of its most prominent dissenters, remembered dinners in Moscow with the Soviet leader. On cold winter nights, instead of discussing socialist theory, Stalin insisted his guests play a game. They each had to guess the temperature outside and, for every degree they were wrong, they had to drink a glass of vodka.10 An amusement for Stalin; and a threatening ordeal for his guests, all of whom lived with the threat of arbitrary imprisonment, torture and execution.