More praise for The Power Game
“There is some dazzling reporting about the Reagan administration that I haven’t seen anywhere else.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“A rich groundwork of behind-the-scenes information and revealing gossip.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“The political book on Washington. It is reporting at its best.… As a working person’s guide to the strange and evanescent nature of our national government, I doubt that it could be topped.… This is a knife with edge.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“No one has done a better or more comprehensive job of explaining how Washington operates at this moment in history.… An unforgettable portrait of the people who run our national politics and their culture.”
—Chicago Tribune
ALSO BY HEDRICK SMITH
The Russians
The Pentagon Papers (coauthor with Neil Sheehan, Fox Butterfield, and E. W. Kenworthy)
Reagan: The Man, the President (coauthor with Adam Clymer, Richard Burt, Leonard Silk, and Robert Lindsey)
Beyond Reagan: The Polititcs of Upheaval (coauthor with Paul Duke, Haynes Johnson, Jack Nelson, Charles Corddry, Charles McDowell, and Georgie Ann Geyer)
The New Russians
Rethinking America
A Ballantine Book
The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1988 by Hedrick Smith
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Brookings Institution: Excerpts from “The Crisis of Competence in Our National Leadership” by James L. Sundquist, which appeared in Political Science Quarterly Vol. 95, No 2 (Summer 1980) p. 192.
CBS Inc.: Excerpts from a CBS Evenings News broadcast of October 4, 1984, in which Leslie Stahl shared her script with the author. Copyright © CBS Inc. All rights reserved.
Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.: Excerpts from A Different Kind of Presidency by Theodore C. Sorensen. Copyright © 1984 by Theodore C. Sorensen, Eric Sorensen, Stephen Sorensen, and Philip Sorensen. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.
The New York Times: An excerpt from “Deciding Who Makes Foreign Policy” by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Copyright © 1983 by The New York Times Company. An excerpt from “The White House Mystique” by John S. D. Eisenhower. Copyright © 1987 by The New York Times Company. Excerpts from “The Greening of Washington” by Kenneth Schlossberg. Copyright © 1986 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
The Public Interest: Excerpts from “The Democratic Distemper” by Samuel P. Huntington. Copyright © 1975 by National Affairs, Inc. Reprinted with permission of the author from The Public Interest, No. 41 (Fall 1975), p. 27.
Time: Excerpt from “Needed: Clarity of Purpose” by Richard M. Nixon. Copyright © 1980 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission from Time.
WETA Washington: Excerpts from an interview with Elliot Richardson for PBS-TV documentary entitled The Power and the Glory. Copyright © 1982 by Greater WETA Educational Telecommunications Association.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96689
eISBN: 978-0-307-82957-3
This edition reprinted by arrangement with Random House, Inc.
v3.1
To Dad,
whose intellect and integrity
have always been a beacon
Acknowledgments
No book is an individual enterprise. This book, like many others, has benefited greatly from the cooperation, assistance, wisdom, and generosity of many people—my editor, academic mentors, researchers, news sources, journalistic colleagues, friends, and family.
Five people in particular gave special nourishment and encouragement to this book, for which I am deeply grateful: my father, Sterling Smith, whose lifelong questioning of government and whose relentless probing about the real workings of Washington were a stimulus for me to tackle this subject; Kate Medina, my editor at Random House, whose immediate and persistent enthusiasm for the concept and for the reporting, seasoned with insightful and demanding critiques, provided me with both the lift and spur that I wanted and needed; Austin Ranney, my sponsor and friend at American Enterprise Institute, whose gentle coaching and sheer enjoyment of the power game put fun and reward into the work of writing; Bill Nell, my chief researcher, who poured heart and soul and tireless hours and attention to tasks and facts too numerous to begin to enumerate; and Susan, my wife, whose “reader’s reactions” often helped me and whose faith and patience and support nurtured me throughout the writing of this book.
This book would not have been possible without two institutions and their leaders to whom I feel and owe special thanks. Over the past twenty-five years The New York Times has given me the rich opportunity of having a fifty-yard-line seat at the power game, and of getting to know so many government officials and congressional politicians at close hand. I am especially grateful to Publisher Punch Sulzberger, and former Executive Editor Abe Rosenthal for granting me a leave of absence to write the manuscript, and to current Executive Editor Max Frankel, who was understanding when I needed more time.
For one very important year, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and its former president. Bill Baroody, Jr., gave me an academic home as a visiting journalist. I am extremely grateful in particular to four senior fellows at AEI—Austin Ranney, Michael Malbin, Norm Ornstein, and John Makin—for their willingness to share so much time and knowledge to educate me. Austin Ranney and Tom Mann of Brookings Institution were generous enough to read the manuscript and give me their insights, and I am deeply in their debt, though obviously I alone bear responsibility for the judgments rendered in this volume.
Many members of Congress and administration officials offered me help or access—some four hundred to five hundred interviews—far too many for me to list them all. And some of the most helpful asked to remain anonymous. I am grateful to Presidents Reagan and Carter for their interviews with me and for similar access to Speakers Tip O’Neill and Jim Wright and Majority Leaders Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and Robert C. Byrd, as well as to scores of members of Congress and several dozen senior Reagan administration officials.
A few people—normally less visible to the public—deserve special mention because they enjoyed analyzing the power game as much as I have and they shared their understanding of the process of governing, and helped me see the patterns more clearly: Richard Darman, who is rich with insights into the levers of power and political dynamics of the presidency, or anywhere on the playing field; Mike Deaver, who has a storyteller’s gift for the inside world of the Reagan White House; Ken Duberstein, Kirk O’Donnell, and Chris Matthews, who tutored me on the ways of new-breed and old-breed politicians in the House; Tom Griscom, Steve Bell, and Linda Peake, whose expertise lay in the Senate; Dick Conlon, who provided vital “institutional memory” on the congressional reforms; Marty Franks and Joe Gaylord, who have for many elections kept me abreast of the partisan battle for control of the House; Bob Sims, unfailingly helpful, whether at the National Security Council or the Defense Department.
Journalistic colleagues helped on many points, large and small, in providing information and refining my own understanding of events—especially Lou Cannon and Hanes Johnson of The Washington Post; Charles McDowell of the Richmond Times-Dispatch; Charles
Corddry of The Baltimore Sun; Bob Shogan and Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times; Steve Roberts, Marty Tolchin, Barbara Gamarekian, and Jonathan Fuerbringer of The New York Times; Leslie Stahl of CBS News; Chris Wallace of NBC News; Sam Donaldson of ABC News; Paul Duke of the Public Broadcasting System; and Brian Lamb of C-Span.
Important material for many chapters in this book was pulled together by my three consecutive researchers—Bill Nell, Lauren Simon-Ostrow, and Kurt Eichenwald—whose assistance was indispensable to my writing. All three assisted me in many ways: compiling files, doing interviews, preparing memos, relentlessly chasing minutiae. Each brought special reporting and research talents to this project, and I am extremely grateful for their care, skill, and dedication. And we all owe thanks to Nancy Ganahl, the librarian at the Washington bureau of the Times, for her willing and thoughtful help.
I am most appreciative, too, for support in many areas from Lynda McAvoy, my efficient and cheerful assistant at AEI. To Randa Murphy, Mildred Edlowitz, Lyn Balthazar, and Penny Dixon goes my gratitude for their careful and patient transcribing of literally thousands of pages of my taped interviews.
Through the auspices of AEI, I was fortuante to have the help, too, of several interns, and I hope they got as much from this project as I did from them. Let me thank John Carpenter, Dave Deluca, Stephen Greene, Kathleen Hynde, Phil Hinz, Carol Monaghan, Debra Piehl, Mark Shaw, and Beate Thewalt.
My thanks, too, to Mitchell Ivers for his hours of patient copy-editing of my manuscript, to Olga Tarnowski for so cheerfully shepherding my work through Random House, and to Julian Bach, my literary agent, who got a light in his eye when I first mentioned the power game and who launched the project and put it under Kate Medina’s kind and constructive care.
—HEDRICK SMITH
Chevy Chase, Maryland
February 5, 1989
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. THE NATURE OF POWER
1. The Presidency and the Power Float: Our Rotating Prime Ministers
2. The Power Earthquake of 1974: The Impact of Reform, Money, and Television
3. The Soft Sides of Power: Visibility, Credibility, and Power Surfing
4. Porcupine Power: The Politics of Being Prickly
5. The Power Loop: Narrow Access vs. Widening the Circle
Part II. THE PLAYERS AND THE PLAYING FIELD
6. Life Inside the Beltway: The Folkways of Washington
7. Congress and the Constant Campaign: Survival Politics and the New Breed
8. Pentagon Games: The Politics of Pork and Turf
9. The New Lobbying Game: Grass Roots Pressure and PAC Money
10. Shadow Government: The Power of Staff
Part III. THE BIG GAMES OF POWER
11. The Agenda Game: Speed, Focus, and Damage Control
12. The Image Game: Scripting the Video Presidency
13. The Coalition Game: The Heart of Governing
14. The Opposition Game: Fighting, Swapping, and Remodeling
15. The Foreign Policy Game: Bureaucratic Tribal Warfare
16. The Other Foreign Policy Game: End Runs and Back Channels
Part IV. GOVERNING: WHY IT DOESN’T WORK BETTER
17. Divided Government: Gridlock and the Blame Game
18. Where’s the Majority Party?: No Longer the Democrats, Not Yet the Republicans
19. Our Political Disconnect: Campaigning vs. Governing
20. What Is to Be Done?
Bibliography
Notes
About the Author
Introduction
We Americans are a nation of game players. From Friday night poker and Sunday bingo to corporate rivalry and the nuclear arms race, Americans are preoccupied with winning and losing. Competition is our creed; it is knit into the fabric of our national life. Sports and game shows are national pastimes. Either we play games ourselves or we take part vicariously. We swim, cycle, jog or play tennis—making it a game by matching ourselves against a rival, against par in golf, or against the stopwatch when we hike or run. Five out of six Americans spend several hours a week viewing football, baseball, boxing, bowling, or some other sport on television. One hundred million people tune into television game shows weekly—forty-three million to Wheel of Fortune, appropriately named for a nation almost addicted to games. All over the world, people are playing at commerce on one hundred million sets of Monopoly.
Some people treat life itself as a game, to be won or lost, instead of seeing it in terms of a religious ethic or of some overarching system of values.
In Washington, senators and congressmen talk of politics as a game, and of themselves as “players.” To be a player is to have power or influence on some issue. Not to be a player is to be out of the power loop and without influence. The ultimate game metaphors in government are the “war games”—not just the military exercises for fleets of ships or regiments of troops, but those ghostly, computer-run scenarios that our policymakers and nuclear experts use to test their reflexes and our defenses in a crisis: human survival reduced to a game.
So it seems only natural to look at how we are governed—the way Washington really works today—as a power game, not in some belittling sense, but as a way of understanding how government actually works and why it does not work better. For the game is sometimes glorious and uplifting, at other times aggravating or disenchanting. It obviously is a serious game with high stakes, one in which the winners and losers affect many lives—yours, mine, those of the people down the street, and of people all over the world.
When I came to Washington in 1962, to work at the Washington bureau of The New York Times, I thought I understood how Washington worked. I knew the usual textbook precepts: that the president and his cabinet were in charge of the government; that Congress declared war and passed budgets; that the secretary of State directed foreign policy; that seniority determined who wrote legislation in Congress; and that the power of southern committee chairmen—gained by seniority—was beyond the challenge of junior members; that voters elected one party or the other to govern; and the parties set how the members of Congress would vote—except for the southern Democrats, who often teamed up with Republicans.
These old truisims have been changed dramatically. My years as a reporter have spanned the administrations of six presidents, and over the course of that time, I have watched a stunning transformation in the way the American system of government operates. The Washington power game has been altered by many factors: new Congressional assertiveness against the presidency, the revolt within Congress against the seniority system, television, the merchandising of candidates, the explosion of special interest politics, the demands of political fund-raising, the massive growth of staff power—and by changes in voters as well.
The political transformations of the past fifteen years have rewritten the old rules of the game. Presidents now have much greater difficulty marshaling governing coalitions. Power, instead of residing with the president, often floats away from him, and a skillful leader must learn how to ride the political waves like a surfer or be toppled. The old power oligarchy in Congress has been broken up. The new breed of senators and House members, unlike the old breed, play video politics, a different game from the old inside, backroom politics of Congress. Party labels mean much less now to voters and to many candidates, too.
Altogether, it’s a new ball game, with new sets of rules, new ways of getting power leverage, new types of players, new game plans, and new tactics that affect winning and losing. It is a much looser power game now, more wide open, harder to manage and manipulate than it was a quarter of a century ago when I came to town.
My purpose in this book is to take you inside each part of the political process in Washington and to show you how it works. And then, to show you how the whole game of gover
ning fits together—and also to show where it doesn’t fit together. My premise is that the games politicians play today—that is, how the power games are played and therefore how Washington really works—have unwritten rules, rituals, and patterns that explain why things so often happen the way they do. These political customs, conventions, and predictable patterns of behavior lie behind what Max Lerner once called “the ultimate propulsion of events”:1
• Why presidents have so much trouble forming the coalitions it takes to govern,
• Why the Pentagon buys so many weapons that cost too much and don’t work better,
• Why the secretary of State really can’t run foreign policy and keeps getting into fights with the national security adviser, administration after administration,
• How the Democrats keep the Republicans from winning the House of Representatives,
• How the political money game generally helps finance the major deadlocks in government,
• Why some presidents such as Ronald Reagan are able to shed most of their political troubles and others such as Jimmy Carter get mired in them,
• Why the press goes after some politicians and leaves others alone,
• And how Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North wound up with so much power for secret dealings with Iran and underwriting the Nicaraguan contras—climbing out on a limb extending from a branch of precedent set by Henry Kissinger.
In using the metaphor of games, I do not mean to imply that politics is child’s play. Governing the United States of America is a serious enterprise. Washington is a world where substance matters. Issues matter. Ideas matter. One political party, for example, can gain the intellectual initiative over the other party, and that is vitally important in the power game. The Democrats seized the “idea advantage” at the time of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal; the Reagan Republicans seized it in the early 1980s with their idea of cutting government and taxes.
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