Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  Helms’s political apparatus is far more structured and extensive than was Kennedy’s, and it has given extra muscle to Helms’s obstructionist politics. In the Senate, Helms made himself the moving force of the Steering Committee, an informal, secretive band of fifteen to twenty conservative Republicans who lunch weekly on Tuesdays. Their committee has no official standing but it has gained clout by its members’ working together, hiring an effective staff, and using filibusters and their senatorial rights to “hold” legislation and appointments. In the Reagan years, Helms’s hard core became known as the 4-H Club: Helms, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire, and Chic Hecht of Nevada. Other steering committee regulars were Steve Symms and Jim McClure of Idaho, Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming, Don Nickles of Oklahoma, Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, Jake Garn of Utah, and until they left the Senate in 1986, Jeremiah Denton of Alabama and John East of North Carolina.

  An equally potent element of the Helms apparatus is the network of sharply partisan conservative congressional staffers, known as the Madison Group. They are orchestrated by a pudgy, boyish-looking, and politically ingenious attorney from South Carolina named John Carbaugh. Staffers such as Michael Pillsbury, David Sullivan, Margot Carlisle, Quentin Crommelin, Angelo Cordevilla, Debbie DeMoss, and Jim Lucier have often pushed Steering Committee senators to take action. Some of these staff aides joined the Reagan administration, formed a network inside government, and fed information—often classified—to those still on Senate staffs. By publicizing what they saw as Soviet violations of arms treaties, the Madison Group activists put pressure on Secretary of State Shultz and President Reagan to take a tougher line toward Moscow. Through cleverly coordinated moves inside and outside the administration, they maneuvered the government into covertly shipping Stinger antitank weapons to Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel leader.

  The core of Helms’s North Carolina apparatus is the Congressional Club, widely regarded as the second most potent fund-raising apparatus in the country after the Republican Party. Using commercial companies it spawned, the Congressional Club pulls in millions for Helms-endorsed candidates and causes. Its peak effort produced the most expensive campaign in Senate history, Helms’s $16.4 million reelection campaign in 1984, a fund-raising feat that caused Howard Baker to call Helms “the Nelson Rockefeller of political fund-raising.”

  In Washington, Helms is the godfather of a large network of right-wing organizations. He inspired the National Conservative Political Action Committee, a multimillion-dollar PAC which targets liberal and some moderate politicians nationwide with blistering negative advertising campaigns. He was a guiding spirit for the Conservative Caucus and Young Americans for Freedom and a founding father of the Council on National Policy, the secretive right-wing answer to the eastern establishment’s Council on Foreign Relations. He has his own bevy of think tanks, The Institute of American Relations (1AR), the Center for a Free Society, the Institute on Money and Inflation, and the American Family Institute, as well as a couple of tax-exempt lobbying groups, the IAR Foreign Affairs Council and the Congressional Club Foundation.

  This political machinery has given Helms the ability to mobilize support to put pressure on others in government, much as mass lobbies do. “Jesse Helms would never have done as well with his issues without being able to trigger mail writing and phone calls,” observed Chris Dodd, the Democratic senator from Connecticut. “If Jesse hasn’t convinced you, there’s the thought of all those people he can activate.”6

  Others contend that the tail of the Helms apparatus has been wagging the dog and that Helms sometimes has to stir up filibusters and make big publicity plays, like the Martin Luther King episode, to raise funds in order to keep his huge apparatus well financed. When Helms, Don Nickles, and James East forced the Senate to stay in session nearly to Christmas Eve 1982 by filibustering a bill imposing a gasoline tax to finance highway improvements, they infuriated other senators. The normally mild-mannered Republican Whip Alan Simpson denounced them for an “obdurate and obnoxious performance.” The bill passed, with Helms ridiculed by his colleagues as “Senator Grinch.” No matter; Helms’s gambit played well with his home crowd and produced a new flow of dollars for his network.

  Howard Baker, an aide told me, ventured privately to his staff that Helms had “become a prisoner of the monster apparatus he created,” because he constantly needed new issues to keep the donations flowing into the Congressional Club and his foundations. “The question is: Does Jesse Helms run the Congressional Club or does the Congressional Club run him?” one Baker lieutenant said to me. “They thrive on unresolved issues or issues where they can make a big fuss even when they cannot win.”

  A key objective of Helms’s porcupine politics has been to press and harass the Reagan administration into a more aggressively anti-Communist foreign policy, especially to promote guerrilla wars against Marxist regimes in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Angola. At a roast in Helms’s honor for his sixty-fourth birthday in 1985, Senator Dole called Helms “the Rambo of the Geritol set,” playing on the gun-toting, anti-Soviet heroism of the movie Rambo. The roast fell on the very night that President Reagan was returning triumphantly from his 1985 summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—a meeting that the right-wing crowd had adamantly opposed. At the Helms dinner, their mood was conveyed in the toastmaster’s quip that as door prizes, Helms would pass out copies of “George Shultz’s Summit Cook-book: Forty Ways to Eat Crow.”

  Sometimes, Helms has tried to run his own independent foreign policy, accusing Shultz of being duped by an appeasement-minded Foreign Service and suggesting that even Casey’s CIA suffered from “pro-Soviet bias” on arms issues.

  When Helms was chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee in 1985, he sought a personal showdown with the Russians over the case of Miroslav Medved, a Soviet seaman who tried to defect from a Soviet freighter unloading grain near New Orleans. After Medved was examined by American doctors and told them he had changed his mind and now wanted to go home, the White House was prepared to close the incident. But Helms was far from satisfied. He charged Medved was being held against his will. Helms issued a subpoena for Medved and sent a personal emissary, David Sullivan, to serve the subpoena and order Medved to appear in Washington. The Soviet freighter captain refused to let Sullivan on board.

  The whole Helms gambit was extraordinary: an Agricultural Committee chairman usurping the normal functions of the State Department or the attorney general. A few weeks later, Secretary Shultz, in a burst of frustration, exploded at a Helms aide during a reception that his senator was a “constitutional ignoramus,” implying that Helms did not know what he was doing.

  In fact, Helms usually knows precisely what he is after. He just plays a very different game from most senators. Their game is pushing programs, passing legislation, making compromises. Helms’s game is the opposite: stalling action or provoking filibusters by making proposals sure to infuriate liberals such as Lowell Weicker of Connecticut and generally gumming up the works.

  “Any time they wanted to put a stick in the spokes, Helms would throw in an abortion amendment or a prayer-in-schools amendment, and Lowell Weicker would stand up and solemnly declare he was going to filibuster the rest of his life on this issue,” Howard Baker told me one morning. “To tell you the truth, Jesse Helms is a much-maligned politician from a senatorial standpoint because, more than most, if you had to do something for the sake of the Senate or the country or the party, and you went to Jesse, you could cut a deal.… Sometimes it took months. Sometimes I had to let it languish there for months, as in some State Department appointments.”7

  Helms’s favorite weapon against Shultz and the State Department has been the legislative “hold,” a senatorial courtesy which allows a single senator to delay action on some presidential appointment if he has personal objections. Most senators use the “hold” sparingly, generally when they have not had a chance to meet the nominee or attend a confirmation hearing and want more time. He
lms uses it constantly.

  In 1981, Helms pressed for a “housecleaning in the Asia bureau” of the State Department and put a five-month hold on a former associate of Henry Kissinger’s to force replacement of two other officials. The Kissinger network is a special Helms target; Helms hated Kissinger’s promotion of détente with Moscow. In 1982, Helms put such a long hold on two senior Reagan appointees to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency that their names were eventually withdrawn. In June 1985, Helms put a hold on twenty-nine ambassadorial and high-level appointments by Shultz to try to force six of his own favorites into ambassadorial spots. From July to November, he held up the appointment of a new ambassador to China. Winston Lord, another former Kissinger aide and former president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Helms did not relent until the administration paid his price: pledging not to funnel economic aid to China through the United Nations for a birth-control program that included forced abortions.

  Helms and Metzenbaum know that these tactics so anger their colleagues that they face retaliation whenever they want something. They are both usually careful not to offer much that can be held hostage by others. Indeed, Helms’s guerrilla strategy left him ill suited as Agriculture Committee chairman for the vital task of lining up votes in both parties to pass farm legislation. He had to lean on Bob Dole, an expert craftsman of compromises and coalition-builder.

  “Howard and Jesse are the skilled of the skilled, and both of them carry very few identifiable legislative bills,” remarked Alan Simpson, the Republican whip. “I can tell you that other senators go hunting with passion for the bills that Helms or Metzenbaum want. They say, ‘Well, Howard held me up,’ or ‘It came to the end and he stopped me,’ or ‘Jesse held me up. What have they got? What do they want? I want to go find it. I want to trash it. I want to filibuster it.’ And there’s not much there. It’s just a few vapor trails going through the sky.”8

  But occasionally, other senators spot and grasp at those vapor trails. One example: In early 1986, Helms was pushing a protege, James Malone, for ambassador to Belize. After a long tussle, Shultz nominated Malone only to have two Democrats, John Kerry of Massachusetts and Ed Zorinsky of Nebraska, fight the appointment. They asserted that Malone had “falsely testified” to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about some of his past dealings, and they implied there had been a conflict of interest in his relations with former clients while he held a State Department post. The committee blocked Malone’s nomination, the first such action in this century. Helms squawked that he had been sabotaged by an “anti-Reagan faction” in the State Department, but eventually he had to give up on Malone.

  So finally, the porcupine politician met porcupine power on the other side. But not without demonstrating many times that power can derive not only from mustering majorities to pass legislation, but also from the simple ability of a tenacious and cantankerous senator to withhold what large majorities want.

  5. The Power Loop: Narrow Access vs. Widening the Circle

  There’s that old line about flattery … it’s all right if you don’t inhale it and the pomp and circumstance of public office is like that.1

  —Former Defense Secretary Elliott Richardson

  Robert Strauss is an archetypal Washington figure—never elected to national office, but supremely successful as a power broker. He was national chairman of the Democratic party in its dark days after the debacle of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign; he was President Carter’s political tutor, Middle East negotiator, special trade representative, and finally, chairman of Carter’s unsuccessful 1980 campaign. In spite of his partisanship, Strauss, now a wealthy, silver-haired lawyer, has been nimble enough to stay close to high Republicans and to be tapped for bipartisan commissions by President Reagan. He is a favorite of both press and other politicians because of his political yarns and the irreverent humor he turns on himself and other politicians. Strauss is a high-stakes political player who knows the ins and outs of the power game and can laugh at them even while he’s playing the game.

  “You know, power is an interesting thing,” Strauss grinned at me one day, his face flushed with a mid-winter Florida tan. “I used to think political power was going to a political dinner. And then I thought political power was helping put on a political dinner. And then I thought it was being invited to stay at the candidate’s hotel in a convention city. And then I used to stand in the hall outside of Sam Rayburn’s suite at the political convention, and I thought that was something. And then I got to go into the living room of the candidate’s suite, and I thought that was something. And then I found out there that the decisions were all made back in the bedroom. And finally, I was invited in the bedroom with the last eight or ten fellas, and then I knew I was on the inside—until I finally learned that they stepped into the John. In the end, just me and Jimmy Carter and Hamilton Jordan made the final decision in the John.”2

  The moral of Strauss’s story is one that politicians live by. It is an element of continuity in politics unaffected by the new power game, for among all the yardsticks that Washington has for measuring power, access is primary. That is the law of organizational politics everywhere, more important probably in Washington than elsewhere because influence and persuasion are the currency of the Washington power game. A president cannot reward his top aides with handsome salaries, annual bonuses, or stock options. There is no profit-and-loss statement, no annual output of widgets to measure; that gives diamond value to access. It is both a channel for doing business and a symbol of trust and importance. It is a privilege to be treasured or a right to be jealously protected.

  In Strauss’s story, the president was at the center of the access maze. But access counts at all levels, in all power pyramids and networks: Congress, Pentagon, Federal Reserve Board, Supreme Court, White House. To politicians, lobbyists, lawyers, journalists, staff aides, and high-level policymakers, access is bread and butter. There is always another circle of power to penetrate; access is the open door, the answered phone call, a couple of minutes with a key player in a corridor or committee room. The pressures of time make access precious; it spells the chance to talk to people who make decisions, draft programs, write legislation. Without it, your case doesn’t get heard; you can’t be a player in the power game. Obviously that’s why corporations, unions, and lobbyists of all sorts pay enormous fees for prestigious Washington lawyers or pump millions into campaigning: They are buying access, if not more.

  But access in the power game is not merely physical; it is mental, too. It is not only entry to the inner sanctum; it is being in the power loop—being chosen to receive the most sensitive information, as fresh grist for the policy struggle. Being “cut out” on information, or being “blindsided” as the power lingo has it, can be crippling.

  People who think they deserve to be included, some at the very highest levels, are deeply embittered when access is denied, and often its absence is a serious omen. During Gerald Ford’s brief presidency, for example, the bad blood between Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld was an open secret. Rumsfeld kept watch over who went into the Oval Office. That nettled Rockefeller. As the 1976 election approached, frictions mounted because Rockefeller was left in the dark about whether Ford wanted him as a running mate. Separately and privately, Ford and Rockefeller took political soundings about the upcoming campaign with Clifford White, who had masterminded Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign.

  “Nelson would talk to me every once in awhile and get me to pass messages to Ford,” White told me. “I’d ride on his private plane back to New York, and we’d talk, mostly politics. He’d raise some issue and say, ‘You know, you ought to tell the president that.’ He left the impression that he wanted the message passed along, and he was having trouble doing it himself. He was very angry at Rumsfeld because he felt Rumsfeld was blocking him out. Having used staff to protect himself, Rockefeller knew how staff could keep others away. I told Rumsfeld about it, and his
response was that Rockefeller should just ask for an appointment. But Nelson did not feel that as vice president, he should have to make appointments to see the president.”3 (An old problem for American vice presidents, one which foreshadowed Ford’s later decision to pick another running mate.)

  In the Reagan years, Jim Baker, as chief of staff, took care of Vice President Bush. He had run Bush’s campaign in 1980, and he wanted to assure Bush clear access to Reagan. So, Baker arranged a private weekly luncheon between Reagan and Bush, with no one else present. It was a rich plum for Bush.

  “The president really enjoyed the Bush relationship because he’d sound off on a lot of things to George,” a Californian close to Reagan told me. Bush used the weekly luncheon as a vital channel for giving Reagan confidential advice (among other things, I was told, urging Reagan to travel to China in 1984 and to move quickly in 1985 toward a summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev). It was also a vital symbol for buttressing Bush’s claim—especially to the Republican right wing—that he is the rightful heir to the Reagan mantle in 1988.

  Some cabinet officials wangled private sessions with Reagan through subterfuges, to get around the palace guard, the top White House staff. Attorney General William French Smith and CIA Director William Casey were especially aggressive, citing their need to report privately to Reagan on national security matters, though White House aides suspected them of doing other business, too. “It was important to them and their staffs for them to be seen meeting with the President as often as possible,” one Reagan confidant remarked. “So they would think up inane reasons.”

  This may sound like Trivial Pursuit, but something much more important than ego trips or displays of importance is involved. Access, especially the exclusive access that blindsides other players in the policy game, is a trump card. Access to the president means involvement in major actions and decisions. It is especially important with a president like Reagan with whom policy is affected by who talks to him last—as his top policy advisers have learned from experience. But that kind of access matters in every presidency. Listen to George Reedy, White House press secretary to Lyndon Johnson: