Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  In the original arms deal, the United States agreed to provide Pakistan with “standard” Air Force electronics on the plane. To DSAA, that meant the old-model fuzz buster, which was “standard” when the deal was made. The new model was more expensive and the Air Force wanted it for American pilots. The Pakistani Air Force felt it was entitled to the new fuzz buster. DSAA refused. No one told the White House or the top Pentagon brass about the dispute. Eventually, Pakistani President Zia blew up, refusing to accept planes with old equipment. The controversy jeopardized Reagan’s goodwill gesture of agreeing to supply the planes. It took Reagan’s personal action to override the bureaucracy and set his policy back on course.

  Even so, the F-16 episode demonstrates how a bureaucracy can set policy—and protect its institutional turf—by keeping others ignorant. Change the issues, and things like that happen frequently in the Agriculture Department, Department of Energy, or other agencies, just as readily as in the Pentagon. In the case of the F-16 fuzz busters, the bureaucrats were uncovered. More often they are not, and they manage covertly to maintain their policy independence and subtly to undermine the policies that presidents think they have decided. The careerists control policy by keeping the power loop small.

  Widening the Circle

  The opposite power tactic is widening the circle—spreading information to summon political allies within the administration or in Congress, or to rally public opinion. That is the basic dynamic behind most policy news leaks that are a favorite tactic in the power game. Almost invariably, the weaker side in an internal dispute widens the circle to call for help.

  The press, especially The New York Times and The Washington Post, serves as the bulletin board on which insiders post notices to allies elsewhere. All over political Washington, government officials and members of Congress keep track of internal battles in the government by following leaks to the press.

  On Wall Street, passing insider information to others is an indictable offense. In Washington, it is the regular stuff of the power game. Everyone does it, from presidents on down, when they want to change the balance of power on some issue. Lyndon Johnson was legendary for leaking information to reporters in off-the-record sessions where he could not be quoted. Usually Johnson was trying to change the slant of Congress or the public on some issue. He did it anonymously to avoid the appearance of special pleading. Sometimes Johnson would later publicly dispute the very same information, to cloak his role as the original source.

  In my experience, that sort of practice has taken place in every White House since Johnson. The Reagan team liked to pass information, say on Soviet-built airstrips in Nicaragua or possible Soviet violations of arms treaties, to friendly senators and congressmen, disguising the origin of the information. Such leaks were usually timed to occur during congressional battles over funding for the Nicaraguan contras or the Pentagon budget: They were intended to stir up public opinion and use public pressure to influence the power game in Washington.

  Some years ago, political scientist E. E. Schattschneider of Wesleyan University spelled out the dynamics of “widening the circle” in a seminal work, The Semisovereign People. He contended that in every political conflict there are two parties: the actual participants and the audience irresistibly drawn to the scene. “Nothing attracts a crowd as quickly as a fight,” Schattschneider wrote. “Nothing is so contagious. Parliamentary debates, jury trials, town meetings, political campaigns, strikes, hearings, all have about them some of the exciting qualities of a fight; all produce dramatic spectacles that are almost irresistibly fascinating to people.”8

  So far, so normal—but Schattschneider’s special insight is that the audience determines the outcome of the fight. He cited the Harlem race riot of 1943, which began as a fistfight between a black soldier and a white policeman and mushroomed into a mob scene with looting, four hundred people injured, and millions of dollars in property damage. Schattschneider’s point was that if the audience had not joined the two-man fight, it would not have been a big deal. But as the audience joined in, the nature of the fight changed. Schattschneider’s moral: “If a fight starts, watch the crowd because the crowd plays the decisive role.”9

  That insight goes to the heart of scores of Washington power games. One example, mentioned earlier, was President Reagan’s policy toward the Philippines in late 1985. He and his White House advisers were content to roll along with President Ferdinand Marcos. But the murder of opposition leader Benigno Aquino and then the massive corruption in the 1986 Philippine election aroused and angered the American public. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana played up the vote stealing, discrediting Marcos and undermining Reagan’s policy. Lugar was allied with people inside the administration, such as Secretary of State George Shultz; in fact, Lugar had been drawn into the power game by the State Department. Lugar’s deliberate play to public opinion changed the balance of forces inside the administration and eventually changed the policy. By constantly widening the audience, Lugar changed the outcome.

  Another case study is the CIA’s covert war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Initially, the CIA, like the DSAA in the story about the F-16s for Pakistan, began secretly to arm the Nicaraguan contras. Only a few people in the government and in Congress knew what the CIA was doing. Some feared where the policy would lead, but voiced their arguments in private; CIA Director Casey kept control of policy. By early 1984, internal critics felt the CIA had overstepped its bounds—blowing up oil depots, attacking coastal installations, and finally mining Nicaraguan harbors. Then, à la Schattschneider, these dissenters appealed to a wider audience: Critics inside the government fed information to allies on Capitol Hill. Congressional intelligence committees, the first of the wider circles, joined the fight. When policy did not change, the weaker side kept leaking embarrassing disclosures until the full Congress became involved. House Democrats, fearing a wider war, blocked further military aid to the Nicaraguan contras after July 1984.

  As the administration was thrown on the defensive, President Reagan adopted the Schattschneider tactic: He took his case to a still wider audience, trying to revive aid to the contras. All pretense of a covert war was abandoned: The power game went public. Reagan threatened congressional opponents with future blame if Central America “went communist.” The fear of a political backlash among voters threatened enough fence-sitting congressmen to revive military aid in 1986. Politically, the battle followed a Schattschneider scenario: What began as covert policy and an inside policy dispute escalated into an open confrontation, driven by the logic of the Harlem race riot, each side trying to gain the upper hand by summoning reinforcements.

  This is how Washington works, again and again. Think of the challenge posed to the Reagan military buildup by the furor over scandalously priced Pentagon spare parts and faulty weapons. The Pentagon rip-off was quietly publicized through press leaks by internal critics. Public outrage reinforced congressional attempts to slow the growth of military spending.

  Even the final halt in arms dealing with Iran did not come with the first disclosure on November 3 in the Lebanese press, but six weeks later, on December 16, after Secretary of State Shultz engaged in a “battle royal” to change policy. He made public protests over a policy still running loose. National Security Adviser John Poindexter and Lieutenant Colonel North wanted to maintain secrecy, not only for self-protect ion, but also to keep control of policy and to keep their arms channels open to Iran. Shultz went public to put an end to the Iranian arms deals and to wrest control of policy away from them.

  Actually, the dynamic action that Schattschneider analyzed dates back in American history to the very formation of our political parties. Inside the Federalist administration, there was sharp debate over Alexander Hamilton’s mercantilists economic policies and his pro-British foreign policy. Thomas Jefferson and his allies opposed Hamilton but realized that Hamilton had the backing to prevail in the cabinet and possibly in Congress. So they began leaking word of the internal debates, s
eeking to involve a larger public. Eventually, the Jeffersonian faction formed the Democratic-Republican party to contest the 1798 congressional elections and ultimately the presidential election of 1800. The process of leaking, of widening the circle, led to the formation of political parties.10

  Schattschneider put his finger on one of the central laws of the Washington power game: Those who are in control of policy, whether the president and his top advisers or bureaucrats buried in the bowels of government, will try desperately to keep the information loop small, no matter what the issue; those who are on the losing side internally will try to widen the circle. As the audience grows and the circle is widened, control over policy shifts, the conflict spreads, and the very nature of the game changes. It is a Washington theme, a pattern of the past that will echo in stories and situations throughout this book, and in Washington power game for years to come.

  *The NID is more high-powered and selective than DINSUM, the Defense Intelligence Summary, put out daily by the Defense Intelligence Agency; the Chairman’s Brief, done by the joint military staff for the chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff; or the Secretary’s Morning Summary, done by the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research for the secretary of State.

  PART II

  The Players and the Playing Field

  The Players and the Playing Field

  Television news shows, newspaper headlines, and the American public all focus on the big games of Washington politics: titanic battles between White House and Congress over taxes, the president’s nominees to the Supreme Court, or aid to the Nicaraguan contras.

  But most of the time, the vast majority of players in the Washington political community are concerned with less visible games, small but important power games that do not grab the big headlines, but which dramatically affect the way that Washington works.

  These games form the political terrain that the big games are played on, the backdrop, the milieu in which political Washington moves and operates. The public senses that this world exists but knows little about it. To the players in the power game, this world is second nature: the networks of power and the odd couples; the survival politics of the constant campaign; the pork-barrel politics and the iron triangles epitomized by the Pentagon cartel; the craft of lobbying and the influence of political money; the enormous and largely hidden power of staff.

  It is hard for outsiders to fathom the dynamics of the big games without first understanding this inner world of Washington, the world that power players themselves call “inside the beltway.”

  6. Life Inside the Beltway: The Folkways of Washington

  The longer you stay, you realize that sometimes you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

  —Senator Strom Thurmond

  When a brand-new member of Congress comes to Washington, he is fresh from the heady experience of winning public acclaim for his politics and victory for himself. Then suddenly, the newcomer is a naked freshman in a world of veterans, a stranger in the political home he has won for himself. Instinct tells him immediately that no individual politician can operate as an atom. He must make his way to clusters of comrades, to small survival groups, to networks of power to which he can attach. He must come to know the folkways of the power city.

  Up close, just as from afar, Washington can seem a foreign place, even though its Capitol dome, White House lawn, and Washington Monument are familiar symbols. But to freshly minted political victors, it is suddenly a strange universe. Near the end of 1980, on the very night that Michael Deaver arrived with his family from California to begin work in the Reagan White House, his five-year-old son, Blair, asked in his innocence a question that must silently sit on many adult tongues: “Daddy, is Washington part of this world?”

  Eighteen months earlier, at the depths of his political despair in the summer of 1979, President Carter had given his own angry, frustrated answer to that question. Carter openly derided Washington as an island “isolated from the mainstream of our nation’s life.”

  In an era of Washington bashing, this is a theme that many people voice and many politicians exploit: this theme that Washington is disconnected from the country. But it is a misleading notion.

  Washington is different, yes; but it is not isolated. With high-speed jets and round-the-clock television news, the capital is closer to being on the same political wavelength as the rest of the country than at any previous time in our history. Congress works a short week in Washington (Monday afternoon to Friday morning), to give members more time with constituents; members are constantly dashing home to maintain the umbilical connection with their voters. In their obsession to keep track of grass-roots sentiment, politicians are forever putting up wet fingers to test the wind. To keep in touch, they have become compulsive consumers of opinion surveys.

  More to the point, Washington is surprisingly open to newcomers, even to those it initially intimidates. Practically everyone in political Washington has come from somewhere else. Each new political tide brings in waves of newcomers. In presidential election years, especially when the White House changes hands, the influx is wholesale. The new crowd from Georgia or California take over literally thousands of the choicest jobs in town. Even in midterm elections, one or two dozen new congressmen and senators arrive with fresh messages from the country for the old hands. The Washington political community is “almost absurdly permeable” to outside influence, suggested Nelson Polsby, a keen academic observer of American politics.

  “What other community in America,” Polsby asked, “regularly accords automatic, immediate, unshakable top status to someone from out of town, even if that someone’s public conversation consists mainly of unpleasant statements about the community and attacks on its oldest inhabitants?”1

  Indeed, Washington regularly takes in newcomers, absorbs them and makes them its own. Those who arrive to serve in Congress learn to live in two worlds—in their hometowns and states, and in the special world of the capital. The longer they stay in Washington, the more they become Washingtonians, buying homes, raising children, worrying about parking places and street crime, some even rooting for the Washington Redskins football team against their home-state teams.

  Newcomers arrive full of idealism and energy only to discover what a tiny fragment of power they grasp. To expand that fragment, they make alliances, join groups, get appointed to committees, make contacts with the press, find friends in the administration. Before they know it, they become caught up in Washington’s internal politics, involved in the rivalries of Congress and administration, consumed by their committee work, their personal specialties, their Washington careers—the clout they develop in Washington and the amount of attention they can command in the Washington power game.

  In short, people who come here to serve in the executive branch or Congress catch “Potomac fever”—the incurable addiction of wielding political power or feeling at the political center. When their president leaves office or they lose their congressional seats, very few politicians go home to retire or make money. Most stay in Washington and become lawyers, lobbyists, or consultants, because they’ve grown accustomed to Washington’s ways and to thinking of themselves as movers and shakers, and no other place has quite the same excitement and allure.

  Power, of course, is the aphrodisiac—the special brand of federal power that is Washington’s monopoly. New York and Los Angeles have enormous financial muscle. Houston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit have industrial and commercial might. Silicon Valley outside San Francisco is at the leading edge of high-tech science and electronics. Hollywood and Broadway create stardom. But Washington is where the nation’s destiny is set. The incomparable titillation for politicians and government officials is doing the public’s business and feeling that the nation is paying close attention.

  Political Washington is a special community with a culture all its own, its own established rituals and folkways, its tokens of status and influence, its rules and conventions, its tribal riv
alries and personal animosities. Its stage is large, but its habits are small-town. Members of Congress have Pickwickian enthusiasm for clubs, groups, and personal and regional networks to insure their survival and to advance their causes. They love the clubbiness of the member’s dining rooms and such Capitol Hill watering holes as the Monocle or the Democratic Club. And downtown, politicians, lobbyists and journalists like to rub shoulders and swap stories at Duke Zeibert’s, Mel Krupin’s, or Joe and Mo’s, where the movers and shakers have regular tables.

  Political parties have a social impact; most politicians fraternize mainly with colleagues from within their own party. But when I first came to the city, I did not realize how personal relationships often cut across party and ideological lines, so that conservative lions and liberal leopards who roar at each other in congressional debates play tennis on the weekends or joke together in the Capitol cloakrooms. And yet, for all their backslapping gregariousness, politicians strike me as a lonely crowd, making very few deep friendships because almost every relationship is tainted by the calculus of power: How will this help me?

  Above all, Washington is a state of mind. I’m not talking about the 3.5 million people who live in the Washington metropolitan area: the hospital administrators, shopkeepers, schoolteachers, and the people who inhabit the middle-class city of Washington and its Virginia and Maryland suburbs; rather, I’m referring to the hundred thousand or so whose life revolves around government, especially the few thousand at the peak who live and breathe politics. To the people of that world, this is the hub, the center, the focus of what Henry Adams once called “the action of primary forces.”2 The conceit of this Washington is not all that different from the conceit of Paris or Moscow.