Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  Example: The city and its suburbs are encircled by a sixty-four-mile freeway loop known as the beltway (U.S. 495). The political community of Washington talks as if that beltway formed a moat separating the capital from the country. “Inside the beltway,” political Washington’s favorite nickname for itself, is a metaphor for the core of government. Hardly a dinner or a meeting goes by without someone observing that the mood inside the beltway on Iran or a new Soviet-American summit or on protectionist measures is running ahead of the country, or that the president, any president, is in trouble inside the beltway but not “out there,” with a wave of the hand toward the boondocks.

  The distance between Washington and the rest of the country is partly a matter of language. Jargon is a vital element of the Washington game. Washington jargon is impenetrable and often deliberately so, to exclude all but the initiated.

  For starters: Unless you’re President Reagan, you can’t be a major player in budget politics unless you know the difference between constant dollars and current dollars, between outlays and obligations, between the baseline and the out-years; you can’t enter the arena of arms control without some grasp of launchers, throwweight, and RVs* If you’re an insider, you will have mastered such trivia as knowing that the shorthand for the Department of Housing and Urban Development is pronounced “HUD,” but that the nickname for the Department of Transportation is pronounced “D-O-T” and never “dot.” You will also know that bogeys are the spending targets the secretary of Defense gives the armed services and that beam-splitters are the nearly invisible TelePrompTers that flash the text of a speech to the president as he turns his head from side to side.

  The split between capital and country also reflects a different awareness of how Washington really works. The veterans know that the important, knock-down, drag-out battles in Congress usually come on amendments to a piece of legislation, not on final passage of the bill. They understand that when some member rises on the floor of the House or Senate and says that a piece of legislation is a “good bill” and that he wants “to offer a perfecting amendment,” he is really getting ready to gut the legislation. Sometimes an amendment is a complete substitute bill with quite different impact and meaning, known in the trade as a “killer amendment.” That’s the way the legislative game is played.

  In many other ways, political perceptions differ sharply inside the beltway and out in the country. For example, Thomas Foley of Washington State, the House majority leader, is hardly a household word. But in the Washington political community, Republicans as well as Democrats respect him as an effective leader with sound judgment who can hold northern liberals and southern conservatives in a Democratic coalition and also work well across party lines. A large comfortable Saint Bernard of a man, Foley has on occasion shrewdly blunted the force of Republican attacks and at other times steered Democrats toward compromises with Reagan.

  Conversely, New York State Congressman Jack Kemp has made a national splash with his tax issue, but political insiders regard him as generally less influential with other House Republicans than Trent Lott of Mississippi, the House Republican whip. “Lott swings plenty of votes,” one Reagan White House strategist confided to me. “You can’t count on Kemp to bring that many members with him.” Over in the Senate, Jesse Helms is the booming public voice of the New Right but when it comes to working major issues with other Republicans, James McClure of Idaho, a quieter legislator, is given more credit as the leader of Senate conservatives. In 1984, McClure, not Helms, was the conservatives’ candidate for majority leader. In short, Kemp and Helms are the national figures with mass appeal; Lott and McClure are rated by their peers as more solid performers. The most striking modern case of a politician who was no great shakes as a congressman or senator but who won a mass following—and the presidency—was Jack Kennedy.

  A City of Cocker Spaniels

  What really sets Washington apart, of course, is the heady brew of power and prominence. Washington combines the clout of the corporate boardroom and military command with the glamour of Hollywood celebrities and Super Bowl stars. That magnetism and the stakes of the battle are what draw armies of politicians, lobbyists, lawyers, experts, consultants, and journalists to Washington. It is a self-selected group, ambitious and aggressive, marked by collective immodesty. Politicians love to be noticed, and they take their notices very seriously, assuming their own importance and grasping for daily confirmation in the attention of the press and television.

  Many people treat the word politician as a synonym for hypocrisy, but I believe most politicians come to Washington largely motivated by a sense of public service, and usually with a deeper interest in policy issues than is felt by people back home. Most politicians really want to contribute to the public weal, as protectors of their home districts or exponents of some cause; their early motiviation is the ideal of better government. Most people who make a career of government could earn a good deal more money in other walks of life. And they toss into the bargain the loss of personal privacy for themselves and for their families. Not all politicians are that self-sacrificing, but I believe a majority are; only a small minority seem charlatans. Their agendas differ greatly, but if one urge unites them all—and really makes Washington tick—it is the urge for that warm feeling of importance.

  That ache for applause and recognition shows in the weighty tread of senators moving onto the floor and glancing upward for some sign of recognition from the galleries. It shows in the awkward jostling for position as a group of congressmen approach the television cameras and microphones outside a hearing room, or after a White House session with the president. I have marveled at it in the purgatorial patience of politicians with endless handshakes, speeches, receptions. I have sensed it, too, in the flattered eagerness of corporate executives arriving at a White House dinner in their limousines. And I have felt it in the smug satisfaction of a select group of columnists and commentators called to a special briefing from the president in the family theater of the White House. None of us is completely immune to that siren song of being made to feel important.

  “Washington is really, when you come right down to it, a city of cocker spaniels,” Elliott Richardson once remarked. Richardson, a Republican Brahmin from Boston, held four cabinet positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations and after a few years out of the limelight felt the ache for attention badly enough to make an unsuccessful try for the Senate.

  “It’s a city of people who are more interested in being petted and admired than in rendering the exercise of power,” Richardson contended. “The very tendency of the cocker spaniel to want to be petted and loved can in turn mean that to be shunned and ignored is painful, and there is a tendency in Washington to turn to the people who are in the spotlight and holding positions of visibility at a given time.”3

  In their collective vanity, the power players are willing to endure long hours of boredom to bathe in the roar of the crowd. Talking with me in his Senate study one rainy afternoon about the vanity of the political breed, Senator Charles McC. Mathias, the Maryland Republican, recalled an incident at an American Legion dinner in Washington years ago. As Mathias arrived, he saw two fellow Republican warhorses—Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts with his arm in a sling and Everett Dirksen hobbling on crutches.

  “It was one of those many functions which you attend but where your absence might not even be noted,” Mathias observed. “Saltonstall and Dirksen had valid excuses [to stay away], but they came anyway. And I thought: Is there never surcease from this demand and this compulsion to get out to these things? But of course, they would be put at the head table and introduced, and the spotlight would fall upon them, and the people from Massachusetts and Illinois would wave their napkins in the air when their names were mentioned, and the band would play their state anthems. It is all utterly meaningless, and yet those two wanted to be part of the act, and the applauders wanted the act, too.”4

  Narcissism is not too strong a label for the Washin
gton syndrome. Political Washington is consumed with its own doings: Who’s up, who’s down, did you hear what the president said over an open mike, how’s the tax bill doing, should we have bombed Libya, what’s next? Surely ranchers in Texas, car makers in Detroit, textile executives in South Carolina, or doctors and lawyers anywhere are equally self-absorbed. But Washington, rivaled perhaps by Hollywood, allows itself the collective vanity of assuming that people elsewhere are fascinated with its doings.

  “The capital, with its curious mixture of high ideals and hard work and base ambition and blind vanity, becomes the universe: If I am so famous that The [Washington] Post is writing about me, then, of course, the whole world is reading it,” observed former Secretary of State Alexander Haig,5 with the wry detachment of hindsight, once he was out of office.

  “Going into the White House every day to work, seeing the iron gates open and then the iron gates shut, you’re in an almost-unreal world,” Carter White House aide Stuart Eizenstat commented. “There is something almost unnatural about the way in which people treat you. There’s a certain unnatural deference. You have microphones thrust in your face and cameras watching you when you make a speech. You begin to think, perhaps, you’re more important than you thought you were when you came into the job. All of these things have the potential, if you’re not careful, to make you again feel that you have the kind of unbridled influence to do that which you will, that somehow you’re a voice of wisdom. And I think that one has to fight against that feeling.”6

  Washington is a city mercurial in its moods, short in its attention span, and given to fetishes. Events flash and disappear like episodes in a soap opera, intensely important for a brief period and then quickly forgotten. Like a teenager, the political community lurches from one passion to the next, seized for a season by the Gramm-Rudman budget-balancing act, later consumed by a battle with Japan over trade sanctions, or gossiping madly over the millionaire antics of White House officials turned lobbyists.

  But whatever the twist and turns, the themes are invariably political. People visiting from New York or Los Angeles complain that Washington is a guild town with just one industry and one preoccupation. New York has the intensely self-preoccupied worlds of Wall Street, Broadway, publishing, and advertising, and Chicago with its corporate headquarters, grain trade, steel industry, and distribution centers. Each city has variety, while Washington, in spite of its growing world of art, theaters, opera and symphony, has only one passion.

  “it’s a one-subject town,” lamented Austin Ranney, a political scientist from California who spent a decade at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “I don’t know how many dozens or hundreds of dinner parties I went to, largely as an outsider, an observer, and yet I almost never had a conversation about music, about novels, or very briefly about anything except the weather. It was always politics, politics, politics, of the insider variety.”7

  Hugh Newell Jacobson, a prominent Washington architect, protested to Barbara Gamarekian, a New York Times colleague of mine, “This is the only city where you can go to a black-tie dinner [in a private home], and there at the foot of the table is a television set up to catch a press conference!”8

  In Washington, people take their own importance so much for granted that their first instinct with a new book is to turn immediately, not to the first page, but to the index to see whether they are mentioned. Yet very few politicians will admit in print how much they hunger for public recognition. Paradoxically, one who did was Paul Tsongas, a Massachusetts Democrat, who had impressed me during his ten years in the House and Senate as less driven by vanity than most. Tsongas had voluntarily retired for family and health reasons. But after retirement, he confessed to me what “heady stuff” it was to win the title of U.S. Senator. His mind flashed back to the moment on election night 1978 when over the radio in his car came the first word that he was the likely winner, and a campaign aide blurted out, “The goddamned senator!”

  “It was so overwhelming to have that word next to my name,” Tsongas said, a bit of wonder in his quiet voice even years later. “It just seemed so unlikely to everybody in the car, and yet from that moment on, that title attaches. And the respect accorded to that title, irrespective of person, is enormous, and you begin to think of yourself in those terms. To a lot of senators that title is life. I’ve seen people who have been defeated and who basically never got over having lost the title.”9

  In a very different vein, Newt Gingrich, a voluble, publicity-prone junior Republican from Georgia, admits to the exultation of making it to Washington. “There are very few games as fun as being a congressman,” he gushed one evening over a Chinese dinner. “Talk to guys who spent Christmas break traveling the world. Talk to people who landed on an aircraft carrier or went to see the space shuttle launched or had dinner at the White House or got to talk to people from The New York Times. There’s a sense of being at the center of things. This is the great game!”10

  Congress: High School Networks

  Great game or not, the individual congressman is often isolated and feeble. Without the echo and support of like-minded young Republican conservatives, Gingrich would be less exultant. In self-defense, politicians naturally band together in power networks, either within the executive branch, on Capitol Hill, or bridging the two. Obviously, the two main political parties are the basic networks of power. But the weak, loose structure of American political parties makes other networks essential. In Congress, individual members are far less creatures of party than are their counterparts in European legislatures, whether the British Parliament, the French National Assembly, or the Canadian House of Commons, where parties provide strong organizational spine. Despite a bit of a comeback in Congress in this decade, American parties are more amorphous than they have been earlier in our history. And so, members make up their own alliance games.

  “Almost everyone in government, whether he works on Capitol Hill or in the bureaucracy, is primarily concerned with his own survival,” observed Charles Peters in a knowledgeable little book, How Washington Really Works, which describes the webs that politicians spin for their own safety and advancement. “He wants to remain in Washington or in what the city symbolizes—some form of public power. Therefore from the day these people arrive in Washington they are busy building networks of people who will assure their survival in power.”11

  The most natural networks are the product of generations, not the normal twenty-year generations but political generations based on when each new batch of politicians arrived in the city. California political scientist Nelson Polsby compares the Washington political community to a formation of geological strata, each new political generation layering on top of the preceding ones, each providing identity and a network of connections to its members.12 It is an apt image. The sediment of old generations hardens because so many politicians remain in Washington. Today, there are networks of older Democrats from the Kennedy and Johnson years, Republicans from the Nixon and Ford administrations, Carter Democrats and more recently the new generation of Reaganite and New Right Republicans with their conservative caucuses, think tanks and political action committees.

  These generational clusters are neighborhoods in the political city. Lasting alliances get forged in the crucible of political campaigns or service in the battles between one administration and its Congress. “You have a special connection with people who are alumni of the various political wars you have fought in,” remarked Dennis Thomas, former legislative strategist in the Reagan White House. Ed Rollins, another Reagan political strategist, underscored the need for such networks for sheer survival, citing Anne Burford, Reagan’s first environmental director, as someone who lost her job because she had no network of allies.

  “You just really need the network, which means, in essence, that you’ve got to give up a little bit of your independence, a little bit of your turf and not make wars over every little issue,” Rollins explained. “Sooner or later, you’re going to need the suppo
rt of some entity or another. Anne Burford is an example of people who have gotten wiped out by not having allies. She came here as a conservative, carried out Reagan’s agenda. When she got in trouble, there was no one to come to her rescue. She had not built coalitions with White House staffers. She had not built coalitions with people on the Hill. She had not built coalitions with the conservative movement. She didn’t build relations within her agency.”13

  In the power fraternity, political alliances are vital not only for survival but to promote policies, to lobby former colleagues, or to play the more personal game of “careers,” advancement up the ladder for the in-and-outers who ride the ebb and flow of partisan politics upward with each generation.

  Many of the most potent networks are factions of the two parties. Senator Jesse Helms and his right-wing Republican colleagues use the Steering Committee as their network to push issues or pet nominees for top administration positions, or to block the legislative initiatives of moderate Republicans or Democrats. The Steering Committee, and other networks like it, are called prayer groups, so nicknamed because they are not official arms of the Senate, just as prayer groups are usually not official arms of the church. In the House, Republicans have political fraternities, such as The Chowder and Marching Society and S.O.S. (the initials are secret). But the rough policy counterpart to the Steering Committee among House Republicans is the Conservative Opportunity Society, formed by partisans of supply-side, tax-cutting economics and less government. Moderate Republicans join the Wednesday Club, which lunches on Wednesday.

  House Democrats have their own splinter groups. The liberal wing of the House Democratic Caucus gravitates to the Democratic Study Group and the Arms Control Caucus. Conservative southern Democrats (who call themselves boll weevils because, like the cotton weevil, they bore from within the boll) have formed the Conservative Democratic Forum. The list of networking groups goes on—many of them crossing party lines: the black caucus, women’s caucus, Hispanic caucus, automotive caucus, footwear caucus, space caucus, military-reform caucus, textile caucus, even the mushroom caucus.