Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  But for most members of Congress, the most important initial networks are the freshmen classes—the legislators who arrive in Congress in the same year, especially if their first election came during a political high tide. Among Democrats, the biggest and most potent freshman class in recent years was the class of ’74, the year when Watergate helped elect seventy-five new Democrats to the House. Among Republicans, the big years were the class of ’78, when the pendulum began to swing back toward the GOP, bringing thirty-six new Republicans into the House, and the class of ’80, when the Reagan sweep helped lift sixteen new Republicans into the Senate and fifty-two into the House.

  Cutting across these freshmen-class layers are state and sectional ties. The big state delegations—California, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois—marshall their troops for issues of local importance, whether military contracts or pet provisions in tax legislation. Significantly, whole state delegations, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, work together for parochial interests. The big states demand, and usually get, a set share of seats on the most powerful committees that deal with spending and taxes: Appropriations and Ways and Means in the House; Appropriations and Finance in the Senate. Then, there are broader regional coalitions, the Northeast-Midwest Caucus, or the looser clustering of western and Sunbelt politicians.

  The kind of regional splits that now divide Snowbelt (Midwest and Northeast) and Sunbelt (South and West) date back in American history to Jeffersonian times. Historian James Sterling Young has written that back then, members of Congress lived together for months in boarding houses arranged along sectional lines. Those “boarding house fraternities,” as Young called them, enforced an iron social and political discipline that would be the envy of congressional leaders today. Sectional ties are still strong, but they lack the raw power of social ostracism used in the Jeffersonian era to whip members into line.14

  For many decades, congressional committees have been important hubs of power, focusing the work of their members. Farm-state senators and congressmen gravitate to the agriculture committees; Rocky Mountain politicians want to be on the interior committees that affect land use and environment; those from big cities head for labor and education; and so on. Sitting side by side on those committees, parceling out funds from the federal pork barrel, committee members form alliances.

  The committees become the members’ power bases for larger struggles with other power groups. Each committee forms the anchor of an “iron triangle”: the committee members and their staffs, the government agencies which the committee oversees, and the interest groups and lobbyists interested in issues which the committee handles (banking, labor, health, etc.). Sometimes the legs of the triangle clash, but more often all three legs work things out to forge policy in their area and then combine forces to battle other special interest communities and their committees over slicing up the budget and setting priorities. The committees are the hubs of the political action.

  The congressional networks evoke those in high school, as Barney Frank suggested. “Everybody’s got the same networks—your class, the people you were elected with. That’s like your high school class,” Frank observed. “Then the people from your region, they’re like the people whose neighborhood you live in. And then, the people whose committee you’re on, they’re like the other students you used to go to class with. Those are the three networks that everybody has. And you may be able to pick up some over and above that.”15

  One of the most important informal networks that has developed is among younger House members who play sports or work out together in the House gym. Located in the subbasement of the Rayburn Office Building, the gym is a hideaway for members; they alone can use it. It is barred to their staffs, reporters, constituents, and most lobbyists (former members turned lobbyists can enter, but can do no serious lobbying on the premises). Senators have their own “baths.” The House gym is not large; it has a sixty-foot pool, $28,000 in Nautilus equipment, a half-length basketball court which doubles for paddleball, as well as steam, massage, and locker rooms. Some members do little more than take a steam bath, shave, shower, and go back to work refreshed; others work out daily.

  But many find that playing sports with political adversaries eases the wounds of political combat. “Ours is a very conflict-ridden profession,” Frank remarked. “I vote against you. I think you’re wrong. I mean, people in other professions are able to muffle that better. We are forced daily to conflict with each other. The gym promotes some stability, which is very important. But also, it’s an information kind of thing. You get to know what people are like, what’s important to them. You get information about what’s going on with this, what’s going on with that. It’s that kind of chatter. And occasionally you will talk about some specific bill.”16

  Frank, a Jewish bachelor in his late forties whose pudgy cheeks once bulged around horn-rimmed glasses, lost seventy pounds through strict dieting and weight lifting. Now, at two hundred pounds, he has shoulders like a New England Patriots tackle. He mixes with the other side. One of his weight-lifting partners is Vin Weber, a staunch Republican right-winger from Minnesota and from the far end of the ideological spectrum. That is typical of the gym. The regular pickup basketball games are bipartisan: plenty of hard-court razzing goes on, but serious partisanship is left off the court. “Republicans and Democrats play together,” says Thomas Downey, a Long Island Democrat with a snappy jump shot. “It’s a great way to release tension.”

  Political Odd Couples

  In my years of reporting in Washington, one of the more intriguing discoveries has been the number of warm political relationships that develop across party lines and across ideological disagreements. Sometimes such relationships are nurtured by common home state or other special interests; other links are more personal. The way we talk and think about most politicians is too stereotyped to account for people’s fluidity and practicality. The fiery rhetoric of political campaigns and the shorthand of many press reports encourages the popular assumption that Democrats have virtually no use for Republicans and that liberals and conservatives are constantly at each other’s throats. Some of that is for show; in fact, inside the beltway, political labels are frequently transcended. Some party scraps are genuine and passionate, but just as often, tolerance and partnership work extremely well across party or philosophical lines.

  To a degree, this reflects the mentality of professional politicians, who know that with different issues, people change sides so that there is no point in making permanent enemies of anyone. “Most people think of politics as dirty and cutthroat,” Henry Waxman, a California liberal, remarked to me one afternoon. With a gesture beyond the beltway, he added: “People out there don’t understand that politicians can disagree and still get along personally. They don’t understand the attitude we have toward each other as professionals.”17

  In short, the best politicians know they have to deal with a spectrum of conflicting views and that personal comity is a vital lubrication to the governmental process. Occasionally, friendships develop from simple human chemistry. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Paul Laxalt of Nevada, from the left and right ends of the Senate, sometimes play tennis together and enjoy each other as friends. In other cases, amicable relations develop from professional respect. Other political opposites enjoy close friendships, such as conservative columnist Robert Novak and liberal humorist Art Buchwald, staunch Republican Al Haig and ardent Democrat Joseph A. Califano, conservative writer William Safire and left-of-center commentator Daniel Schorr. Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill and House Republican leader Bob Michel were longtime golfing partners.

  Sometimes personal relationships develop from the fact that people at the peak of the power pyramids inevitably must deal with one another, regardless of differing views and clashing functions. The bond that has developed between Nancy Reagan and Katharine Graham, chairman of The Washington Post Company, is an example. Every president since John Kennedy, except Richard Nixon
, has dined at Mrs. Graham’s house. She was one of the first people in Washington to entertain Ronald Reagan after his election in 1980. But her personal relationship with Mrs. Reagan dates back to Reagan’s time as governor of California.

  “Nancy and I had a mutual friend who said we would like each other and then I met them [the Reagans] at a governors’ conference where I was at one of those press seminars,” Katharine Graham told me. “I saw them there in California two or three or four times, and said, wouldn’t they call when they came to Washington. One of the times they came, I did say, ‘Would you and the governor come to dinner since you’re going to be here?’ And she said, ‘No, we can’t because Ronnie’s giving a speech that night.’ And I said, ‘Oh, well, that’s too bad. Would you like to come anyway, and I’ll have some people for you?’ And she, being in this old-fashioned mold, somebody’s wife, thinks you never want to see her, said, ‘Oh, no, let’s not do that—you don’t want me.’ And I just laughed and said, ‘Nancy, we’re supposed to get over that. Now, of course I want you. You come to dinner and then if Ronnie wants to come after the speech, fine. It doesn’t matter.’ And so she came and I gave a dinner for her.”18

  That episode, Mrs. Reagan’s friends say, created a bond, and the two women have lunched half a dozen times a year during the Reagan presidency, in spite of the Post’s endorsements of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale and periodic fusillades between Mrs. Graham’s paper and the Reagan White House.

  “Celebrity women, powerful women have a common bond—of vulnerability, of concern for their families, of being treated unfairly by the press, of being survivors,” remarked Nancy Reynolds, a longtime friend of the Reagans who worked for several years for Mrs. Reagan, both in California and in the White House. “And I think Nancy admires Kay Graham, but with a caveat that Nancy knows the Post is going to write a lot of things Nancy isn’t going to like. And she accepts that and knows, I think, or feels that Kay is separate from all the negative things that the Post might write.”19

  The relationship has not been without scars. In 1982 after Colman McCarthy, a liberal Post columnist, wrote a biting review of Mrs. Reagan’s ghostwritten book on the foster grandparents program, Graham sent the first lady a “note of sympathy.” During the 1984 reelection campaign, they fell out of touch over some misunderstanding and not until the summer of 1985 did they get back together. With some nudging from Mike Deaver, Mrs. Reagan’s closest confidant in the White House, the first lady spent a weekend at Graham’s summer cottage on Martha’s Vineyard with other celebrities, and the two women went walking together on the beach.

  In Congress, “odd couples” are fairly common. Capitol Hill’s slashing rhetoric is sometimes little more than political soap opera, or what Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming colorfully calls “doing the goddamned sage-chicken dance,” a ritual mating dance where the sage cock inflates his chest with air, a nice image for politics. But even when the battles are genuine and leave feelings raw, the best politicians take them philosophically, always careful in victory not to wound their foes so badly that there is a residue of bitterness. They temper their disagreements with civility. For one of the main axioms of the power game is to keep the lines open, because you may need your foes of today as allies tomorrow.

  Rarely has that axiom been more graphically illustrated than in the spring of 1986, by Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon. In one of the most dramatic political reversals in recent congressional history, Pack-wood did a U-turn on the tax-reform bill. He went from a bill that protected loophole after loophole for special business interests to one that slammed shut a lot of loopholes on personal tax shelters and radically reduced the top tax rates. His somersault literally turned his alliances upside down. He left a nucleus of supporters from oil-and-gas states (Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, Russell Long of Louisiana, David Boren of Oklahoma), and shifted to a proreform nucleus of moderates (Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, and John Chaffee of Rhode Island).

  “What you discover is that there are no permanent friends, no permanent enemies—just temporary alliances,” Packwood pragmatically admitted. “It just doesn’t do you any good to bear grudges in this business. The person who may be against you this week, you’re going to need next week.”20

  As a moderate Republican, Packwood has not been a tough point man against Democrats; that made his turnaround easier politically. But other politicians with more partisan reputations—Senate Democrats such as Gary Hart of Colorado, Alan Cranston of California, and Joseph Biden of Delaware—have also quietly developed bipartisan partnerships that are little known and more intriguing. Sometimes odd couples are deliberately created; sometimes they are fused in the suddenness of events.

  Alan Simpson, a Republican whose fund of humor has made him a modern Will Rogers, recalls arriving in 1979 as a freshman senator from Wyoming and being immediately thrust into three political odd couples. He served on three Senate subcommittees opposite three liberal Democrats with presidential ambitions: Cranston, Hart, and Ted Kennedy.

  “I suddenly thought, ‘My God, I could be washed away in this process,’ ” he recalled, rubbing his chin. “ ‘Here’s three guys who want to be president.’ I went to each one of them and said, ‘Look—don’t you use this committee for your quest, and I won’t use it to embarrass you in any way.’ ”21

  Simpson had to deal with Kennedy on immigration issues, Cranston on veterans issues, and Hart on the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. His partnership with Cranston became so effective that as the rival Republican and Democratic whips in the Senate since 1981, they have defused many partisan showdowns.

  Fate gave Simpson time to feel his way with Kennedy and Cranston, but not with Hart.

  Ten weeks after Simpson had arrived in the Senate, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident occurred. Hart and Simpson, respectively the chairman and ranking opposition member of the Senate Subcommittee on Nuclear Regulation, were quickly flown by helicopter to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

  On the helicopter, Simpson eyed Hart, wondering whether Hart was going to seize on the nuclear accident and exploit it to build his presidential bid. “Are you going to make a circus out of this nuclear thing?” he asked Hart.

  “Now, who told you that?” Hart replied.

  “I don’t know,” Simpson parried. “But I’m brand new here, and I’m not ready for a circus. I don’t even know what this issue is. I don’t even know where the hell I’m going today.

  “Well,” Hart began reassuringly, “why don’t you watch and see how I do it, and I’ll bet you won’t be embarrassed in the process. ‘Cause you and I are going to be in this deep.”

  By Simpson’s account, Hart was good to his word and a wonderful companion, even though other senators call Hart a loner. “He’s pleasant to work with,” Simpson said. “He loves a good joke, has a very infectious belly laugh. He practically gets tears in his eyes when he gets into one. And then he’ll tell one himself.”

  On substance, Simpson found Hart bending over backward to keep him informed and to make the subcommittee report thorough and accurate. “But Gary called me every time he had an interview or went on Meet the Press,” Simpson recalled. “Every time we were on the data link with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, he included me in everything. He never put stuff in front of the committee that was totally political. He and I managed bills on the floor together, worked closely together.” Sometimes, Hart would let Simpson take the lead. “Instead of his just sitting off and sniping,” Simpson observed, “we actually got our work done.”22

  An even more unlikely political pair are Joseph Biden, a passionate Democratic liberal, and Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina Dixiecrat who became a Republican two decades ago. Thurmond, of course, won his spurs fighting for Dixie, stalking out of the 1948 Democratic convention under the banner of states’ rights, leading his own presidential splinter ticket. Biden, four decades younger and first elected to the Senate in 1972, got his own reputation for brashness, a quick lip, and roug
h-and-tumble battling. On many issues they began poles apart—provisions of the 1982 Voting Rights Act and Senate approval of Ed Meese as attorney general and Bradford Reynolds as his deputy among them. But their disagreements have been clean and courteous, and they have cooperated on important legislation.

  When Strom Thurmond became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1981, Biden, as the committee’s ranking Democrat, went to him privately and offered a deal: no parliamentary tricks, no savage sallies or gambits to embarrass Thurmond, in return for a solid chance for both sides to air the issues. Biden also gave Thurmond a ninety-page draft of a crime bill that Biden and his staff had developed, offering to let Thurmond become its main sponsor. That was not only courtesy to a committee chairman but an act of political pragmatism, because Biden knew that no crime bill would pass without Thurmond’s backing. Initially, Thurmond was distrustful.

  “He just sat, you know, very cautious, and listened,” Biden recalled. “Then he finally figured out I was serious, that he could work with me. I told him—and I told my Democratic colleagues—‘I’ll make a deal: If you keep your right-wing guys from killing this bill, I’ll keep the liberals off the bill. And if you and I stand fast and agree on what we can agree on and just hold firm, we can pass this thing.’ From that point on, Strom Thurmond has never, never, never once suckered me or done any of the old chicanery stuff. And I don’t play around with him. I kid him, but he knows I do it with affection.”23

  The version from the Thurmond side is much the same. Thurmond thinks so highly of Biden that he has invited Biden to appear at Thurmond’s testimonials. Their toughest moment probably came on the night before the final Senate voting on the 1981 crime legislation. A Thurmond aide said the two men worked all night alone, hammering out final compromises.