Deaver’s initial response was that he knew the law and had not violated it. His argument was that he had been on the White House staff, and that McFarlane, Miller, and NSC staffers—while part of the Executive Office of the President—were technically with other agencies, not part of the White House proper. Deaver lashed out at innuendos that he was trading on his long relationship with the Reagans. “I do not believe that my friendship with them is either a commodity to be exploited by me or a legitimate basis for my being hounded in the press or anywhere else,” he declared. “In my view, the suggestion that after twenty years of selfless service I would suddenly begin to use that relationship for personal gain is not only mean-spirited but is also an implicit attack on the integrity of the president.” But later Deaver told a grand jury that he did not remember several of the specific contacts of which he was accused; that became the basis of the perjury charges against him.
The thrust of Deaver’s political defense in public was that he was not doing anything different from what a lot of other people were doing, except with higher visibility and a bigger payoff. In large measure, he was right. What The Washington Post headlined as the “Deaver syndrome” became inside-the-beltway shorthand for a wider phenomenon of high officials rapidly cashing in on high government posts. In the Reagan years, the revolving door between government service and private profit turned ever more richly. David Stockman sold a book for $2 million; Donald Regan and Jeane Kirkpatrick for about half that figure; David Fischer, Reagan’s appointments secretary, left the White House and picked up a $20,000-a-month retainer merely for helping wealthy contributors to the contra cause get in to see the president. Plenty of officials left the administration or Congress, where they were making between sixty and seventy thousand dollars a year, and became consultants or lobbyists making a quarter of a million, half a million or even a million dollars a year.
Foreign governments and businesses, angling for an inside track, became the biggest clients of nouveau riche lobbying. The Justice Department reported 7,650 foreign agent registrations in 1985, including plenty of former government officials. In one year, Justice disclosed, Japanese firms and agencies spent $23.5 million on close to a hundred American lobbyists. In recent years, they have included former Reagan National Security Adviser Richard Allen; former Carter Transportation Secretary—now Senator—Brock Adams; former Director of Central Intelligence William Colby; former U.S. Trade Representative William Eberle; Robert Gray, former inaugural cochairman for Reagan in 1981, and retired Admiral Daniel Murphy, chief of staff to Vice President Bush. Plenty of other nations paid big money. The going fee structure broke through $300,000 a year in the late 1970s and just kept climbing.63
The gold-plated lobbying, high-priced foreign contracts, and big PAC war chests all underscore the blatant influence of money in the new power game. At neither end of Pennsylvania Avenue was a strong code of ethics set by the city’s two prime political leaders, President Reagan or Speaker O’Neill. Each tolerated laxity. Both were old-fashioned politicians whose style was rewarding allies and turning a blind eye to their darker sides. Reagan’s easy tolerance was legendary. While presidential counselor Ed Meese was not formally prosecuted, many in Congress felt Meese lacked a sense of propriety in accepting loans from people whom he rewarded with government jobs. The close Senate Judiciary Committee vote on his nomination as attorney general in 1985 was a sign of disapproval. Meese was back in trouble again in 1987 for failure to make the full financial disclosures required by law. Lyn Nofziger, another Reagan intimate and former White House official, was indicted on July 23, 1987 on six charges of illegally lobbying former White House colleagues on behalf of Wedtech Corporation and Fairchild Industries, two military contractors. Echoes of Deaver. Nofziger, who wound up with Wedtech stock worth $750,000, was charged with violating the 1978 Ethics in Government Act, forbidding a former government official from lobbying his former agency within one year of leaving government.
Without a strongly voiced public philosophy from the top, the ethics of public service suffered from a general climate of laxity. Reagan’s lusty advocacy of free-enterprise individualism and go-for-the-gold sloganeering was read by many as a barely disguised doctrine of greed for politicians as well as ordinary people. To be sure, some politicians put a premium on virtue and self-restraint; many others had spasms of conscience. I have heard senators, congressmen, and lobbyists privately echo the sentiments of Ken Schlossberg, a former congressional staffer turned lobbyist, worried that excess was corrupting the game.
“I don’t mean to suggest there is something fundamentally foul about the familiar relationship between politics, campaign fund-raising, and lobbying,” he said, admitting his own part in the money game. “Like anything else, within acceptable limits the relationship can be ethical and legitimate. Unfortunately, in today’s Washington, those limits are long gone.”64
Enough senators were similarly troubled for forty-seven to cosponsor a bill to reform the campaign financing system in 1987. The bill called for limits on PAC contributions to each candidate and offered modest government subsidies to senators and their challengers, as inducement to accept voluntary ceilings on campaign spending. Its sponsor, Democrat Dave Boren of Oklahoma, said that it was needed “to protect the integrity of our election process.” By June, a fifty-three-vote majority was lined up to support the bill, but a Republican filibuster stalled action for weeks, and the Democrats had to set the reform aside.
Certainly, there have been other periods of American history when graft and corruption were more rampant than today. A mental flashback to the Nixon campaign and its sordid record of under-the-table cash payoffs and millions of dollars in illegal slush funds is a reminder that fifteen years ago things were much worse. But as Barry Goldwater asserted, the sheer volume of PAC money has made the appearance of venality seem pervasive. Without some reforms, many politicians and lobbyists are fearful that some scandal of blatant vote buying will bring a voter backlash and blow the lid off the PAC-man game and big-bucks lobbying. For the most astute Washington players clearly fear that deep-pockets, me-first politics has gotten out of hand.
* Former Senator Daniel Brewster of Maryland, a member of the Post Office and Civil Service Committee, was convicted in 1971 of accepting an unlawful gratuity—$24,500—to influence his action on postal-rate legislation.
10. Shadow Government: The Power of Staff
You skate along on the surface of things. More and more you are dependent on your staff. There is so much competition among staffs, fighting over issues …
—Senator William Cohen
At the most vulnerable and uncertain period in the saga of the monumental 1986 tax bill, Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon called an extraordinary press conference. What made it so unusual was that Packwood, chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, a politician who clearly basks in the limelight, summoned the press but not to hear him speak. Packwood turned center stage over to a Senate staff aide, a man far more accustomed to working in the shadows, as so many thousands of government bureaucrats do.
Packwood was deliberately violating one of the unwritten tribal codes of Congress—that every significant action should appear to be taken by senators and congressmen, and that staff can have strong influence on the substance of policy only if it remains unseen and unheard. Like priests entering a holy order, staffers must take an oath of anonymity: not to be seen, not to be quoted, always to push the Big Man in front of reporters and cameras. Yet here, at a moment of great importance for the tax bill, Packwood was intentionally walking away from microphones and TV cameras, turning them over to David Brockway, tacitly acknowledging Brockway’s power and importance in a way that members of Congress rarely do.
Brockway is a bright, straight-shooting, fast-talking, chubby-faced congressional civil servant in his early forties from an Ivy League milieu: history at Cornell and tax law at Harvard. His title is chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation—Joint Tax in congressional
lingo. With a touch of whimsy, someone tacked on Brockway’s door in the dismal Dickensian basement of the Longworth House Office Building, a sign: CHIEF TAX DRONE.
Brockway, who can be playful as well as serious, kept the sign, but he is much more than a green-eye-shade drone. In ten years, with Joint Tax, he has earned the trust of both houses and both parties; he is recognized not only for knowing tax law cold, but for his diplomatic touch with prideful politicians. As boss of forty highly regarded economic forecasters and tax lawyers, Brockway makes $73,600 a year. He could be earning four times that much with a private tax law firm. He tried that for five years in New York, but gave it up for public service. He also rejected academic life, fearing it would be too narrow.
“I didn’t want to wake up at fifty-five and find myself in East Podunk having written a monograph on hoe-handle production in Bratislava,” he explained. “If I could come up with some conceptual breakthrough and make a contribution, I might have done it. But I didn’t want to be an also-ran. I wanted to be on the first team. You want to be somebody, do something. This is a very hands-on thing. You’re here because it’s what’s going on. What you’re dealing with every day is interesting. The problems are important. You sort of like the excitement. What you can do in jobs like this is infinitely more than you could ever hope to do in the private sector. You have a lot of influence, even if it’s at the margin. Some of us are a little more crazy about it than others are. I mean, power—the exercise of power.”1
Normally, Dave Brockway talks so fast that he trips over his own syntax. His tongue cannot keep up with his racing brain. He rattles off figures and arcane legislative provisions at breakneck speed, then twists them this way and that, looking for new patterns like a ten-year-old playing with a kaleidoscope. The volume of material that he and his staff must master is staggering. Senators and House members cannot hope to learn it; they have to depend on staff experts. Brockway’s desk is covered with ocean swells of paper, great waves of computer printouts—tides of fat folders rolling in from subordinates while Brockway juggles phone calls from conservative Republicans or moderate Democrats.
Joint Tax is a nonpartisan committee staff which serves both House and Senate. In 1986, Brockway was flanked by wall photographs of his two rival bosses: Packwood, the Republican Senate Finance Committee chairman, and Democrat Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Each man had has his own committee staff, more political, more partisan, closer to its single boss, than Joint Tax, which serves both houses, both parties. But Brockway’s staff has the top technical expertise. For example, it was Joint Tax that put flesh and blood on the skeleton Democratic ideas for tax reform proposed by Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Congressman Dick Gephardt of Missouri in 1982. Later, Joint Tax did the spadework for Republicans—the rival package of Representative Jack Kemp and Senator Robert Kasten of Wisconsin. In fact, when the outline of Reagan’s tax plan was sent to Congress in 1985, Joint Tax did weeks of work converting it from general proposals into actual legislation.
Nonetheless, Brockway’s public appearance on April 25, the day that Packwood called him before the cameras, was a rare, dramatic, even amusing event. Dramatic because just eight days before, Packwood had ordered a halt in the Senate Finance Committee’s handling of Packwood’s first doomed tax package. So many special interest provisions had been written into that bill and so much government tax revenue lost, that it was way out of balance. Packwood had shut down business for a week and huddled with his top political adviser, Bill Diefenderfer, Finance Committee chief of staff. With Diefenderfer’s encouragement, Packwood had decided to attempt a radically new approach. He wanted to slash individual tax rates from 50 percent to 25 percent and close lots of tax loopholes. But neither Packwood nor Diefenderfer knew whether this approach would work—either financially or politically. First, they had to ask Brockway to devise an actual plan and run his computers to see if the tax books would balance. Brockway’s answers and options made him more important as an author of the ultimate tax bill than most senators. On April 24, he had spelled out some ideas to the Finance Committee in a secret session, creating a great stir. But Packwood was not yet ready to embrace the new approach. That was what made the next day’s press conference so amusing.
For close to half an hour, Packwood and Brockway did a political ritual, a Kabuki dance, in front of TV cameras. Packwood warmed up the press with preliminary remarks and then invited Brockway to the microphone for the main event, an explanation of the radical new approach to tax reform. Reporters kept trying to question Packwood, but he ducked. “Dave, where are you?” he called out. Then he admitted Brockway’s expertise to reporters: “I think it’s easier for Dave to answer your questions, and I’ll answer a few if I can. But he knows the subject better.” Brockway moved toward the lectern as Packwood danced away. The reporters called Packwood back and Brockway, who at five eleven is a shade taller than Packwood, deferentially gave up center stage. But Packwood bobbed away.
Their little seesaw game went on for about five minutes until Packwood firmly established Brockway as ringmaster. It was a deliciously ironic little byplay, a total role reversal. Normally, it is the staff aide who comes out to introduce the committee chairman and then quickly retires to the wings. This time, Packwood spent the press conference on the sidelines, leaning against a fireplace mantel, watching Brockway’s performance, and wearing a lopsided, wistful grin. Even when Packwood was drawn back, he reminded the press that “these are the options that Dave brought us” and “this is what Dave came up with on his chart [emphasis added].”
Indeed, Brockway was the star that day. He handed out a three-page memo, showing what tax deductions would have to be canceled to bring the top individual income tax rates down to twenty-five, twenty-six, or twenty-seven percent. His memo contained political dynamite, for among other things it proposed eliminating tax deductions for interest on home mortgages, charitable contributions, state and local taxes, individual retirement accounts, the passive-loss loophole, and killing the special low tax rate for capital gains. It was a tough package for wealthy and upscale voters who use tax loopholes heavily.
In front of the cameras, Brockway came across as accomplished, cool, and easy to follow. He was as smooth as a performer as he was with the arithmetic of the tax code. The new plan, Brockway said, had the same thrust as the administration’s proposal, as Bradley-Gephardt, and the House bill, “but it goes more completely to a simplified tax system with lower rates.” On business taxes, Brockway had left the Packwood bill as it was. On personal taxes Brockway had made big changes, emphasizing that his chart “was simply trying to illustrate how you might accomplish” low tax rates. When reporters asked Packwood whether there would be a higher rate for the rich, the senator parried: “Don’t know. Dave is working on that now, and he’ll come back with an answer on Tuesday.”
By so openly and dramatically acknowledging how much he was leaning on his staff, Packwood was letting the public in on the secret of staff power which is well known in Washington. Although Packwood was actually very knowledgeable about tax legislation, he was admitting for all to see that Brockway and the Joint Tax staff were his brain trust. Months before, on the House side, Danny Rostenkowski had also leaned heavily on Brockwav and on Rob Leonard, chief tax counsel of the House Ways and Means Committee, to produce a draft tax package which he candidly called the “staff option.”
Although leaning on staff for substance is hardly a new phenomenon, it is more prevalent today than it was a decade or two ago. As issues have become more intricate, complex and technical, and as members of Congress have grown busier, their staffs have become more indispensable. That is especially true of tax bills, budget bills, and high-tech aspects of defense.
Actually, Packwood was playing up Brockway’s role for his own political purposes. He was using Brockway for another classic staff function: political buffer. This is an ancient ploy in the Washington power game. A president will have a staff
aide leak an idea to the press as a trial balloon and then disavow the idea if it gets a negative reaction. A senator or congressman will send staff aides to take the political heat from lobbyists or unhappy constituents. A committee chairman will use his staff director to deliver bad news to members or to do some early bargaining. In this case, Packwood was using Brockway as a public fall guy, in case this tentative shift in tax strategy backfired. By having Brockway float the idea, first to Packwood’s own committee members and then to a wider public, Packwood left himself more room to walk away from it if it flopped. For those first couple of days, Packwood wanted the scheme labeled “Brockway’s options” rather than “Packwood’s plan.” His gambit worked. As the new package took off politically, Packwood came back out front, leading the charge and harvesting acclaim for his gutsy strategy.
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