Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  By 1989, the Democrats were in control of the Senate, and Sam Nunn, the highly respected senator from Georgia, was in charge of Tower’s confirmation. I had just arrived on the Hill and started to pick up signals that there was going to be a problem. I was developing sources among the senators, many of whom I’d known because they had been frequent visitors to the White House over the years. There were reports of heavy drinking and infidelity. All of a sudden, what should have been an easy confirmation was becoming a major crisis for the new administration; the story accelerated so quickly that Nightly News wanted to have it on the air competitively every night.

  As the newest of the Senate correspondents working against senior players from the other networks, including Bob Schieffer from CBS and Jim Wooten from ABC, my skills were quickly tested. It was a very fast lesson in how different this beat would be from the White House. I found myself following senators underground on the Senate’s internal subway to catch them in an off moment, and wandering through the hallways to grab people after hearings and caucuses—most often without a camera, because these were places camera crews could not go.

  Luckily my training as a police reporter in Philadelphia kicked in once again. In addition to getting to know secretaries, who, as at the White House, zealously guarded their bosses, on the Hill there were hundreds of knowledgeable legislative aides who were often willing to talk. And you could literally trail the main players themselves, the primary sources. I loved every minute of it. It was a reporter’s dream, exactly as Tom Pettit had forecast.

  I quickly learned that, contrary to what the president and his aides thought, the opposition to John Tower was not driven entirely by politics. In the case of Sam Nunn, it came instead from a deeply felt, ingrained sense of duty. Nunn, a dedicated military expert, had very strongly held views about what was deemed appropriate and inappropriate behavior. His nightmare was that some figurative red phone would ring in the middle of the night to inform John Tower that a nuclear warhead was flying toward Washington, and Tower might be in a compromising position—or too drunk to respond properly.

  Part of my job was also to separate the wheat from the chaff and make sure that everything we reported was accurate and fully sourced. For instance, there was one story circulating about Tower and a ballerina who danced on a piano; it had all sorts of permutations, and it was probably wrong—certainly it had not been corroborated. So as we covered Tower’s nomination in that overheated environment, I often found myself calling Bill Wheatley and saying, “We don’t want to report this; it’s not true.” Before the advent of multiple cable networks, you could easily kill a bad story with one call. This was long before the Internet facilitated a constant flow of rumor and gossip. In the 1980s it was a lot easier to filter out inaccurate information. These days, with twenty-four-hour cable news and talk, it is more complicated. In fact, there is a rarely acknowledged but implicitly different standard for what we can say on cable talk shows, as compared to Nightly News or the Today program.

  Tower’s nomination set the tone for my years on the Hill. Despite my years covering controversial figures like Mayor Frank Rizzo in Philadelphia and Governor Marvin Mandel in Maryland, and the Carter and Reagan administrations, the Tower debate was the first time I’d encountered scandal of such a highly personal nature. The Iran-Contra scandal had involved the nation’s policy on terrorism, and the appropriate roles for the National Security Council and the CIA—big issues, like whether a rogue group inside the White House could circumvent congressional authority. But the Tower scandal raised different questions. Instead of affairs of state, these were alleged affairs of the heart. Personal reputations were at risk; and by their very private nature, the charges were almost impossible to verify.

  There was a signal moment when John Tower went on the David Brinkley program on ABC one Sunday morning. Sam Donaldson, one of the panelists, raised the issue of Tower’s alleged womanizing. The twice-married Tower bristled and turned the question around, asking Cokie Roberts, also on the panel, to define “womanizing.” Paraphrasing the Supreme Court decision on the definition of obscenity, she replied, “I think most women know it when they see it.”

  The exchange turned the debate. It quickly became clear that Sam Nunn was not going to let Tower be confirmed, despite the beleaguered nominee’s extraordinary public pledge, on that same program, to abstain henceforth from what he quaintly called “beverage alcohol.” Tower’s nomination was defeated along party lines, 53 to 47. John Tower was only the ninth cabinet appointee in U.S. history to be rejected by the Senate.

  The Bush team was badly shaken, because this was the first defeat for a new presidency, and it signaled to the Hill that the new administration could blink first in a showdown. In a big game of poker, the president had lost the first hand. Fortunately for him, he had a highly credible and politically popular person ready to substitute for Tower—Dick Cheney, then a member of Congress from Wyoming. Cheney had experience on the House Intelligence Committee, and had been chief of staff to President Ford. I had covered him as a member of Congress for several years, and then gotten to know him because he was a friend and former colleague of Alan’s from the Ford years. His nomination zipped through.

  At the time, Cheney, the number two man in the House Republican leadership, was thought of as fiscally conservative but otherwise middle-of-the-road. Even though he was more of a social conservative than many people probably realized, his association with Gerald Ford had given him the stamp of moderation. Unlike some of the more partisan members of the House, he had Democratic friends, including Tom Foley, majority leader and later speaker of the House. Cheney’s elevation to the cabinet had the unintended consequence of changing the history of Congress. As the Republican whip, his nomination as defense secretary sparked a battle among House Republicans hoping to replace him. Among those eager to move up was a backbencher named Newt Gingrich.

  Gingrich and a few of his more rebellious colleagues were smart, impatient, and bold. They seized the opportunity of Cheney’s departure to challenge the more moderate approach of Republican leader Bob Michel. Gingrich and his cronies were chafing at what they considered decades of Republican passivity in the face of Democratic hegemony on the Hill. They felt that Michel had not been ideological enough, and that Cheney’s designated successor would not challenge the House leadership forcefully enough. The Democrats had been dismissive and abusive to the Republican minority for years, and now the Republicans saw their chance to get even.

  Gingrich used his new power to do something that had been previously unthinkable—he brought down the speaker of the House, a Democrat. Gingrich had been orchestrating an ethics complaint against Jim Wright, the speaker, for accepting gifts and outside income, including book royalties. One of Wright’s top aides was also revealed to be a convicted felon who had once assaulted a young woman. After a yearlong ordeal, Jim Wright resigned dramatically in the “well” of the House, asking in a fiery speech that “this period of mindless cannibalism in the House” cease. Wright was the first speaker in history to be forced out because of scandal.

  Suddenly, Newt Gingrich was a powerful force—the guy who had taken down the speaker of the House. Although lacking in seniority, he had growing support among the Republican rank and file to make a run at the leadership post himself.

  We could barely keep up with all the political drama. In the Speaker’s Lobby you could mingle with members and send a message onto the floor to ask someone to come out and talk. Again, the only frustration was that all this wasn’t visible to the cameras, so I had to find ways to convey the atmosphere without pictures. The mission was to tell a story, and illustrate it by creating a mini-video, trying to capture the excitement of a lengthy House debate within the time constraints of a network TV news story. The challenge was to do it without losing context or distorting the substance of the story.

  Critical to making this work was my bureau chief, Tim Russert, who had worked for New York’s legendary Senator Pat Moynihan
and loved the Hill the way I was learning to. He was deeply involved in shaping the coverage on Nightly News, briefing the New York producers each morning about which of the day’s developments would likely prove to be the most important.

  There were fights over gun control, access to public and private buildings for the disabled, extending civil rights protection to women, affirmative action, tax increases, tax cuts, the savings and loans scandals, and public housing rip-offs. There were investigations into sexual improprieties and financial skullduggery. When it came to judicial confirmations, Republicans were still seething over what had happened during the Reagan years, when Judge Robert Bork had been nominated and rejected for the Supreme Court. Reagan, ever the pragmatist, got over it immediately. The Senate judiciary chairman at the time, Joe Biden, has since recounted a remarkable one-on-one meeting he had with Reagan shortly after Bork was defeated. Biden says he walked into the Oval Office and Reagan congratulated him on having defeated his nominee. Biden demurred, saying he was sorry to see anyone suffer defeat this way, but that the Democrats just felt Bork wasn’t the right person.

  Reagan said, “Well, let’s move on. Who would you like to see?’”

  Biden replied that as the head of the Judiciary Committee, it wasn’t his role to decide, but the president’s. “Whomever you select, we’re going to take a close look at,” he told Ronald Reagan.

  To which the president responded, “Well, let’s go through the list.”

  What happened next completely contradicts conventional wisdom about Reagan being disengaged or unwilling to compromise. Biden reports that he and the president then sat together and went through a list of possible nominees, jointly vetting them. Finally, Reagan suggested Judge Anthony Kennedy, a moderate who was on the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California. Biden said, “That’s a good name; assuming that we go through his writings and he’s okay, that can fly.” That’s how Justice Kennedy, who has since become a crucial swing vote with another Reagan appointee, Sandra Day O’Connor, got to the Supreme Court.

  Ronald Reagan had been able to move on after Bork was rejected, but rank-and-file Hill Republicans could not. They wanted to pay back their perceived enemies on the Senate Judiciary Committee and the liberal interest groups who worked closely with the committee’s Democratic staff. The atmosphere in both the House and Senate during the early years of the Bush administration had become poisonous.

  I can trace it to the winter of 1989, shortly after I arrived in Congress, when members tried to award themselves a pay raise: 7.9 percent more for that year, plus an additional 25 percent increase in 1991. The raise was coupled with new ethics reforms, eliminating speaking fees paid to legislators by special interest groups, and limiting gifts and free travel. The idea was that if the senators and representatives were paid better, there would be fewer inducements to accept income or gifts from special interest groups on the side. The increases may well have been justified, but they quickly became a cause célèbre on talk radio. This marked one of the first instances where powerful talk radio hosts, particularly conservatives, campaigned against the Washington bureaucrats and members of Congress. Even traditional liberal allies were divided on the issue: Common Cause, the government watchdog group, supported the initiative because it was linked with ethics reforms, while consumer activist Ralph Nader objected, claiming that it amounted to a bribe to get legislators to do the right thing.

  These episodes sparked a revolution in the relationship between politics and television. The popularity of talk radio quickly gave birth to television talk shows, as well. Cable news had begun in 1980 on CNN, but as other cable networks began to proliferate, and as they saw the commercial success of talk radio, they initiated their own shows built around angry debate and commentary. Neutral observers did not get invited back. The most heavily courted guests were the people who would be the most provocative. There was a premium placed on bullying government figures; being well informed was secondary.

  It became an escalating war of words: politicians and pundits competed to be as outrageous as possible in order to get invited back on the air, so that they could increase their lecture fees, or sell a book, or make money in some other fashion. They could even become paid consultants to one of these networks, or parlay their exposure into jobs as campaign aides in a national race. Better yet, from their perspective, some of the “talking heads” became candidates, before returning to their roles as television commentators—a revolving door of political insiders.

  Soon, legislating became almost impossible. Special interest groups could kidnap an issue by exploiting the talk show phenomenon. One celebrated example was what happened when Congress passed catastrophic health insurance in 1988. It would have provided coverage for long-term disability and major medical problems, but seniors would have had to pay higher premiums. It passed with 80 percent public support. But within weeks, lobbying groups, including the American Association of Retired Persons and the Committee to Save Social Security and Medicare, started campaigning against it. As opposition mounted, the bill’s chief supporter, Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski, went back to his district and was ambushed.

  Outside a hearing in his Chicago district, sixty-one-year-old “Rosty,” one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress after thirty years, was forced to flee like a fugitive, as dozens of elderly people shouted “Liar!” and “Chicken!” and banged on his car windows with canes, walkers, and picket signs. All this was captured on television nationwide. Pressure mounted so quickly that within months Congress reversed itself, repealing the hard-fought catastrophic-insurance legislation.

  It was an important signal that voting to change the guaranteed benefit programs was political suicide. In a memorable phrase coined by Tip O’Neill’s counsel Kirk O’Donnell, Social Security became known as the third rail of politics, and it’s been nearly impossible to reform it ever since. The Republican White House and the Democratic majorities in Congress learned that dealing with the long-term fiscal solvency of these enormous programs was risky business.

  The incident also helped make Rostenkowski vulnerable. In him, Newt Gingrich and the Republicans saw another chance to challenge the Democratic leadership. Before long, Rostenkowski was the target of a federal investigation into his personal finances. He ended up being indicted on seventeen counts of embezzlement, corruption, and fraud, and served time in jail. The Republicans also investigated one of Congress’s little-known perks, the House bank, which was used as a private piggybank to give credit, basically interest-free loans, to House members, mainly Democrats. They were overdrawing their accounts—free of charge. That outraged a public already infuriated by the pillaging of the nation’s savings and loans.

  Quickly, the scandal spread. Congress began to look like the capital of perks. In addition to the House bank, there was the barbershop, the postal services, gifts from the gift shop—all sorts of cut-rate services that had built up over years and years of unchallenged Democratic leadership. An underlying sense of entitlement had finally been challenged; once the Republicans started peeling back the layers, more and more was unearthed. None of this would foster comity, the tradition of genteel collegiality for which the Hill had long been known.

  When I first started covering the Senate, a centrist group of moderates in both parties worked together trying to craft compromises. Gradually, the atmosphere so eroded that these senators began retiring—people like John Danforth of Missouri, who became special envoy to Sudan and, briefly, ambassador to the United Nations under the second President Bush. Danforth, thoughtful and avuncular, was in fact an ordained Episcopal priest. In that role, he had officiated at the funerals of Teresa Heinz Kerry’s first husband, Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania, Katharine Graham, and later at the state funeral of Ronald Reagan. During his years in the Senate, the only time Danforth was openly partisan was during the bitter fight over Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court. But that was because Thomas had been a Danforth protégé. On mos
t issues, Danforth got along well with Democrats, and wanted to get things done.

  There were others, in both parties: Sam Nunn and John Chafee, David Boren and Pete Domenici, Pat Moynihan and Bob Dole. These were men who honored the constitutional mandate of advice and consent, of healthy debate, but always in the spirit of Senate collegiality.

  The atmosphere began to change, though, particularly as some House Republicans ran for the Senate to fill the seats of those who had retired. The House had always been scrappier, full of people with sharper elbows. They had successfully dumped the speaker. They were taking on the leaders in the opposing party, challenging authority. They weren’t raised with the same genteel rituals that had become embedded in the DNA of the Senate. Now the upper body changed as well, in ways that rewarded partisanship rather than cooperation.

  One of the nastiest of these early investigations involved the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and HUD secretary Samuel Pierce, the only African-American in the Reagan cabinet. He had such a low profile, he was informally known as Silent Sam. There were reports that he left his underlings in charge, while he spent the day watching soap operas. As Mary McGrory wrote in The Washington Post, there was speculation that he’d only come to Washington on the hope that if Thurgood Marshall were “subpoenaed by heaven,” Pierce might be named to the Supreme Court. Reagan had once even referred to him as “Mr. Mayor.” Seeing an African-American in the usually all-white Reagan White House, the president had assumed Pierce must be a big-city mayor!

  After he left the cabinet, when called to testify before a House subcommittee about whether housing contracts had been awarded to political cronies, Pierce took the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. Even for ethically challenged Washington, having a former cabinet member refuse to testify on the grounds of self-incrimination was stunning.