Power Game (8 page)

In another arena, Scotty Reston recalled for me the wartime days when he used to visit every morning with Secretary of State Cordell Hull in the old State Department building next to the White House. Sometimes, he said, Byrnes, an old Tennessee politician, would throw a few overnight cables from American ambassadors across his desk and ask Reston, “What d’you think?” The relationship between press and government was relaxed enough in those days that Reston understood it was all off-the-record, not for direct use, and he would hand back the cables after reading them, without stealing secrets.

Henry Brandon, for decades the London
Times
’s correspondent in Washington, recalled traveling with a small White House press corps to Key West, where President Truman relaxed. Truman, who normally wore a corset to tuck in his tummy, would hold bare-chested press conferences in swimming trunks. Even though this exposed a pear-shaped profile, Truman did not flinch at informal snapshot taking. On such trips, the U.S. Navy not only provided billets for reporters but arranged deep-sea fishing excursions for their amusement. Brandon, thinking of the angry confrontation between press and government since Vietnam and Watergate and everyone’s sensitivity to buying influence with favors, chuckled quietly, and asked, “Can you imagine either side putting up with that kind of arrangement these days?”
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In the early 1960s, when I first came to Washington, it had the easy feel of a southern city. There was still a clubbiness, a close-webbed intimacy within the power establishment. “Washington used to be cozy,” observed Barbara Gamarekian, who worked in the Kennedy White House and later became a
New York Times
reporter. “You could go to a party, a reception of a hundred people, and look around and say, ‘Well, everybody’s here—everybody who counts.’ You can’t do
that anymore. The city has grown big and amorphous. There are so many social circles: the administration people, the corporate crowd, members of Congress, patrons of the arts, the old Kennedy-Johnson crowd, the Reagan Republicans, the Nixon-Ford Republicans. These circles bump up against each other now but it’s not one cozy network anymore.”
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Then more than now, I believe, small power circles dined intimately and debated policy over candlelight and sterling silver or over brandy in the sitting rooms of tastefully rich homes in Georgetown. From those dinners, secretaries of Defense and State or their assistant secretaries would be discreetly summoned, and quietly depart to deal with some distant crisis. In Dean Acheson’s vivid phrase, the other diners felt they were “present at the creation” of policy. In that vein, Stewart Alsop titled his vintage account of the power elite in the Johnson presidency simply
The Center
. That book’s inside-the-cabinet profiles and its judgment that Congress mattered “less and less” were a revealing record of the time. But from the vantage point of the late 1980s, Alsop’s focus on the power apex and his virtual silence about television, political money, the fluidity of modern power, the lobbying and brawling now common to Congress, seems rather quaint.

“The jet airplane wrecked everything,” Mo Udall groused. “It used to be when a constituent came in, it was a big deal. You stopped whatever you were doing and hailed this traveler from far-distant Arizona. Now, hell, they come in here by the jetload every morning, educators and businessmen and whatever. Your day is full with Arizona people coming to see you.”
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For a senator or congressman, the time compression has become unbearable. “I’ve got two hundred lobbyists pressing to talk to me about the tax bill, each one representing some different interest,” Senator David Pryor of Arkansas shrugged helplessly. “And every time there’s a change in the tax bill that affects their industry or their group, those lobbyists want to talk to me again.”
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A look at the numbers shows how overloaded the system has become:

When Truman ordered dropping the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, I was told, he broke the news to the entire White House press corps—twenty-five reporters. By mid-1987, some 1,708 people had regular White House press passes. So enormous had the wider political community grown—lobbyists, lawyers, journalists, policy think tanks, defense or health consultants, and the hotels, offices, accountants, restaurants and the service industries that support them—that by 1979 this whole nongovernmental sector actually outnumbered federal government employees in Washington!

Mail, too, illustrates the exponential growth. Congress is now drowned in a Niagara of constituent letters and postcards, mostly organized by lobbies and mass-generated by computers. In 1972, mail volume to the House of Representatives was 14.6 million pieces a year. But it jumped by 1985 to more than 225 million pieces—an average of more than half a million pieces a year per member.

Sometimes lobby groups target a particularly sensitive date and a key member of Congress and then truck in mass computerized mail all at once for maximum psychological impact. They literally bury a member in one day’s mail. In 1984 and 1985, whenever Social Security recipients got worried about some imminent vote to freeze their cost-of-living adjustments, they would inundate House Speaker Tip O’Neill. When American trade negotiators were engaged in ticklish talks with Japan or European countries, then-Majority Leader Jim Wright got swamped more than once by the steel industry and other sectors hit by imports. On several occasions, O’Neill’s and Wright’s mail ran 5 million or 6 million pieces in a single day. The record, according to Bob Rota, the House postmaster, came in the summer of 1985 when Speaker O’Neill got 15 to 18 million pieces in one day.

“Three big tractor trailers rolled up full of mail,” recalled Rota. “Those big trailers, you know, eighteen-wheelers. There was no way we could count it. The freight people weighed it and gave us an estimate of the volume. Those trucks were blocking our whole area up here. We had to find rooms to store the mail and get those big trucks out of there. You wouldn’t believe the mail the members receive: car keys from people with notes saying ‘Unlock the economy,’ pieces of two-by-fours from the homebuilders with the message ‘Cut the budget across the board.’ One year we had hundreds of thousands of baby chicks from farmers upset about high interest rates.”
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Money and Razzle-dazzle

Business has led the new political rush to Washington. Obviously business leaders have worked their influence in Washington for more than a century. But a new surge of corporate involvement came in the late 1970s. Initially it was a reaction to the consumer activism of Ralph Nader and was fired by fear of new regulatory pressures in the environment and the workplace, as well as by Democratic control of government under Carter. Corporate CEOs such as Irving Shapiro of Du Pont, Reginald Jones of General Electric, Thomas Murphy of General Motors, and Walter Wriston of Citibank, long critical of Washington but leery of too close contact, set up the Business Roundtable to represent corporate leaders in the new Washington.

A real breakthrough for business came in March 1977, when business lobbying helped mobilize the House to defeat organized labor’s highest priority, the common-site-picketing bill. A year later, business lobbies helped kill President Carter’s legislation for a consumer protection agency, a pet Nader project, and helped push through a reduction in capital gains taxes. The tax turnaround was typical of the new, wide-open power game. It sprang from a completely unexpected—and successful—revolt against President Carter’s tax bill led by William Steiger, a mid-rank Republican congressman from Wisconsin. That surprise victory had an electrifying effect on business.

“The Steiger amendment marked a turning point for the business community in Washington,” commented Arthur Levitt, president of the American Stock Exchange. “After that, business began to see they could get some of the things they wanted, and within a couple of years, you saw Carter’s attitudes turn around.”
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Success brought more bees after the honey. Back in 1968, for instance, only 100 corporations had offices in Washington; by 1978 that figure had jumped to 500. One business directory listed 1,300 corporations in 1986. By the early 1980s, Washington had surpassed New York as the trade association capital of America and is now far ahead. By 1986, it had 3,500 trade associations’ headquarters, more than triple the number in 1960, with a work force of roughly 80,000.

But the most stunning indicator of business activism was the sky-rocketing growth of corporate political action committees (PACs) to raise money and make contributions to the election campaigns of candidates friendly to corporate interests. In 1974, there were eighty-nine corporate PACs; a decade later, the number had shot up to 1,682.

Paradoxically, the drive to reform campaign funding was what gave business the green light to become more aggressively involved in financing political campaigns. Reform went astray, as often happens in Washington—high-minded reforms have unintended consequences. In this case, the reformers wanted “public financing” of political campaigns—that is, public subsidies from the government to major candidates to eliminate private financing by individuals, corporations, unions, or interest groups. The reformers achieved public financing for the general election campaign for the presidency in 1974, but Congress blocked such taxpayer subsidies for congressional races—leaving that arena open to individual contributions and to PACs. About the same time, court decisions made it legal for government contractors to have PACs (a practice previously barred for fear that the PACs of government contractors would be used to buy influence). The court decision making corporate PACs legal was a watershed.

“It opened the door for the creation of PACs and institutionalized the role of PAC money to buy influence,” asserted Fred Wertheimer, president of Common Cause, the public-interest lobby. Any organization or group of people can form a PAC, but Wertheimer pointed out that “the biggest increase [in recent years] was the corporate PACs, because they came from practically nothing and there are so many corporations.”
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Not only PAC donations but the overall hard cash pumped into congressional campaigns rocketed steeply from 1974 onward. In the campaigns of 1974, for example, a total of $72 million was spent on House and Senate races; by 1986, the figure had multiplied more than six times, to $450 million.
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At the national level, the national Republican party and its campaign committees raised $254.6 million in the presidential election year of 1984, more than triple the $74.3 million that the rival Democratic committees raised.
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Political spending was spiraling everywhere, but PACs were the main vehicle of growth. Their number, including all kinds of PACs—business, labor, and other interest groups—jumped from 608 in 1974 to 4,157 in mid-1987, and PAC donations to candidates leapt nearly a multiple of fifteen—from $8.5 million in 1974 to $132.2 million in 1986.

Big money has changed the face of Washington and its life-style. In a decade or less, several billion dollars of investment funds have poured into Washington to finance scores of new luxury office buildings, top-of-the-line hotels, stylish restaurants, and ten significant new art museums that have put glitter into downtown Washington. Texas money. British money. Dutch money. Plus multimillionaire local developers
such as Oliver T. Carr and Charles E. Smith are expanding commercial corridors along K Street, the West End, the Potomac Riverfront in Georgetown, and in Virginia.

With its think tanks, consulting firms, lawyers, and lobbyists, Washington is a natural boomtown in an economy driven by the information revolution. By the mid-1980s, it was bolting ahead so rapidly that more new office space was being opened and leased in the capital each year than in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or Houston.
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Between 1976 and 1983, thirty-seven new hotels opened. Two glass-box mini-cities of consulting firms sprouted in Crystal City and Rosslyn across the Potomac River, mainly to serve the Pentagon. Spreading political power has been a catalyst for the real estate surge, but a lot of new money flowed to Washington with modern light industry. A dozen high-rise, high-tech mini-cities have sprung up in the capital’s backyard, and in early 1987, Mobil became the first major industrial corporation to choose Washington’s Virginia suburbs for its world headquarters.

The city of Washington has become zip-code chic for firms eager to display a capital address but anxious to avoid rising rents downtown.
USA Today
built twin modernistic towers in Arlington, Virginia, but listed its address as “Box 500, Washington, DC 20044.” The Mariott Hotel Corporation put its world headquarters in suburban Rockville, Maryland, but listed its address at a mythical “Marriott Drive, Washington, DC 20058.”

Pennsylvania Avenue, the political spine of the city, was once the butt of tart complaints from President Kennedy, who bemoaned the seedy combination of liquor stores, souvenir shops, and vacant lots that he saw on his inaugural ride from Congress to the White House in 1961. Since then, Pennsylvania Avenue has been transformed not only with new parks and promenades but a huge burst of investment. Between $1 billion and $1.5 billion in private capital has gone into its renovation: for rescuing the National Theatre and the old Post Office Building from demolition and reviving them; for giving the National Press Building a $47 million face-lift; for a new $35 million Canadian Embassy; much larger sums for several swanky office-hotel complexes between Sixth and Thirteenth streets, with price tags from $125 million to $200 million apiece: and also for Oliver Can’s elaborately authentic $150 million Beaux Arts restoration of the historic Willard Hotel, where Abraham Lincoln and other presidents awaited their inaugurations.