We're with Nobody (6 page)

Starting out eighteen years ago, we worked in total secrecy. Any investigation requires discretion, after all. But the volatility of today's political and media environment has lifted some of the traditional taboos about our line of work. A candidate who can't afford his own researcher may hold a news conference to decry his opponent's having hired a “private detective” to discredit him, but this is a quaint throwback. Most people are now aware that political research is routinely done, and social networking sites have blurred the lines between what's public and private, anyway. On one hand, it can be distressing when someone forwards you an inflammatory, baseless e-mail, but it's also liberating for us as researchers in that people are becoming less easily shocked by our digging.

During a recent research project in Georgia, as I was requesting copies of property tax records for a candidate who'd been late paying numerous times, the clerk came upon one request and said, “This isn't the candidate. You must have written the number down wrong.” She knew the candidate, knew what I was doing and was not at all put off or surprised. This is most decidedly not always the case, but the fact that it happened at all represents a minor sea change. In the past, few clerks complied with our requests unquestioningly unless they loathed the candidate we were researching.

When we are confronted by obstructionist clerks and others who attempt to throw obstacles in our path, we gird ourselves with the knowledge that in this, the golden age of lies, we are on the side of truth. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from opposition research. Finding out what's going on is about far more than sitting down to Google someone (which, unfortunately, is how many campaigns are coming to view opposition research), or citing an undocumented claim in someone's blog. In the end, the cold, hard, documented facts are our best hope of knowing what's really going on, and the best way to find them is as close to the source as possible. That's something that's understood even in the underworld of recalcitrant clerks. The process of discovering salient facts is crucial to the world's greatest evolving democracy and, at times, is also extremely entertaining—as we learned long ago, while hoisting beers in a bass boat on the Tenn-Tom.

Chapter 6
Michael

D
uring one of the climactic scenes in 1939's
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
, Jimmy Stewart's affable character, the newly elected U.S. senator Jefferson Smith, rails at his fellow Senate members that “a certain man in my state, a Mr. James Taylor, wanted to put through this dam for his own profit. A man who controls a political machine! And controls everything else worth controlling in my state. Yes, and a man even powerful enough to control congressmen—and I saw three of them in his room the day I went up to see him!” The voters, Smith insists, have a right to know when politics gets corrupted, and it's his responsibility to tell them.

The idea that negative politics is a recent phenomenon, that once upon a time elections were decided by polite, informed debate, is complete fantasy. Attacking political opponents has been used effectively for centuries. In some cases it's been done honorably; in other cases it's gotten people killed.

Among the earliest evidence of oppo, one of the most dramatic episodes dates to the first century
B.C.
, a tumultuous period during which Julius Caesar was assassinated, a slave named Spartacus led a cinematic uprising against the Roman Empire (“They trained him to kill for their pleasure . . . but they trained him a little too well!” gushed Universal Pictures), and the navy of Mark Antony and Elizabeth Taylor went down in defeat in the Battle of Actium. With so much material to work with, it's not surprising that the debut of opposition research was among the era's milestones.

Of course, it wasn't called oppo at the time, but in the first century
B.C.
, Marcus Tullius Cicero, then the Roman consul, famously documented a plot by one Lucius Sergius Catilina (commonly referred to as Catiline) to murder several senators and overthrow the government. In what would have been the executive summary of his research report Cicero proclaimed, “How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience? . . . You do nothing, you plan nothing, you think of nothing which I not only do not hear, but which I do not see and know every particular of.” In other words, “Catiline is a scoundrel! It's been documented!”

Cicero charged that Catiline had established an armed rebel camp, that during a secret meeting he and his cohorts had formalized their plot, that two Roman knights had been employed to slay Cicero in his sleep and—to ensure that the story ran above the fold—that Catiline had murdered his wife to make room for another woman while engaging in an act so despicable that Cicero refused to even speak of it. Upon announcing the last detail, Cicero no doubt paused—meaningfully. Everyone was dying to know! Cicero may have been referring to allegations that Catiline had had sex with a vestal virgin, who was said to be the half sister of Cicero's wife, and may have married his own daughter.

Most of what Cicero revealed appears to have been factual, with the possible exception of his claim that Catiline sought to “destroy the whole world with fire and slaughter,” which would be pretty tough to document.

Public disclosure of the damning details had the desired effect. When Catiline took his seat in the senate, other senators got up and moved, leaving him a solitary figure on his bench. Emboldened, Cicero called for his execution. In what was essentially history's first documented attack ad, which ran live, Cicero asked, “For what is there, O Catiline, that you can still expect, if night is not able to veil your nefarious meetings in the darkness, and if private houses cannot conceal the voice of your conspiracy within their walls—if everything is seen and displayed?” Perhaps it wasn't catchy, but people caught his drift. Today, “O Catiline” would be the opposition's mantra.

Catiline attempted to respond, but his fellow senators shouted him down, labeling him a traitor. He scurried from the chamber, throwing out verbal threats, as often happens when there's no meaningful rebuttal. In the end he fled north, where he was killed by Roman troops. As a result of Cicero's later attacks, Mark Antony had his hands chopped off and displayed them in a smartly designed exhibit in the forum.

Although it would be centuries before it really hit its mainstream stride, oppo was here to stay. When scandal-mongering pamphlet wars between England's Whig and Tory parties broke out in the eighteenth century, freelance writers such as Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, whose only alternative was to wait tables, were only too happy to stoke the public's political bloodlust with the necessary diatribes (under assumed names). Soon Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin got similar gigs in the increasingly raucous political environment of the American colonies.

In the 1800 presidential race of the fledgling United States, incumbent John Adams found out just how vicious oppo could be when his opponent, Thomas Jefferson, accused him of having a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” It didn't exactly get people talking about the substantive issues, and the claim itself was apparently undocumented, judging from a web search of “John Adams” + “nude hermaphrodite,” which produces a few hits that, while terrifying, fail to support Jefferson's accusation. Adams didn't take kindly to the introduction of his sex organs into the presidential debate, and saw no need to present proof of his countercharge that Jefferson was “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” The name-calling continued: fool, hypocrite, criminal, weakling, atheist, and so on.

To make sure voters weren't confused about who was which, Jefferson secretly hired a cunning, sleazy Scotsman named James Callender, who had earlier exposed a sexual liaison between Alexander Hamilton and a married woman. Jefferson liked what he'd seen of Callender's work, and on his behalf Callender convinced voters that among other things Adams had an overwhelming desire to go to war with France. Prior to Callender's efforts, the electorate had shown limited interest in the subject of attacking France, but afterward became rabid about it. So it goes with sensational, unfounded attacks.

Somewhere along the way the Adams administration imprisoned Callender for sedition, and on his release he approached Jefferson about a job but was rebuffed. In response, he publicly disclosed their clandestine relationship, adding that, oh, by the way, the president had fathered children with one of his slaves. Two lessons can be drawn from this: Friends turned enemies can serve as excellent sources, and it's never a good idea to alienate the oppo guy.

Considering the lengths to which Adams and Jefferson went to portray each other in a bad light, it's curious that Abraham Lincoln got off as easy as he did during his own presidential bid. Obviously, the mores of the time influence whether potentially damaging information about a political opponent is useful in a campaign, but it seems odd that something that has preoccupied Lincoln biographers in recent years—questions about his sexual orientation—caused so little public debate during his political career. Perhaps it's because men commonly slept in the same bed back then, or because people of the era were loathe to openly discuss homosexuality.

According to some historians, Lincoln slept with at least eleven boys and men during his youth and adulthood. Lincoln never denied the practice, and even raised the subject on occasion, but you can bet we'd hear a great deal of conjecture and supposed “facts” if such a detail came to light during a political race today.

Reporter: Mr. Lincoln, I understand you enjoy sleeping in the same bed with other men—a
lot
. Don't you think it's natural that the voters would wonder about your relationships with these men and . . . occasionally, boys?

Lincoln: I slept with them. That is all. With the men it was mostly a matter of convenience, nothing more. Perhaps we discussed politics before drifting off to sleep, or in the early morning hours. I don't recall much of what we discussed in bed when I was a boy. Perhaps Indians.

Reporter: Can you tell me about this Joshua Speed fellow? You two lived together over in Springfield for four years and slept in the same large double bed, according to people we've talked with.

Lincoln: According to which people you've talked with?

Reporter: I can't say.

Lincoln: Was it that Mrs. Pritchard? The landlady with the hairy ears?

Reporter: Let's stick to Mr. Speed. Is he a Republican, too?

Lincoln: He wasn't then. But he is now.

Though Lincoln was never publicly challenged about his bedfellows during his political career, there were whispers about his relationship with a Captain David Derickson, his bodyguard and companion for eight months during the Civil War. The two reportedly shared a bed during Mary Todd Lincoln's absences, until Derickson was promoted in 1863. The relationship was the subject of gossip. Elizabeth Woodbury Fox, the wife of Lincoln's naval aide, wrote in her diary, “Tish says, ‘Oh, there is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the president, drives with him, and when Mrs. L is not home, sleeps with him. What stuff!' ”

Such musings were typically limited to private conversations and diaries, but other topics, particularly a man's political dealings, were fair game for the public discourse, and Lincoln did not shy away from doing his own oppo on that. Prior to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, William Herndon, his law partner, reportedly did some dirt digging in the Illinois State Library to collect “all the ammunition Mr. Lincoln saw fit to gather” for his run against Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 race.

In response, as still happens today, Douglas decried the use of investigators to vilify him, charging that some of his former political allies had secretly conspired to sabotage him and that one group had published a document “in which they arraigned me as having been guilty of a criminal betrayal of my trust.” While other senators were attending church, Douglas asserted, they had “assembled in a secret conclave,” devoting the sabbath to their own conspiratorial and deceitful deeds. Considering his constituency, it was good stuff, but it didn't help Douglas in the end.

Opposition research crops up in almost every presidential election thereafter, though the actual phrase did not appear until Edmund Muskie's 1971 presidential bid, when newspapers reported that a female Republican volunteer had infiltrated his campaign organization. Soon after, during the Nixon administration, the practice became systemized: The Republican Party began keeping up-to-date files on potential opponents rather than waiting on the campaigns to dig up dirt on them. Nixon, of course, resigned over an episode in which his lackeys broke into the Democratic Party offices in the Watergate building to steal potentially revealing files. Say what you will about Nixon—he was a tyrant and arguably a criminal—but he recognized the importance of facts. In an era when people create them out of whole cloth, and are rarely called to task for it, the idea of breaking into a building to steal documentation seems almost quaint.

Oddly, considering that political research is more pervasive today, and is done on a far grander scale, there appears to be less accountability than in the past, which is one reason Alan and I have become disenchanted with the meanness of the political posturing that grips the nation. Too much is based on undocumented claims and base contempt. We recognize that we're part of a dubious tradition, but as long as the information can be proved true, it clearly serves a purpose. The problem we have with the political fact-free zone—aside from the effectiveness of certain of its purveyors—is that it's counterproductive. It results in an electorate that is, by turns, sanguine and jaded, and it inevitably pushes the debate further from the truth.

Karl Rove, who for us symbolizes the enemy (and not merely because of our ideological differences), is a particularly venal denizen of the fact-free zone. From his days as a college student, when he stole campaign letterhead from a Democratic candidate and printed and distributed fake campaign fliers touting free beer, food and girls; to the “black love child” whisper campaign about John McCain during the 2000 presidential race, Rove has stunk up more voting booths than anyone else in recent American political history. He may liken himself to a protégé of the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater, but even Atwater conceded toward the end of his life that he regretted many of his less scrupulous methods. Atwater had his hand in the now-infamous Willie Horton ad that torpedoed the political career of Michael Dukakis by highlighting how, as governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis had granted Horton weekend passes from prison. At least that effort was based on fact. Horton was indeed a convicted murderer who raped a woman while on a weekend furlough during Dukakis's tenure as governor. Rove, who masterminded the Valerie Plame fiasco and sought to purge U.S. attorneys who didn't meet his loyalty standards, cares only whether a story will further his agenda. He gives opposition research a bad name, which, considering some of the transgressions committed in its service in the past, is saying something.

The irony is that widespread disregard for documenting the truth has come about at a time when access to public records is vastly improved. Every state now has an open records law, which means that if you don't fall for the bluff of the obstinate courthouse clerk you can get your hands on at least a facsimile of the truth, and much of it is easily accessible online. Between access and technology, nothing in politics stays hidden for long anymore. What's strange to us is that as the public has grown more and more jaded by the process, they're still as seduced by it as the Romans were centuries ago. Sometimes the attacks are legitimate and sometimes they're invented, but the stories, true or not, get a life of their own and become a part of history.