Power Game (21 page)

“When I arrived in the morning, there they were, the two of them in their shirt-sleeves, still working, still dealing,” the aide told me. “It’s much harder to deal, to compromise, than to stand up and shout, ‘This far and no further.’ It’s hard to sit across the table from your adversary and say, ‘Okay, neither one of us is going to have everything we want. Now what can we work out.’ ”

Thurmond speaks of Biden with the affection of an eighty-five-year-old father talking about a forty-five-year-old son whose views bewilder him. In his soft South Carolina drawl, Thurmond instructed me on his philosophy, mellowed by the years:

“Some people feel that because of different philosophies, they have to be antagonistic. I take the position that you have to work with people even if they have a different philosophy—if they’re sincere. Biden and I get along. Biden is a nice fellow. He’s a high-quality man. He’s an excellent speaker. He’s impressive. He’s articulate. He’s flexible. He’s a good family man. And I say, the longer you stay here, the more you realize there’s more than one side to the question, the more you realize that compromise and courtesy are necessary. The longer you stay, you realize that sometimes you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”
²⁴

Workaholics: The Lonely Crowd

From afar, politicians appear as disembodied villains or cardboard celebrities. The demands of televised image making for blow-dried breeziness and self-assured opinions on any subject under the sun often disguise their humanity and vulnerability. The common perception often misses the mark.

I have frequently run into the popular assumption that politicians work less hard and have an easier life than people in the private sector. My experience is the opposite: People coming into government from private life are shocked at the compulsive intensity and workaholic ethic of Washington, in Congress or high in the executive branch.

Not surprisingly, the White House is such a pressure cooker that after a year as cabinet secretary and aide to Reagan, Al Kingon, the
former Wall Streeter and publisher of
Saturday Review
magazine, confessed to me that he had found the workload “overwhelming—beyond my wildest dreams.” Normal days found him starting work at seven
A.M
. and ending late at night, with many a cold or canceled dinner. The late Malcolm Baldrige told me that he worked fifty-percent longer hours as secretary of Commerce than he did as chief executive officer of Scovill Manufacturing Company. As a corporate number one, he used to make speeches saying that any business leader who was working more than an eight-hour day wasn’t delegating enough to subordinates. But in Washington, Baldrige said, “I found eight hours isn’t enough—I need twelve. And I stopped making those speeches.”
²⁵
People leaving high government positions say the pressure is less on the outside. David Gergen, former White House communications director, told me he found the pace less frantic as editor of
US News & World Report
.

For senators and members of Congress, the pressures are unrelenting. Days are a kaleidoscopic jumble: breakfasts with reporters, morning staff meetings, simultaneous committee hearings to juggle, back-to-back sessions with lobbyists and constituents, phone calls, briefings, constant buzzers interrupting office work to make quorum calls and votes on the run, afternoon speeches, evening meetings, receptions, fund-raisers, all crammed into four days so they can race home for a weekend gauntlet of campaigning. It’s a rat race to beat the pell-mell existence of ambitious New York lawyers, Chicago stock-brokers, or independent Texas oilmen, and about as sterile personally. Part of this is necessity. Part of it is the high-powered, super-achiever, Benjamin Franklin work ethic that drives the city: people proving their own importance.

“The problem with Washington is it’s all an input town” was the shrewd comment of Chris Matthews, spokesman for former House Speaker Tip O’Neill. “You can’t measure outputs. You measure input. This is a town where the GNP is government. And government is measured not by output but by how many hours you put in. Everybody says, ‘I’ve been really busy this week. Are you busy? I’ve been busy. I must be busy.’ And it’s like busy-ness is a value in itself.”
²⁶

“A lot of us have that as part of our makeup,” Senator David Durenburger, a thoughtful, introspective Minnesota Republican, acknowledged over dinner. “A lot of us have that need to be driven. You don’t find many laid-back people in politics. What you really love is that whether you get up at six or eight in the morning, there’s always too much to do.

“You are important if you are in demand. You work hard to prove how valuable you are. It’s a volume-oriented kind of operation: the more hands you shake, the more letters you write, the more times you appear on TV, the more hearings you hold, the more valuable you are. Somehow quality is subsumed by quantity.”
²⁷

He quoted the advice of one senior senator at a prayer breakfast: “If you want to really keep on a fast track, always have more than two things to do for any space on your schedule. Have people telling you about all the other things you should do. Go into politics, because there’s always too much to do. And in politics, you can justify workaholism. After all, it’s important for the country.”

The irony is that Ronald Reagan, with the most powerful, most demanding job of all, has made a mockery of workaholism. Quite deliberately, he worked a relatively short day, in his office from about nine to four, taking naps or going off horseback riding, and then attending some official dinner or tackling a bit of overnight reading, though sometimes it was left unread while he and Nancy watched television. Reagan really preferred oral briefings. National security advisers read him documents aloud, got his approval, and initialed them on his behalf. On Iran, for example, Reagan apparently never bothered to look at the critical decision paper of January 17, 1986, that formally authorized the arms-for-hostages deal.

When the press and other politicians nicked Reagan for being too hands-off and laid-back, Reagan poked fun at his lazy ways. At one press dinner, he joshed, “It’s true that hard work never killed anybody, but I figure why take the chance at this late age.” The audience roared at his admission.

Until the Iran-
contra
scandal broke, Reagan got away with his light routine partly because Jimmy Carter had slaved like an indentured servant and the public watched him sink in the morass of detail. Reagan’s gentler pace made him look at ease with the presidency and with his power, and that was reassuring to the public. What’s more, Reagan clearly has enjoyed the time-consuming ceremonial part of the job, and that enjoyment radiated self-confidence. For a long time, and during his first four years certainly, Reagan got away with going light on substance by delegating enormous authority to a superb staff.

What the public didn’t notice, or didn’t mind, was that Reagan did not have the driving curiosity that most presidents have about major issues or the way their administrations operate, both to educate themselves and to protect themselves from trouble. Reagan trusted others to keep him out of harm’s way. But Reagan’s second-term staff was not
sharp enough, either in judgment or political skill, and Reagan’s failure to control the staff got him into a mountain of trouble, climaxed by the Iran affair. Then his laid-back, hands-off style backfired badly.

For many other politicians and government officials, the intense type-A Washington life-style takes its toll in divorce and family tensions. Washington has one of the highest numbers of psychiatrists per capita in the country, about as many as New York, testimony that workaholism and the pressure-cooker atmosphere of Washington life are an occupational hazard.
²⁸
Washington’s monochrome life-style also makes for grayness. Occasionally, of course, poets emerge in Congress (Senator William Cohen of Maine who wrote
The Baker’s Nickel
and also coauthored a spy novel,
Double Man
, with Gary Hart), journalists put on amateur theatrical skits (the Gridiron Club), and everyone admires the cherry blossoms in springtime. People do get away for weekends on Chesapeake Bay or in the Blue Ridge Mountains. But there are not many real time-outs.

A few years ago, Blythe Babyak, a television journalist from New York who had a commuting marriage with Richard Holbrooke, a State Department policymaker, complained about the dessicated existence.

“Washington is a fifties kind of place,” she observed in
Newsweek
, “a town whose inhabitants are relieved of the uncertainty about life’s goals, those that provoke a deeper examination of our own lives and those of others. Washingtonians know what counts: getting ahead in a clearly defined bureaucratic context—running the country, running the world. That’s what they think they are doing, and, indeed, that is what they do. Day and night. Breakfast meeting, lunch, and dinner—to the exclusion of life’s trifles and its mysteries.”
²⁹

Weekday evenings bring no relief because political Washington treats social life as an extension of business. People are often booked three or four nights a week, sometimes to several events a night, and people relate to each other in terms of position and title. At dinners or other informal occasions, there are implicit quid pro quos. Journalists turn to officials and politicians for stories; the politicians trade for favorable mention. Lobbyists need politicians for legislation, and the politicians need the lobbyists for money and votes. Of course, there are times of levity and humor, but the underlying transactions of the political bazaar sap most occasions of serendipity.

“People will go to an embassy party if they think they might see someone they have missed during the day,” wrote Sondra Gotlieb, the irreverent wife of the Canadian ambassador. “Powerful Jobs comes to parties to trade information with other Powerful Jobs they hadn’t made contact with during the day.”
³⁰

In her chatty fictionalized portrait of Powertown, entitled
Wife of
 …, Gotlieb captured the impersonalism of operational relationships. She gave her characters stereotyped names: White House Person, Important Job, Supremely Powerful, Gentleman-in-Waiting, Close-To, Used-to-Be-Close-To, World’s Most Expensive Lobbyist, World Famous Columnist, and Media Star. In real life, she and her husband, Allan Gotlieb, an extremely able diplomat, often operated by this utilitarian code.

“We invite
jobs
, not people as individuals,” Sondra Gotlieb admitted to Sandra McElwaine, a well-informed chronicler of Washington’s ways. “Our purpose is to promote our country. We don’t spend the taxpayers’ money for the neighbors.”
³¹

For a time, the Gotliebs became the most glamorous entertainers in Washington, creating a name for themselves and giving Canada a high political profile by luring many of the movers and shakers of the Reagan entourage to their dinner table. Their star dipped when, perhaps because of the pressure of it all, Sondra Gotlieb publicly slapped her social secretary just as her dinner for the Canadian prime minister was getting under way. The shock reverberated in social Washington, and the Gotliebs took a lower profile for a while. But they are an intelligent, likable couple with a flair for entertaining, and their parties came back into fashion.

Something more fundamental than job stress and the hollow superficiality of the cocktail circuit often squeezes the juice out of politicians’ private lives. They seem to fit David Reisman’s image of
The Lonely Crowd
. Their public lives bring them hundreds, if not thousands, of contacts. What stands in the way of deeper friendships is the Darwinism, the struggle to get to become king of the hill. The competitiveness of the power game inhibits people from revealing the kind of persona] vulnerability and doubts about life that are vital to forming close and sincere friendships.

To a politician, weakness can be fatal. So it is only natural that they cover up their frailties and uncertainties from rivals as well as from voters. For the risk of inner self-revelation, which genuine intimacy requires, is too dangerous for most politicians and public officials.

Consider recent history: In 1968, George Romney, the former governor of Michigan, was fatally wounded as a Republican presidential contender when he lamely told the press he had been “brainwashed” by the Pentagon on Vietnam. Former Senator Edmund Muskie was hurt politically in the 1972 presidential race when reporters saw him shedding tears at a New Hampshire press conference over mean sniping
at his wife in the
Manchester Union-Leader
. That same year, Senator Tom Eagleton of Missouri was dropped from the Democratic ticket because he disclosed that years earlier he had gotten psychiatric help. In 1984, Senator Gary Hart was winged by constant questioning about why he had changed his name and why his official biographies understated his age by a year; and in 1987, he left the presidential race, hounded by questions of marital infidelity. Senator Joseph Biden also had to give up his presidential bid after revelations that he had plagiarized sections of his stump speeches and exaggerated his law school record.

Most politicians carefully keep their guard up to hide such human flaws. Steven Pieczenik, a Washington psychiatrist who once held a State Department post, makes the case that politicians, journalists, and others in the political community require a kind of “obligatory paranoia” to operate effectively in the political arena. “They have to question other people’s intentions, motives, manipulations to do their job,” he said. “The problem comes when they bring that back to their family life or their close personal relationships.”
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Watching members of the House gather on the floor for a vote, I have seen a boyish camaraderie among them, born of serving in the trenches together. The Senate is less ostentatiously chummy than the House and less of a club than it used to be. Some members do form a few close relationships, but more commonly, politicians maintain a guarded distance beneath the Rotarian backslapping and gregarious arm squeezing that they display in public. Close staff aides reveal that some of those who appear the most congenial, including Ronald Reagan and Howard Baker, have a self-protective way of reserving their real feelings and preventing others from drawing too close.