Power Game (22 page)

“We all have our little power-packages here,” Senator David Duren-burger said, admitting to that self-protective instinct. “When you’re trying to put together fifty-one votes, you have to make it appear that you’re not a vulnerable person. And yet a loving relationship, a friendship, is in making yourself vulnerable. At times you have to take criticism. You have to hear things that you’d rather not hear. That kind of vulnerability doesn’t go over well in a political situation.”

Durenburger reflected on how the tragedy of his own marital separation had made him more willing to take risks. “Because of my own problems, I began opening up to a few guys, and I found them parched for such contact,” he told me. “I found a few of the newer senators opening up personally—Slade Gorton, Dave Pryor, Bill Armstrong. All of them have gone over some kind of life hurdle in recent years, and
they are less defensive about talking about it now. But that’s not typical.”
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More generally, Dr. Pieczenik suggested, the quest for power and the relentless pace derive from a deep, inner feeling of inadequacy and dissatisfaction that breeds loneliness.

“There is an addictive quality to all of this,” he said. “You’ve always got to go one higher. As that goes on, the loneliness price is very high.… Real friendship is very tough to come by in this town. Friendship is a very fragile commodity. It doesn’t have a basis in the profession of political life. The politician never really trusts as much as one would imagine. So much is bled out of them in constituency demands, in legislative demands, in family demands that they wind up after a number of years saying, ‘What’s left of me? Who am I?’ They’re always on stage. They’re like the comedian who’s always got to have a joke. Some of them wind up forgetting what their roots are as individuals.”

Sad to say, the most corrosive thing to personal relationships is the Darwinian drive. “Politicians are different from you and me,” Richard Reeves, the political commentator, observed. “The business of reaching for power does something to a man: It closes him off from other men until, day by day, he reaches the point where he instinctively calculates each new situation and each other man with the simplest question: What can this do for me?”
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More Women, but Still a Man’s Town

Over the past fifteen years, the power and responsibility of women has grown in the power game, though the feminist push has not changed the way the game is played. Politics has been a man’s sport, and women have learned to play hardball.

Starting with the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern, women have become far more numerous, active, and visible in Washington—whether as a vice-presidential nominee, cabinet member, or Supreme Court justice, or as members of Congress, staffers, lobbyists, or journalists. The McGovern campaign, with its strong antiwar plank and its domestic themes of equality and social justice, fueled an explosion of feminist political activity and drew hundreds of able women into politics at the state and national level. The reforms that broke up the old power baronies in Congress opened up further opportunities.

In 1972, there were two women senators and thirteen women members of the House. By 1987, the figures were two senators and twenty-two House members. The inertia of past habits and the inertia of
incumbency slow change. It takes years for the pipeline of qualified women candidates to develop at the grass-roots level. But at the state level, the tide of women is rising. In 1974, Ella Grasso of Connecticut became the first woman elected governor in modern times; now there are three. The numbers of women in state legislatures has tripled since 1973, to the point where women held fifteen percent of the seats nationwide in 1987.
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The numbers tell only part of the story: On Capitol Hill, manners have changed dramatically since 1973, when Patricia Schroeder, as a freshman anti–Vietnam War Democrat from Colorado, had to endure unprintable sexist insults from F. Edward Hebert, the Armed Services Committee chairman. His high-handed tactics help cost him his chairmanship two years later. More recently, women have become sought after by party leaders. Both party caucuses in the House have women in at least one leadership position. The women who in 1977 formed a caucus on women’s issues open to both men and women have become more assertive, but it took until 1985 for women members to get admitted to the House members’ gym, which remained a male holdout.

“You have a different kind of women in Congress now than a couple of decades ago,” observed Ann Lewis, former political director of the Democratic National Committee. “They are far less likely now to be widows carrying out the family legacy and far more likely to be pursuing careers of their own. Take someone like Barbara Mikulski, who has just won a Senate seat in Maryland. She is sought after by other Democrats as a fund-raiser for their campaigns.”
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The growth of women’s political activism has spread into other fields: Congressional liaison for executive agencies, lobbying, public relations, journalism. Women lobbyists set up their own association in 1975 and now claim eight hundred members, the most prominent of whom are Anne Wexler and Nancy Reynolds, drawn from the Carter and Reagan White Houses and now with one of the best-known lobbying firms in town. Women journalists, barred from the National Press Club, flocked, in the 1970s, to the rival Washington Press Club, which gained several hundred members; the National Press Club agreed to a merger in 1985. Public relations has become such a promising field for women that Sheila Tate, former press secretary to Nancy Reagan and now a top public relations executive, told me that she worries that it may be turning into a “pink-collar ghetto for women.”

“Washington is still a male-dominated city,” Tate said, “because power is at the White House and on Capitol Hill. Those are earned offices. But one half of the staffers on the Hill are women. That’s
created a need for more women lobbyists. Women are better communicators than men.”
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Of course, the most dramatic symbolic changes have come at the peak of government. From a single token woman in earlier presidential cabinets, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan have each had two or three women in their cabinet. Reagan’s precedent-shattering step was naming Sandra Day O’Connor the first woman on the Supreme Court in 1981. But an even larger breakthrough for women was the selection of New York Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1984. I remember standing on the floor of the convention hall in San Francisco when she first appeared as the nominee and feeling the throbbing excitement throughout the hall, especially among the women there.

“Ferraro’s presence on that platform and in those campaign debates sent a message to a whole lot of women that they could do it,” Ann Lewis declared. “She made the possibilities real. All of a sudden, we realized what we had been missing.”

“Forgetting the outcome and the problems she had, it broke the ice,” agreed Nancy Reynolds, a lobbyist and a strong campaign fundraiser for Republicans. “It showed that a woman vice-presidential candidate is viable, and it’s an open field now. You hear women mentioned all the time now.”
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But even though women are pressing into new areas and male politicians recognize that they have to include some women at high levels, the power game is still a male-dominated world. If women are no longer exceptions, some old arithmetic still applies: For example, Lynn Martin, vice chair of the House Republican conference, observed that while women comprised fifty-one percent of the committee staff aides in the House, “seventy-five percent of those making $40,000 or more are men, and seventy-four percent of those making $20,000 or less are women.”
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Women are edging into more of the top jobs on the personal staffs of senators but they still have trouble penetrating the inner core of the White House staff. Anne Wexler, who was the liaison with outside political groups in the Carter White House, was an exception.

What is more, there are still policy and political arenas where men prevail almost totally, or only grudgingly let in women—among them defense, intelligence, arms control, the senior White House staff, and political campaign strategy. That point was politely but firmly impressed on me by Katharine Graham. As one of the most powerful women in the country, Kay Graham is no upstart feminist at seventy,
but like many a forceful woman, she expects men to accept women more fully as equals.

“It’s true there are a lot of women in good jobs,” she said. “We have Nancy Kassebaum in the Senate and Elizabeth Dole in the cabinet.” Then she paused and went on, both an edge and a sadness in her voice: “But I want to tell you, it’s still a very male-chauvinist town, this town. And this has no impact on me anymore, but I think it’s very hard on spouses who come down here from places where they’ve had jobs and they’ve mattered on their own. And they get to dinner and they absolutely are treated like somebody’s wife. I mean people say, ‘What does your husband think?’

“I just came back from an arms-control seminar up at the Wye Plantation,” she went on, “and the administration people there were kind of applauding themselves on their press relations. I looked around the room and there wasn’t a single woman there. There was
no
woman. I thought, this arms control is still a very male area.”
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Jeane Kirkpatrick, who stirred excitement in late 1984 by making an unsuccessful run at capturing one of the three top foreign-policy jobs, has bristled publicly at unequal treatment in the press. Her complaint is symptomatic: The press refers to Henry Kissinger as “Dr.” Kissinger while she is “Mrs.” Kirkpatrick, though both have doctorate degrees.

In the rough-and-tumble game of campaign politics, women have had a hard time penetrating into the inner sanctums. One major reason is that fund-raising is a difficult nut for them to crack. Men have both made more money and have the habit of dispensing it. Pamela Harriman, widow of the late New York Governor Averell Harriman, has been a major force in raising funds for Democratic Senate candidates, helping them capture a Senate majority in 1986, but she is exceptional.

Talking about the keys to greater political clout for women, Nancy Reynolds commented: “The big secret is getting people to give and raise money, and that’s where women have always been weakest. Money is the mother’s milk of politics. Fund-raising for politicians, which has been an age-old habit for men, has been distasteful for many women. Raising money for charities is one thing, but they don’t like raising money for politics. They find it hard to ask for. It’s easier for men to tap the money-giving networks.”
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Equally tough to penetrate is the hard-boiled work of campaign strategy and consulting. There are only a few women political pollsters, Linda DiVall for Republicans and Dottie Lynch for Democrats, and only a handful of political consultants and strategists.

But the 1988 presidential campaign brought a few breakthroughs: Susan Estrich, a senior campaign aide in the presidential bids of Ted
Kennedy in 1980 and Walter Mondale in 1984, became national campaign manager for Governor Michael Dukakis—the first woman to hold the top campaign job for a major national candidate. Robert Dole used Linda DiVall for poling and Mari Maseng as his press secretary, and George Bush tapped Barbara Pardue as press secretary.

“The presidential campaign remains the last locker room of American politics,” commented Ann Lewis, a top political consultant who gave advice to presidential contender Jesse Jackson. “But this is the year when we have finally seen the locker room door begin to open. It’s still very tough. Barriers remain. Even candidates who have been right on our issues, like George McGovern, have lagged in practice. There are teams and coaches with not nearly enough women in the inner circle.”
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Ann Lewis’s “locker-room” image fits the power game in Washington. She and Sheila Tate and Kay Graham are right: Washington is still a male town, and football is its game. I have friends who like to compare politics to poker, with its high-stakes betting, its bluffing and its uncertainty. Others think of it more as a horse race or a steeplechase.

More often, politicians turn for analogies to those quintessentially American pastimes, baseball and football. Barry Carter, a former national security aide and now a law professor at Georgetown University, sees baseball as the sports metaphor for politics: the confrontation of pitchers and batting stars balanced by the intricate choreography of fielding plays or hit-and-run situations. Perhaps, but any city that cannot sustain a major-league baseball team is not a baseball city at heart. The Washington Senators packed up in 1972 and moved to Minnesota.

Washington is a football city, and football is the right metaphor for its politics. Washington Redskins games are sellouts every year, in Super Bowl seasons or when the team is way down in the league. In fact, one of the most coveted perks in Washington is a good season ticket to the Redskins games or, better yet, an invitation to the private box of Jack Kent Cooke, the Redskins’ owner. Football thrives as a link between the two cities of Washington: the solidly middle class, overwhelmingly black central city and the largely white, upper-middle-class political city which resides mostly in the bedroom suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. The Redskins provide the missing symbol for a community that sprawls from the District of Columbia into two states, lacking a single mayor or governor or any other unifying institution.

What’s more, football fits the rhythm and soul of the power game. Political Washington is a city with a terribly short attention span, quick to shift from one political melodrama to another, more given to the game-of-the-week mentality than the quiet patience of a baseball season
with 162 games. Moreover, the action of the power game more nearly mirrors football. Both are contact sports.

Consider the action: Baseball offers a neat linear focus, pitcher versus batter, the crack of the bat, a fielder nimbly gathering the small white globe against a field of green, the race between his throw and the batter streaking to first base. To be sure, a bases-loaded home run or the flying spikes of a stolen base offer high drama. But generally, baseball presents a more orderly test of skills than the jarring mělée of line play on the gridiron or the crunch of ballcarrier and tacklers that evokes the brawling confusion and partisan wrangling in Congress or the bruising clashes between White House and Capitol Hill. In football, as in politics, the pass patterns are tricky; action everywhere at once.