Power Game (30 page)

I later learned, for example, that John Kerry, a Democrat who won a Senate seat from Massachusetts in 1984, had started collecting money for his reelection virtually right away. By the first six months of 1986, with their next Senate election still four and a half years away, Bill Bradley raised $1.1 million, Phil Gramm of Texas $804,170, Joseph Biden of Delaware $614,160, and Kerry $471,195. But in mid-1986, the incumbent senator with the biggest war chest for the 1990 election was Bennett Johnston, a Louisiana Democrat, with $1.6 million.

They were all taking a lesson from Al D’Amato of New York. D’Amato, with his pork-barrel politics, built a massive war chest long before his 1986 reelection contest. The word that he had amassed $4 million by the fall of 1985 scared off potential Democratic opponents such as Geraldine Ferraro. That is now a standard ploy for incumbents—the money scare-off tactic.

“I met D’Amato one day in the summer of 1985,” Eagleton recalled. “D’Amato said to me, ‘What are you doing this summer?’ This was just after I had announced that I wasn’t running, and I said, ‘Oh, I’m going to have a good summer.’ Told him about a trip I was going to take. And he said, ‘Oh, you’re lucky. Do you know how many fund-raisers I’ve got this month? I’ve got twenty. I got ’em in New York; I got ’em in Chicago; I got ’em in Dallas; I got ’em in Los Angeles.’ ”

Eagleton grimaced, “I would say that an incumbent senator in a hotly contested reelection campaign would devote seventy to eighty percent of his personal time, effort, thought, and worrying to fund-raising for the last two years of a six-year term,” he said. Eagleton was including time spent chasing publicity, doing favors, and pork-barrel work aimed at getting supporters to ante up for the campaign. “It becomes an all-consuming obsession. Others may not subscribe to my seventy to seventy-five percent. You know, you can still stagger over to vote while you’ve just finished a call trying to raise some money. Your staff gives you a little card and says, ‘By the way, there’s a roll call up on the Eagleton amendment to do such and such,’ and you stumble over and vote aye and then get back on the phone again raising money.”

Imminent retirement had increased Eagleton’s candor. Publicly, most politicians are gun-shy about discussing their fund-raising. A decade ago, senators used to deride the House as the “Tuesday-to-Thursday Club” because its members hustled home for a long weekend from Friday morning through Monday. The Senate then prided itself on active sessions all week long. But Eagleton and others complain that the Senate now works a short week, usually four days, in order to get out with the voters and the givers. Like D’Amato, many senators raise money in far-flung states from groups whose interests they affect or promote in their legislative work. In D’Amato’s case, a seat on the Appropriations Committee provided ideal entrée.

“If you’ve got fund-raisers in these faraway states, you can’t just fly to Los Angeles in an instant,” Eagleton pointed out. “Your people have to set up these things. A Friday night in Los Angeles, a Saturday night in San Francisco, and a Sunday night in San Diego, for example. To
do this money sweep of the West Coast, Friday’s a shot day, and Monday’s virtually a shot day.”

“Go over and look when roll-call votes were held,” he advised me, “and you will find precious few were held on a Monday or a Friday. It’s to accommodate the fund-raising and campaign schedules of one third of the brethren up for reelection. That means our work here is all telescoped into a three-day time frame.”
⁴²

Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut told me in early 1986 that out of 260 weekends over the previous five years, he had worked 124 on the road, making appearances in his home district or hustling money elsewhere. That is largely self-defense, for nothing so offends the voters as the impression that their senator is stuck on Washington and has lost touch with the home district. That fearful charge exacts a high price on congressional effectiveness, for it requires constant home campaiging. What the public often demands is public relations, not public service.

The toll falls heaviest on those from the West Coast, Rocky Mountains, Texas, or the Plains States, or House members from districts far from a big-city airport. California Congressmen regularly hop the redeye overnight planes on Thursday nights going out to the Coast and come back on the Monday overnight flight. After weeks of that, they drag around Congress on Tuesdays.

The short congressional week—dictated by the politics of the constant campaign—deeply troubles experienced members.

“We aren’t on the job,” Senator McC. Mathias of Maryland worried aloud one day before his retirement. “We’re spending time running around for media attention. We’re spending too much time with constituents. We’re not spending enough time with the issues. We’re not spending enough time with each other.”
⁴³

An echo came from two House Democrats, Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, and Don Edwards, dean of the California delegation. “The marketing branch is running things, and the power branch is on vacation,” said Schroeder.
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Edwards was more blunt: “The jet age has become the enemy of good government,” he said. “You can’t govern well with part-time legislators.”
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In sum, the survival politics of the constant campaign take a toll on government. New-breed politicians like to build their own independent political organizations. And those require vast efforts—both by the members and their staffs—for casework, mail operations, travel home, or fund-raising around the country. Inevitably, the constant campaign competes with the regular work of senators and House members—and the business of governing suffers.

In the darkness shortly before one
A.M
., Chris Schall, a plump, good-natured, grandmother of nine, rolls out of bed and begins preparing for an early-morning rendezvous with Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and the top Pentagon brass.

Mrs. Schall, a $32,000-a-year GS-12 Air Force career civilian, has been in bed only three or four hours. “I sleep fast,” she says. To get moving, she downs a couple of cups of coffee, fills another mug for the road, fixes her husband’s lunch, and then heads for the Pentagon—only a fifteen-minute drive from her split-level rambler in Springfield, Virginia. “I can get on the expressway, put it on cruise control, and drink my coffee,” she says.

Her five-member team has a little less than four hours to put together one of Washington’s best-read and most-influential daily newspapers.
It is a compact, sixteen-page digest formally called
Current News
, but known simply as the “Early Bird.” In sixteen
Time
magazine-sized pages, it provides a cut-and-paste distillation of the hottest Pentagon-oriented news articles culled and photocopied from nine major daily newspapers plus an overnight take from two wire services and the three television networks.
¹
Producing it is a high-pressure operation. “I drink a lot of coffee, and I smoke a lot of cigarettes,” chirps Mrs. Schall, as she chain-smokes Pall Mall Golds.
²

At six
A.M
., the Early Bird must go to the Air Force printers, but Cris Schall’s rendezvous with Weinberger comes at 5:50
A.M
. That’s when his chauffeur, Matt Turner, shows up for an advance copy of the Early Bird plus several major newspapers. Weinberger reads them on the ride from home to work.

But the Early Bird reaches far beyond the Pentagon. Just after six, a White House driver arrives for more copies, followed by couriers from the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency and the personal driver of Vice President George Bush. Then runners from the civilian secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the top military brass. In no time, eighty copies are gone.

That’s just the top-level trickle. Before noon, a full print-run of six thousand copies is dispatched, five hundred to key congressional committees, seventy to the senior White House staff, sixty to the State Department, eighty for the Defense Intelligence Agency, fifty for the National Security Agency, thousands for the military hierarchy and scores more for the reporters who cover the Pentagon. The Early Bird is also transmitted around the world by Wirephoto daily to fourteen American military-theater commanders. It gets into the bloodstream of the national security community.

Because the Early Bird sees the news through the special lens of the Pentagon, its yellow front page and its contents have a special slant. Often, it gives top play to articles dug out from page twenty of
The Wall Street Journal
, page forty-one of
The Washington Post
, page twenty-five of the Baltimore
Sun
, or page seventeen of
The New York Times
. But politically, the Early Bird pulls no punches. Echoing the regular press, it naturally headlines Weinberger’s speeches and major Pentagon pronouncements, but it also reprints coverage on Pentagon waste, military incidents abroad, leaks about weapons systems in trouble, congressional feuding over the defense budget, controversies over arms control, or Star Wars strategic defense. Longer supplements, printed daily, weekly, or monthly, tap more than sixty newspapers nationwide and three hundred magazines.

“We print everything—both sides of the issues,” explained Harry
Zubkoff, founder and for thirty-six years the guiding spirit behind
Current News
until his retirement in 1986. Zubkoff is a five-foot-five look-alike for Menachem Begin, a voracious reader, a man with a curious mind, a wide grin, and a tough hide toward military services jealously fretting that their achievements are underplayed and their gaffs are overcriticized. Over the years, Zubkoff, a self-taught editor, developed an independent sense of what is news and what the Pentagon should be reading. Some high officials credit “Mr. Z,” as they call him, with making the Pentagon more literate by the think pieces he circulates and more alert by the alarms that he sounds.

“We don’t print the scurrilous stuff, name-calling and profanity,” Zubkoff told me before his retirement. “But I’ve often been the bearer of bad tidings. I see our job as bringing the bad news to the right people.”
³

The impact is immediate. In the Reagan era, people at the pinnacle of the Pentagon learned it was perilous to show up at Weinberger’s morning staff meeting without having scoured the Early Bird and prepared their rebuttals. Similarly, the Pentagon’s internal critics and whistle-blowers found out that the best way to get Weinberger’s attention was to leak some headache to the press and get the story into the Early Bird.

Weinberger told me that some people exaggerate the influence of Early Bird, but half a dozen other high Pentagon officials contended that Weinberger leaned on the press—especially Early Bird—to keep the Pentagon on its toes. “Weinberger tends to manage the department by reading the Early Bird and asking his staff about it,” said one close aide. “He’s an information junkie. He will come into the morning staff meeting, flip through the Early Bird, and if he has a policy question, he’s got the experts right there to question.” Another regular at Weinberger’s staff sessions said outsiders would be surprised how much the agenda was dominated by items plucked by Early Bird from deep inside the major newspapers. “Cap’s management control system was the newspaper,” said a third high official.

Weinberger’s trigger reactions to the Early Bird exasperated Richard DeLauer, for nearly five years undersecretary for Research and Engineering. “Cap himself believed everything that was said about the costs of those spare parts,” DeLauer told me. “He felt they were a rip-off.”
⁴

When DeLauer would come under Weinberger’s fire in staff meetings for some weapons snafu, he would scowl and urge Weinberger to sidestep. “Look, you’re a lightning rod,” DeLauer would whine, his raspy voice rising in frustration. “Just ignore ’em. Tell ’em, ‘I’m running
this whole Defense Department, I can’t be bothered with one little piece of the action.’ Tell ’em, ‘It’s DeLauer’s job or somebody else’s job.’ And it gets defused.
We’re
not news. If you can’t take on Cap Weinberger for the six o’clock news, who the hell wants to take on an undersecretary or an assistant secretary? Christ, we do sixteen million procurement actions a year. If you’re better than Ivory Snow, ninety-nine and one half percent pure, that’s still one half percent of mistakes. Christ, that’s eight thousand a year!”

The Dissident Triangle

From the standpoint of the Pentagon hierarchy, DeLauer was right, but Weinberger largely ignored him; the Early Bird plays into the hands of the rank-and-file against the top brass. It is a central element in the “dissident triangle”—the triangular power network formed among the Pentagon’s internal critics, their allies in Congress, and the press, which harvests news leaks from both.

The way the power game is played, this triangle operates against the top Pentagon hierarchy, and the Early Bird acts as a proxy for the Washington press in the Pentagon’s inner circle, magnifying press influence by prodding policymakers to react to what is in print. The Early Bird puts the Pentagon’s woes into Weinberger’s ride-to-work reading: the $640 toilet seat; the $2,043 nut; the $1,118 plastic cap for a stool leg; the $7,622 coffee maker; the $9,606 Allen wrench; the General Dynamics executive who kenneled his dog and charged it to his Pentagon expense account.

In effect, the Early Bird is an institutional channel for rebels and whistle-blowers within the military establishment, giving these dissenters a voice—albeit an anonymous one—in the supreme councils of the Pentagon. This in-house press digest enshrines Schattschneider’s basic principle—that the outcome of the conflict depends on how the audience grows and how it reacts. Pentagon dissidents use the Early Bird to change the arena of their internal battles with the generals and admirals over how to spend taxpayer money; the arena shifts from inside the Pentagon to the open battleground of Congress. Critics get their word out to the press, and the Early Bird ricochets it back into the corridors of power. That’s in line with Zubkoff’s motto: Bringing the bad news to the right people.