All Too Human: A Political Education (3 page)

I couldn't have planned what came next. Everyone needs a break or two to get ahead. Mine came the night Norman Mayer was shot.

Norman Mayer was an older man with a deep tan who wandered the streets of Washington in a nylon windbreaker, sunglasses, and a golf cap, looking like the caddie master at a country club gone to seed. He too was working on disarmament, but in his own peculiar way. If he caught your eye on the street, he would hand over a pamphlet that promised ten thousand dollars to anyone who could actually prove that nuclear weapons prevent nuclear war — a pretty lucid point for a deranged person. Occasionally, Mayer walked into our offices off Dupont Circle to lobby for his proposal. Since I was the lowest person on the totem pole, he was my responsibility. I'd offer him a sandwich, and we'd chat uncomfortably until I could find a reason to excuse myself and usher him out the door. Not exactly what I had in mind when I imagined Washington power lunches, but Norman seemed harmless enough. Until December 8, 1982.

When I returned from lunch, my boss was waiting for me with a weak smile. “Your friend is holding the Washington Monument hostage,” he said. “You'd better call the police.”

Dressed in a homemade space suit, Norman Mayer had driven a van he said was loaded with dynamite up to the monument and threatened to blow it up unless he could broadcast his plan to prevent nuclear war. Washington was paralyzed, and the world was watching on live television. After I called the police, reporters started calling me.

So began my first foray into a media feeding frenzy — one of those times when everyone in the country responsible for bringing “the news” to the rest of us focuses for a moment on a single event. TV bookers who fill the airwaves with talking heads work the phones to find anyone with even the most tangential connection to the event. That day, that someone was me: I was the guy who knew the guy who was holding Washington hostage.
Nightline
sent a limo. I actually said, “Well, Ted …” on national TV, before telling what little I knew about Norman. My parents made a video, and calls came in from friends all over the country. To top it all off, a newly elected congressman from Cleveland named Ed Feighan was watching — one day after I had applied for an entry-level position in his office.

Feighan called the next day: “If you can get yourself on
Night-line
, maybe you can do some good for me.” The job title was legislative assistant, which meant I would draft letters, memos, and speeches on whatever the congressman was working on. The salary was more than double my intern's stipend — $14,500 a year.

I was thrilled with my new job but spooked by how I got it. Norman Mayer had been bluffing. There was no dynamite in his truck. But the police couldn't know that, so they shot him down near midnight when he tried to drive off the Mall.
It's not my fault Norman got shot. I didn't drive the van or pull the trigger. Why couldn't he just surrender after making his point? Besides, I would have gotten the job anyway. I'm qualified, I'm from Cleveland, I'll work hard. Still
… No, it wasn't my fault Norman got shot, but I couldn't escape the fact that his fate was my good fortune.

Around this time, one of my new friends, Eric Alterman, introduced me to his mentor, the legendary journalist I. F. Stone. Nearing eighty, Stone had spent the last fifty years covering Washington on his own in his own way, always exposing hypocrisy, always challenging power, never getting too close to it. Eric arranged for us to meet at the bagel bakery on Connecticut Avenue. I can still see Stone at a small table, picking at his late afternoon lunch of a toasted bagel, raisins, and a cup of tea. With his wispy curls and clear eyes, he looked like Yoda come to life in a fraying flannel suit.

“You've covered Washington so long,” I asked, “weren't you ever tempted to go into politics yourself?”

“Once,” he answered. Sixty-five years earlier, when Izzy was in high school, the political “boss” of his class had offered him a place on the editorial board of the school paper — his dream job — in return for campaign help. But whatever temptation Izzy felt was quickly overwhelmed by a wave of nausea and a vow never to approach active politics again.

I respected that sentiment, envied it, felt slightly shamed by it, but didn't share it. My new work seemed too thrilling to renounce, and I was a natural at the game of politics: at knowing who knew what I needed to know, at absorbing the rhythms of legislative life by walking the halls, at preparing committee hearing questions for my boss that might get picked up by the press, at learning to anticipate his political needs and to use his position to advance my issues too, at succumbing to the lure of the closed room and the subtle power rush that comes from hearing words I wrote come out of someone else's mouth.

A democracy needs people like Izzy on the outside to keep it honest, but it also needs people on the inside to make it work — people who will play the game for the sake of getting good things done. But you have to be careful. Your first deal is like your first scotch. It burns, might make you feel nauseous. If you're like Izzy, once is enough. If you're like me, you get to like it. Then to need it.

In October 1983, two days after a terrorist attack on American marines in Beirut, President Reagan ordered an invasion of Grenada. To me it seemed like a transparent diversion: Invade a tiny country in the Caribbean in order to keep people's minds off a terrible tragedy in the Middle East. I rushed into work that morning to write a speech for Feighan lambasting the president. “The whole country will see through this,” I assured him, “and you should be leading the charge.”

Feighan questioned the invasion from the floor of the House — and he never let me forget it. Few other members of Congress joined him, and the public loved the pictures of those rescued medical students kissing American soil. I had made a tactical error in allowing my personal views to cloud my political judgment. Even if I believed I was right on the merits, I was wrong about the politics. I should have known enough to warn my boss that the invasion would be popular even as I advised him to speak out against it.

Would that have convinced him? Maybe not; maybe it was my passionate certainty that opposing the invasion was a political winner that made my case. Whatever the truth, I learned that day to separate what I thought was right from what I thought would work, a skill that would serve me well — at a price. Judging how the world will judge what you do — how a position will “play” — is an essential political skill. If you can't predict what will work, you can't survive in office. If you don't keep your job, you can't achieve what you think is right. The danger is when you stop caring about the difference between being right and being employed, or fail to notice that you don't know what the difference is anymore.

That month I also applied for a Rhodes Scholarship, a second try after being rejected as a college senior. Studying at Oxford would give me the opportunity to spend more time thinking about what was right rather than what would work, and would reassure my parents about my future. Only half joking, my father asked, “When are you going to stop playing around in Washington and get a real job?” So I made a deal with him. If I got turned down again, I really
would
go to law school.

The selection committee saved me from that, and the scholarship offered the professional security of law school without the drudgery. The Rhodes is a passport to the Establishment. While it may not assure success, it guarantees opportunities to interview for great jobs. And the romantic vision of Oxford life passed down from scholars perched in the corridors of power is that while you're there, you get to read what you want, absorb the wisdom of brilliant tutors, argue into the night, and travel around the world. All this without a career penalty; it's an idyll off the fast track.

Unburdened for a time by the need to prove myself by getting good grades or impressing the boss, I had the chance at Oxford to learn and explore on my own. That fall a famine broke out in the Sudan. I went to volunteer in the camps and see the famine for myself — to understand why it happens, what it does to people, and write about it if I could. Helping feed a few kids or keep the camps clean was worthwhile work, and the articles I intended to write might heighten awareness. But the return ticket zipped in my knapsack reminded me that I was no Albert Schweitzer. This trip was as much about adventure as altruism, and I knew it.

While I was in Sudan, the general who'd ruled for a generation with CIA backing was overthrown. On the day of the coup, I found myself in the middle of a silent riot. Mobs were milling about, but the only sound you heard was the squeak of sneakers on pavement. Then the radio announced that the general was gone, and the crowds started to race through the streets with joyful screams.

The rest of the day I wandered through Khartoum wondering if this was what a real revolution was like. The air was charged with happiness and hope, energized by the belief that everything would be better now that the bad guy was out and the new guys could govern. But I was struck by the sight of a dazed old woman who was observing the celebration from her cardboard home by the side of the road.
What does she think of all this? Will her life be any better tomorrow than it is today? Or is some human misery beyond the reach of any revolution? Is it possible things will get worse?

Years later, that image sticks with me — not as a counsel of despair or an excuse for cynicism, but as a reminder to be humble about the promise of politics and the potential of government. Because I believe in original sin, because I know that I'm capable of craving a cold beer in a village of starving kids, because I understand that selfishness vies for space in our hearts with compassion, I believe we need government — a government that forces us to care for the common good even when we don't feel like it, a government that helps channel our better instincts and check our bad ones. But I also believe in containing government and tempering the claims we make for it. I don't think government is good, just necessary. I'm a liberal who accepts limits.

My second year at Oxford was an attempt to reinforce my intellectual instincts with systematic study of Christian ethics. Back to basics. I wanted to build a better foundation for my political views, to ground my personal beliefs and partisan experience in philosophy and theology — another way of reconciling the life I was leading with the life I had imagined as a boy. I knew a lot about the “how” and “what” of politics. Now I wanted to think more about the “why.” So I read Augustine and Aquinas, Martin Luther and Reinhold Niebuhr, analyzing the fundamental questions of politics — war and peace, life and liberty — from the perspective of what was right rather than what would work. This would offer me a guide to which questions to ask and a reminder of where I was going wrong when I got too caught up in the game.

And I still loved the game. After my Rhodes I went back to Washington, where Congressman Feighan made me his chief of staff. The next year I signed on with the Dukakis-for-President campaign. This was a no-brainer: a Greek American liberal from Massachusetts was running for president. How could I
not
work for him? After volunteering in the primaries, I moved to Boston for what I thought would be a short, happy hiatus before returning to Washington with a new president.

When I arrived, we had a seventeen-point lead. Then came the summer assault. The Bush campaign, led by Lee Atwater, opened up a disciplined, ruthless, and sustained series of attacks on Governor Dukakis's record and character. Flags, furloughs, the Pledge of Allegiance. Willie Horton became a household name, and President Reagan even joked that Dukakis was an “invalid.” This “joke” was a calculated effort to ignite the false rumor spread around Washington by Republican operatives that Dukakis had been treated for depression — and, politically, it worked. Though the allegation was false, Dukakis was forced to call a press conference with his doctor to deny it. By August's Republican convention, our lead was gone, our candidate was a caricature, and our campaign was effectively over.

A few months after the election, I left politics to become the assistant to Father Tim Healy, the new president of the New York Public Library. Father Healy, a brilliant Jesuit with the bearing of Jackie Gleason, wanted to rebuild the branch libraries that had meant so much to him when he was a kid growing up in the Bronx. I wanted to learn how to manage a major institution and to be part of that educational effort — and, with the Republicans still controlling Washington, Manhattan seemed like a good place to be.

But just after I found an apartment, Newt Gingrich's campaign to topple Speaker Jim Wright succeeded, and the shake-up in the Democratic congressional leadership that ensued ended with Tom Foley as Speaker, Richard Gephardt as majority leader — and my getting a call from Kirk O'Donnell. A veteran of former Speaker Tip O'Neill's operation, Kirk had been my boss in the Dukakis campaign and was now a Washington lawyer scouting talent on the side for Dick Gephardt.

Kirk called my office overlooking the library lions on Fifth Avenue and got right to the point: “I know you just started with Father Healy, George, but would you consider coming back to Washington to be Dick Gephardt's floor man?”

Consider? Are you kidding? Kirk was offering me a starting job in the Democratic Party's major league — the House leadership. The majority leader was one step away from the Speaker, who was two steps away from the president. As executive floor assistant to Gephardt, I would be his shadow, his surrogate, his eyes and ears. In my old job with Feighan, our successes had been satisfying but small, like successfully petitioning for the release of a political prisoner or sneaking an amendment onto the foreign-aid bill to create microloans for third-world farmers. With Gephardt, I would get the chance to help set a national agenda for the Democratic Party, to figure out how to blunt Bush initiatives and force Bush vetoes. With Feighan, I couldn't get my phone call returned by the majority leader's floor man. With Gephardt, I would be that guy. Although I had never met the man, I knew Gephardt was a good Democrat, and there was a bonus: In 1992, he was planning to run again for president. So much for getting out of politics.