The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (25 page)

In 1988, in the Hall of St. Catherine at the Kremlin, Gorbachev looked straight at
him with a glimmer in his eye and said, “What are you going to do now that you’ve
lost your best enemy?”

The next year the general got his fourth star the day before his fifty-second birthday.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a few months later, the youngest ever. Without
its best enemy America could fight wars again, and he ran the first since Vietnam—Panama
(a drug dealer with a face like a pineapple), then the big one, Desert Storm. The
ground campaign took four days to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. America was back, and
the chairman did it by turning the agony of Vietnam into a doctrine: clear goals,
national interest, political support, overwhelming force, early exit. (The Kurds and
Shia were on their own; the Bosnians would be, too.)

By the time the general retired after thirty-five years in uniform, he was the most
admired man in America. No one knew his political party—he had voted for JFK, LBJ,
and Carter once, then he started voting Republican. Both sides trusted him because
he embodied the bipartisan center. (A few people distrusted him for the same reason.)
He was an Eisenhower internationalist, cautious to the core. As long as the center
held, his prestige kept rising. History performed jujitsu and turned race and Vietnam
in his favor, giving him an authority no one else in Washington had.

He made everyone feel that America still worked.

In 1995 he declared himself a Republican. His friend Rich Armitage, a known party
member, had warned him not to: it was no longer the party of Eisenhower—it was no
longer even the party of Reagan. Something had been set loose, a spirit of ugliness
and unreason, even in foreign policy. (The Cold War had been clarifying and moderating—maybe
Gorbachev was right.) The establishment still held the reins, but the horses were
Know-Nothings. But he said that he wanted to broaden the party’s appeal.

He could have been the first black president. Instead, he took himself out of the
running and volunteered his time for poor kids in poor schools. His message was always
the same: hard work, honesty, courage, sacrifice.

When he was called back to service, the new secretary of state took the stage and
towered over the barely elected, bewildered-looking president. No one was more experienced,
more able, more popular. He would open the hood, fix Russia and China, tinker with
the Balkans, lubricate the Middle East, tighten up Iraq, and restore a demoralized
department to good order and discipline. But his friend Armitage, who became his number
two, thought Bush had picked his secretary of state for his approval ratings, not
his views.

For two years the secretary represented the best face of America to the world.

When the planes hit the buildings he was at a meeting of Latin American leaders in
Lima, and he had the presence of mind to linger long enough to vote for the Democratic
Charter and reaffirm the values behind it. “They can destroy buildings, they can kill
people, and we will be saddened by this tragedy. But they will never be allowed to
kill the spirit of democracy. They cannot destroy our society. They cannot destroy
our belief in the democratic way.”

He assembled a coalition against the Taliban, bringing Pakistan into the fold. He
let the world know that America was not going rogue—its friends still mattered. He
didn’t have to say that a country that had made the son of black immigrants in the
South Bronx its emissary to the world was worth supporting.

And when the president turned his sights on Iraq, the secretary was the voice of caution.
He didn’t say no, but he tried to steer the car while stepping on the brake. His department
was skeptical of the intelligence. He articulated a new doctrine: you break it, you
own it. He wanted the UN involved. He didn’t want to lose the center.

He was holding together the foreign policy establishment without knowing that it was
gone. He needed structure to thrive, but the structures that held up the postwar order
had eroded. The Council on Foreign Relations and the Ford Foundation no longer mattered.
The statesmen and generals had become consultants and pundits. The army was composed
of professionals, not citizens. The public schools were leaving the children of the
whole people semiliterate. The parties were locked in a war of attrition.

He was trying to function inside institutional failure, but that was incomprehensible
to the stellar product of great American institutions. The administration was rotten
with ideologues and operatives who showed contempt for the institutions. He didn’t
see that they had him isolated and defeated.

The most popular man in America was alone.

The president wanted his approval ratings. The White House wrote a speech for him
to give, forty-eight single-spaced pages. He had a week to get rid of all the lies,
and that wasn’t enough time, and there never could have been enough time, for he didn’t
stop to challenge its premise.

On February 5, 2003, the secretary went to the United Nations building on the East
River, twenty minutes away from 952 Kelly Street, which had long ago been burned out
and demolished. He sat down at the Security Council table with audiotapes, photographs,
drawings, and a vial of white powder, and while the world watched on live TV, he spoke
for seventy-five minutes about the threats posed by Saddam’s regime. He spoke with
all the authority and self-control of a lifetime, and a great many Americans were
convinced, for this was the man who showed that America still worked.

Then he stood and walked out with the erect bearing of a soldier.

He had hurt himself far more than any punji stick or Southern bigot could hurt him.

When the war began, the president said that he was sleeping like a baby. “I’m sleeping
like a baby, too,” the secretary said. “Every two hours, I wake up screaming.”

JEFF CONNAUGHTON

Connaughton’s timing in politics hadn’t been great, but in lobbying it was nearly
perfect. When he first got into the business in 1997, companies were spending around
$1.25 billion a year exercising their First Amendment right to petition the United
States government for redress of grievances. Twelve years later, when he left, the
amount had almost tripled. (This was just the fees paid directly to lobbyists—public
relations fees added unreported billions more.) This pot of cash drew a horde of politicians:
between 1998 and 2004, 42 percent of the congresspersons and half the senators who
left office went on to lobby their former colleagues. Thousands of congressional aides
also decamped for K Street, as did several hundred of Connaughton’s ex-colleagues
in the Clinton administration. When he first passed through the revolving door in
1997 and joined Washington’s permanent class, the practice was still called “selling
out.” By the time he pushed through the other way in 2009, it had acquired the air
of something enviable, possibly admirable, certainly inevitable—it was known as “cashing
in.”

In January 2000, Connaughton’s boss Jack Quinn left Arnold & Porter—partly at Connaughton’s
urging—to set up a new firm. The moment was right: Quinn was known in Washington as
an Al Gore guy, and Gore had a good chance to win the presidency in the fall. Quinn’s
political career went back to Eugene McCarthy’s campaign plane in 1968, plus five
years at the highest levels in the Clinton White House, where he’d kept his head in
all the crises. When clients sat down with him, they believed this was how the White
House thought about the big issues. The surprise was Quinn’s new partner: Ed Gillespie,
a Karl Rove guy. Gillespie had worked for Dick Armey in the House and helped draft
the Contract with America, and he was positioned to be one of the Republican Party’s
main fixers if George W. Bush won the White House.

Quinn Gillespie & Associates rented elegant fifth-floor offices on Connecticut Avenue
between M and N, up the street from Morton’s, where the firm did its drinking. Connaughton
came on board as principal and vice chairman, with a corner office and a 7.5 percent
equity stake on top of his salary. Quinn and Gillespie divided the rest.

Other lobbying firms were either Democratic or Republican, and they lost clients when
the wrong party took power. At QGA, the lobbyists were all strong partisans—Quinn
and Gillespie first met as combatants on Fox News—but when they got off the elevator
in the morning their loyalty was directed exclusively toward the firm and its clients.
Congress was fracturing on ideological lines, voters were growing more polarized with
every election, and states were turning red or blue, but at QGA they liked to say
that they were all members of the Green Party, even though the division of labor was
clear: the Republicans at the firm wrote checks to Republican politicians and hosted
fundraising events for them; the firm’s Democrats did the same on their side. As the
2000 election drew near, Connaughton realized that he wasn’t quite as passionate as
usual about his team winning—Bush or Gore, Quinn Gillespie would come out all right.
On election night, Quinn was in Nashville with the Gore team and Gillespie in Austin
with the Bush team, and as the Florida vote tipped back and forth, the two partners
shared the latest news by BlackBerry. Gillespie played a major role for the Republicans
during the Florida recount, and after the Supreme Court made Bush president, he became
one of the hottest insiders in Washington. The firm now had ties to every power center
in government.

Connaughton couldn’t provide access to the top people in Washington. He wasn’t a deal-making
D.C. lawyer or party power broker. His highest rank in government had been special
assistant to the White House counsel. What he brought was a capacity for hard, skillful
work, a few years’ experience in the Senate and White House (staff would return his
calls), cable news exposure on behalf of Clinton during impeachment, and the cachet
of being a Biden guy, though in truth he was more of a Kaufman guy and was becoming
a Quinn guy. Soon he was making more than half a million dollars a year. A wave of
cash came pouring in over a retaining wall and hit him in the face every two weeks.
In Washington there were plenty of other people no one had heard of who were making
more than a million a year.

Quinn and Gillespie considered themselves the smart guys in the business. Lobbying
was no longer about opening one door for a client—power in Washington had become too
diffuse for that. It was about waging a broad strategic campaign, hitting different
audiences through different channels, shaping the media’s view of an issue, building
pressure on legislators in their home districts. Quinn Gillespie was expert at forming
temporary “grasstop” coalitions—enlisting local citizens in a cause as if there had
been organic grassroots support. The firm didn’t flinch from controversy. When Quinn’s
legal client Marc Rich, a billionaire fugitive living in Switzerland, received a presidential
pardon on Clinton’s last day in office, the uproar consumed Quinn for weeks. But an
alternative view of the affair was available: Quinn had gotten a tough thing done
for a client. Old Washington—the press, the social establishment, the upholders of
high standards—pretended that its moral sensibilities had been scandalized. New Washington
understood that the Marc Rich pardon was good for business.

The firm’s clients included the American Petroleum Institute, the nursing home industry,
the British Columbia Lumber Trade Council, Verizon, Bank of America, Hewlett-Packard,
and Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of the World Trade Center. Quinn Gillespie
helped Enron beat back attempts to regulate the electricity markets in California
shortly before the company went bankrupt, and it represented the families of Pan Am
Flight 103 in their effort to collect reparations from Libya. Connaughton had one
of his biggest successes with online advertisers. He became the spokesman for a grasstop
group called the Network Advertising Initiative, spent half a year working up a self-regulatory
system for the industry, met with all five commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission
and the attorneys general of seven states, and headed off a bill in Congress that
would have helped consumers prevent websites from collecting data on their Internet
spending habits. This was the kind of complex work that partners at big-time law firms
did—and Joe Biden had never cared to know his opinion about anything.

At Arnold & Porter, Connaughton had drawn the line at representing Allianz, a German
insurance company that had been accused of cheating Jewish policyholders after World
War II. Quinn had helped negotiate the tobacco settlement under Clinton and wouldn’t
work for the cigarette companies. But Quinn Gillespie represented (for a reputation-hit
premium) the Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb entity spawned at the end of the Balkan
War, and Ivory Coast, which was enmeshed in its own civil war and whose government
was rumored to be operating death squads. Connaughton found international work fascinating,
and he believed that the firm was trying to get the Ivorian regime to do the right
thing by holding elections (anyway, France and Poland never wanted to sign you up,
only the bad boys). In 2005 he flew to Abidjan and was driven through terrifying checkpoints
to the presidential palace, where he was seated in a chair next to President Laurent
Gbagbo. But the president paid no attention to what his lobbyist had to say and showed
no interest in democracy—he just wanted good PR. Connaughton bought a large carved
elephant from a beachfront vendor and lugged it back to Washington for Gillespie,
the firm’s top Republican. Six months later the Ivory Coast account was terminated.

A colleague at the firm once said that when Quinn Gillespie hired a new lobbyist,
only two things mattered: “One, is he comfortable asking his friends to do favors
for him? And two, is he willing to do this?” The colleague made a show of spreading
his legs. “Does he understand that we’re here to make money? If he’s not hungry to
make money, he’s not going to come to work every day doing what he needs to do.”