ORIGINAL SIN Chapter Six

 

"In recent years, I have come to believe that “conservatism”....has become an arrogant defender of ideological excess and entrenched interests and privileges...(of) Wall Street, Big Energy, multinational corporations, the Military-Industrial Complex, the Religious Right, the Market Extremist think-tanks, and the Rush Limbaugh Axis...."

Kevin Phillips “Why I am No Longer A Conservative” 7 October, 2002

In the early summer of 1988 Lee Atwater (above, right) asked twenty-eight year Republican “operative” Roger Stone (above, center) to come to his Washington, D.C. Office. According to Stone – who is far from an unimpeachable source - Atwater locked the door of his corner office and then popped in a video tape. Atwater said, “`I got a couple boys going to put a couple million dollars up for this independent.'' He meant the ad had been funded by a political group with no ties to the Bush campaign. But the fact that Atwater, who was running the Bush campaign, had an advanced copy of the 30 second spot belied any claim the two groups were working independent of each other.

At 18 years of age Roger Jason Stone (above, right) had cut his dirty tricks teeth on Nixon's 1968 campaign. Before the New Hampshire primary Stone made a donation to one of Nixon's Republican competitors in the name of “The Young Socialist Alliance”, than passed the receipt for that payment to the conservative Manchester Union-Leader newspaper, which eagerly smeared the unwitting target. 

Stone became such a Nixon loyalist, he had “Tricky Dick's” face tattooed across his back. Stone insisted he did nothing illegal during the Watergate scandal, but when it later became public he was working for Senator Bob Dole, Dole felt forced to fire him. Seeking a legitimate income source Stone formed a political “consulting” firm with old friends Charlie Black and Paul Manafort and later, Lee Atwater.

Stone  (Above left) was recruited for the 1980 Reagan campaign, learning from, among others, the infamous Roy Cohn (above, right) , who had been the brains behind Republican Senator Joe McCarthy.  As an operative, Stone admitted delivering a cash filled suitcase to a lawyer representing the Liberal Party of New York. 

In the 4 November general election Reagan beat Democrat Jimmy Carter in New York by just 165,000 votes. Liberal Party candidate John Anderson siphoned almost half a million votes, ensuring Reagan won New York's 41 electoral votes. Not that Reagan needed them that year. But in any case, Lee Atwater knew fully well who he had invited to view “his” commercial.

What came to be called the “Furlough” ad began with pictures of George Bush and Micheal Dukakis side by side. The narrator began, “Bush and Dukakis on crime.” Now only Bush's face was center screen. “Bush supports the death penalty for first degree murderers,” said the narrator.

Now only Dukakis' image appeared. “Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murders to have weekend passes from prison.”

Now the grainy booking photo of William Horton taken from the foot of his bed in the hospital ward, appeared. Horton seemed to be gazing down at the viewer, his tall “Afro” hair defiant, his eyes clouded with pain killers. Intoned the narrator, “One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him 19 times.” 

A photo of Horton being moved in police custody was then shown. “Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison.” 

Then, as each additional offense were named, the key words appeared on the screen. “ Horton fled”, said the voice.” KIDNAPPED a young couple, STABBING the man and repeatedly RAPPING his girl friend.” 

Then Dukakis' face appears again, under first the words (also spoken by the narrator) “Weekend prison passes” and then the words, “Dukakis on crime.”

Nothing stated in the ad was untrue. But according to Stone (above), his reaction was immediate. “That's a huge mistake”, he claims to have told Atwater, “You and George Bush will wear that to your grave. It's a racist ad. You're already wining this issue. It's working for you. You're stepping over a line. You're going to regret it.'' 

 According to Stone, Lee Atwater responded at the time, ``Y'all a pussy.' But for every Republican who seems determined to argue into perpetuity that the ad is not racist, the first reaction of Roger Stone stands unchallenged – if he said it - “It's a racist ad.”

Whatever the truthfulness of Stone's version of events, something caused Atwater and or Ailes to contact the National Conservative Political Action Committee, whose name was on the ad. NCPAC was the 2 year old creation of Floyd Gregory Brown, out of Oregon. He had raised enough money through direct mail and telephone marketing to bring himself to the attention of conservative billionaires like Charles and David Koch, Robert Mercer and Peter Thiel. These wealthy extreme conservative contributors had pumped $9 million into NCPAC, and saw that it hired its most important employee, Larry McCarthy. The “Furlough” ad was physically his creation.

Lawrence C. McCarthy was Brooklyn born. After graduating from Georgetown University in 1974, he worked for several Republican congressmen, on their campaigns and as a press officer. Then in 1981 he became a senior executive for Roger Ailes. Late in 1987, however, Larry abruptly shifted to working for NCPAC. The separation from the Bush Campaign and Roger Ailes was thus no more than one degree and just a few weeks in time.

Larry McCarthy now re-edited “Furlough”. In the new version the in-hospital booking photo of William Horton was completely absent. It was replaced by a longer hold on the middle distant image of Horton in police custody. It was this new “Furlough” which was presented for “clearance” to the advertising directors of the various television stations and cable systems. 

Once they had cleared that version for broadcast, McCarthy then substituted the original “Furlough”, containing “Willie's” ominous image.

Any skepticism about the overt racist message of “Furlough”, or the more subtle version of the coming “Revolving Door” ad, should be buried six feet deep along with the later obfuscation, denials and justifications by Lee Atwater (above),  Roger Ailes and all future generations of Republican apologists. The only reason for a “Cleared” copy and a “Broadcast” copy of “Furlough” was that, in 1988, both conservatives and liberals damn well knew the party was selling racism.

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ORIGINAL SIN Chapter Two

 

“The question everyone wants answered is how a cold-blooded murderer ever got out in the first place,”

The Lawrence Eagle-Tribune April, 1987

One afternoon in late May of 1988, the 6' 9” Jim Pinkerton, leader of the 35 “nerds” doing Opposition Research for the Vice President George Walker Bush Presidential campaign, was reading the transcript of the New York Democratic Presidential Primary debate. 

By then it was clear Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis would be the Democratic nominee, and early polls gave him a 17 point lead over Bush. 

But Jim read something in Al Gore's remarks which tweaked his interest. He called Reagan White House Staffer Andrew Hill "Andy" Card  (above) who was from the bay state, to ask about the “furlough issue.”

Jim Pinkerton explained later, “Card said, Yes, this has been a huge thing up here...The Boston Globe had run stories on this, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune had run something like one hundred thirty stories.   They won a Pulitzer Prize (abive) ... it was just sort of totally hiding in plain sight...it was just like discovering gold.” 

When Pinkerton told his boss, campaign manager, “boy wonder” Lee Atwater said, "By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.”  And  Communications Director Roger Ailes promised to “Strip the bark off that little bastard (Dukakis)”, adding, “The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.” Within days, Horton's threatening mug shot was hanging at Bush''s 15^th street, D.C. headquarters.

Roger Eugene Ailes (above) came into politics as a two time Emmy winning talk show producer with a "boundless propensity for fabulism and a bottomless ego.” 

The talk show brought Ailes (above, left) into contact with Richard Nixon (above, right), who after a few hours listening to Roger, appointed him his Executive for Television.  Privately Ailes had a cynical view of his new client. “He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, ‘I want to be president.’"

In the words of Jim Pinkerton, with Nixon, Ailes was,  part Don Rickles, part psychiatrist and part motivational football coach".,  During the 1968 campaign,  instead of doing standard interviews with heavyweight journalists Ailes designed “town hall” meetings,  hosted by local anchors and filled with carefully chosen voters who would ask Nixon softball questions. Historian Rick Perlstein explained the events were not staged, rather, “They were fixed”.

It also highlighted Roger's insight into the creation of news, what came to be called his “Orchestra Pit Theory". “If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, "I have a solution to the Middle East problem," and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?” Or as Roger rephrased it during the '84 campaign, “ What would a journalist rather cover? New TV ads or the latest proposal to change the capital gains tax?"

Working closely with Ronald Reagan, Ailes became known as “Dr. Feelgood” because of his ability to reassure and coach the candidate through difficult situations. It was Ailes who counseled that facts were not important. “You get elected”, he told Reagan, “on themes”. As Mary Matalin, a longtime Republican campaign strategist remembered, “"Roger always had the clearest vision...When you came to a strategy impasse...I can’t remember a single incident where he lost a fight."

Having chosen to highlight the issues of furloughs – among others - the next step was to convince their client, Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush (above) that he needed to play rough. The Bush family had been wealthy since Samuel Prescott Bush took over the Buckeye Steel Company in 1908 and bought a summer vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine. 

And although Bush had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross in World War II (above) and been a successful businessman, and politician, he was what Atwater called a "cocktail party Republican", a large step removed from the blood thirsty front line fighters like himself.. 

So Ailes rented an office in a shopping mall in the "quintessentially suburban” town of Paramus, New Jersey (above), where he ran a series of focus groups, testing the public impressions of Bush and Dukakis. It seems likely that while these groups were also “fixed”.

As expected and intended the groups did not have good news for Bush. They reinforced the “Curse of Martin Van Buren”, the last Vice President who had won election to Presidency in his own right back in 1836. Atwater explained the current dilemma. “We’re 17 points back,” said Atwater, “and (Dukakis will) pick up 10 more points at their convention and we won’t win. Even with a good campaign, we won’t win.” After this presentation, Atwater said, “it was an easy sell.”

Atwater (above) would later explain to an interviewer what “it” was. “You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can't say "nigger"...So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now...fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes...” When the interviewer asked if Atwater was admitting the “conservative strategy” was just racism dressed up in new clothes, Lee responded, “You all don't quote me on this.”

By now, William Horton (above)  was inmate number 189-1821 at the Jessup Correctional Institute, south of Baltimore. He had been sentenced to 2 life terms plus 85 years by Maryland Judge Vincent Fema. 

Massachusetts had requested Horton's return to finish his life sentence, but Judge Fema said, "I'm not prepared to take the chance that Mr. Horton might again be furloughed or otherwise released. This man should never draw a breath of free air again." It was as if the judge were writing ads for the Republicans.

And Horton's victims were still trapped in prisons Horton had created for them. They never returned to their home, selling it at a loss. Although they went ahead with their marriage plans 2 months after the assault, Angela Barnes constantly carries a knife in her purse, and keeps one in her beside table. She admits to even taking the weapon into the bathtub with her. She thinks, if faced with a similar situation, with a gun to her head, “I think I'd say 'Go ahead, shoot me'. I don't want to go through this again”. 

Since that horrific night in 1987, Clifford Barnes has never gotten a full night's sleep.  He would later demand, “Ask Dukakis if he wants Willie Horton in his basement”  But when the couple had approached Governor Micheal Dukakis to discuss the state's furlough program, he refused to meet with them. It was as if Dukakis was writing ads for the Republicans.

Now all the Bush team needed to find the right person to create the perfect ad that mixed race and prison furloughs to destroy the Democrat candidate,

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GO ASK ALICE ROOSEVELT

I wonder how Alice felt when they called her “The Other Washington Monument.” The best nicknames are half jokes and half true, and the truer they are the funnier they are. Her first nickname had been “Princess Alice”, and her second had been bestowed by the press, who dubbed her “Alice in Plunder Land”. And to her credit Alice always got the joke, and always cackled in public. She was tough. When she was a little girl Alice contracted polio, leaving one leg shorter than the other. Her stepmother mercilessly forced the screaming child to painfully exercise her legs, day after day. So dutiful about this was her stepmother, that into her eighties Alice could touch her nose with her toe. Alice was proud of that, but it never earned her a nickname.

“One pill makes you larger, And one pill makes you small. And the ones that mother gives you, Don't do anything at all. Go ask Alice, When she’s ten feet tall.”
(Grace Slick – 1966)

Alice was born into the world with a silver spoon in her mouth, the first child of Alice Hathaway Lee and Theodore Roosevelt. Her inheritance turned to tin just two days after her birth when her mother and her paternal grandmother both died on the same day.  Her father Theodore  was so shattered that he never spoke his dear wife’s name again. That also meant he never spoke Alice’s name again, either. Theodore loved his child, and showered her with gifts, but he called her “Baby Lee” and he called her “Mousiekins”, but he never called her Alice. So deep was that scarring that Alice never referred to herself by her first name, either. And Alice was always talking about herself.

Theodore mended his grief by hunting grizzlies in the Black Hills, and Alice was left with her aunt, Anna Bamie Roosevelt. In her autobiography Alice noted, “There is always someone in every family who keeps it together. In ours, it was Auntie Bye.” But she also said that “If auntie Bye had been a man, she would have been president.” And Alice should know. Her father was President. When Alice was two her father remarried, to an English woman named Edith Carow, and Alice was sent to live with them. Edith and Theodore would have five children together.  As Alice saw things, her father loved her “one-sixth as much as he loved his other children.”

“And if you go chasing rabbits, And you know you're going to fall, Tell them a hookah smoking caterpillar has given you the call. Call Alice, When she was just small”.

Alice grew into the physical embodiment of a John Singer Sargent painting, with a striking beauty, a vicious sense of humor and a first rate brain, allowing her to view the world with what she called a “"detached malevolence”

Her entire life Alice kept one gift, a pillow embroidered with the phrase, “If you can’t say something nice about anyone, come sit right here by me.” She had a simple philosophy; “Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch where it itches.” “The secret of eternal youth,” she said, “is arrested development.” And Alice should know.

“When the men on the chess board, Get up and tell you where to go. And you just had some kind of mushroom, And your mind is moving slow. Go ask Alice. I think she'll know.”

To Alice, all politics was personal, and everything personal was political. On the day that William Howard Taft (above, left) was to replace her father in the White House, Alice (above, center) lay a voodoo curse on Mrs. Taft by burning her effigy and burying it on the White House grounds. She said of Calvin Coolidge, “He looks like he was weaned on a pickle.” And Warren G. Harding’s White House simply appalled her; “…the study was filled with cronies, the air heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey stood about, cards and poker chips ready at hand--a general atmosphere of waist-coat unbuttoned, feet on the desk, and the spittoon alongside.” Theodore Roosevelt's  White House was clearly superior in every way, in Princess Alice’s eyes.

Not that she made life easy for her father. When he was President, Alice constantly burst into the Oval Office with advice, until Theodore threatened to throw her out a window. The President explained to a visitor, “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.”  And Alice had no illusions about her father. “He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening, ” she said. It could have been used as the sketch of every successful politician, before and since.

Alice disliked Eisenhower, admired the Kennedys, tolerated Johnson, felt warm affection toward Nixon, and refused to even meet Jimmy Carter. But the President she disliked the most was her cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, noting that his branch of the family were “one step ahead of the bailiff from an island in the Zuider Zee.” She explained, “I am a Republican.... I am going to vote for Hoover.... If I were not a Republican, I would still vote for Mr. Hoover this time.” Later, she insisted, “I'd rather vote for Hitler than to vote for (F.D.R.)”, thus becoming the first Republican to use a Hitler analogy against a Democrat.

“When logic and proportion, Have fallen sloppy dead. And the white knight is talking backwards, And the Red Queen's “Off with her head!” Remember what the dormouse said.”

It took me a long time to understand why Alice married Ohio Congressman Nicholas Longworth. Her 1906 nuptials set the standard for White House weddings. But he was fourteen years her elder, a dedicated alcoholic and a prodigious Lothario. He was also socially skilled and very wealthy.

Still, it was difficult to imagine her enthralled with him, until I came across the story told of a fellow congressman who ran his hand over Nicholas’s bald head, saying, “It feels as smooth as my wife’s bottom.” Whereupon Nicholas ran his own hand over his own head, and announced, “Yes. So it does.” A sense of humor can make almost any sin bearable.

It was not marital infidelity that separated the couple, it was political infidelity In 1912, Nicholas supported Taft’s re-election, while Alice, of course, supported her father Theodore's run under the Bull Moose banner. Theodore lost, but so did Nicholas, which probably saved their marriage.  It was also during this period that Alice conceived her only child, Paulina. Nicholas lost that election, too. He never let on that he knew Paulina was not his, and he loved his daughter for the rest of his life. He was  re-elected in the next cycle, and would eventually become Speaker of the House. So Alice won there too.

 Nicholas died in 1932. And at his funeral someone asked Alice if she also intended on being buried in Cincinnati. Alice replied that would be a fate worse than death itself. When she died in 1980, Alice’s remains were buried in Washington, D.C.

“Feed your head. Feed your head.”

In her autobiography, Alice wrote of her stepmother Edith’s “fairness and charm and intelligence, which she has to a greater degree than almost any one else I know.” It was almost, but not quite, an acknowledgement of what a pain in the ass Alice had been to her stepmother . And it was certainly not an apology. As far as I can tell, Alice never apologized to anyone. Ever.

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