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Off Script
An Advance Man's Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle, and Political Suicide
By Josh King St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2016 Josh King
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7892-1
CHAPTER 1
THE ADVANCE MAN
DUKAKIS'S RUNNING MATE
Matt Bennett, a twenty-three-year-old advance man from Syracuse, New York, didn't enlist in the 1988 Dukakis presidential campaign with ambitions to oversee the worst political event in history. Despite modest misgivings about what his assignment held in store, only in hindsight could the gangly, khaki-clad operative form a fuller perspective on the catastrophe that lay in store on his watch. Advance people, as much as they try to anticipate disaster when serving a presidential candidate, can't foretell the future.
And even if he could smell doom for the event itself, as Bennett thought he might, who would listen to the warnings of a fresh-faced young man just off a plane in Detroit?
In the summer of 1988, Mike Dukakis looked well positioned to wrest the White House from the Republicans who had held onto presidential power for sixteen of the previous twenty years. One task before him was selecting a running mate. Among the names floated for the short list were Bob Graham of Florida, John Glenn of Ohio, Sam Nunn of Georgia, Tom Foley of Washington, and Lloyd Bentsen of Texas.
Picking a vice-presidential running mate is a process first cloaked in secrecy and then bathed in marketing. Part beauty contest and part background check, it is also the first decision-making "test" of a party's nominee. On July 13, 1988, Dukakis announced that Senator Lloyd Bentsen, a bomber pilot in World War II, would be his wingman, reprising the Massachusetts-Texas axis of the 1960 Democratic ticket. "Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson beat the Republican incumbent vice president in 1960," Dukakis said, referring to Richard Nixon and his running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, at a rally at Faneuil Hall, Bentsen beaming at his side. "And Mike Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen are going to beat him in 1988."
But that summer the Republican Party was also putting someone on Dukakis's ticket. Their choice was clear. His name was Willie Horton.
Horton, of South Carolina by way of the Northeastern Correctional Center in Concord, Massachusetts, was not on Dukakis campaign chairman Paul Brountas's vetting list. A convicted murderer, Horton was serving a life sentence when he was released on June 6, 1986, as part of a weekend furlough program put in place for Massachusetts inmates but didn't return from his hiatus. Instead, ten months later, he raped a woman in Maryland and beat her fiancé to a pulp before being captured by the Prince George's County Police Department. Maryland refused to extradite Horton to Massachusetts out of fear he might be furloughed again.
The awareness campaign for "Candidate Horton" — the slowly building linkage between a convicted criminal and a presidential candidate — began in the primary season but reached a crescendo on October 13 at the second presidential debate between Bush and Dukakis, moderated by Bernard Shaw of CNN at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles. Some 67.3 million people watched at home, making it the fourth most-watched debate in history. It was the year that the Commission on Presidential Debates, or CPD, debuted as presidential debate sponsor, taking over for the League of Women Voters.
The CPD brought with it a striking, made-for-television set that endures to this day. The candidates stand at identical podiums on a bright red carpet installed for the event. They appear before a royal blue backdrop, a "hard wall" like those that once flattered the anchormen on news programs, framing them against a strong, flat color. In the hard wall, hard to see by those watching at home, is a hole through which a TV camera takes "reverse shots" of the moderators without distracting the viewer. Above the candidates rests a graphic depiction of a bald eagle alighting on a shield of the Stars and Stripes. In the eagle's beak billows a ribbon that proclaims, in all capitals, "the union and the constitution forever." The old League of Women Voters debate sets simply used a draped curtain as a backdrop.
In addition to marketing itself with these words and icons of strength and nostalgia, the CPD also catered to the vanity of the candidates. Vice President Bush, at six-foot-two, and Governor Dukakis, half a foot shorter, represented the widest height differential in any presidential campaign in the twentieth century. To make Dukakis look roughly the same height as Bush, the floor beneath his podium was elevated by a three-inch riser underneath the red carpet. Always a keen observer of the visual in politics, Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times, "When [Dukakis] stepped off of [the riser], the six-inch difference in height between the men looked suddenly dramatic."
Following their walk-out on stage, the pre-debate handshake allowed the audience to momentarily take the measure — literally — of the combatants, but the tale of the tape soon gave way to a jab below the belt. Surprisingly, it came not from one of the fighters but from the ref. The debate's moderator, Bernard Shaw of CNN, was a man in a hurry. As soon as the clock struck 6:00 p.m. in Los Angeles and the red tally light blinked atop the camera, Shaw took aim at one of Dukakis's most vulnerable spots.
"For the next ninety minutes we will be questioning the candidates following a format designed and agreed to by representatives of the two campaigns. However, there are no restrictions on the questions that my colleagues and I can ask this evening, and the candidates have no prior knowledge of our questions," Shaw warned. "By agreement between the candidates, the first question goes to Governor Dukakis. You have two minutes to respond. Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?"
Willie Horton's name was never mentioned, but the consequence of his grisly case was applied in the most personal way to the Democratic nominee in the first thirty seconds of the debate.
I was in the audience that night in L.A. and had barely found my seat when Shaw's first question flew across Dukakis's plate. There was an audible gasp from the Democrats seated in the rows in front of and behind my vantage point. Bernie, a curveball for the first pitch, I thought to myself. The moment called for a little hitch in Dukakis's swing, but the pitch was eminently hittable. Handled well, it could be a home run.
Instead, Dukakis's response was the rhetorical equivalent of the thump of a strike landing untouched in the catcher's mitt. "No, I don't, Bernard," Dukakis said. "And I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime. We've done so in my own state."
While Shaw's ghoulish scenario envisioned a heinous crime committed against the governor's spouse, Dukakis's clinical response comprised 44 milquetoast words, followed by 319 more of boilerplate rhetoric on drugs, including his familiar refrain, "We have work to do to fight a real war, not a phony war, against drugs," before his lips stopped moving. Slumped in my seat at the Pauley Pavilion, I couldn't believe the exchange I'd just heard.
Horton's story had been gaining traction since it first appeared in a Massachusetts newspaper, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, in a series of articles beginning in 1987. It was picked up by one of Dukakis's Democratic rivals, Senator Al Gore, who used the failures of the Massachusetts furlough program to score political points before the New York primary. But it was Lee Atwater, Vice President Bush's campaign manager, who used Horton and furloughs to kneecap his opponent. Atwater told a Republican gathering, "By the time we're finished, they're going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis's running mate."
Vice President Bush started making oblique references to the case in his stump speech, and Atwater spent time that summer observing voters' reactions when they heard the basics of the Horton story. He noted how quickly their opinions turned negative toward the Democrat when it was suggested that there was a link between the rap sheet of the paroled murderer and a governor promulgating liberal policies.
On September 21, an independently produced ad from the National Security Political Action Committee called "Weekend Passes" hit the airwaves. The ad, produced by Larry McCarthy, was simple but brutal, a combination of words on the screen and narrated copy edited together with still photos of Bush and Dukakis. The ad also featured Horton's mug shot, designed to shock. The spot was taken off the air on October 4, replaced by one directly from the Bush-Quayle campaign, called "Revolving Door."
"Revolving Door," more stylized and cinematically menacing than its predecessor, delivered an anti-Dukakis message similar to "Weekend Passes," leaving out the Horton mug shot but adding in a subtle pulsing score that, in movies, might signal imminent danger for women walking down dark alleys. Those sounds were mixed with images of prison guards and twenty male inmates passing through a chain-link gate. One of the prisoners, an African American, is the only one to make eye contact with the camera as he passes through the revolving door.
Dukakis never forgave himself for failing to respond to his enemies' early efforts to define him. "Houston had a homicide rate four times the homicide rate of Boston," he said many years later about a major city in Vice President Bush's home state. "It was inexcusable that I let him get away with this. But I did."
WHILE DUKAKIS SLEPT
The governor had reason to think that he could play nice that summer, well before the debate in Los Angeles. He was pictured in news footage looking carefree, lounging on the lawn of his father-in-law's home in the Berkshires after capturing his party's nomination at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta. As he started his vacation at the end of July, a Gallup poll gave him a 55 percent to 38 percent advantage over Bush. With a lead like that he could afford to relax, but Dukakis's staff was uneasy about the mounting attacks and the muted response.
In the White House briefing room in early August, President Reagan, readying for his own summer vacation, joked about Dukakis, saying, "I'm not going to pick on an invalid" in response to unsubstantiated rumors that the governor had undergone treatment for depression. Strip away the Reagan wit and you're left with a sitting U.S. president suggesting a potential successor suffers from mental illness. Dukakis brushed it off. "We all occasionally misspeak," he said. "I'm a very healthy guy."
In California, at the end of the month, Bush needled Dukakis for a 1977 veto of a bill that imposed fines on teachers for not leading classes in the Pledge of Allegiance. Dukakis's rationale rested on a 1943 Supreme Court decision, West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, but the vice president ridiculed him, saying, "What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?" The pledge attack opened a wound that didn't heal fast.
Later, in an interview with a Blackfoot, Idaho, radio station, Republican senator Steve Symms hinted at the existence of photos of Kitty Dukakis, the candidate's wife, burning an American flag at a 1960s anti-war demonstration. The description of such an image, even if it couldn't be produced as evidence, started more rumors buzzing.
At least Mrs. Dukakis fought back. "There couldn't be such a photograph because there was never any such incident. It's outrageous. It didn't happen," she said angrily. Mrs. Dukakis's anger notwithstanding, the chatter about Willie Horton, Reagan's quip, the commotion over the pledge and rumored flag burning struck a chord among voters.
Despite the attacks, Dukakis turned the other cheek and decreed that August was time for him to return visibly to the role of governor of the Commonwealth, nurturing his "Massachusetts Miracle" state programs to keep them ripe for the fall campaign to come. Putting his national campaign temporarily aside, his statehouse staff organized official events in Springfield, Greenfield and other western Massachusetts towns.
Dukakis campaign press secretary Mark Gearan was a native of Gardner, Massachusetts, one of the stops along the tour. "When we left Atlanta at the convention," he told me, "we were seventeen or eighteen points ahead. We were very excited, imagining D.C. And then August, because of the commitment to running the state, really put us way behind." The Berkshires, with its country inns and antique galleries set behind white picket fences, make for bucolic vacations, but spending time there with a soundtrack fed by the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood was a massive time suck for a national campaign in an election year. The press following Dukakis, Gearan remembers, was "bored."
Ignoring the directive for campaign staff to lie low while the governor was on state business, Gearan tagged along on the trip to his hometown of Gardner and tried to take command of the media logistics of the tour. Directing the traveling press bus onto Fairmont Avenue, where his mother lived, Gearan assumed the role of advance man. "Robin Toner [a dean of the political press corps] filed from my house," he remembered. He then took Michael Kelly, another media big shot, to the home of Mrs. Tannen next door. "I remember knocking on the door and saying, 'This is the L.A. Times.' It was crazy." In proper advance work, filing centers should be well-organized work spaces, not a free-for-all at private homes on a residential street, but Gearan did what he could to improvise.
As the Dukakis tour of towns in Western Massachusetts consumed valuable days in August, the governor's supporters began to get antsy. "They have two weeks to turn the campaign around," Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank said publicly. The Olympic Games in Seoul would begin September 17, much later than usual for a Summer Olympics, diverting attention from domestic politics for two weeks during the height of election season. While August passed at a snail's pace, September would become a race against time. Every day preceding the lighting of the Olympic Cauldron in Seoul was precious.
Dukakis knew he was in trouble. He brought back John Sasso, his exiled campaign manager, and inserted him into a new role as vice chairman. Sasso had resigned a year earlier as campaign manager after admitting that he had leaked a videotape showing Delaware senator Joe Biden appropriating lines from British Labour leader Neal Kinnock. But Dukakis needed his alter-ego back, as well as a shot in the arm, and his new vice chairman immediately commenced planning for a series of high-profile events in battleground states to portray the governor as a strong prospective commander in chief. "Bringing John back added a lot of energy and confidence," Gearan told me. "We needed him, because the campaign wasn't working." The first order of business was what's known in politics as a "theme week" to commence right after Labor Day.
Sasso would become "an ambassador to the candidate," as E. J. Dionne noted campaign aides saying in a report for the New York Times — the new vice chairman serving to bridge a communication gap between Dukakis and his staff. Among the plans Sasso put in place was the Reagan-style strategy of selling a consistent message, spanning several days, with each day serving as a variation on the theme. In campaigns, if you're not creating the message, the message is created for you. One of these "theme weeks," scheduled for mid-September, was designed to show Dukakis's command of national defense issues on a trip that would span five states in three days.
On Monday, September 12, the governor would give a speech in Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, site of the First Continental Congress. He would then fly to Cincinnati to tour a General Electric plant that built jet engines for the Air Force. On Tuesday, September 13, he would speak at the Council on Foreign Relations in Chicago, followed by a visit to a General Dynamics facility outside Detroit. There, he would be briefed on the M1A1 tank and speak to defense workers. The tour would then move on to Washington, D.C., for a policy address at Georgetown and a rally in Annapolis before returning to Boston on Wednesday night.
If all went well, the September national defense week would provide a new cloak of machismo for Dukakis, a triumphal return for Sasso and Reagan-style images for the press.
DEATH MARCH
Over more than a quarter century, a simplified chronology of the political death of Michael Dukakis has taken root. It begins with the August attacks as the start of the fatal slide. The governor's clinical response to Bernie Shaw at the October 13 debate, three weeks before Election Day, is pegged as the final nail driven into the candidate's coffin. But it takes more than one nail to bury a presidential candidate. First, the coffin must be built. Then the corpse must be attired for the afterlife. Finally, a funeral must be held.
The specter of political interment that Barack Obama lectured about to the Navy Midshipmen in 2013 is what Dukakis should have sensed in 1988 when, on September 13, his limousine arrived at General Dynamics Land Systems.
That limousine was his hearse. That motorcade from Detroit Metro Airport was his funeral procession. The General Dynamics facility was his graveyard. The governor's awaiting casket took the form of a decommissioned M1A1, temporarily taken out of active Army service to serve as a political prop. The tank, a twelve-foot-long, sixty-plus-ton behemoth designed to counter a Soviet ground attack across the European frontier, was a tight fit for four passengers but had more than enough legroom to fit a single political corpse.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Off Script by Josh King. Copyright © 2016 Josh King. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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