When the Senate Worked for Us: The Invisible Role of Staffers in Countering Corporate Lobbies
232
When the Senate Worked for Us: The Invisible Role of Staffers in Countering Corporate Lobbies
232eBook
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Overview
What has remained untold is the major behind-the-scenes contribution of entrepreneurial Congressional staff, who planted the seeds of public interest bills in their bosses' minds and maneuvered to counteract the influence of lobbyists to pass laws in consumer protection, public health, and other policy arenas crying out for effective government regulation. They infuriated Nixon's advisor, John Ehrlichman, who called them "bumblebees," a name they wore as a badge of honor.
For his insider account, Pertschuk draws on many interviews, as well as his fifteen years serving on the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee that Senator Warren Magnuson chaired and as the committee's Democratic Staff Director. That committee became, in Ralph Nader's words, "the Grand Central Station for consumer protection advocates."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826521682 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Vanderbilt University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/26/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
An Accidental Bumblebee
I was bred a New Deal Democrat. President Franklin Roosevelt was an icon in our family. But it never occurred to me to engage in politics, other than to vote robotically for Democrats. By high school, I wanted to be a poet. So troubled was my father by his conviction that a poet could never earn a living that he began pocketing Cuban cigars at social events and saving them for me in the hope that by habituating me to expensive smokes he would sabotage my determination to become a penniless poet and redirect me to a living-wage trade, such as the law.
My predilection for writing poetry, however, was seared into my psyche and reinforced in my freshman year at Yale College when I was pounced on by a fevered dorm neighbor from Groton, the elite and very conservative prep school. He was hell-bent on the United States dropping a preventive nuclear bomb on the Soviet Union. I begged to differ. I would rather see the Soviet Union conquer the United States, I told him, than blow up the world with nuclear mutual destruction. After all, like any historic conqueror, Soviet communism would collapse in time, our globe would remain intact, and democracy would have a fighting chance.
At the time, red-baiting McCarthyism was enjoying its apex. "You're a Communist," he charged. "I'm going to report you to the FBI." He never did; but the threat was so unnerving that I timidly vowed thereafter to confine my extracurricular activities to romantic poetry writing.
As for my vocational trajectory, my father succeeded. I would become a lawyer, though I still harbored a muted ambition to be a poet.
I never considered entering government. Despite our trust in Roosevelt, my family shared the collective Jewish immigrant wariness of governments, which had historically been our people's oppressors. This sentiment is best expressed by the rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof when a young man asks, "Is there a proper blessing for the Tsar?"
"Of course!" the rabbi exclaims. "May God bless and keep the Tsar — far away from us."
After a two-year detour to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to serve out my military obligation as an artillery officer, I returned to Yale to attend law school. In 1959, with my new degree, I headed out west to Portland, Oregon, to clerk for a wise federal judge, appropriately named Solomon. Government service was far from my mind. I followed Judge Gus J. Solomon's firm guidance and accepted a junior position in the most prestigious corporate law firm in Portland. That year I voted for John F. Kennedy for president. It was the extent of my involvement in politics. In my mind, my future would be limited to climbing the rungs, ultimately reaching the heights of a safe, lucrative partnership within the law firm.
Judge Solomon's secretary, Helen Bradley, was a passionate activist Democrat with whom I had formed a warm friendship during my clerkship. She had worked hard for the Oregon State election to the US Senate of the liberal journalist Richard Neuberger, and then, after his sudden death, for the election of his wife, Maurine Neuberger.
In 1961, only a year and a half after I joined the law firm, I received a call from Bradley. She had heard from Senator Neuberger, who was seeking a new legislative assistant. Would I be interested? My answer was a quick, "Not for me."
Yet that night, as I talked over the possibility with my wife, my resistance softened. In those days, it seemed as if every other young lawyer in Portland was eager to get to Washington to bask in the glamour and excitement that surrounded the youthful President Kennedy. It would be a novel experience; it might even burnish my resume. Perhaps I could arrange a one-year leave of absence from the firm, secure in the knowledge that I would return to the safe bosom of Davies, Biggs, Strayer, Stoel, and Boley (which was destined to grow into the seventeenth largest corporate law firm in the United States in the 1970s).
I decided to apply for the Neuberger job. My credentials were hardly impressive. I knew less about lawmaking in Washington than the average eighth grader: I didn't realize that the Capitol, where Congress resides, was in a separate building down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.
Fortunately, Senator Neuberger had written Bradley that she had only one requirement for the job: the candidate must be able to write English. That I could do. I got the job without being interviewed by the senator, or even visiting Washington.
In February 1962, I arrived in Washington and began serving Senator Neuberger as her legislative assistant. She was a tenacious, independent legislator, the ninth woman ever to serve in the US Senate. Among her predecessors, she was easily the least deferential to the institution's traditional male dominance — a fearless liberal and a seasoned consumer advocate.
On her way to the Senate, Neuberger had gained national attention as an Oregon State House member who had stood before television cameras and a state senate committee in an apron, with a mixing bowl and a package of margarine on the table before her. Her target was a mandate pushed through every state house in the nation by the dairy lobby that forbade the sale of butter-colored margarine. The margarine industry, in response, had made its product a law-abiding white, accompanied by a small packet of butter-yellow dye. Neuberger demonstrated the laborious effort required to mix the margarine and the dye just to deceive butter-habituated children. Her testimony was featured on national television news. Oregon soon repealed this indefensible law. Within five years, so had every other state except Minnesota and Wisconsin, which held out for another decade.
To please my new boss, I found I had to be aggressive in finding initiatives for her to champion that could burnish her political identity as a consumer protection advocate. But I had no idea how to go about doing it. I sorely needed guidance. My first stroke of luck was to be taken in hand by the senator's chief of staff, Lloyd Tupling. The former editor of an independent muckraking newspaper in Idaho, Tupling had effectively been driven out of the state when he fearlessly attacked the consumer-rate inflation of one of the state's most powerful corporate monopolies, the federal dam–created Idaho Power.
First, Tupling told me, comb through the Washington papers and watch the TV news. Second, never write a Senate floor speech on any initiative without simultaneously drafting a press release on it.
I was readily infected with the populist spirit that had inspired Tupling to challenge the energy companies, and I began poring over the Washington Post and the Washington Star every day with an eye out for issues that would appeal to Neuberger. I bumped into an opportunity almost immediately. On March 8, 1962, the back pages of the Washington Post carried a story about the publication of a report issued by a distinguished panel of the Royal College of Physicians in London. The panel had concluded that smoking is a major cause of sickness and death and proposed regulatory restraints on cigarette advertising.
I knew that the senator had struggled to give up smoking and that any action to curb smoking would fit within her consumer protection commitment. That day I set about drafting a Senate floor statement for her that began with a summary of the panel's report, but I had no idea how to finish it. In desperation I wrote, "Within the next few days, I expect to introduce legislation to deal with this tragic problem." Senator Neuberger read the statement into the Congressional Record as I had drafted it, giving it no more forethought than I had.
That afternoon, a Washington Star reporter called me and asked, "Exactly what action will the senator call for?" Nonplussed, I promised to get back to him and again sought counsel with Tupling. He suggested the time-worn response to issues one has no idea how to solve: have the senator introduce a congressional resolution directing the president to name a national panel of experts. I promptly drafted the resolution. (As if the British were a different species, it called for a review of research on the impact of cigarette smoking on US smokers.) Neuberger's resolution attracted only six cosponsors and went nowhere. The media paid attention, however, and the resolution gained Neuberger unaccustomed public exposure, which pleased her. She began to have some confidence that I could do the job.
I had never before thought about smoking as a public health issue. I had smoked a pipe in law school because I thought it made me look like a sober lawyer, though I soon gave it up since every fourth or fifth pipeful left me so queasy I had to lie down. My motivation in pursuing tobacco control legislation on behalf of Neuberger was primarily the desire to please her and secure my new livelihood. But as I set about learning more about the science and public policy research on cigarette marketing strategies, I developed an intense revulsion to the tobacco industry's disingenuous insistence on the safety of cigarettes and their aggressive marketing targeted at children. Philip Morris was proving to be the most rapacious of cigarette marketers. I woke up almost every morning scheming: What can I do today that will make Philip Morris executives squirm?
Media attention to the Neuberger resolution had brought me together with several dedicated tobacco control advocates, each of whom helped educate me. Among them were Michael Shimkin, a cancer researcher from the National Cancer Institute who opened my eyes to the substance and politics of health science; Morton Mintz, the most irrepressible reporter on corporate abuse and consumer protection the Washington Post had ever turned loose; Stanley Cohen, a veteran Washington columnist and editorial writer for the advertising industry trade journal Advertising Age, who turned out to be an unexpectedly harsh critic of cigarette advertising; Philip Elman, a brilliant legal scholar and aggressive consumer protector who was one of the five commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC); and David Cohen, who showed me what a skilled public interest lobbyist could provide a staff rookie.
Knowing little about health science, I had made a blind call to the National Cancer Institute, seeking a researcher who specialized in tobacco and health research. I was learning that government bureaucrats responded even to junior staff telephone calls. That call led me to Michael Shimkin. He hardly fit the stereotype of the neutral scientist. His first question when he came to my office was, "Do you smoke cigarettes?"
"No. Why?" I responded.
"Because smokers are incapable of hearing the bad news," he said. "They are all members of the Flat Earth Society."
Shimkin told me there was no scientific doubt that cigarettes cause cancer and heart disease but that his colleagues at the Cancer Institute, many of whom were smokers, had scorned the evidence because they were determined to prove that their own focus, air pollution, was the only cause of lung cancer. Though they would later be proven wrong, at the time they provided soothing balm to the tobacco lobby. Shimkin's crusade was a lonely one, but he was a disciplined scientist, and I learned from him the basics of the scientific case against smoking — and the answers to the claims of tobacco companies' hired scientists that the science condemning cigarette smoking remained "controversial," rendering regulatory action as yet unwarranted.
As I intensified my focus on the aggressive cigarette advertising that dominated nighttime television, I began to get regular calls from Stanley Cohen. At first I was on my guard. I assumed that a writer for the advertising industry would be sympathetic to the commercial interests of the cigarette companies that advertised heavily in Ad Age. I could not have been more wrong. In an editorial Cohen wrote for Ad Age, he made the journal one of the first publications to call editorially for a ban on cigarette advertising. Imagine a trade journal's publisher allowing a reporter, much less an editorial writer, to risk offending lucrative advertisers today. In an interview shortly before his death, Cohen, at age ninety-two, explained why Ad Age was different:
You were doing something that was new and important, and I sensed that it would be a good thing for Advertising Age to get into this story early. At that stage in my life, I was essentially just a reporter. I was a loose cannon, and I simply wrote anything I felt like writing. I was supported because the philosophy of the Crane family [owners and publishers of Ad Age] was that you serve your readers best if you give them information that they can rely on to make sound decisions. And so they told me when they hired me, "We expect you to call it like you see it. And if you try to anticipate what will please the advertisers or the readers, we'll fire you."
Later, I would draft statements for the senator, noting disingenuously that even the advertising industry's "mouthpiece" (which it truly was not) "supported a ban on cigarette advertising." My conscience gave me only a twinge when Cohen began to treat me to lunch and counsel me almost weekly at the august National Press Club.
Through Stan Cohen, I met federal trade commissioner Philip Elman, with whom I soon developed a close working relationship. He schooled me in the need for Senator Neuberger to pressure Paul Rand Dixon, the weak-kneed chair of the FTC. She readily agreed, and I drafted a letter for her urging the FTC "to hold as inherently deceptive all [cigarette] advertising that failed to include a warning on the health hazards of smoking." Dixon was characteristically reluctant to take this stand, but Neuberger continued to press him for a response while Elman pushed him from inside the FTC.
After months of silence, Dixon finally responded to Senator Neuberger: "If the Commission is able to secure competent probative scientific evidence including that furnished by the Public Health Service" (a mandatory FTC requirement for such warnings), it would likely "be upheld in appellate courts." That, at least, seemed like progress toward action by the FTC.
Morton Mintz was an inquisitorial investigative reporter who drove his editors at the Washington Post mercilessly, demanding ever more space for his exposure of corporate wrongdoing without excluding Post advertisers, for whom negative coverage soured their enthusiasm for enriching the paper. Though his sentiments were always with the wrongdoers' victims, he was scrupulous in his investigations. A Bumblebee I later worked with, Leonard Bickwit, told me: "Morton would always write stories that were beneficial to us and hostile to our enemy. But he was not easy to deal with. He would say things to me like, 'Let's not manage the news here.' If all you had heard was our discussion, you wouldn't have expected the story to be favorable to our side — as it almost always ended up."
Then there was David Cohen, still a young man, lobbying for progressive nonprofit organizations such as Americans for Democratic Action. He was almost as green as I was, but over the next fifty years he would come to be known informally as the "dean of public interest lobbyists." He would also become my closest ally outside the government, and my friend and partner in public interest advocacy. In 1962 he came to visit me to help support Senator Neuberger's consumer protection initiatives. Unlike the other public interest lobbyists I had begun to meet, most of whom were smokers blinded by their addiction, Cohen welcomed Neuberger's initiatives on tobacco control. He helped guide me to a strategy that would make Neuberger effective. Among the tools available even to a junior senator, he counseled me, were openly publicized letters to all the potential decision-makers who could move tobacco control forward, from President Kennedy on down to the surgeon general of the Public Health Service.
President Kennedy, however, had plenty of other headaches with a Congress in which southern senators from tobacco-growing states held positions of power. The last thing he needed was an issue that would only intensify his already strained relations with them. They had served so long in one-party Democratic states that they chaired almost every important committee vital to his agenda.
On May 23, 1962, a reporter asked Kennedy at a press conference what he intended to do about the growing evidence that smoking is harmful. He waffled elegantly: "That matter is sensitive enough and the stock market is in sufficient difficulty without my giving you an answer which is not based on complete information, which I don't have." The president's solution was almost exactly what Neuberger had advocated: a call for a study by the surgeon general, Luther Terry. But Kennedy had another objective: to kick the issue down the road to avoid alienating his tobacco-state Democrats.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Part I
1 An Accidental Bumblebee 11
2 Jerry and Maggie 23
3 A Bumblebee's Crucible 35
4 A Triumph of Passionate Truth over Power 49
5 Hi-gh Spirits and High Gear 69
6 Jerry's Juggernaut 89
Part II
7 Colonizing the Bumblebees 105
8 The Flights of the Bumblebees 125
9 Finishing Unfinished Business-with Bumblebee Guide 145
10 Advise and Dissent 155
11 Pushing the Boundaries 171
12 Pushing Open the Closed Door 183
13 Time to Move On 195
Interviewees 203
Acknowledgments 205
Notes 207
Index 211