ED ROLLINS AND THE END OF HONOR
Merry, Robert W.
ED ROLLINS AND THE END OF HONOR By Robert W. Merry In his multivolume Story of Civilization, Will Durant tells the tale of a young English nobleman who was a favorite at the court of Elizabeth...
...The state of New Jersey launched its own inquiry...
...Integrity,” Rollins writes of his most important early mentor, “had his price...
...Ronald Reagan is spared, as are a few others...
...He was strong, muscular, and very athletic, and he loved to fight...
...As a student at California State University at Chico, sidelined as a boxer because of injuries, Rollins gravitated to the political game...
...Rollins found himself interviewed by the FBI for four hours, then sitting before a federal grand jury for seven hours more...
...When that ruffled feathers in the first family and the office of White House chief of staff James Baker, Rollins said he had spoken to Rennert off the record, not for publication...
...He said the Whitman campaign had invested half a million dollars in “walking around money” to suppress the vote in black neighborhoods...
...All hell broke loose...
...Instead he wrote a booklength, two-part article in the Atlantic Monthly that portrayed Carter, still a sitting president, as a hopeless incompetent...
...But he plunged into the race anyway, only to discover that his friends had been right...
...Step out of line, and you would be cut adrift for life...
...Is Rollins saying here that hiring a campaign gumshoe is lower on the order of sleaze than illegally absconding with $10 million...
...His main chance in national politics came through his association with longtime Reagan operative Lyn Nofziger...
...Ray Johnson, Mr...
...Apparently not...
...But I’d watched her discard a longtime associate after the primary, and I guess I was stupid to have expected anything better...
...So utterly consumed with embarrassment was the poor fellow that he promptly booked passage to the New World, where he languished in self-imposed exile for three years before concluding that he had expiated his embarrassment sufficiently to return to England and show his face once again at court...
...And so we come to the crux of this story: Ed Rollins, from the age of about 15, should have made a greater effort to live a life like that of his father and to follow that good man’s sound advice about lying and bragging...
...Which brings us back to Ed Rollins, whose inability to resist these temptations is all too evident in his own prose...
...It isn’t surprising that political loyalty isn’t high among the traits to be found in such people...
...There were also such things as shame and honor...
...She had every right to cut me loose, but I hadn’t expected her to pile it on like that...
...Noting that Carville was suffering the agony of a close defeat, he said, “I was trying to make his life miserable for a few weeks...
...Rollins gained a reputation as a pugnacious politico with loads of street smarts and people smarts...
...It was a display of loyalty to stir the soul...
...He had met Ed’s mother, a red-haired beauty, at age 19 and never dated anyone else...
...He was ashamed to be associated with them: “The magnitude of Arianna Huffington’s lust for power was beyond the pale even for me...
...He had to answer questions under oath from Democratic party lawyers...
...But, if that’s the case, why did he include it in the book, thus maligning just about everyone in the small group of people who could possibly be the culprit...
...I didn’t think she could be that ruthless...
...The motivation seemed to be to get a jump on history and on any political foes who might be lurking at their own typewriters...
...He practically destroyed the budding career of one of his own clients...
...Those were far different times, times when there was such a thing as embarrassment...
...But there was almost always some historical value to them, and at times a a great deal...
...And then, just a few days later in Washington, Rollins committed an act so bizarre that it defies comprehension...
...No, he replied...
...In the days of party bosses and political patronage, it was considered natural that the spoils should go to the victors and that those with the power would reward their friends and punish their enemies...
...He had practically ruined his career as a Republican operative some months earlier by rushing down to Dallas to help run the alternative-party presidential candidacy of billionaire Ross Perot...
...In an interview with Leo Rennert of the Sacramento Bee, he ridiculed Reagan’s daughter, Maureen, who was planning an ill-conceived run for a California Senate seat...
...Rollins facilitated the illegal ruse by assuming an alias...
...Her use of private investigators in the campaign was lower than anything he had seen in politics, even the time when he “learned” that a prominent Washington lobbyist had pocketed a $10 million illegal campaign contribution from a foreign government . . . But wait...
...Soon he was heavily involved in amateur boxing, which began a life in which he routinely violated his father’s stricture against lying...
...At the kids’ Catholic school, the nuns’ discipline was always supported at home...
...If he could contribute to a victory for this bright but longshot candidate, he would be back in the game...
...So we see Rollins, from his midteens onward, as a man on the make, ever vigilant for the main chance...
...At a breakfast with reporters early in the Carter years, Fallows was asked if he were collecting material for a book...
...Reagan administration secretary of state Al Haig, budget director David Stockman, press secretary Larry Speakes, ambassador Helene A. von Damm, chief of staff Donald Regan—all served, in some degree, to undermine their former boss’s effort to lead the nation...
...he wouldn’t write a book on his White House days because it wouldn’t be proper to trade on his privileged conversations and experiences there...
...So what does he do...
...In fairness, it could be noted that Rollins didn’t invent the trash memoir...
...Consider the remarkable tale of Rollins’s association with New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, who won her job in a hotly contested race in 1993...
...News & World Report...
...I found myself wondering if I had a price, and whether I’d know it when the time came...
...In recounting his exploits as campaign manager, Rollins seems a bit like the flea that thinks it is steering the dog...
...He had a penchant for saying embarrassing things to reporters and then lying HE HAD A HABIT OF SAYING EMBARRASSING THINGS TO REPORTERS AND THEN LYING ABOUT IT TO COVER UP...
...That means moving fast, while the publishers still consider you a hot commodity and your enemies are in positions lofty enough to make them vulnerable to embarrassment...
...It was a heady moment, to be savored by candidate and consultant alike...
...When Whitman hired Rollins for that campaign, it amounted to a rescue mission for the often-beleaguered politico...
...Or perhaps he really doesn’t know whether this episode actually took place...
...These tomes were typically stuffy and self-serving efforts intended to puff up the reputations of their authors before the academics took over the storytelling...
...And while old rivalries might re-emerge in the memoirists’ pages, ad hominem attacks and mean-spirited portrayals were considered bad form...
...He said he had made it all up, largely because he wanted to twit his Democratic rival, James Carville, who had run the opposition campaign...
...Nor does he spare people from whom he took substantial sums of money...
...But later, after enjoying a heady Hollywood evening at the Oscars courtesy of another set of lobbyists, he shelved a piece of pet legislation that those lobbyists found offensive...
...Besides, Whitman owed him something for his efforts to keep her husband, whom Rollins portrays as an arrogant fool, away from the hurly-burly of the campaign...
...If he couldn’t remain loyal to his party, how could he expect Republicans to hire him...
...And his book, written with Tom DeFrank, gives a whole new meaning to the word disloyalty...
...It appears that this is just another example of reckless abandon on the part of Ed Rollins, all too typical of this book...
...I was disappointed...
...Rennert calls that allegation, which is a serious slur on his professional integrity, “totally untrue...
...Later, although he declined to turn pro, he allowed his trainer to fight him for money and pay him under the table so he could retain his amateur status...
...It isn’t really very surprising that, among the legions of political consultants swarming over the political landscape these days, Rollins would be the one to bring the art of the political memoirist to a new low...
...The money, he said, went mostly to black ministers, who in return refrained from promoting the Democratic candidate at the pulpit and in civic activities...
...Ed Rollins, for example, is reliably reported to have received more than $1 million to produce Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms...
...And he brought upon himself the kind of embarrassment that would make even his many enemies cringe...
...In our times, in our court of national politics, those things seem to be in serious decline, if indeed they exist anymore at all...
...So let’s tote up the score here: No laws, it was concluded, were broken...
...There has been a trend in this direction for some time, and it’s anybody’s guess as to just how low it can sink...
...Later, after he went to work for a Republican state legislator named Ray Johnson, Rollins learned what Unruh already knew...
...Robert W. Merry, executive editor of Congressional Quarterly, is the author of Taking On the World: Joseph and Stewart Alsop—Guardians of the American Century (Viking...
...They were “craven,” and “beyond contempt...
...It was a marvelous opportunity...
...He called the president “insecure at the core...
...It was a bit cramped for a family with five children, but they all took pride in their little home...
...It takes a man or woman of considerable character to resist these temptations of behavior and outlook...
...Thousands of dollars in illegal bets were placed on his fights...
...Does he slink off to some modernday equivalent of the New World to lick his wounds and expiate his embarrassment over time...
...At a breakfast with reporters, he took to bragging about his victory and launched into a rambling and self-serving peroration that ended with a stunning revelation...
...Predictably, his political adventure in Texas lasted little more than a few weeks, and it was widely assumed that Rollins’s career as a Republican paladin was over...
...Rollins’s coach put him in the ring against military boxers at the naval station at Treasure Island, even though he was under the legal age of 18...
...Goddamnit, I’d helped her win...
...ED ROLLINS AND THE END OF HONOR By Robert W. Merry In his multivolume Story of Civilization, Will Durant tells the tale of a young English nobleman who was a favorite at the court of Elizabeth I. Once when he was presenting himself to the queen, he bowed with elaborate obeisance— and inadvertently broke wind...
...Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms: My Life in American Politics (Broadway Books, 386 pages, $27.50) makes clear that Rollins has a tendency to stumble into episodes any normal person would be ashamed of—and yet he manifests no shame at all...
...His Boston Irish parents had moved to Vallejo after World War II, and his father worked in the huge town shipyard as an electrician...
...But Rollins proved himself a liar on a grand scale, either in his original remarks or his later sworn testimony...
...Just a few paragraphs earlier, he tells of how the Sacramento lobbyists routinely picked up the food and booze tabs for staffers such as himself...
...Only one person can intimidate him, and that’s Nancy Reagan, who is portrayed as a selfobsessed, bitchy, conniving tyrant...
...And it was a house of strong values and high moral instruction...
...The old system certainly could lead to some unsavory practices, but it also generated strong feelings of political loyalty...
...And in a sentence that probably deserves a prize for spin audacity, he said, “This was an inside-the-Beltway b—s— game that I’ve become the victim of...
...That system is gone, destroyed by the waves of reform that swept over American politics in the late 1960s and 70s...
...And what was the impulse behind such books...
...Probably nobody personifies the transition to the new approach more clearly than James Fallows, once President Carter’s chief speechwriter and soon to be editor of U.S...
...Oh well, the Huffingtons make good fodder for his introductory chapter...
...Even after his Whitman fiasco, Rollins still managed to get hired by Michael and Arianna Huffington— for a significant amount of money, according to reports—to help with Michael’s 1994 Senate race in California...
...Instead of Mayor Daley’s intricate network of power arrangements and mutual commitments, we have a rising breed of political professionals, consultants for hire who flit from campaign to campaign, dispensing their technical knowledge and often amassing considerable wealth in the process...
...The Reagan years brought a rash of memoir efforts, many of them sleazy...
...senators, top government officials, and the president of the mob-connected Teamsters union...
...The money’s too good, the revenge too sweet...
...Too often candidates forget they’re not the only ones making sacrifices in a campaign...
...I think he rented out for two tickets to the Oscars and probably didn’t even realize it...
...No book...
...Had he done so, surely he wouldn’t have in the bank the million dollars or so that this book has brought him...
...no sense of loyalty compels him toward compassion simply because some sucker extended opportunities along Rollins’s path to fame and wealth...
...No, he writes this book, in which he complains about how his client handled the mess he had created...
...You could get hurt badly, but you didn’t get killed,” he recalls...
...The closer this characterization was to the truth (and it was probably pretty accurate), the more it would undermine the poor man in his dealings with political adversaries, not to mention foreign heads of state...
...Whitman gave the guy another chance...
...He brought humiliation to his poor wife, one of the few people in Rollins’s book who seem to have any judgment...
...To get rich and get even...
...Johnson once threw three lobbyists out of his office for trying to give him cash for his reelection campaign...
...Nor is it surprising that many of them come to view themselves as the real repository of political wisdom in IT ISN’T SURPRISING THAT ROLLINS WOULD BE THE CONSULTANT TO BRING THE ART OF THE MEMOIR TO A NEW LOW...
...He lost his job as an NBC commentator...
...But there was something troubling about the way he operated...
...He and his friends engaged in street brawls with the Marines sent into town for combat training...
...The Justice Department initiated an investigation...
...In fact, the book is a catalogue of slurs on just about everyone who came into contact with Rollins over the years...
...about the circumstances to cover up...
...She could have distanced herself effectively without kicking the corpse so hard,” he whines...
...At one point shortly after Reagan left office, 11 former administration employees had weighed in with books on their experiences, many of them published while the man still sat in the Oval Office...
...He got an internship with Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh, the legendary speaker of the California assembly whose remarkable political reign rested upon the cynical assumption that all men could be bought—or at least rented for a time...
...In his sworn testimony he recanted...
...A year later he succeeded to Nofziger’s job, and a year after that he became director of Reagan’s reelection campaign...
...In dialogue that sounds like it’s from some awful, overdramatized movie, he dresses down U.S...
...The Democratic party vowed to pursue the matter to full disclosure...
...She pleaded with me several times,” he writes, “to keep him off her butt...
...Has he reported this to the authorities...
...On Election Day, she pulled off a dramatic victory...
...He was as good as his word...
...Don’t lie and don’t brag...
...For example, he seeks to portray himself as a young innocent, influenced in his early years primarily by the simple verities he learned from his parents at home in Vallejo, California, “a scruffy, scrappy, lunch-pail kind of place that has zero tolerance for anyone with pretensions...
...But he might have a sense of honor—something that, for the remainder of his life, will forever elude him...
...His flaws and self-deceptions are well marked in his book, although the better insights are often found between the lines rather than in the selfcongratulatory spin that suffuses the writing...
...Ed, never much of a student, developed into a kind of street tough...
...When Nofziger became White House political director in Reagan’s first year as president, he appointed Rollins his deputy...
...Nothing illustrates this reality more starkly than this wretched little book by the well-known Republican operative Edward J. Rollins...
...Rollins trashes just about everybody he ever worked with in American politics throughout the 30 years of his largely mediocre career...
...Isn’t he an accessory after the fact to a serious felony...
...But generally the only really worthy character in the book is Rollins himself...
...Moreover, “If I wanted to go to Lake Tahoe for gambling and a show, tickets and complimentary hotel rooms were always available...
...Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, waited 17 years after leaving office before penning his memoir, and when it came out Present at the Creation offered political perspective, historical breadth, and a detachment of outlook that would have been impossible to achieve had he written earlier in his retirement...
...He added, “I spun myself out of control...
...Ed’s father taught him “two great life lessons”: honesty and humility...
...With abundant overtime, Rollins senior made enough money to buy a $7,000 tract house with three bedrooms, a single bathroom, and a flat roof...
...And when he had produced the work, 798 pages in length, he went back to the front and wrote a dedication: “To Harry S. Truman: The captain with the mighty heart...
...All this is related to another development in American politics— the rise of the paladin politico and the corollary decline of political loyalty...
...He casually tosses nearly all such people into a category he calls “dumbf— candidates,” people he portrays as so stupid they could hardly walk through a door without banging their heads and who certainly wouldn’t have amounted to anything if it hadn’t been for the strategic brilliance and street smarts of one Edward J. Rollins...
...There was a time, not so long ago, when a certain honor accompanied such writing...
...He is the hero of nearly every scene, except when he is trying to explain away some well-known gaffe or act of stupidity from his past...
...Outraged black ministers in New Jersey attacked him, and Whitman and her family disowned him with a fervor born of desperation...
...he owed a lot to Christie Whitman...
...America, to believe that the candidates they advise are merely the vehicles that they must ride—often with considerable disgust—in order to make the wheels of democracy turn smoothly...
...He doesn’t care who gets hurt or who might be unfairly maligned...
...Whether it was fighting illegally, taking boxing money under the table, or accepting expensive Las Vegas accommodations from lobbyists, he has ever manifested a certain moral obtuseness...
...The man seems to have utterly no capacity for embarrassment...
...If they’re good at PR, they might even get a network contract for regular air time, which makes them famous and enhances their income potential through speaking engagements...
...He writes that he was advised by many friends—and the ever-wise Sherrie—to stay away from them...
...He had gone to Dallas against the objection and sound judgment of his wife, Sherrie, whose job as a high-profile aide in the George Bush White House came to an end when her husband ignored her and joined forces with the opposition...
Vol. 1 • September 1996 • No. 49
