INSIDE HART'S HEADQUARTERS
Riordan, Teresa
INSIDE HART'S HEADQUARTERS So far, the staff has stayed hungry. by Teresa Riordan Damn, there's the drug store. I must have missed the entrance again. I turn around and walk back, past a couple...
...On the other hand, they probably get their share of walk-in transients...
...After the 1972 election, Gary Hart wrote an account of George McGovern's campaign, called Right From the Start...
...People are either very drawn to Caddell or they hate him...
...We decided to put money in media, which conventional wisdom says you don't do in a caucus...
...Hart won the county, thanks to Schwarz...
...These people may be ambitious but they are also warm...
...At the top of the stairs is what is rumored to have been at one time a porno flick studio...
...About a year and a half ago, Gary Hart was asked how he thought he could win the nomination...
...Competence and quality are important ." And, he says, there may be a marked contrast between the personality of Hart (closed, reserved) and, for the most part, the personalities of his staff (open, outgoing...
...In the Senate office, it's his administrative assistant, Buie Seawell, who was the top legislative aide to Richard Lamm, governor of Colorado, before coming to work for Hart...
...People like Schwarz and Levy are in the campaign because they believe in Hart...
...In it, Hart says that McGovern "suffered fools too gladly...
...The Mondale campaign was paying supporters $10 a night to house its workers...
...Smith, most notably Joseph Biden from Delaware...
...Caddell told Hart he was in big trouble, and presented him a 150-page memo on how to win the nomination...
...Aside from the "reception area" (a desk and a cardboard table with sign-up cards for volunteers) and the bathrooms (one of the women's johns sits next to a picture window) the place is windowless and dark...
...I worked in bureaucracy for eight years:' says Doug Wilson, director of campaign operations, "and one thing I've found to be ridiculous about the way the office structure works there is that people think you have to wait several birthdays before you can use your talents...
...After all, it was he who was the architect of Carter's 1980 reelection debate strategy, in which Carter appealed to every imaginable interest group from women to gays to ear-nose-and-throat doctors...
...In contrast, Mondale has four paid staff people, two of whom are considered experts in the field, working on delegate selection...
...The fact that Hart gave so much responsibility in this campaign to names that Washington "insiders" have never heard of—like the name of Henkel—tells a lot about how the candidate has molded this campaign...
...There Egos Again Speaking of strong egos, let's take a look at Patrick Caddell...
...After college he came to work for Hart and was soon made colegislative director, along with Bushkin, while going to law school at night at George Washington University...
...But there are other reasons, and they are perhaps just as important as the first...
...The memo had been written months before, in October, not with Hart in mind, but rather a fictional candidate named Mr...
...Though Hart appears to have a strong distaste for "bolstering, fathering, brothering, encouraging, and consoling',' he realizes that somebody has to do it...
...If he has a fault, it's that he is too easygoing, too decent ." In the campaign, the sufferer of fools, as Hart would put it, is Pudge Henkel...
...They were living off savings...
...As for the Rick Stearnses of this campaign, Mike Levy is a prime example...
...But, he insists, "Pat brings a lot of credibility to the campaign...
...She is more than a press secretary to Hart, however...
...He left Jones Day, where he was making more than $100,000 a year, and temporarily left behind his wife and three children back in Cleveland to become Hart's campaign manager about a year ago...
...But, says Wilson, you must remember that no one on the staff "suffers fools gladly" (his words, not mine...
...Caddell has learned some lessons from his Carter days...
...If there is anyone in line to inherit the political kingdom of Gary Hart, it is Bill Shore...
...That's understandable, says Henkel...
...When Hart became campaign manager of George McGovern's presidential bid in 1972, he was a young lawyer from Denver whose only previous campaign experience had been as a volunteer for the presidential campaigns of John and Robert Kennedy...
...We have been through a lot as a group of people together...
...He is not a team player...
...Today she wears a necklace of delicate gold hearts, owns her own polling firm, and seems like someone who might be profiled in Working Woman in any given month...
...Two others are Kathy Bushkin, Hart's press secretary, and William Shore, who supervises the campaign road show...
...Smith last fall and found that Mr...
...Oliver "Pudge" Teresa Riordan is on the staff of The Washington Monthly...
...The first is by conducting most communication by memo (a dismaying reminder of Jimmy Carter...
...He has managed one campaign before, back in 1971: a mayoral contest in a suburban community...
...Smith...
...He is wearing a conservative grey suit and a clean, starched blue button-down, not to mention a tie...
...He talks like a TV anchorman and looks as if he wandered in off Wall Street, which isn't far from the truth...
...So I put together a series of memos discussing it ." No one else had got around to thinking about it yet...
...I turn around and walk back, past a couple of derelicts hanging out on this "transitional" block of Southeast Washington...
...But Bushkin and Shore, though they have a lot more access to Hart, typify his staff in other ways as well...
...In my own very unscientific poll, the opinion is running about five to one against...
...The $100,000 was there and people who hadn't been paid in a while knew it was there...
...Ahah, there it is, about eye-level on a dark-green door: a Hart For President bumper sticker, the sole identifying marker of Gary Hart's national presidential headquarters...
...Hart was too much of a long shot...
...As a result, they have intense personal loyalty to Hart...
...The familiar faint smell of stale urine greets me as I open the door...
...We have persevered together...
...But "Gary is very sensitive to making sure people don't feel put down or patronized;' he says, and that attitude is reflected in the staff...
...It was a gamble...
...If there is another major ego soother, it is Doug Wilson...
...THANKS...
...The important thing is that we don't lose the kind of spirit we've had in the campaign ." Won't bringing in "professionals" like Pat Caddell endanger that spirit, in the same way that the influx of professionals like David Garth, a high-priced political consultant, dampened morale in John Anderson's 1980 presidential bid...
...October 1981), "she makes you feel guilty for even thinking anything bad about her boss ." Bushkin went from coordinating a van with a press corps of about five to supervising a chartered plane with a press corps of 70 "without pissing anybody off' says one reporter...
...But still, Caddell seems to have alienated and angered those who stayed with Hart in the trenches during the dog days...
...But Henkel is more than a hallmark of Hart's campaign style...
...In an office where everybody calls everybody by his first name—even the candidate is called "Gary" by people who have never met him—it is telling that most people seem to call Pat Caddell by his last name...
...The most important thing around here is the management philosophy: let people take the ball and run with it ." Some of the people who run with the ball aren't quite as young as Mike Levy...
...Caddell is, after all the antithesis of a Hart campaign worker...
...I welcome whatever help he can bring...
...He went to law school with Hart at Yale...
...Shore, whom everyone calls Billy, is variously described as a "precocious young political talent:' "creative, unflappable;' "enormously smart;' and the "classic, bright young aide'.' Shore first worked for Hart as an intern...
...Yet his strategies helped a then-obscure senator win the Democratic nomination in a phenomenal upset...
...He also left as his own man when he and Hart reportedly had a clash of egos a couple of years ago...
...it's eerie how frequently people on the staff use the expression...
...We can get everything going in three days...
...You can see it from across the street, right next to a movie marquee advertising Scarface and Angel, Rated R. Even so, I imagine they still don't get too many walk-in volunteers...
...But they're there just as much for the responsibility they've been able to acquire...
...They figured they were dealing with a sympathizer...
...No',' says Henkel...
...The type of people a senator assembles on his staff says a lot about him...
...I was wearing a great big peace medallion around my neck:' she says...
...But Levy is even younger than Stearns was...
...The second is by using loyal top staff members as filters (a system that, I am told, has caused feelings of alienation in the lower echelons of the Senate staff, though this problem hasn't yet appeared in the campaign staff...
...In an article by Curtis Wilkie in The Boston Globe, he cites the story of Lazarus...
...She also serves as adviser in a Jody Powell-type role...
...The Nice Squad If one were to describe in a single adjective the people who work for Gary Hart, both on his Senate staff and his campaign staff, it would be "nice:' in the sense of "outgoing ." That's not to say that "any one of those people isn't capable of doing you in:' says a former staff member...
...Caddell was another boy wonder of the McGovern era...
...Caddell ran a poll on Mr...
...The advice...
...He is a ruthless self-promoter...
...So Levy got the job...
...He has the same kind of political savvy that Hart has...
...It's certainly reflected in Wilson...
...He seems easygoing—he knows how to relieve tension with a joke—but he is in fact quite intense...
...Maybe not since before then...
...But we have a pool of volunteers on campuses ready to be activated at any time...
...He likes to make everybody happy...
...He relies on people to teach him the parameters of an issue...
...One of the many Gene Pokornys of this campaign is Eric Schwarz, a 23-year-old who organized hundreds and hundreds of student volunteers from ten states to canvass on the weekends in New Hampshire and, later, Vermont...
...Henkel is, of course, tall and lean...
...Pudge makes decisions by consensus:' says Dottie Lynch...
...I remember being in Rome for Carter's visit to the Venice Summit [Wilson was a foreign service officer there...
...He is a senior staff member and sits in on most of the important meetings...
...Sometimes, she says, but her political attitudes have changed since then...
...Levy is in charge of delegate selection, as Stearns was in the McGovern campaign...
...This was Schwarz's second campaign for Hart...
...It looks more like the set for The Sting...
...In New Hampshire, about 40 Hart volunteers—college students who had taken the semester off and recent graduates—had to find supporters to stay with who would give them free sleeping space and free meals...
...They tend to describe themselves as "fossils:' though they've barely turned 30...
...Some of those advance men told me I had to do everything short of moving rocks from the Roman Forum to clear a path for them ." The Buffer Zone Hart protects himself from people who might "waste his time" in a couple of ways...
...Smith would win an election hands-down...
...Today Caddell is 33, is acquiring a middleage girth, and doesn't do anything as mundane as conduct polls...
...The egos of Shore and Bushkin, says one former staff member are so intertwined—so "fused"—with Hart's that it's as though they are all three one person...
...Ralph Nader has been known to run classier operations...
...The foreman of this operation is this 47-yearold man whom everybody still calls by his prepster nickname, Pudge...
...There a lot of people on those staffs walking around with sharp objects sticking out of their backs...
...He found it very difficult to shut people off...
...Kennedy has an opposite style as a senator',' says one observer...
...Seawell's strong point, according to Eric Sondermann, who used to work in Lamm's office, "is soothing egos, keeping everybody's eye on what the objective is...
...One of the biggest decisions I had to make was what to do with $100,000 we got in matching funds three weeks before the caucuses...
...He worked as an intern last summer for Hart and has taken a semester off from Yale this spring to work on the campaign...
...Some of the offices have carpeting—I think it is brown—but it looks as if it hasn't been vacuumed since the headquarters moved here in September...
...Which, to me at least, comes as a surprise, given the aloof, cool personality of Gary Hart...
...For example: "If there is one thing I insist on it's that advance people will be nice:' he says...
...Hart defines the parameters and then has his people fill them in ." Aides who have their own notions of what the parameters should be—who have self-defined egos—are rare around Hart...
...Hart, as well as Caddell, had good reason for going through with the last-minute marriage...
...In Wisconsin we have no political organization whatsoever',' he says...
...He is a 14-year-old volunteer who is good with computers...
...That Hart needed to sharpen his image by emphasizing the "generational difference" between him and Mondale, focusing on Mondale as a candidate of the past, of special interests...
...Pat was not part of .that experience...
...Much to Caddell's chagrin, some have interpreted the roles the other way around...
...They are taken by Gary Hart, whether or not they always have a clear picture of what his much touted ideas are...
...But Caddell wants control of the whole neighborhood...
...I've spent eight years dealing with advance people who are condescending and patronizing...
...He's not old enough to buy liquor in New Haven, but in the campaign he's considered competent enough to devise the delegate selection strategy, a complicated and tedious but crucial part of the campaign...
...This includes taking your trash outside...
...Reason Number One, if you ask these people, is the candidate...
...Some people, like Andrew Hurwitz, a 22-year-old campaign worker in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have waited tables at night to pay the rent so they could work for Hart during the day as volunteers...
...There are basically three types of people on Capitol Hill: careerists...
...Never fear, though...
...Initially, he wanted to get a new pollster, get a new campaign manager, get a lot of new people, says one staff member...
...She is 34 but still looks like a Big Eight cheerleader: blond hair, big smile, and a rah-rah ability so refined that, as Robert M. Kaus once pointed out in this magazine (see "Should This Man Be President...
...He is symbolic of much of the rest of the staff in respect to the sacrifices he has made (lots) and the experience he has (little...
...Neither had substantial political experience before going to work for Hart, so they aren't politically mature in the same way that he is...
...One sign says, "EVERYONE is responsible for cleaning up around here...
...but people were having the time of their lives working on this campaign...
...I didn't want to spend an entire summer licking envelopes',' says Levy...
...The walls are covered with rec-room wood, which is covered with hand-written signs and messages...
...Caddell apparently sees himself as Jesus Christ in the analogy, and Hart as the Lazarus he has raised from the dead...
...At 29, he is one of the key people on the campaign...
...A professor suggested that I get into delegate selection...
...Those calls have been silenced for now...
...Hart has few consiglieris, few people he accepts as advisers of his stature...
...And he is currently being heralded by everyone from The Washington Post to The New Republic as the savior of the Hart campaign...
...Junior staff members were taking home reduced paychecks for about the same amount of time...
...Henkel and Seawell are two such filters...
...We had no money, we were nowhere in the polls, the press had written us off...
...So although people on his staff, like Pudge Henkel, or David Landau, his issues person, may have been telling him for the previous three months what Caddell told him December 31, the advice wasn't heeded until Caddell, whom Hart had trusted as a neophyte pollster in the McGovern days, put his insider stamp of approval on it...
...There was some grumbling, but that was about all ." As Glazer and others put it, tight money forced them to "learn to live off the land ." While Alan Cranston's workers in Iowa could afford to rent 70 cars and a big phone bank, Hart workers had to find supporters within the state who would lend them phones, lend them cars, lend them typewriters...
...He did it because no one else would do it...
...They knocked on 100,000 doors in five months...
...Pudge Henkel is one of Gary Hart's best friends...
...They ask me for money a second time, with no more success than the first...
...People are flowing in and out of doors and yelling messages across the hall...
...people just out of college looking for "experience...
...Staff members may give Hart independent counsel, but he is rarely inclined to pick up an aide's proposal and adopt it as his own the way, say, Ted Kennedy would...
...Lynch decided to work for Hart because—in addition to believing in the candidate— like long-shot campaigns...
...He seems to be doing a better job his second time around...
...Maybe the key, for the campaign manager as well as the candidate, has more to do with suffering grown-up boy wonders gladly than it has to do with suffering fools...
...Because money was so scarce before the New Hampshire primary, sacrifices had to be made at every level of the campaign...
...He answered: "Walter Mondale may know more county chairs around this country, but I know more effective 27-year-old organizers ." Often they aren't yet 27...
...Hart has a fiendish ability to harness the energies of the young...
...Bushkin and Shore, like most of Hart's staff members, would fall into final category...
...I would match that pool of volunteers with their enthusiasm with the pool of volunteers the AFL-CIO has provided Mondale any day...
...The president didn't do everything I wanted him to do',' in the debate, Caddell told David Broder of The Washington Post, "but he did 75 percent of it ." Caddell's expert advice hasn't been without a price...
...Memo in hand, Caddell had gone to the Hill, knocking on every door but Hart's, trying to peddle the presidency to senators who closely resembled Mr...
...There are "offices;' but the place seems more like one big room...
...Levy has an assistant on the way...
...While a senior at Harvard, he became the official pollster of the '72 campaign...
...Henkel hadn't dabbled much in politics before now...
...It was six months of a grim lifestyle:' says Keith Glazer, 28, the state coordinator for Iowa...
...He interprets polls...
...It was this ability that launched the early careers of people like Rick Stearns, who at 26 was second in command of the McGovern campaign, and like Gene Pokorny, who was at 24 a key field organizer...
...Soon it was December and Caddell, for the first time in his adult life, was without a presidential candidate to advise...
...A more 'professional' campaign manager would have ended it long ago...
...On my next trip, A Hart For President banner will hang overhead...
...In Hart's 1980 Senate race, he organized Colorado's Greeley County, a notoriously conservative rural county that Hart had expected to lose by a large margin...
...His candidate lost...
...Often he seemed to resemble a circus owner who, besides being ringmaster, also served as confessor to the clowns, counselor to the acrobats, money-lender to the roustabouts, currier of the horses, groomer of the bears, waterer of the elephants, and tamer of the cats...
...A lot of them, like Dottie Lynch, are old McGovernites...
...I worked for McGovern and Carter...
...He wandered in from Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, in Cleveland, Ohio, the seventh biggest law firm in the country, where he has been a partner for 12 years...
...His name is Scott Berkowitz...
...and idealists...
...Volunteers, Schwarz advises, are the key to this presidential campaign...
...Hart has only Levy, who gets paid $75 a week and stays for free at Dottie Lynch's house...
...In Iowa, people had to double- and triple-up in empty group houses that held nothing but mattresses strewn about...
...Before Caddell, there were few turf wars in the campaign, mostly because there was so much turf and so few people to guard it...
...Most senior staff members, all of whom took big salary cuts to come work on the campaign, went without pay for five months...
...They've become more pragmatic...
...When in 1972 it was suggested to Lynch that she should consider joining the McGovern campaign, she was a 23-year-old researcher for NBC News...
...By his own admission, he considered rudeness the cardinal sin . . .. McGovern spent much of his time bolstering, fathering, brothering, encouraging, and consoling his friends, supporters, contributors, and staff...
...The ever humble Caddell has done his best to promote the image by giving reporters lots of juicy tidbits, off the record of course, on how he single-handedly rescued Hart from going the way of Cranston & Company...
...I won't let it ." Hmmm...
...Pat Caddell is one of them...
...Pudge's spirit has held this campaign together',' says Dottie Lynch, Hart's in-house pollster...
...But none of them bought it...
...You can take risks with this kind of campaign...
...Bushkin has been Hart's press secretary for about nine years...
...The story goes, in case Caddell hasn't gotten around to calling you personally with it, that Caddell and Hart met on New Year's Eve and had a "brutally frank" discussion...
...Even if reporters have reservations about Gary,' says one observer, "they always really like Kathy...
...Levy was one month old when John E Kennedy was shot, so the new generational theme sort of eludes him...
...One such person used to be Larry Smith, Hart's administrative assistant for four years...
...Smith is older than Hart and a veteran Hill staffer, so he came to Hart as his own man...
...Why did Hart's supporters stick with him during the lean times...
...When you're a frontrunner you can't ." Does she have twinges of regret about not being on McGovern's campaign in '84...
...A recent article in The Washington Post by Martin Schram on Caddell's 150-page memo to Hart contains a paragraph stating, "A copy of the [Caddell] memo was made available to The Washington Post by a source other than Caddell ." Sure, a running office joke goes, it wasn't Caddell . . . it was his secretary...
...He often listened to people who wasted his time by their own ignorance or by telling him something he already knew...
...Now he's in Washington, where he lives in a basement one-room apartment and leads a "monastic life...
Vol. 16 • April 1984 • No. 3
