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. 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.
Those were far different times, times when there was such a thing as embarrassment. There were also such things as shame and honor. In our times, in our court of national politics, those things seem to be in serious decline, if indeed they exist anymore at all.
Nothing illustrates this reality more starkly than this wretched little book by the well-known Republican operative Edward J. Rollins. The man seems to have utterly no capacity for embarrassment. 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.
And his book, written with Tom DeFrank, gives a whole new meaning to the word disloyalty. Rollins trashes just about everybody he ever worked with in American politics throughout the 30 years of his largely mediocre career. Nor does he spare people from whom he took substantial sums of money; no sense of loyalty compels him toward compassion simply because some sucker extended opportunities along Rollins's path to fame and wealth. 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.
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. When Whitman hired Rollins for that campaign, it amounted to a rescue mission for the often-beleaguered politico. 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.
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. 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. If he couldn't remain loyal to his party, how could he expect Republicans to hire him?
Whitman gave the guy another chance. If he could contribute to a victory for this bright but longshot candidate, he would be back in the game. It was a marvelous opportunity; he owed a lot to Christie Whitman. On Election Day, she pulled off a dramatic victory. It was a heady moment, to be savored by candidate and consultant alike.
And then, just a few days later in Washington, Rollins committed an act so bizarre that it defies comprehension. 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. He said the Whitman campaign had invested half a million dollars in "walking around money" to suppress the vote in black neighborhoods. 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.
All hell broke loose. The Justice Department initiated an investigation. The state of New Jersey launched its own inquiry. The Democratic party vowed to pursue the matter to full disclosure. Rollins found himself interviewed by the FBI for four hours, then sitting before a federal grand jury for seven hours more. He had to answer questions under oath from Democratic party lawyers. He lost his job as an NBC commentator. Outraged black ministers in New Jersey attacked him, and Whitman and her family disowned him with a fervor born of desperation.
In his sworn testimony he recanted. 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. 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." He added, "I spun myself out of control." 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."
So let's tote up the score here: No laws, it was concluded, were broken. But Rollins proved himself a liar on a grand scale, either in his original remarks or his later sworn testimony. He practically destroyed the budding career of one of his own clients. He brought humiliation to his poor wife, one of the few people in Rollins's book who seem to have any judgment. And he brought upon himself the kind of embarrassment that would make even his many enemies cringe.
So what does he do? Does he slink off to some modern-day equivalent of the New World to lick his wounds and expiate his embarrassment over time? No, he writes this book, in which he complains about how his client handled the mess he had created. "She could have distanced herself effectively without kicking the corpse so hard," he whines. "I was disappointed. . . . She had every right to cut me loose, but I hadn't expected her to pile it on like that. Too often candidates forget they're not the only ones making sacrifices in a campaign. . . . Goddamnit, I'd helped her win. But I'd watched her discard a longtime associate after the primary, and I guess I was stupid to have expected anything better. I didn't think she could be that ruthless."
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. "She pleaded with me several times," he writes, "to keep him off her butt."
In fairness, it could be noted that Rollins didn't invent the trash memoir. 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. There was a time, not so long ago, when a certain honor accompanied such writing. The motivation seemed to be to get a jump on history and on any political foes who might be lurking at their own typewriters. These tomes were typically stuffy and self-serving efforts intended to puff up the reputations of their authors before the academics took over the story-telling. But there was almost always some historical value to them, and at times a a great deal. And while old rivalries might re- emerge in the memoirists' pages, ad hominem attacks and mean-spirited portrayals were considered bad form.
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. 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." It was a display of loyalty to stir the soul.
Probably nobody personifies the transition to the new approach more clearly than James Fallows, once President Carter's chief speech-writer and soon to be editor of U.S. News & World Report. At a breakfast with reporters early in the Carter years, Fallows was asked if he were collecting material for a book. No, he replied; 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.
He was as good as his word. No book. Instead he wrote a book-length, two- part article in the Atlantic Monthly that portrayed Carter, still a sitting president, as a hopeless incompetent. He called the president " insecure at the core." 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.
The Reagan years brought a rash of memoir efforts, many of them sleazy. 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. 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.
And what was the impulse behind such books? To get rich and get even. 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. Ed Rollins, for example, is reliably reported to have received more than $ 1 million to produce Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms.
All this is related to another development in American politics -- the rise of the paladin politico and the corollary decline of political loyalty. 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. The old system certainly could lead to some unsavory practices, but it also generated strong feelings of political loyalty. Step out of line, and you would be cut adrift for life.
That system is gone, destroyed by the waves of reform that swept over American politics in the late 1960s and 70s. 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. 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.
It isn't surprising that political loyalty isn't high among the traits to be found in such people. Nor is it surprising that many of them come to view themselves as the real repository of political wisdom in 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. It takes a man or woman of considerable character to resist these temptations of behavior and outlook.
Which brings us back to Ed Rollins, whose inability to resist these temptations is all too evident in his own prose. 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. 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 self-congratulatory spin that suffuses the writing.
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." His Boston Irish parents had moved to Vallejo after World War II, and his father worked in the huge town shipyard as an electrician. He had met Ed's mother, a red-haired beauty, at age 19 and never dated anyone else.
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. It was a bit cramped for a family with five children, but they all took pride in their little home. And it was a house of strong values and high moral instruction. At the kids' Catholic school, the nuns' discipline was always supported at home. Ed's father taught him "two great life lessons": honesty and humility. Don't lie and don't brag.
Ed, never much of a student, developed into a kind of street tough. He was strong, muscular, and very athletic, and he loved to fight. He and his friends engaged in street brawls with the Marines sent into town for combat training. "You could get hurt badly, but you didn't get killed," he recalls. Soon he was heavily involved in amateur boxing, which began a life in which he routinely violated his father's stricture against lying.
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. Rollins facilitated the illegal ruse by assuming an alias. 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. Thousands of dollars in illegal bets were placed on his fights.
As a student at California State University at Chico, sidelined as a boxer because of injuries, Rollins gravitated to the political game. 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.
Later, after he went to work for a Republican state legislator named Ray Johnson, Rollins learned what Unruh already knew. Johnson once threw three lobbyists out of his office for trying to give him cash for his reelection campaign. 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.
"Ray Johnson, Mr. Integrity," Rollins writes of his most important early mentor, "had his price. . . . I think he rented out for two tickets to the Oscars and probably didn't even realize it. I found myself wondering if I had a price, and whether I'd know it when the time came."
Apparently not. 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. Moreover, "If I wanted to go to Lake Tahoe for gambling and a show, tickets and complimentary hotel rooms were always available."
So we see Rollins, from his mid-teens onward, as a man on the make, ever vigilant for the main chance. 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.
His main chance in national politics came through his association with longtime Reagan operative Lyn Nofziger. When Nofziger became White House political director in Reagan's first year as president, he appointed Rollins his deputy. A year later he succeeded to Nofziger's job, and a year after that he became director of Reagan's reelection campaign. In recounting his exploits as campaign manager, Rollins seems a bit like the flea that thinks it is steering the dog.
Rollins gained a reputation as a pugnacious politico with loads of street smarts and people smarts. But there was something troubling about the way he operated. He had a penchant for saying embarrassing things to reporters and then lying about the circumstances to cover up. 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. 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. Rennert calls that allegation, which is a serious slur on his professional integrity, "totally untrue."
In fact, the book is a catalogue of slurs on just about everyone who came into contact with Rollins over the years. Ronald Reagan is spared, as are a few others. But generally the only really worthy character in the book is Rollins himself. 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. In dialogue that sounds like it's from some awful, overdramatized movie, he dresses down U.S. senators, top government officials, and the president of the mob-connected Teamsters union. Only one person can intimidate him, and that's Nancy Reagan, who is portrayed as a self-obsessed, bitchy, conniving tyrant.
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. He writes that he was advised by many friends -- and the ever-wise Sherrie -- to stay away from them. But he plunged into the race anyway, only to discover that his friends had been right. Oh well, the Huffingtons make good fodder for his introductory chapter. They were "craven," and "beyond contempt. " He was ashamed to be associated with them: "The magnitude of Arianna Huffington's lust for power was beyond the pale even for me." 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! Is Rollins saying here that hiring a campaign gumshoe is lower on the order of sleaze than illegally absconding with $ 10 million? Isn't he an accessory after the fact to a serious felony? Has he reported this to the authorities? Or perhaps he really doesn't know whether this episode actually took place. 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?
It appears that this is just another example of reckless abandon on the part of Ed Rollins, all too typical of this book. He doesn't care who gets hurt or who might be unfairly maligned. The money's too good, the revenge too sweet.
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. Had he done so, surely he wouldn't have in the bank the million dollars or so that this book has brought him. But he might have a sense of honor -- something that, for the remainder of his life, will forever elude him.
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).