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The Buying of the President, 1996-2004

Nearly a half-century ago Theodore H. White launched a new genre of political campaign books with his The Making of the President 1960, which was on the bestseller list for nearly a year and later won the Pulitzer Prize. Back then, reporters, including White, didn’t write much about the grubby issue of money in politics. It was a more innocent time, before the rise of a more critical press that chronicled the myriad betrayals of public trust: Vietnam, Watergate, Abscam, Iran-contra, the 1996 Democratic campaign-finance scandals, the Clinton impeachment, various brouhahas embroiling no fewer than four speakers of the House of Representatives, and, of course, Iraq.

At some point, these outrages understandably benumbed our enthusiasms for politics and glamorizing the presidential election process that White called “the most awesome transfer of power in the world.” As the cost of campaigning for a major presidential candidate increased astronomically, so too did the need to go beneath the rhetoric and investigate the influence of the most powerful forces in our society over the political process. Since 1996, the Center has been filling that need.

Over more than a decade, the Center has amassed and studied thousands of pages of federal and state records in 1996, 2000, and 2004 to produce The Buying of the President books, the first such long-form efforts to systematically examine the powerful special interests that are closely aligned with each of the major presidential candidates. The first book, serialized in The New York Times, provided substantial investigative grist for the 1996 Frontline documentary, So You Want to Buy a President?, and its “Top Ten Career Patrons” lists for the various major candidates moved worldwide on the wires. The Buying of the President 2000 first reported that George W. Bush’s top financial “career patron” was Enron Corporation. And The Buying of the President 2004 was on The New York Times bestseller list (short or extended) for approximately three months. In 1996, The New Yorker magazine called the organization “the center for campaign scoops.” That year, as President Bill Clinton ran for reelection, the Center broke the now-infamous “Lincoln Bedroom” scandal.

Here you can read all of the Center’s Buying of the President books and related reports and ask yourself the question that began our investigation: Is the Oval Office for sale?

Charles Lewis
Founder, The Center for Public Integrity
July 2007

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