Countdown

Reports and Other Projects

Introduction

“All parties, however loyal to principles at first, degenerate into aristocracies of interest at last, and unless a nation is capable of discerning the point where integrity ends and fraud begins, popular parties are among the surest modes of introducing an aristocracy.”

— John Taylor, in a letter to John Adams, 1814

This is the ninth published study by the Center for Public Integrity. The following individuals researched, wrote, edited, or otherwise assisted in the preparation of the text.

David DePerro is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in physics at Duke University, where he has a full-tuition Angier B. Duke Scholarship.

Margaret Ebrahim has conducted research at the Center for more than a year. She holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from The American University, a bachelor’s degree from Tulane University, and she once researched human rights in the Brazilian Amazon for a year on a Watson Fellowship.

Bill Hogan, who edited this study, is a managing editor of National Journal. An award-winning investigative journalist, Hogan formerly was a senior editor of Regardie’s magazine.

Charles Lewis is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Public Integrity. For 11 years, he did investigative reporting at ABC News and CBS News, most recently as a producer for “60 Minutes.”

Samuel Loewenberg has been at the Center for nearly a year. He was a co-author of Under the Influence, which was released in February. He is a student at The Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, where he has concentrated on political theory, literature, and writing.

Meredith Reid is a senior at the University of Notre Dame, where she is studying government and public policy in the Hesburgh Program of Public Service. She will graduate in May 1993.

Diane Renzulli is an administrative assistant at the Center. She graduated from Georgetown University with a bachelor’s degree in English.

Susan Smith is a sophomore at Vassar College, where she is pursuing a degree in political science.

Two people should be singled out for their especially valuable contributions: Samuel Loewenberg and Diane Renzulli.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The chairmen of America’s two major political parties are not well-known to the average voter. Their relative obscurity, however, belies their power and access in Washington. To date, the party chairmen have received far less public scrutiny than their importance deserves.

The Center for Public Integrity interviewed nine of the ten living persons who have served as chairmen of the Democratic and Republican National Committees since 1977. The average age of an elected chairman is 47; he is almost assuredly a white male (only one black man and no women have been chosen in this 15-year period) from the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, and not only is he college-educated, but he is very likely a lawyer. After his election by his party’s national committee, the chances are he’ll stay in the position for roughly three years.

We uncovered one other statistical likelihood: Unless a party chairman died or left Washington, he became a lobbyist.

There’s probably nothing more critical to a Washington lobbyist than achieving “access” to the nation’s most important and powerful public officials. And few people in the nation’s capital have more access than the party chairmen.

The Center found, for example, that party chairmen have major access to Washington’s inner circles. Chairmen meet frequently with the president if they are from the same party; chairmen also meet with congressional leaders of the same party. Indeed, Democratic chairmen are included in such exclusive gatherings as the Speaker of the House’s closed-door Deputy Whip meetings on Wednesday mornings in the Capitol, where legislative strategy, the upcoming agenda, and vote counts are openly discussed.

Since 1977, the Center found, half of the national party chairmen have received outside income — despite party charters stipulating that the chairman’s position is “full-time.” Of the 11 elected chairmen since 1977, none has simultaneously worn more hats nor raised more questions about potential conflicts of interest than the current chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Ronald H. Brown. He was the only party chairman since 1977 who declined to be interviewed by the Center.

Since he became DNC chairman in 1989, Brown has continued to receive income from the law firm in which he remains a partner, Patton, Boggs & Blow. He has maintained business relationships with at least three private companies. He has solicited government business for both his law firm and the company he heads. He has traveled to Japan on law firm business.

Suddenly, the issue of access becomes more relevant. When Brown attends the Speaker of the House’s Deputy Whip meetings, in addition to serving the Democratic Party, is he also gathering data for Patton, Boggs & Blow’s 1,500 active clients or for the Democratic National Committee?

Brown maintains that he has done no outside client work since 1989, although records obtained by the Center contradict this assertion.

Since 1977, other past party chairmen have also taken money from law firms or corporations or both during their tenures: Charles T. Manatt, Paul G. Kirk, Jr., Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Jr., and Clayton Yeutter. Charles Black, the “acting spokesman” for the RNC during chairman Lee Atwater’s illness, derived all of his income from his lobbying firm, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly.

Today, in Washington, the ethical lines are blurred on this and many other issues. For example, when asked about the conflict-of-interest issues surrounding Brown, Timothy May, the managing partner of Patton, Boggs & Blow, told the Center that the idea is ridiculous “that someone is chairman of a party and has influence and that they can’t employ this influence to help clients.” May added: “There’s no problem. It only gets into conflict of interest [when helping the client] would damage the interests of the party.”

Because of the inordinate emphasis today in Washington on money at all levels, it is difficult to know anymore just what are the interests of the national parties. Nearly all the chairmen since 1977 said that they had no problem occasionally making a telephone call or facilitating a meeting between a donor and government officials. There are no ethics or conflict-of-interest guidelines for top party officials. Disclosure is at a minimum, because the parties are private corporations. There are no post-employment restrictions on where the chairmen can work after leaving the party. Among the current and former chairmen we interviewed, there was no strong opinion or sentiment against former chairmen becoming Washington lobbyists.

In addition, the Center found that since 1977, half the party chairmen have been registered with the Justice Department, either before or after their party tenures, as foreign agents for overseas corporations and governments. Their clients included such human-rights-abusing nations as “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s Haiti, Kenya, Nigeria, and Zaire.

How important are the ethical issues that involve America’s party chairmen? Perhaps no one said it better than former Senator and U.S. Trade Representative William Brock. “I find it impossible not to act in nonprejudicial ways when on retainer to a law firm, because it is inconceivable that the firm and the party’s interests coincide,” he told the Center. “I really have no right to comment on the other party’s rules, but in the Republican Party, I think, people should divorce themselves from external responsibilities.

The political parties aim to win elections at the national, state, and local levels. That is their paramount mission. But the chairmen of the DNC and RNC, by dint of their position and status in Washington, also represent a back-channel route for corporations and individuals to achieve critical, inside access to public officials. It is a largely hidden and unaccountable system by which to potentially bend and influence public policy for private benefit.

Therein lies our curiosity, the reason we undertook this project of analyzing the party leadership. We wanted to understand just exactly who the Democrats and Republicans have chosen to lead them in recent years, how the party chairmen have interacted with other decision-makers in Washington, what standards of conduct they have operated under while serving their parties, and what opportunities have been available to them on leaving their positions.

INTRODUCTION

Recently, for this study, we interviewed John White, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, in his Washington office. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter chose the affable Texan to head the DNC.

In those years, the Democrats were in grim shape financially. Not only was the Democratic Party still paying off its long-standing, multimillion-dollar debt from the 1968 presidential campaign, but the day-to-day situation had suddenly become so dire that the DNC’s entire staff might have to be let go, and the prospect loomed that the DNC actually might have to vacate its office space.

Such a notion, White said, would have been acutely embarrassing. And so the chairman cast about, looking for a dependable Democratic donor who would be able to write a very large check and help the DNC avert further disaster and humiliation. White found such an individual — Lew Wasserman, the chairman of MCA, Inc., the entertainment conglomerate.

What did Wasserman seek in return?

Not really anything, White told us. But there was one occasion, he recalled, when Wasserman was coming to Washington and couldn’t get a hotel room. He called White, who telephoned the owner of Washington’s Madison Hotel, imploring him to accommodate Mr. Wasserman. Unfortunately, however, no room was available.

White smiled proudly and recalled that he finally found suitable overnight lodging for the wealthy Hollywood mogul — at the White House, in the Lincoln Bedroom. This favor for Wasserman, White said, was “just a small thing.”

More than a decade has passed since this telling episode. The story isn’t generally known in Washington and has probably never before appeared in print.

America’s political parties are nearly always in the news, especially in presidential election years. But seldom are the activities and business relationships of their leaders ever examined — and certainly not in a methodical, comparative manner. The chairmen of the Democratic and Republican national committees are among Washington’s best connected, influential power players. And yet, other than discussing party rules, primary schedules, or electoral strategy with political reporters, they and other party leaders are seldom interviewed or analyzed in the context of how Washington really works.

In the unique culture of Washington, of course, the intertwining of politics and commerce is routine and well-understood; what raises America’s blood pressure often produces just a yawn inside the Beltway. Americans today are victimized by Washington’s marketplace mentality, in which private gain supersedes the public trust and in which the merchants are mainly former high-level officials, presidential campaign advisers, and others who can manipulate and distort national decision-making to their own ends. From savings-and-loan regulators to Environmental Protection Agency officials, from trade negotiators to Food and Drug Administration watchdogs, the grass is considerably greener on the other side of the public-sector’s fences. So many people in Washington have dollar signs in their eyes that the public can no longer be certain that any proposal, policy or program has evolved based on the substance and the merits of what is truly in the public interest.

Lobbyists in Washington today have become what investment bankers in New York City were in the 1980s. It has become a profession young people apparently aspire to — a notion unheard of a few decades ago. Many college interns and law school students now come to Washington not to change the world, but to learn more about the high-powered, extremely lucrative world of big-time wheeling-and-dealing.

Meanwhile, as the National Commission on the Public Service concluded: “Too many of our most talented public servants — those with the skills and dedication that are the hallmarks of an effective career service — are ready to leave. Too few of our brightest young people — those with the imagination and energy that are essential for the future — are willing to join.” And as management guru Peter Drucker observed in The New Realities, “The locus of decision-making in the political process is rapidly shifting from politicians and civil servants to lobbyists.”

The Center for Public Integrity, which was formed to better understand these issues, has published several studies to illuminate the degree to which public service and the public trust have been eroded.

Against this backdrop, it would be naive to think that the nation’s two major political parties, headquartered in Washington, have somehow been operating in a sterile vacuum, hermetically sealed away from the corrupting influences of the capital’s mercenary culture.

Watergate remains indelibly etched upon the nation’s collective political soul. Wholesale corruption was found in the Committee to Re-Elect the President, with its amusing acronym (CREEP), as well as in the Republican National Committee. The GOP was so scarred, in fact, that serious consideration was given to changing the party’s name. In the mid and late-1970s, a host of post-Watergate “reform” measures were enacted; many of them, however, have proved to be ineffective or even counterproductive.

There have been studies and reports and news stories for more than a decade about the nation’s polluted campaign finance system, with the principal emphasis on Congress. And such laudable organizations as the Center for Responsive Politics have methodically exposed how millions of dollars in “soft money” — funds not regulated by federal election law and difficult to trace — flow every year into the coffers of the political parties.

Unfortunately, with the exception of this kind of campaign finance reporting, the roles of the political parties have not been systematically studied in the everyday mechanics of public policy. Seldom has anyone attempted to examine the political party relationships to the large, multimillion-dollar interests vying to be serviced in today’s Washington.

Indeed, aside from reporting certain financial information to the Federal Election Commission, the political parties operate under surprisingly little scrutiny. Despite their very public role, the parties are private corporations that can, for the most part, disclose only the information they choose to. While there are ethical standards and public-disclosure requirements in the executive branch and legislative and judicial branches, there are no such standards or requirements for the party chairmen. Yet, the party chairmen are just as well-connected and potentially as powerful as any public official in Washington.

Investigative Methodology

The Center makes no assertion that this is the most thorough study of its kind that could have been undertaken. We could have included, for example, the treasurers and other leaders of the political parties. To use our time and resources most effectively, however, we decided to limit the range of our inquiry to the chairmen of the DNC and RNC.

Even then, this type of institutional inquiry has never been undertaken, possibly because of the paucity of available information. Identifying potential and apparent conflicts of interest isn’t particularly difficult, but conclusively documenting an actual, specific conflict or thoroughly assessing a perceived business entanglement are quite different matters. With the dearth of public records, the dimness of human memory over time, the reluctance of people to reveal sometimes unflattering information, or conversely, to embellish a proud moment, any investigative study — and especially this one — necessarily has limitations.

We decided to limit our inquiry to the 15-year period from 1977 to today. The project thus gained some contemporary historic perspective and bipartisan balance; we were able to include a Democratic presidency along with the Republican domination of the White House in the 1980s.

After we ascertained the names of the various elected chairmen, we proceeded to methodically collect and read the most relevant secondary source material available from newspapers, magazines, books, studies, and other sources. Lobbying records were obtained from the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Justice Department’s Foreign Agent Registration Act office. Federal Election Commission records, as well as financial disclosure forms from the Office of Government Ethics, were retrieved when applicable. State and federal Freedom of Information Act requests were made for relevant documents, and researchers pored over hundreds of pages of other government records as well, such as local government contracts and bid proposals.

Only after collecting and digesting all of this data, and gaining a rough sense of the issues and problems faced by each chairman during his tenure, were we then adequately prepared to interview the former and current chairmen. For purposes of accuracy, each of our nine interviews with the party chairmen was tape-recorded (with, of course, their full permission). Further information about these interviews is in the appendix.

One party chairman, Ronald H. Brown, the current chairman of the Democratic National Committee, declined to meet with the Center. We did conduct a tape-recorded interview with Joan Baggett, the DNC chief of staff.

The Republican National Committee had a difficult situation in the early 1990s. A respected political strategist, Lee Atwater, was named chairman of the RNC in 1989, but a year later he was found to be suffering from brain cancer. He valiantly fought the disease for another year. The GOP was in an awkward position. It needed an able and aggressive party leader but understandably had no desire to replace Atwater as chairman. One of Atwater’s closest personal friends, Charles R. Black, Jr., also a respected GOP campaign operative, was named “chief spokesman” of the RNC. In many respects, Black was the de facto party chairman for nearly a year, and for that reason we have included him in this study. Black also declined to be interviewed.

Over the past decade, the Republican Party has developed the title of “general chairman.” Biographies of Paul Laxalt and Samuel B. Skinner, who have served in this vaguely defined capacity, are not included in this study.

Just as with our first study, America’s Frontline Trade Officials, a substantial part of this publication is made up of biographies. We were interested in the personal backgrounds of the party chairmen both before and after they held their positions.

No individual and no career, of course, are identical. Similarly, there are differing views as to the various ethical constraints under which a national party chairman must operate. We found wide-ranging personal interpretations and, in general, confusion over any ethical standards that might apply.

Thomas Jefferson once said, “When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself public property.” From our research and our interviews, it is clear that many past and current party chairmen do not regard political parties as public entities with attendant public responsibilities. How each man weighed his own obligation to uphold the public trust varies.

Only by assembling detailed profiles of the party chairmen can we begin to see broad trends and themes. Only then can we begin to understand how the parties and their leaders interact every day in Washington’s dissolute milieu.

Charles Lewis
September 15, 1992
Washington, D.C.