Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Me

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It remains to be seen what additional services Robert Mueller will do for his country, but he has performed a great one for me personally: what has come to light about Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, as a result of the Mueller investigation,  has explained a big chunk of my life that was previously obscure to me. I realize this is a revelation that is of interest to no one but myself, but it is a revelation to me, and I’m going to write about it. So there. My blog.

During the 1970s I was rising steadily in the ranks of operatives in the Republican Party. I had consulted for a number of congressional campaigns; had managed a campaign for U.S. Senate in Virginia (for a newcomer whose goal was not victory — we were running against Elizabeth Taylor’s husband, for crying out loud — but statewide credentials); I had been given (too much) credit for engineering an upset victory in a race for mayor of Akron, Ohio; had parachuted in to the Iowa precinct caucuses campaign with a team trying to resuscitate Howard Baker’s anemic presidential campaign; and had afterward been appointed manager of two states for him during what remained of his truncated campaign.

To this day I am not only satisfied with, but proud of, the candidates for which I worked in the 60s and 70s — people such as Governor Linwood Holton of Virginia, Mayor Roy Ray of Akron, Congressman J. Kenneth Robinson of Virginia, State Senators Bill Truban and  Nathan Miller of Virginia. If any of them ran today, I would vote for them if I could.

But with the advent of the Reagan Revolution beginning in 1980, it became increasingly rare and difficult for such pragmatic moderates to get nominated in the Republican Party. Terms such as bipartisan, compromise, loyal opposition, and honor disappeared from the lexicon of Republican politics, to be replaced by labels and pejoratives such as tax-and-spend-Democrats, soft-on-crime, and liberal — used without elaboration as a simple insult.

I always blamed the nastification of the Republican Party largely on Lee Atwater, who later surfaced as a Reagan adviser, and who spent 1980 showing us how to do the new Republican fandango — getting a Congress-critter elected by calling his opponent a liberal, a communist, a (white) member of the NAACP, and a past recipient of electroshock therapy, which Atwater described as being hooked up to jumper cables. Sounds normal today, but it sure didn’t in 1980.

I heard about Atwater, of course, but what I did not know until recently was that also in 1980, a new consulting firm was founded in Washington to institutionalize the new pit-bull politics. The firm was called Black, Manafort and Stone, and it soon became renowned among Washington insiders for combining in one firm lobbying and political consulting, performed with a take-no-prisoners, scorched-earth, amoral style. They lobbied for a long list of the world’s nastiest dictators and companies (including Big Tobacco), and managed campaigns for some of the nation’s nastiest politicians. Lee Atwater soon joined Roger Stone and Paul Manafort as a senior partner of the firm.

The work of these savages drove me from the Republican Party. It was they, for example,  who demonized the black, furloughed felon Willie Horton and made Michael Dukakis seem responsible for Horton’s depredations (Democrats, you see, are pro-crime). When he was dying of brain cancer in 1991, a repentant Atwater wrote a letter to Dukakis apologizing for the “naked cruelty” of that campaign. It was part of the same bunch, a long-time Atwater cohort named Karl Rove, now in service to George W. Bush, who spread the word during the 2000 presidential primary campaign in South Carolina that John McCain had fathered a black baby out of wedlock, when in fact he and his wife had adopted a brown baby from Bangladesh, well within wedlock. 

It was no coincidence, and no change of trajectory, that two of the Founding Savages — Roger Stone and Paul Manafort — worked at the highest levels of the Trump Campaign, surely one of the most unspeakable campaigns of political vandalism ever seen in America.

I suppose that if your rowboat is swamped by the wake of a yacht passing in the night, it does little good to know, 30 years later, the name of the yacht, or its destination. Still, I take some satisfaction from the fact that while I did not know the names of the people who in 1980 originated the wave that overbore me, now I know their names and destinations. Manafort is in jail and Stone is awaiting indictment. And while I do not own a single ostrich-skin jacket, neither have I ever had an official visit from the FBI.