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12. A Lobbyist Is a Lobbyist Is a Lobbyist
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12 A LOBBYIST IS A LOBBYIST IS A LOBBYIST 156 public relations consultant, government affairs counselor, legislative advocate, lawyer—call it what you will, the fact remains: a lobbyist is a lobbyist is a lobbyist. This play on Gertrude Stein’s celebrated aphorism weighed on my mind as Maurice Rosenblatt, Charley Brown, and I opened the doors of our new offices at 1028 Connecticut Avenue in the heart of downtown Washington on January 22, 1961. I was doing what I had promised myself never to do. I was going to use the contacts and connections I had made in five furious years of political campaigning to open doors and influence decisions on behalf of whoever would hire me. Stripped to its essentials, that is what my new game was all about. I had no illusions about being a legislative expert or a bill craftsman. I was a political campaign functionary with some expertise in the election process. Since Washington was a totally political town with its paladins of power depending on the ballot, it wasn’t a bad skill to trade on. I told myself that lobbying would be an interim thing to fill in the time between campaigns. I was going to be like the French girl from the provinces who only worked in the Paris bordello to get her grubstake so that she could go home and live a respectable bourgeois life. The idea of making a longtime career out of influence-peddling was anathema to me. Being a highpriced lobbyist and driving around town in a limousine like Clark Clifford or Tommy Corcoran was not in my nature. Newspapering and campaigning had bred in me a kind of proletarian professionalism. I was a working stiff, a union man, with no craving for the fancy office suites, exclusive clubs, and other appurtenances of power and prestige that seemed to be the hallmarks of the successful Washington lobbyist. I liked driving a twelve-year-old Volkswagen , shopping at Safeway, and buying clothes off the rack. Handball at the YMCA was my game, not squash at the Metropolitan Club. I made my own phone calls and fixed my own coffee. I was a reverse snob. When I expressed my misgivings to a business-lobbyist friend, he laughed and said: “Just wait until you make a hundred thousand for getting an innocuous amendment or little clause added to an obscure bill. You’ll get hooked. It’s like hitting the jackpot. You get addicted.” He was right. In 1961, Washington was not crawling with lobbyists as it is today. There was a rather elite corps of well-established advocates of the nation’s traditional interest groups: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, American Medical Association, and Farm Bureau Federation on the right and the AFL-CIO, NAACP, National Council of Churches, and Catholic Welfare Conference on the moderate left. All the major economic interests had their own lobbies, usually sheltered in marble -façaded edifices close to the Capitol and the White House. An indelible mark of prestige was to have either building framed in one’s office window to impress visitors. There were also the downtown law firms whose principal raison d’être seemed to be influencing Congress, the departments, and regulatory agencies of government on behalf of their clients. Through fundraising for various Senate candidates, I had become familiar with most of them. Many were former functionaries from the New Deal and the Fair Deal who had come to Washington with idealistic stars in their eyes. Along the way, the stars had been transmuted into dollar signs, and these lawyers had done well working for the interests they had once regulated and curbed. Many were big names— cabinet officers and the like—and I was somewhat in awe of their celebrity. Could little me be breaking bread with The Secretary, The Ambassador, and Tommy the Cork? Earle Clements demystified them for me. “They are chasing the almighty dollar, same as anybody else,” he said. “Don’t ever forget it.” My partners and I didn’t recognize it at the time, but we were in the vanguard of a new wave of lobbyists flooding into the national capital. The incoming Kennedy administration promised to be noticeably different from the a lobbyist is a lobbyist is a lobbyist 157 [18.219.22.169] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 20:45 GMT) middle-aged, comfortable, and somewhat prosaic Eisenhower and Truman regimes, and Kennedy campaign figures from the...