This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu

ROBERT J. DOLE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview with

DAVID ROGERS

April 5, 2008

Interviewer

Brien R. Williams

Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics 2350 Petefish Drive Lawrence, KS 66045 Phone: (785) 864-4900 Fax: (785) 864-1414 This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 2

Williams: This is an oral history interview with David Rogers for the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. We’re in David’s home in Takoma Park, Maryland. Today is Saturday, April 5, 2008, and I’m Brien Williams. David, let’s start with your getting the assignment while on the staff of the Boston Globe to come down to Washington, how that felt, and how you got started.

Rogers: I had come down and I had covered City Hall for the Globe, and then after the mayor’s election in ’79, they sent me down to Washington to cover primarily the New England delegation. So what happened was that everyone in the—that was the year [Edward (Ted)] Kennedy was running for president, so the entire Bureau was off covering Kennedy and I was really left alone in Congress, and literally they took me up— this woman, Michelle Patterson, took me up and gave me a bowl of bean soup, and in the midst of the bean soup, said, “You’re going to be fine,” and left. So I was very educated in Congress by the members, and I fortunately had the Massachusetts delegation and I had good people in the Globe, like Marty Nolan was my Bureau chief, and he would come back from the campaign and help me, but the reality was, I was very much a product of education by the Massachusetts delegation and then through them got to know different things. [Howard] Baker was always nice to me. It may have been that I was the paper that covered Tip [O’Neill], so people probably thought it was useful to talk to the paper that covered Tip, because then they could say things to Tip through the Globe, and there was probably a little bit of that, not too much, but there was some of that, and that helped. That was sort of my introduction to him.

Williams: Did you angle for that assignment?

Rogers: Yes. I wanted to come to Washington. It was pretty much—Marty Nolan was a big influence on me. He was the bureau chief, and I had basically done a lot in the neighborhoods of Boston. I’d come back from Vietnam and gone back to school and studied cities at Harvard, and then I’d done a lot of the neighborhoods and desegregation with the busing, and I had done City Hall for four years. And to stay at City Hall after the…. I really didn’t have much interest in the State House. I liked City Hall, I’d done City Hall, and so Congress was available, and there was an opening. I was a good, young This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 3 reporter, and they wanted me to go. It wasn’t really so much angling as that was sort of the next step.

Williams: When you started out, did you try to balance between coverage of the Senate and the House, or how did that break down?

Rogers: I always covered both. I have always believed, wherever I’d been, I’ve always believed you have to cover both. We wrote a weekly column called “New England and Washington,” and that was focused on New England’s delegation. I had a really remarkable delegation, when you think about it, because [Paul] Tsongas was there, Kennedy was running. My relations with Kennedy only came later. But I had an active Connecticut delegation. [Edmund] Muskie was chairman of the Budget Committee for Maine. So this was early on. [Robert] Giaimo was the chairman of the House Budget Committee, and the budget was a big story then, and then obviously a huge influence on me was Appropriations. Because Silvio Conte was the ranking Republican on House Appropriations, and the ranking Democrat was Ed Boland. They were both from Massachusetts. So I can remember, one of the first stories was the Soviets moving into Afghanistan, and [Jimmy] Carter wanted to resume registration for the draft, so that was an issue in Appropriations between Conte and Boland, and that was one of my first stories.

Williams: Did you gravitate towards Budget and Appropriations and those areas just naturally?

Rogers: Yes, I was considered a bit of a joke. I have been considered most of my career for how I’ve covered Appropriations. I’ve spent a lot of time on Appropriations. I think that people now are covering Appropriations that didn’t cover it before, but believe me, when I first started covering Congress, there weren’t many reporters covering Appropriations. I think it was because we had a situation where we had Conte and Boland. Conte wanted you to cover him, so if you were going to cover him, he was in all the conferences. I’d say, “Well, you ought to get me in the conferences,” and then he’d get me in the conferences. So to a certain extent I had some extra access because of these This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 4 people, and I think to a certain extent Washington was asleep at the switch and not covering Appropriations. And I was interested in it. The budget, I guess, because of Giaimo and Muskie, but the truth was, the budget used to be a huge story. You couldn’t cover Congress without paying attention to the budget. It used to be literally months were consumed at the beginning of each year with the budget discussions generally, which led to a lot of assumptions that were ignored by the Appropriations Committee, and as you did the budget more, you learned how important Appropriations was to the actual resolution of things. Then because of the budget, you deal with people like Dole on the Finance Committee.

Williams: Just as a footnote here, the new configuration of the budget process and whatnot was only five years old, I guess, when you got there.

Rogers: That’s right.

Williams: Do you have any reflection on how important that ’74 legislation was in terms of clarifying how the budget ought to be handled?

Rogers: It certainly set in place a process that was genuinely very important at that time, and there was probably a much greater deficit consciousness at that time. I remember people really were worried about the deficit. One of my earliest stories, Carter won Iowa, and when he won Iowa, he moved to the right and decided he could balance the budget. It would have been the fiscal ’81 budget. He wanted to balance the budget, ’80 or ’81. I can remember one afternoon someone in O’Neill’s office said, “Wait here,” and the entire Cabinet walked by, and they were coming to the Hill—not the whole Cabinet, but a lot of people from the White House, because they were coming to the Hill to balance the budget. So that whole period when I first got here was this intense Carter effort to balance the budget, to show he was fiscally responsible versus Kennedy and versus [Ronald] Reagan coming up in the Republican ranks. Now, it didn’t last very long. We would have votes about how much aid to go to New York City, detailed votes, and you would cover it with great seriousness, but the reality was, in the end it was This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 5 basically assumptions, planning assumptions, and you came to realize it after a while and then you would focus more on Appropriations. But one of the biggest changes in Washington in the time I’ve been there is the budget process does not have the same dominance. What’s happened is, it’s gotten to a point where no one wants to make the real choices, so they avoid the budget process. But the whole tenure of Dole was making some very painful choices. Some would argue that one reason the Republicans lost the Senate in ’86 was what they did in some of the budget process in ’85 and ’86.

Williams: Just sticking to Carter here for a moment, what was the fate of his effort to reduce the deficit?

Rogers: They made an effort, but the problem was, like everything with the budget, you’re only as good as your baseline is, and the reality was, with inflation and interest costs and so forth, things were slipping past him, so he had a target that if he cut—I can’t remember the full number, but it wasn’t a big number, certainly not in today’s world; it was like 20 or 30 billion, then he could balance the budget, and they were going to do that. Actually, one of the ironies of the situation, I believe in that period of time, that was the Hollings…what happened in the middle of that, Cy Vance quit, left the firm, or returned to his firm, is a famous thing, “Cy Vance has returned to his firm.” Anyway, so then Muskie, who’d been the Budget chairman, became Secretary of State. So [Ernest] Hollings took over and was more defense-oriented as the chairman of the Budget Committee, so he didn’t want to cut as much from defense. They played around then for the first time with this process called reconciliation, where they would go back and make changes, by law. This became a precedent that the Republicans would later use to pass tax cuts. In fairness, Howard Baker did not use it with Reagan’s tax cuts. He did not use the reconciliation process that way. They only used it for spending cuts. But as time went on, I think they may have used reconciliation with TEFRA [Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act], but in each case you were really trying to reduce the deficit. [George W.] Bush, this Bush, clearly used reconciliation repeatedly to get tax cuts through Congress that would not have gotten through a sixty- vote margin in the Senate. This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 6

Williams: Most people don’t understand that process and the significance of reconciliation. Can you just review it?

Rogers: The whole term comes about, it used to be, believe it or not—you’re taxing my memory a little bit, but there used to be two budget resolutions. There used to be a spring budget resolution, which you can think of as sort of a master plan for the year. Then the idea was, you would do your Appropriations bills and go through legislation, and then in the fall you would have a permanent budget resolution, ostensibly. I think the idea of reconciliation was to reconcile the experience of the summer and spring with the reality of where things stood in the fall. That then became a process that people, I would say, probably twisted and took it to the spring. The idea of reconciliation was, you had to make adjustments, and because you had to make adjustments, filibuster should not stand in the way. So you could make fixes at that point in an expeditious way, and there would not be a filibuster. Simple majority ruled. As I remember, that is the birth of reconciliation. It was reconciling the experience of the summer with the reality and quick decisions to fix things and move on. The Carter people did use it. What happened in this case was that we had a situation where in recent years where we’ve used reconciliation really not to reconcile anything, but simply to take advantage of the fact that reconciliation allows you to pass a law without a sixty-vote to override cloture. To make reconciliation work, you have to conform to the budget, and since the budget is either five or ten years, whatever you do only conforms to that period of time, and that’s why we’ve created this situation in Washington where we have a cliff in 2010, where all of Bush’s tax cuts run out in 2010. So in a sense, he’s made a devil’s bargain, in that he got his way, but he got his way only to this point, and at that point they have to revisit the whole issue.

Williams: Do you recall your first contacts with Bob Dole?

Rogers: I think I got to know him in the budget, obviously with the tax bill. The ’81 tax bill for me was a great education. Congress used to be more open in some ways, and they would have conferences. This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 7

Let’s back up. The real battle over the ’81 tax bill was more in the House than the Senate. The Democrats still controlled the House, and the Senate had moved to have a tax bill that had some variation of what Reagan did, but it had more of Reagan’s structure to it. What happened in the House was there began to be a bidding war where Democrats were adding other things, particularly for oil interests, in an effort to try to win over boll weevil conservatives who could then vote with them on less of the three-year rate cut. What this led to was a bidding war, and the bill grew in cost tremendously, not that it was cheap anyway, but, it was expensive. So then this set up the conference. I know I dealt with Dole in the spring of ’81, with the budget. I got to know him some, but I think I got to know him better as we moved into the conference, and then he was representing the Senate, with [Dan] Rostenkowski representing the House in the conference. That conference was this marvelous experience, frankly, because they held it in Longworth, in the big Ways and Means room, and there was this guy from Treasury, Bud Chapeton, I think he had worked in Congress, but he was a superb tax—and it was almost like a tutorial on taxes. They would sit up there, and you could always get a room, and it was a big room, so you didn’t have to crowd into a small room, and you could watch and listen, and you really learned a lot. Chapeton would explain provisions and so forth, and so for a nitwit like me who had just come down less than a year before, it was a marvelous education.

Williams: Was Dole carrying the White House message pretty much on all of that?

Rogers: He always had a tone of sort of carrying a little bit of his own message. I guess he was pretty loyal, but there was this issue—I’d have to go back and research, but this issue about leasing, and it was some of the big corporations. Dole went after that big time in TEFRA. Some of the big corporations were behind that, and it was a tax break for corporations. The Heritage Foundation was behind it, and Dole separated himself from that pretty early. I don’t know that I can really answer. He was very involved in the oil stuff, because Kansas and oil interest, and when the Democrats introduced all this added oil stuff, the Republicans already added some, but the Democrats upped the ante, Dole was very involved in that. This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 8

Actually, they were a little annoyed with me eventually on one of those things, because they had a conference—here’s an example of Dole and me. The very end of the tax conference was in a small room and it was primarily about the oil stuff. Kennedy had had an oil-related amendment which the Senate had accepted, which dealt more with windfall profits or, I don’t know, maybe spending some of the oil money on low-income fuel assistance, something like that. Anyway, so I felt obliged to pursue that, and when they had the conference—and this shows you, they kept a transcript of the conference, and I asked to see the transcript, and Dole let me see it, and then when I quoted from portions of it, they got all upset. Dole didn’t get upset, but his tax staff got upset with me. Frankly, to this day I’ve never understood quite why they were upset, because I thought I did everything by the book. But there was sensitivity because it showed how he and Russell Long had ignored Kennedy in the conference, okay? Because they both had oil. They were, they just said, “Does anyone want this? No, no one wants this,” and then, of course, they’d go out on the floor and say, “Well, we tried hard, but we—.” So I think he was a little pissed at me because of that, and they would claim later that because of me they weren’t going to show the transcript. It was sort of goofy to me, because that’s the whole point of having the transcript. The whole issue is, you weren’t supposed to quote directly from the transcript because the transcript may not be perfectly accurate, and so I didn’t. I just said, “The transcript indicates that they didn’t try very hard,” or something like that. I did a generic. But anyway, that was a bit of a sore point for them for a while, but he never made a huge issue with me, but that was sort of one of my first experiences with that side of him.

Williams: How did you interpret his leadership style and how he was going about being chairman of the Finance Committee?

Rogers: He was interesting. He would pick different targets where he had a sense of a certain unfairness or things were excessive. He was always, you would argue, more identified with, like we talked about before, the older wing of the Party that was a little more deficit-conscious. And so Reagan had come along with this 30 percent cut in rates. It was big. Howard Baker had called it a riverboat gamble. I think that Dole saw it as a This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 9 riverboat gamble. He went along with it, he saw where things were going, and I think he was always someone concerned about—Dole always showed a sensitivity to fairness. There were times when he wouldn’t always live with that, and then you might give him a hard time, but the reality was that he showed a sense of that, and I think that when he saw how some people profited from some of the provisions in the ’81 act, he came back after it in TEFRA, and I really think you have to judge the two together. You have to do ’81 and ’82 together to sort of get the full picture of Bob Dole.

Williams: Just in general, I call it a two-act play.

Rogers: Yes, I think you have to. Robert [C.] Byrd was voting for the Reagan tax cuts. It was like Reagan had won a landslide. He’d taken over the Senate. These people were not going to stand in his way, and that was, frankly, one reason why Howard Baker didn’t have to do reconciliation. He was smart not to, because he took advantage of the fact that he could get the majority and just get it done. And they did. And then we had the economy. '82 was tougher with the economy. The other thing was, '82 was when Social Security surfaced more as an issue, and Dole was sensitive to that. They had done some cuts in Gramm-Latta [Delbert Leroy Latta]. That was the big deficit-reduction package in '81 that included effective minimum benefits for Social Security. And there was a race in Mississippi. Wayne Dowdy was a special election in Mississippi, and Wayne Dowdy used Social Security and the Democrat [Tony] Coelho saw how Social Security could be an issue for the Democrats in the sort of April-May period of '82. They pushed hard on it, and I think Dole may have been caught a little off guard by how powerful that turned out to be in the House elections. Tip [Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill] didn’t really have…. After the '80 election, Republicans controlled the Senate. The Democrats ostensibly controlled the House, but they really didn't, as a practical matter. They were the majority, but on any given day on most fiscal issues, Reagan could get the swing votes he needed from the Southern conservatives. It wasn't until the '82 election when Tip won back a critical number of seats did that balance of power come back, and then Tip was much more a force.

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 10

Williams: What about Rostenkowski's role in '81 versus '82?

Rogers: Well, I think he'd probably admit he made a mistake and that he went into a bidding war, and he couldn't win the bidding war against the White House because the White House wasn't going to be outbid. He couldn't win, and then in '82, Rostenkowski worked with Dole on that. You know, like all things in taxes, once you get into it, I think, in some ways, it was sort of a dynamic in the House where I think Rostenkowski wanted to give in more to Dole's TEFRA because he thought it was more equitable than the one that he'd been able to get out of the House, to be honest. I think there was some of that, where it was like House receipts. Do you know what I mean? I’d have to go back and look. I remember there was a blue-slip problem because Dole had taken an initiative in terms of passing TEFRA. I ought to go research that for you if you wanted to come back to me. But the point is, in any case, there was this big conference, and in that case I think that Rostenkowski was appreciative of some of the things Dole had done. Issues would flare up, like withholding on interest income in banks and so forth, and Dole would take on the banks on this. He had some pretty nasty fights on the floor, and he would just get pissed. But he'd go out there and he'd just go after them.

Williams: So would you say that '81 didn't reflect much of Dole's philosophy, but that by '82 he was able to effect some influence on how things came out?

Rogers: I wouldn't want to say it didn't reflect his philosophy, but I think that there's no question you have to look at '81 and '82 together to have a full appreciation of him, because he was a new chairman; he was implementing the new administration's policy; he was trying to do that. He certainly got involved in the oil stuff, which had parochial interests on his part, but I think he was trying to implement what the administration wanted. By '82, the administration was not quite as strong. He was more established, and I think that was more Dole. Whereas one was Dole implementing Reagan, the second was Dole.

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 11

Williams: You, from your perspective, saw both ERTA [Economic Recovery Tax Act] and TEFRA as major battles and having great significance for the country. How were these playing out with the populace? What did you get the sense, Massachusetts and so forth, were they aware that this was as important as it was?

Rogers: People were pretty aware, but I think Social Security eventually probably with voters took on more, and the economy, took on more meaning than what the Senate and House had done in terms of deficit reduction. It was a serious deficit-reduction effort.

Williams: Remind me of where David Stockman and the—where was he taken to? It wasn't the outhouse.

Rogers: The woodshed.

Williams: Woodshed. Where was that all coming into this? Because that's what I remember more than anything else of that period.

Rogers: Well, I'd have to go map it out. I'm sorry, I can't do that totally, but I know there was the period where we had the budget, and then Stockman always had the magic asterisk. Then in the start of '82, there was a new budget and people saw the deficits, and they were really larger than expected, or larger than promised. Then Stockman did the famous interview, he talked about the inability to control spending, and that's what led to the sort of [Pete] Domenici-Dole alliance and so forth.

Williams: So should we talk next about Social Security, or should we go on to the '84 deficit-reduction efforts?

Rogers: You mean with Gramm-Rudman and stuff?

Williams: Yes.

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 12

Rogers: I think that basically what people forget is how--people particularly given where we are today, where we have a war and we have these large deficits--that people don't fully grasp how much people were self-conscious about the deficit at that time and would really focus on it politically, and particularly in the Senate, where you have this sort of mix of people like Dole and Domenici and others who were quite conscious of the whole thing. I mean, I can remember when Gramm and Rudman. This is a famous…. You'll like this one. I could go back and check this date, but I was one of the first people to write about Gramm-Rudman, and again, it was because I was from New England. [Warren] Rudman invited me to some breakfast they had, and I guess by that point, that would have been '84, right? And by that point I was at the [Wall Street] Journal. I was no longer at the Globe, but Rudman knew me. [Phil] Gramm and Rudman had this little donuts and coffee thing, and they wanted to talk about this incredibly Rube Goldberg thing about to control the deficit. I remember coming back, and I said, "Boy, this is the most wild-ass idea, but people are so frustrated." And they were. “Maybe they would do this.” And I wrote a story essentially to that effect for the Wall Street Journal. It was pretty short, but it was funny. Anyway, [Ernest F.] Hollings wasn't there. Okay? Hollings signed that later. Well, I would never call it—

[telephone interruption]

Rogers: Rudman had this breakfast, and Hollings didn't come. And then Hollings signed on, and so it became called Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, right? I would never call it Gramm-Rudman-Hollings because Hollings wasn't at the breakfast, and I wasn't going to waste space in the Wall Street Journal for all these names. It just made the lead terribly complicated to write. Hollings, at first, complained about this, and then later they were worried I had given a corporate contribution to them because they were so embarrassed—remember later he wanted a divorce from Gramm-Rudman-Hollings and so forth? The Wall Street Journal had covered this entire period of time never mentioning—no, I did mention he supported it, but I never called it Gramm-Rudman-Hollings. Anyway, they used to joke that they could never decide whether I had done them an immense favor by not associating. But anyway, there was that. This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 13

What more did you want to know about that—Gramm-Rudman?

Williams: What was the real objection to it, or why was it such a Rube Goldberg idea?

Rogers: It basically set up a situation where, if you didn't meet these targets, you would—everyone kept thinking of what can make us do the right thing. It's like, we can't do the right thing, so find a machine that will make us do the right thing. Then they would create a machine, and everyone would say, "My god, this machine will be terrible." And that was sort of what Gramm-Rudman-Hollings was. It introduced more the concept of sequestration, sort of across-the-board cut, and it also probably, in some ways, encouraged what became later the sort of pay-go approach. I think, in fairness, it had that effect. But generally, it forced the Republicans into some situations where they ended up adopting some very tight budgets in the Senate that touched on Social Security or Medicare and caused huge divisions with the House and the House Republicans. This is where you started to see, particularly, if you started to think broadly, you could sort of think of '81 and '82, sort of Dole on tax policy together. But then as Dole became Majority Leader in '84, right? After Baker?

Williams: Well, yes.

Rogers: '85. So he walked into this problem, and there was this growing frustration, and then what do we do, and do we stick with our guns and reduce the deficit? Well, my god, we've got to stick with our guns and reduce the deficit. Was it Pete Wilson got wheeled in on the gurney and all this kind of stuff. And by god, we passed this thing. Meanwhile, Trent Lott is saying, "Nah, nah, nah, forget it. We're not doing this. We're just not doing this." And the Democrats in the House weren't keen on it, and so it sort of blew up.

Williams: Why would a Trent Lott be against it? And it's a little bit easier, I think, to see how the Democrats—

Rogers: Well, Trent Lott was identified with the Jack Kemp—well, I mean, Jack Kemp believed that you didn’t…. I actually looked at a story in ’85 on this where the This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 14 tensions…. Well, first of all, they knew Reagan was now in his second term and that was ending. Secondly, there was the Jack Kemp school of thought and that was always the supply-side view, and you had the other people who weren't sure of that. Lott was identified with Jack Kemp, and [Newt] Gingrich was beginning to come into his own a little bit. And there was Bob [Robert] Michel, who was the Republican Leader, was more akin to Dole. Actually, I came across this quote where Bob Michel said to me, "The decisions are getting tougher and tougher, but it doesn't take any institutional fortitude to be for tax cuts. Judas Priest, everyone's for that." So you had that. But you have that school. I mean, the people were up against some tough decisions at that point and they didn't want to make them. And they really weren’t made until… That theme runs through the whole thing because then you have [George H.W.] Bush I, "Read my lips. No new taxes," that whole school. And then, of course, he runs into problems, and he makes the deal with [Richard] Darman, and then he loses the election. The reality is, everyone says Congress should do the right thing, but anyone who really tries to deal with the deficit pays a terrible price. Dole paid a price in '86, you could argue, though you could argue time was running out on that Republican majority anyway. But that helped contribute to it. Bush I paid a price for what he did in '90 and '92, and [William J.] Clinton lost the Congress after what he did in '94. You don't really gain a lot of votes by addressing the deficit.

Williams: How important is the defense budget in all of this?

Rogers: Well, it was huge in Reagan. [Mark] Hatfield used to brag—Hatfield was the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. It was a matter of great pride to Hatfield that he never spent more than Reagan asked. He just spent it on different things. Reagan asked so much for defense that Hatfield could fund everything else in Appropriations and have a total budget authority that was less than Reagan. They would shift money around every year. I had to research this when I was doing some stuff on the Iraq War, but one of the [Caspar] Weinberger budgets one of those years is one of the highest in terms of real dollars. So when you think of Vietnam, Weinberger and now Iraq, so—no, the defense was big. There was a pretty broad group of moderate This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 15

Republicans who were willing to make cuts from defense. You had in the Republican party you had votes…. There was one set of [Senate Republican leadership] elections—I can get you the dates—but Dole and [Alan] Simpson won, but [John] Chafee lost. And Domenici lost to [Don] Nickles in lower elections. You could start to see the young people coming up. And Chafee lost to [Thad] Cochran, who you wouldn't really think of as a conservative, but Cochran was being backed by the conservatives. I think that was a particularly painful thing for Dole, and I think Dole may have gone along with it. I don't know that I've ever fully asked or got a straight answer from him on that, but Chafee lost narrowly and I'm not sure that Dole helped him.

Williams: You say lost. You're saying lost a chairmanship or lost—

Rogers: No, no, lost a caucus position. I can find it for you, but there was in this period of time, there was a set of elections in the Republican structure where—do you want me to go look for it or—

Williams: No, that’s O.K. We can add it later.

Rogers: All right. It's in this eighties period, but I know Chafee lost and he'd been a longtime supporter of Dole's on the Finance Committee and so forth.

Williams: Talk about some of the other players.

Rogers: Chafee backed Dole for Leader, and he'd gone to law school with [Ted] Stevens, but he backed Dole.

Williams: That was quite an election.

Rogers: That was a fascinating election. I was very proud of my…. The press was off on theories about [Fred] McClure, and, I don’t know about Domenici…. There was a This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 16 bunch of people. I remember people thinking McClure was going to win and get past this and all that.

Williams: Stevens, McClure.

Rogers: Right. And I always bet on Stevens versus Dole. We did a piece on that that held up quite well, and he only lost by one vote. That was allegedly the whole [Jesse] Helms thing, where Helms delivered for Dole in return for [Bob] Packwood doing something on cigarette taxes.

Williams: I don't think anyone has told me that.

Rogers: One of the subplots… If Dole runs for Leader, he vacates the chairmanship, so Packwood gets to be chairman, right? So there's always that kind of element. So behind Dole were a set of pretty smart, savvy Finance Committee people. In fairness to Chafee, while I think Stevens was disappointed Chafee didn't support him, Chafee's self-interest rose more with the Finance Chairman Dole succeeding. Packwood, then, was going to be in line to be Finance chairman, and I think that Stevens had counted on Helms helping him. In the end, the perception is that Helms voted with Dole. The rumor, the story was always that Packwood had made a deal with Helms that he would help protect tobacco and cigarette taxes in return for Helms putting Dole over the top. Stevens felt very betrayed at the end, and I think that was where he felt the betrayal the most.

Williams: And how do you think Stevens' and Dole's relationship suffered and for how long?

Rogers: I don't really know fully. I've known both of them pretty well over the years. Stevens had been the Whip. You have to remember he was the Whip. He was next in line, and basically, Dole was coming in and taking it away from him. Dole was more the outside player, you could argue. He had been vice presidential candidate; I'm not quite sure how many times he ran for president. He ran in '80, some; he ran in ‘88 and he ran again, obviously, in '96. Stevens was more the institutional guy, and it is a kind of This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 17 institution job, and here comes this guy who everyone said just wanted to be Majority Leader so he could run for president again. I think that Stevens resented some of that, and I'm sure there was—I don't know, truthfully, their whole relationship. Stevens is not someone who forgets, but I’ve always found him to be…. I always thought Stevens was a more decent person than people gave him credit, and that was one reason I focused on him as the real guy who could be a threat to Dole getting it. The popular theory was the McClures of the world, or someone, would take away the conservatives, and those people disappeared very quickly in that race. It was really two pros. That really was a race between two complete pros, and that's why it had to be close in the end because they were such good pros.

Williams: In that era, who are some of the other pros?

Rogers: In the Senate?

Williams: Yes.

Rogers: Well, Domenici was a force. Lugar was a force. Packwood was a force before he turned out to be, obviously, flawed, but he was definitely a force. It's hard to remember now, but I think there was one point where the conservatives wanted [Richard G.] Lugar to oust Packwood, because Packwood was considered too liberal or something. [Barack] Obama once said to me when he first came, he said that the Senate was like the Peloponnesian Wars, it reminded him, and there's a certain element of that that goes on all the time. Overall, Hatfield was a tremendously talented Appropriations chairman. I always had a weak spot for Chafee. I thought he worked hard and he was a professional. Simpson and [John] Danforth were powers. They could be nastier than people like to think they were. On the Democratic side, Kennedy was coming back into himself, and he's just a tremendous legislator.

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 18

Williams: Social Security, the Greenspan Commission and all, should that be looked upon as just a very temporary correction, or does it really have legs and was a major shift? How do you evaluate that?

Rogers: Shift in terms of policy?

Williams: Yes.

Rogers: I'm probably not as good on that as I ought to be. I remember covering some of it, but other people covered it more for the Globe. I think that while there was a sort of relief that they had figured something out, I think they increased the payroll tax quite a bit and they moved the retirement age up some. I think that a lot of people felt that was setting a pattern that was going to be more trouble down the road. But to be honest, the economic reporter at the Globe, I remember, covered it more than I did, so I watched it because O'Neill was involved and Dole was involved. But it was one of those things where I'm not as good a source for you.

Williams: So what more is there to say about budget, appropriations and the second Reagan term?

Rogers: Well, a lot of the second Reagan term for me was the Iran Contra. See, I went off onto that. I had done the story on the mining of the harbors, and so I was very involved in Central America coverage. So the truth is, I sort of went off in '86, '87 into that world. I was covering the things that I was interested in--at that point were more like the emerging funding for the Afghan war, and I was breaking stories on that and that kind of stuff. I wasn't really trying to do the sort of big macro picture stuff as much.

Williams: Well, since we're taking a chronological approach to things again, how did you come by the bombing of the harbors story?

Rogers: Mining of the harbors?

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 19

Williams: Yes.

Rogers: Well, I can't tell you all of it, but the trigger point was that [Barry] Goldwater said something on the floor one night and I heard him. It used to be, see, the Senate wasn't televised, and I don't know when it started to be televised. But in any case, I was in the room and used to go in more in the room and watch. I was there, and someone handed something to Goldwater and he read some of it out loud. I realized the significance of it and I chased it. I had my own sources in the intelligence community, and I worked it very hard beginning that night for about twenty-four hours. We had a situation, I think it was like a Wednesday night, and if I was going to write, I had to write by Thursday night because we didn't have a paper Saturday and Sunday. So I wrote, as best I could, a story. I worked at that and, basically, that was the story. Goldwater didn't say everything explicit. He said something that I heard like, "We're more involved than we know," or something, and it was sort of generic like that. Then the next day they had taken it out of the Record. So I knew what I’d heard and I knew what was in the Record, and so I chased it.

Williams: Talk about that whole period and the outcomes.

Rogers: The truth is, that had a huge impact, because what happened was our story ran on a Friday, and the Times sort of did a back-of-the-hand thing Saturday or something. Then they did a really big piece, as only they could do, on Sunday. Then the whole world knew. Journal had put it on like page A17 or something. When I retired, when they bought me out, they did the mock front page and they put it on page one; that was my agreement with them. It got a lot of attention. In fairness, I never was that upset. I was just glad it was right, glad it got in the paper. Do you know what I mean? Looking back, it certainly should have been more in the front of the paper, and they were embarrassed they didn't do it. I don't know whether you know this story. The editorial page wrote an editorial later attacking the House committee for leaking it to the Washington Post, and then they had to write a correction that it had actually broken in their own newspaper. We had this This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 20 division between the news and the editorial page, and this was one reason they all hated me at the editorial page for several years. But anyway, Kennedy knew me from the Globe, and he seized on it in the [Democratic] Caucus and offered this motion to condemn the mining of the harbors. It got a big vote, obviously, and the House then voted on it. The real significance of the mining story was it fractured the bipartisan support in the Senate. [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan was embarrassed. [Daniel K.] Inouye, who had supported it, was no longer going to support the Contra money, and so that's when they cut off the Contra money. The House had previously voted, but they could never get the Senate. In the '84 defense bill it didn't get funded, so that ushered in Iran Contra. That's the significance of that.

Williams: So the arms contract, that came up before or after the mining?

Rogers: We were ostensibly trying to help El Salvador by using the Contras to cut off arms shipments into El Salvador. Obviously, we were using the Contras to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, as it turned out. Then when we were mining the harbors, it was obvious what we were doing, so that's what set that off. Then once the funding was cut off, [Oliver] North had to go find alternative money, and that all followed from that. Then they went to the Saudis, and then they went to the Iran Contra.

Williams: And did you cover that aspect of the story?

Rogers: Yes. That's what I'm trying to say. When you started to ask me about the budget period and the sort of '86, '87, '88 period, I am not as good because I was focused on Iran Contra, the Afghanistan operation, and then in '88, they had me do the presidential campaign.

Williams: I've asked a number of Dole's colleagues about Iran Contra. And in particular, I'm curious about Bush's knowledge and so forth, and I always get steered away. They don't want to deal with it or express any sense of culpability and so forth and so on.

Rogers: Right. This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 21

Williams: Now, you covered it very closely. Can you talk about that at all?

Rogers: You mean how much the vice president would have known?

Williams: Yes.

Rogers: Well, there was a lot of attention on his dealings with Felix Rodriguez, and then there are people feel that Felix Rodriguez was seeing Bush at different points. People feel Bush should have been more aware of what Felix Rodriguez was doing. I'd really prefer to go over things, but that was the big point. I remember I did some stories. I got some documents declassified regarding Felix Rodriguez and his conversations with George Bush, like he visited the White House and this kind of stuff. So people kept saying, "How could Bush not know what Felix Rodriguez was up to?" But Felix Rodriguez would always say, "I didn't tell him," and that kind of stuff.

Williams: I've read the diary entries of Reagan's during that period, and of course he at least feigns [unclear].

Rogers: Oh, you mean whether Reagan would have told Bush stuff?

Williams: Right, or even what about your assessment of Reagan's knowledge of what was going on? Or do you believe, as the diaries tend to indicate, that he just really didn't know until people started coming to him as a result of it becoming known?

Rogers: The Bush part with Rodriguez I pursued more than what Reagan knew. I didn't really care, to be honest, and no one was going to impeach him. As far as I was concerned, it went all the way up and they all knew something. He certainly knew about the Iran weapons sales, and that itself, some people would say, is as big a problem as giving the money to the Contras. Whether he fully knew the profits were going to the Contras, I don't know whether they could have kept that from him.

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 22

Williams: Talk about the '88 campaign, then.

Rogers: I did some with Dole. I know they sent me out. The truth is, I finished '87 and they had me do [Albert] Gore [Jr.]. I did more of Gore, and so I did get thrown out with Dole some, but then he lost. So I don't think I'm a great source for that period of time.

Williams: What about in general, that campaign, and how did you see it?

Rogers: I worked with a fellow, David Shriven [phonetic], and we were pretty much the two leg guys. I did primarily [Michael] Dukakis. [Al] Hunt was running the Bureau then, and he is a very good political mind and he's very much a [George S.] Patton. “You will do this; you will do that,” and that's what you did. And when you got the assignment, then you would try to do it as imaginatively as you could. But he was sort of tactically running things. It's like anything with campaigns. This is a funny story where—this won't really help you with Dole, but remember in '84, the big issue was picking [Geraldine] Ferraro? That became the issue. So then in '88, there was, like, two big issues. One was character. Remember we went through Gary Hart and all that, so we had to really do character. So the Journal set out to define the character of each candidate as only we could in four takes or five takes, like 1200 words. So yours truly was assigned to get Al Gore, and he used to complain, "Why did I get you?" I did a long piece on him, and I looked back at his military record and all this kind of stuff. Then I went through Gore and I did a lot on the South and Mississippi. But then when it became clear it was Dukakis, then the issue became--I basically did Gore up to New York, and then everything fell apart and that was over with. I had Congress stuff I'd have to go back to. So then, when Dukakis was—the big issue was--I remember Hunt said, "I want to be able to do a story that the day he picks his vice president, we know who it is and all the thought process that led to it." Do you know what I mean?

Williams: Right.

Rogers: So I said, "This is an insane asylum." So he got all upset with me. Shriven and I did it, and I used to call it Operation Village Seal. It was an operation I was with in This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 23

Vietnam where we did a village seal. It was a terrible operation. It was just a totally fucked-up operation. This is the joke Shriven and I had. Sometimes we referred to Operation Village Seal. But in terms of Dole, he won Iowa; he lost New Hampshire, and then he lost South Carolina, right? It fell apart pretty quickly for him.

Williams: But I heard many people say that that was really his year, both in terms of his career, his energy, his fire in the belly and so forth, and that '96 was just sort of an afterthought.

Rogers: I think that's probably right. I don't know that I would disagree with that. I think that, again, some could argue that 2000 was [John] McCain's year. McCain isn't quite the same candidate as he was in 2000, and I think the problem with Dole was he was up against the sitting vice president and he was probably too identified with some of the old-school deficit and stuff. That hurt him. If he saw me on the stump, he was always very cheerful and friendly. I do think there was this thing I say about him where, if everyone in Washington got up and said, “We love you, Bob,” he would be one person. Then when things turn against him and he gets angry, he's another person." I remember one day, I think maybe he had won in Iowa and we were up in New Hampshire or something. Hunt said, "Go on up,” and do some piece on him. See, that's it. I'm really not a good—like Kit [Seeyle] was with him—she was with him in '96. Did she go with him in '88? Okay. She was with him. I was sort of in and out. But he was like Reagan that day. He was funny, he was witty. People were appealing. He was just generous and clever, and he could be that. I did go back out to Kansas and do a piece on him. It must have been before that. That's when we went out and we went in the backyard. It's interesting. I said to you before when we were talking—it is somewhat relevant. I won't go off too long, but in '85, ten years after the choppers went off the roof, the Journal said, "Why don't you go pick two guys who were in public life who were in the war and write about them." So it's like classic journalism, pick a Republican; pick a Democrat. So I picked Bob Kerrey, who was then governor of Nebraska, and John McCain, who was like a second-term congressman. But to get them to talk, I had to talk. This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 24

So I flew out to see Bob Kerrey. We spent a fairly painful, nice weekend together. I flew out and saw John McCain. To get him to talk, we'd have to do the same thing, because for him to talk, I'd have to tell him what it had been like for me. That was the deal. That's what they wanted. It wasn't quid pro quo, but it was sort of like you couldn't ask someone to talk about something painful without being willing to talk about something painful. I think not that period, but subsequently, I went out and saw Dole, but to get him to talk about that, he didn't want to talk about it. It's changed very much, because when he ran in '96, that's all they talked about. When McCain ran in 2000, he would talk about it more than he talks about it now. But they didn't want to talk then. And my relationship with McCain and Kerrey goes back to that. I remember with Dole, I wanted not to be too prying, but he did open up some. We went in the backyard and he showed me the thing. You could sort of see the miserableness of it coming back and trying to exorcise everything in the—but the point is, in the '80 campaign I'm going to bet he didn't talk that much about it, whereas in the '96, he did. I think it's something these people go through as the question of how much they can open up and show themselves. Do you know? Whereas Bush was talking about being the navy flyer and all this, and “I am that man,” I don't know that Dole did talk as much about that then. I think that Dole got pinned down as—remember that was the line about, “You're lying about my record," and that kind of stuff. I think that that was a problem for him.

Williams: Did Dole strike you as different in Lawrence, Kansas, than on the floor of the Senate?

Rogers: Not really. He's always been, I think, respectful, but a little guarded with me. Like, with McCain, there was one point with McCain in South Carolina in 2000, one of my favorite points was, he had won New Hampshire, and then all hell broke loose in South Carolina. We were on the bus and it really was just a few people, but it was really kind of magical in a certain way. Later it got to be this lot of crap and all that, but anyway, at that point it wasn't. He's getting off the bus. They weren't prepared to deal with the crowds. Bush was attacking, attacking, and McCain's getting off the bus. We were alone on the bus for a minute before he gets off, and he turns to me. He says, This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 25

"David, we've unleashed the dogs of war." Okay? Now, Bob Dole's never really been that. He's never said that kind of thing to me. Do you know what I mean? We have a nice relationship, but he's always had a little more reserve with me, I think.

Williams: I'm curious about how you go about your craft. When Hunt sent you up to New Hampshire, to sort of pop in and do a story, do you come with a) an assignment or b) something you're already looking for when you get there, or do you just sort of sounding board pick up osmosis and develop the story on site?

Rogers: It’s a little bit of all that. The general structure was we have what we would call at that time a back-pager, which was generally a thousand words, or a little more feature on the back page of the front section. So you always went up with the target of seeing if you could come up with a back-pager. I'm not quite sure what I came out of that assignment. You were asking me about '88, and I remember being thrown out with Dole some. But the truth is, I never did much with the vice president that year. I think other people were, like Jerry Sive [phonetic]. I went to the conventions and so forth. But no, you would go, and I think Hunt felt, “Look, you know him. Go up, see what he's doing.” It was sort of that thing. “See what you come up with as an idea,” and generally I could. Sometimes Al would have specific—“He's going this way, Bush is going that way. I want you to ask him about this, but try to get some time and ask him this.” But it wasn't always that planned. Later in '88 they threw me in to [Dan] Quayle, but that was because of the whole Vietnam thing. Remember, Bush picked Quayle, and Quayle hadn't been in Vietnam. That became a huge issue at the New Orleans convention. The truth is, there weren't many people in public life who had been in Vietnam. There weren't many journalists who had been in Vietnam. So, “Oh, we've got a reporter who was in Vietnam. Here, you can write this story about how he didn't go to Vietnam.”

Williams: Was that selection a big surprise to you?

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 26

Rogers: Quayle? I didn't know enough to know. Did people talk about Dole as a potential? I don't think they did. By that point there, I don't think anyone talked about Dole being Bush's vice president. I think there was someone else in play that other people thought of, but the truth was, I wasn't focused on it.

Williams: You've made reference, obviously, to your own Vietnam War experience and whatnot, but when you were talking about that bond between you and Dole, that was before we started the tapes. Cover that a little bit more, please.

Rogers: Well, I was a medic in Vietnam. The whole story is I was a conscientious objector. But there was a certain program; it was called 1-A-O. We went to Texas and we were trained in basic training with our rifles, and then we were trained across the base as combat medics. So, not surprisingly, I ended up in Vietnam as an infantry medic. And I was wounded, not badly, not to the level of Dole, of course. I was there '69, part of '70. I came home, and so all I was trying to say is that when I first met Dole in '79 or that period of time, the war was still very fresh. So the fact to meet him and to know his own history, it was interesting to me. I think there was probably a period of time, maybe running up to going to Lawrence, where he thought I wanted to talk about it more than he just wanted to talk about it. Do you know what I mean? That it was probably more on my mind than he was willing to admit it was on his. But clearly there was something. It's one of the reasons Chafee made such an impact on me. Chafee had been in World War II and Korea, and I had basically fought in a war where a lot of people of sort of Chafee's class hadn't fought. That's not true with everyone, but it was basically true. And so, to me, Chafee meant a lot to me, and Chafee and I got along and that kind of stuff.

Williams: So during the first Bush administration, were you back following the tax issues and whatnot?

Rogers: There were others beginning to do more of the budget stuff. I was doing more of Appropriations. There was one point there, I think I went off for part of a year doing This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 27 an investigative piece regarding Israel and arms deals. I know there was sort of a tense period with the Journal, and I—here, you want me to—

[telephone interruption]

Rogers: The Democrats were in charge, a new administration. It was the [John] Tower stuff. That was tense. Dole also had to carry the water for…, you know, there was this sort of nasty fight over the Chinese immigrants, and there were a couple things there where he had to sort of carry the ball for Bush. There was a period there where I went off to do this investigative piece on Israel with a guy downtown. To be honest, it used to be Congress was more cyclical, and you used to be able to sort of go off the Hill for like three or four months and do some investigative work, and then come back and catch up. It's become more less that, and it was harder to separate yourself, which was probably a problem for me eventually with the Journal because I never left the Hill. So they didn't know who I was after a while. In '90 I went to Afghanistan for a while, and that was partially because someone else wanted me to work for them, and then I decided I'd stay with the Journal, and then one of the deals was I can have the trip overseas, so I went to Afghanistan. Lott had come over to the Senate in '88, so you're starting to see in that period of time, Bush—and then you had the Gulf War, of course. Bush had his tensions with the right, too, because of the economy and the budget stuff and Darman. But you started to see more and more manifestations of the sort of Gingrich group in the House, and they were openly scornful of Dole.

Williams: Was Bush's mistake saying he wasn’t going to raise taxes more than the fact that circumstances really commanded that they raise taxes, or what do you think?

Rogers: Well, clearly, by saying he wasn't going to raise taxes, helped himself get elected, and then he raised taxes. I think he just saw a set of people emerging in the House who weren't willing to tolerate that approach. They wanted to cut spending more. What they really wanted to do was to not raise taxes.

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 28

Williams: But in your judgment, was it really necessary that taxes be raised at that point?

Rogers: Well, considering the fact that he raised taxes then and Clinton raised taxes again in '93 and '94, and that was only when we got to somewhere approaching a balance, I guess there was an argument for doing—it's funny; sometimes I remember the eighties better than some of this period, so I'm sorry. We can do this again; I can go over my stuff, but my memory is that the big tradeoff was that Darman wanted to get in place, in return for the taxes, some fixed agreement about spending. That's the pay-go agreements. There were agreements about caps on appropriations, and they did respect some of those, and those things became real. I think that Byrd got some pretty generous caps, people argued, but the reality is, it set in place some structure that then, when Clinton came in, he did more of that. I think pay-go goes back to that deal, not to Clinton. Clinton kept pay-go, or [Robert] Rubin kept pay-go.

Williams: When was pay-go let go?

Rogers: Well, it's like all these things. Once it becomes impossible to do, then they don't do it. I think that in the Clinton years you had an environment in which you had a conservative Republican House and eventually a Senate. I guess at the same time you had the Senate because they won both in '94. You had that pressure and you had an improved economy with improved revenues, so they were able to make some logical decisions that would work, but the reality was…. They did Freedom to Farm and then prices went to hell, and then they were doing disaster payments every year. Freedom to Farm cost a fortune in the end. And now they're in a situation where they seem to be—I did a piece this week. They're doing pay- go with the farm bill this year, and they're really only talking about ten billion in revenue over ten years and they can't seem to work it out. [George W.] Bush came in with a surplus and he decided to spend the surplus on the tax cuts. Then everything disappeared and then he had the war.

Williams: You mentioned the farm issues. What's your take on Dole and farm policy?

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 29

Rogers: Well, he was a huge player. He and [Thomas S.] Foley would sometimes write the bill. Even when Helms was chairman, Dole would go back and work it. Dole wasn't there for Freedom to Farm, really. That's really more Pat Roberts' creation, which, frankly, was driven by some Kansas wheat interests because some Kansas wheat interests had some extra loans due and the whole system of Freedom to Farm with the extra direct payments gave them some cash when they needed it. But Freedom to Farm has not worked, and it has created the system of direct payments that is now a mockery, because we're paying five billion a year in cash to these people when they're getting good prices. You know what I mean? The Wall Street Journal likes to editorialize about loan price supports. Well, these loan price supports are so out of date now, given current prices. The cost of the farm bill in terms of commodities is the cash payments, which go back to Freedom to Farm, which was a Republican creation in which the administration, even though it wants to have reform, supports because it suits their trade agenda. Anyway, but I saw Dole recently and I said something about the farm bill. He was laughing about the direct payments. So, Dole's one of those guys who—he did the farm bill because it was his job, but I think at times he thought some of it was crazy, the subsidies and so forth. But he was a huge influence, and then, of course, he did a lot of the food stamps. He was heart and soul part of that whole coalition that [George] McGovern and he helped to build for the farm bill. The farm bill now, two-thirds of the farm bill is nutrition. I did a story this week, but the nutrition element is maybe like 215 billion out of a 300-billion-dollar bill.

[telephone interruption]

Rogers: I imagine you've talked to some other people. I didn’t do the farm bills. I've gotten more interested in the farm policy, probably, since he left, but I know I watched it and there was no question, particularly during the Helms…. Helms basically became chairman of Agriculture and he cared about North Carolina and tobacco. He didn't know about wheat and all that kind of stuff, and Dole would always step in there. It's too bad he's so sick and ill, but Foley would be a great person for you to talk to. He's in terribly bad health now, but he'd be a tremendous person to talk to. This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 30

Williams: Did you get the impression that Dole was doing the bidding of ADM and various other farm interests, or was his populism coming to the fore?

Rogers: I don't know, because one of the things that you come across with particularly the people that do the—I mean, the basic idea of the government involvement is that farming is sort of an unpredictable occupation and you should logically have a safety net. Then you get into that safety net and you get into all these arcane things. He could well have been. I don't know. It's not like I covered him at length in the 1990 farm bill. I knew it was happening. I was watching it, but I was worrying about other things.

Williams: You mentioned the Tower nomination. Anything to say about that?

Rogers: Well, that was a bitter thing and he was bitter.

Williams: He being—

Rogers: Dole. I think he was. It was a particularly tough fight. I think probably it was a lesson in… You know, [George] Mitchell was tough, and that was part of it. And then part of it, too, was there was this whole drinking suggestion with Tower and all this kind of stuff. And Sam Nunn was such a force in the Tower case. I knew him well, and I think Nunn was genuinely disturbed. Then what happened with Tower, I became convinced, was that the right wing, and particularly my newspaper, the editorial page, really didn't care about Tower in the end. They wanted to destroy Nunn. And so they went after Nunn with a vengeance, and that was part of the politics of that. In other words, Tower was wounded and Nunn was the one who had hurt him. The theory was, if you could weaken Nunn, you would weaken someone who protected the Democrats in the South. Things were shifting, obviously. By that point, Lott had won [John] Stennis' seat, so you were closing in on a situation where there weren't going to be any Democrats left in the South soon. But anyway, there was always Sam Nunn out there and David Boren and those kind of people who, if you were going to mount a candidacy in someplace, This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 31 you'd have Sam Nunn come in and help you. Well, if you could destroy Sam Nunn, you would destroy that person. I was convinced they were trying to do that, because they dug up something about some drunken driving thing involving Nunn when he was a teenager and they ran it at length in the Wall Street Journal.

Williams: Did you have any connection with the [U.S.] Supreme Court nominations during the period?

Rogers: Was that when we had the famous—

Williams: [Robert] Bork.

Rogers: Yes. I didn't do as much then, no.

Williams: And what about [Clarence] Thomas in ‘91?

Rogers: Did some then. Was certainly conscious of it and so forth, but Danforth was the bigger Thomas person. I think Dole was being handed—but if you start to think of it in a broad sweep, like you said, '81 and '82 on the budget, and then you sort of—he was being handed an increasingly nasty set of choices. Do you know what I mean? And also seeing around him an increasingly nasty politics. You know, this is a man that everyone would- -what did he say? The Democrats had started a war or "the Democrat wars," or something like that, where he had to live down that for years, when he was Gerald Ford’s—and Washington then was changing. There was this increasing nastiness, and the Democrats were responding to the Republican attacks. I think there were people like Bill Cohen from Maine was clearly upset with Nunn's role in the Tower thing. He thought it was excessive, and this was a former colleague and so forth. And what are we doing here? We're not going to let him be Defense Secretary? Of course, that had an impact, because that's why [Richard] Cheney became Defense Secretary and that's why Gingrich became Whip. All these things were like chips. If you're sort of Senator Bob Dole and you’ve tried and you did everything and then you tried in '88—let's say we said '88 was the best This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 32 year for him. And then what happens later? It's muckier. And it's not just, gee, the Democrats are doing things that are pretty nasty, they’re taking down John Tower. I'm not saying John Tower should have been the Defense Secretary, but there's no way not to look at it as sort of a nasty fight. So you could sort of see you're viewing life that way, and then you're seeing Bush, who just beat you now having to do his tax increases. Then you're seeing this constant barrage of people who are attacking you in the House. Bob Michel is on his last legs and Gingrich is coming on, and then Cheney leaves and you have all that.

Williams: So are you suggesting that the debate over Thomas' appointment was connected to the Tower nomination?

Rogers: No, but I think from the right's point of view, they really saw the Bork thing, that he was “Borked,” you know, that Kennedy…, and then Thomas followed, right? And it was a combination of events for people, this sort of personal politic. I would have to give it more thought, but if you say that Tower lost because he drank and then Bork lost because of some ideological thing, and then Thomas, you had the whole thing about the sexual harassment stuff, it wasn't really what you thought you'd come to talk about.

Williams: What motivated your shift from the Boston Globe to Wall Street Journal?

Rogers: Well, the Post had come to me, and Marty Nolan had talked me out of that. Then when the Journal came to me, the Times had not come, and so I began to have a little bit of concern that maybe I was boxing myself in a little bit, and I thought it might be a good change. Hunt was keen on me and I was nervous about it, but it was sort of like time to try a national paper, sort of your career. Hunt was really the person who wanted me to—he'd seen me covering Congress and he wanted me to come, because he had become Bureau chief and he was leaving Congress himself. So he wanted to put someone in, and that was part of it. Jim Sterva [phonetic] was an influence. When I was in Vietnam and we had been in some bad fighting and I had gotten hit, and Sterva came out. Sterva worked for the New York Times then. He had come out and met me and later looked me up. He was a This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 33 sort of big force for me. He had recently come to the Journal, so they had him call me, and that was probably a factor. It was a factor, for sure. That was why. The truth was, I grew up in New Jersey and I probably always wanted to work for the Times, and the Times showed some interest after I had gone to the Journal, but by that point I felt loyal to the Journal. I was supposed to go the Times years later, but my son had a brain tumor and so I couldn't leave because of health insurance. It got worse that week, so that's the story of my career choices. The Times has shown some interest since, recently, but they've got their own financial problems and I can't count on it ever happening anymore. The Journal, in some ways, was a good experience; in other ways it was torture. It's over with now, but it was basically, you're a young reporter, the Post has come to you. You turned it down, how many are you going to keep turning down, and why don't you give it a try? Are you going to never grow up? With the Globe, you didn't really know how long you could stay in Washington, and I wasn't sure I wanted to go back to Boston. So it was a question.

Williams: The editorial policy of the Journal didn't cause you not to take the job?

Rogers: The truth is, I didn't think about it. We had a pretty adversarial relationship later. Like I say, there was a—but I didn't think about it. People tease me, but the truth is, I didn't think about it. The truth was, I thought it was time for a change, try something different. The worst that happens, you go back to the Globe. I knew the Globe would take me back. I wasn't leaving on bad terms. They understood. It was like they brought down this reporter and people wanted him. They weren't happy I was leaving, but it was a very pleasant, very supportive departure. In fact, we had many conversations later about me coming back, and it didn't work out. In the end, they hired Truman [phonetic] to be bureau chief, who was my colleague at the Journal, instead of me, and I don't know, I don’t want to belabor that. But that's all. The editorial page. I came in '83. I broke the mining of the harbors story in early '84. They made this goof on the editorial page. [Edward] Boland, who was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, wrote this very witty letter to them. I know who wrote it. There were these two clever guys; one worked for Tip O'Neill and one worked This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 34 for Boland. There was this beautifully scripted, short letter that goosed the editorial page because they were attacking Boland all the time, and this was a piece of that. They were going to attack Boland for leaking about the mining. He had nothing to do with it, and he had found out about it in January and he hadn't said a word. So he laid all this out. And then he had this thing, "Well, it's inexcusable for editorial writers. You don't have delays to make these errors, and perhaps someday you will rise to the level of your reporting staff." Playing on all the aggravations in the paper. Well, of course the editorial page had to print this, but hated me. Then later there was something on Iran Contra. It was the GAO [Government Accounting Office] report where some group may have planted an Op-Ed in the Journal for the Contras. I had to call the editorial editor on this one weekend, and he was furious with me because he made some remark about how we're not going to respond to every burp from GAO. So I printed it, and he was upset, and things like that. The Tower thing, Tico [phonetic] was the columnist then. He and I got along a little later, but it really took the McCain campaign for us to talk to one another. But I would sometimes insert in the copy, I would say in my stories that Nunn was now the target of editorialists who wanted to weaken him or something like that. And they'd notice this.

Williams: Did you see the Journal drifting rightward over the period of time you worked there, or was it pretty consistent editorially?

Rogers: Oh, I think they were pretty consistent right wing. What happens more if you cover Congress is that as the Gingriches took power more, they were in daily conversation with the editorial page. There was a famous incident where something happened, and Gingrich turned to an aide in front of other reporters and said, "Get me John Fung [phonetic]." I think Barclay [phonetic] at times and Gingrich had arguments, but you really didn't know sometimes when you worked for the paper who was calling the shots, whether they were calling in the plays to Gingrich or whether Gingrich was doing something and then they were supporting him. I don't want to make too much of it, but I wasn't considered one of their favorites.

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 35

Williams: Let's look at, as I described it earlier, almost the last quarter of the twentieth century, and since we're on the press right now, how did you see the press changed from 1980 to '96 and beyond?

Rogers: Well, it changed tremendously in terms of, particularly, congressional coverage. When I first came, the Senate wasn't covered by television. So you had to go into the room, and they also had to come to the floor more to hear one another and to see one another. There may have been an audio where they could have heard, but the point was, people did come to the floor more to listen to one another and to watch one another and exchange. When television came, that changed. People could watch from their offices. I've always thought it was sort of amazing if you were ever in the Senate Gallery where people are literally sitting outside watching on television what's happening inside. Do you know what I mean? And it's like here you are covering this incredible democracy, and they're debating on the floor and you're not going in to watch; you're watching it on television feet away. I know why that happens, but you miss something. There's no question. It's not just the Goldwaters saying what they say about the mining of the harbors; it's how they interact. They talk to one another. You see people go over and talk to one another. There used to be much more of a self-consciousness of reporters doing that, and I think that's missing. Then as television has taken over the Senate, the television correspondents have left, to a certain degree. I mean the network television—when I first came, people really did wonder what Roger Mudd or Phil Jones were going to say, and people would pay attention to the evening news. It's been a long time since you've watched the evening news to find out what's happening in Congress if you're a congressional reporter. You may watch C-SPAN or CNN a little bit, but the truth is, you're pretty current most of the time, or you're as current as they are. You may all be missing it. That's changed. There used to be more of a hierarchy, too. I remember when I first came, like I told you, Baker's people were always kind of nice to me. So even though I was from the Globe, they would include me in little groups they had with the national reporters. And it was really a hierarchy. Brit Hume used to give me a hard time for coming. He was there from ABC, but he would say, "Why are you here? You're a regional reporter." Anyway, This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 36 we got to know one another better. I don't want to make too much of that, but that was sort of a mindset. That would never happen today. The big thing, too, it's really late in Dole's career, but you have the growth of all these publications that cover Congress. Congress Daily. You've got Roll Call, The Hill, now Politico to a certain degree, and Congress talks more to itself with these people. I told you I covered Appropriations for years and I was well known for covering Appropriations, but there's no question that at the time Appropriations would almost talk to itself through Congress Daily. Because you could put something in Congress Daily that would come out at three o'clock and everyone would see it, and then you'd get a reaction by six o'clock when people voted or something. That's changed. Ironically, that's a set of publications—someone would have to do a larger study—a set of publications that's financed by, in some ways, by special interests, because a lot of the advertising is issue advocacy advertising. Do you know what I mean? So people are competing from Northrop and Boeing to buy ads to compete over the tanker debate that might come up on the supplemental, and that's what's happened in journalism. So there's a lot more journalists covering the Hill. The Tuesday lunches are much more—that hall is packed with people. It's much more crowded.

Williams: Is there still the same demand for Capitol Hill information? It's my impression that the percentage of the evening news in the Roger Mudd days had a lot of stories emanating from or about Capitol Hill. Now perhaps less so or—

Rogers: It's like sort of an informal bargain where the networks ignore Congress. The Times still covers Congress and the Post does, but not that well, and the Wall Street Journal. I wrote a lot, but they’re doing less, obviously, and the L.A. Times. But it's almost like we’ll agree, we're not going to cover it as much, and Congress lives with that insult because it's got all these other people covering it and they can talk to itself. But in some ways, it shrinks in its standing. Now, we'll have a new administration and a new Congress next year, and who knows? Maybe all hell will break loose up there. But I think, in general, the drift has been away from a sort of broader view of things to this sort of interlocking level, another level of stuff. This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 37

Williams: And what about Dole and his generation, and the changes that occurred over that period of time in the Senate? I think we've already covered it to some degree, but maybe sort of in summing up how politics, the trend—

Rogers: Well, he certainly had his feet planted firmly in the earlier period. He actually was, when you think about it, a pretty adept person in the televised Senate. Do you know what I mean? Harry Reid, you could argue, does not do well in a televised Senate. Harry Reid is a very shrewd, capable person at making deals, and now he's thrust into this situation where Bush doesn't want to deal and he's on television. Do you know what I mean? Dole could be witty and sardonic. There were times he probably didn't look good on television, but on the whole, he could handle himself pretty well on television, and I think he was pretty successful at making that transition. And in fact, that may have been the smart thing for the Republicans to have picked him over Stevens. I don't know how Stevens would have done as well on television. I think Dole is definitely a substance person. This was a man who genuinely knew foreign policy and knew tax policy and cared about some real programs, and I think was a skilled legislator. There was a civil rights theme in his being that probably comes out of his early years as a Republican.

Williams: Do you think twenty, thirty years from now people will still be thinking about Dole and, if so, in what way?

Rogers: I think a lot of people know about him running for president, but I think his real legacy is in Congress. He was a very, very capable senator, and he's someone who could make bargains and he was good. But I think that's where his legacy is. I don't think it's really in the presidential campaigns. In some ways, the presidential campaigns, you could argue, became a distraction from his—when you think of Kennedy, for example, Kennedy ran for president once, really, and stopped. He didn't really try again. Dole kept trying. I hadn't thought of this until now, but I guess I can make an argument that, to some degree, Dole might have surrendered some opportunities to be a legislator in order to run for president. Kennedy is a pretty awesome legislator on a whole set of issues, and it would have been interesting to see Dole when he'd deal with immigration. In the This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 38

Senate there are a lot of people who get a lot of committee assignments and then act too busy to do them. [Patrick] Leahy, for example, has an incredible number of responsibilities between Appropriations and Judiciary and so forth, and then he’ll always be looking like--and Agriculture, and he'll always be, like, flustered, like he can't do them all instead of giving up some of them. I think that Kennedy has, for a man of his—he's really kept going. And I think that Dole is of a par with that, but Dole kept looking for the White House.

Williams: Dole, as a presidential candidate, is fairly flawed, I imagine you would say. Can you imagine what a Dole administration would be like?

Rogers: Not really. Like I said at the beginning, I don't really have a great appreciation for Dole as a presidential candidate. I was in and out a little bit, but the man I know is the man I saw in the hall or on the floor or in the markups. Certainly, what I hear about him as a presidential candidate, he was very skilled, and the world I saw wasn't that world. He had run into trouble.

Williams: But leapfrogging into the White House where he could then regenerate some of these skills as a legislator?

Rogers: Look, it's like McCain. But again, like people ask now, what are you going to get with McCain? Are you going to get the 2000 McCain, or are you going to get the 2008 McCain? I don't know. This is the sort of question you'd probably have to ask a Sheila Burke or someone who was closer to how he managed things. Do you know what I mean? I don’t know. People who run for the presidency from the Senate—they typically don't run from the House, but from Congress. [Mo] Udall ran from the House, but most people run from the Senate. They're always faulted for thinking too incrementally, too much the next vote, they don’t have the big vision. If you were to say, what would a Dole presidency be like, I could see where he would be trying to do the right thing, be decent, but I don't know whether he would have a larger vision. This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 39

This is what Obama feels. Obama felt he had a vision and he should get out and do it before the Senate took it away from him, maybe. You can sort of imagine McCain a little more in an executive role than Dole, but that's probably because in the back of your head you're still thinking of him as the navy officer or a pilot.

Williams: I'm going to pause here for just a second.

[pause]

Rogers: I guess the one thing about his legacy, the civil rights part is important, I do think. He stuck with that, and when I mentioned earlier about the African American Surgeon General, I think that might have bothered him a little bit. I think he had a sort of basic sense of fairness and about the civil rights. When you think about it, he had to deal with Reagan on South Africa, which was a nasty business. Who knows? Maybe he owed his majority leadership to Jesse Helms when he had to stand up for the Voting Rights Act? You know what I mean? Anyway, that's all I would say.

Williams: Another area that people don't talk very much about is Dole and foreign policy. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Rogers: I'm not as well thought out on that, to be honest. I suppose I should think about it. No, it's the sort of thing maybe you can come back and we can talk about it. He would generally take the administration posture, sort of anti-communist, that kind of posture. There are some things with Israel sometimes I think about, but the truth is, I don't really have a good grasp with him on foreign policy. My impression is he tended to be with the administration on most things, but I don't truly know how much thought he was giving it.

Williams: Thank you.

[End of interview] This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 40

Index

‘New England and Washington’ (newspaper column), 3

Baker, Howard, 2, 5, 8, 9, 35 Boland, Edward, 3 Boland, Edward, 33 Boren, David, 30 Bork, Robert, 31, 32 Boston Globe, 2, 33, 35 Burke, Sheila, 38 Bush, George H.W., 14, 24, 27, 32 and Iran Contra, 21 Bush, George W., 5, 28, 37 Byrd, Robert C., 9, 28

Carter, Jimmy, 3, 4, 5, 6 Chafee, John, 15, 16, 17, 26 Chapeton, Bud, 7 Cheney, Richard, 31, 32 Clinton, William J., 14, 28 CNN, 35 Cochran, Thad, 15 Coelho, Tony, 9 Cohen, William (Bill), 31 Congress Daily, 36 Conte, Silvio, 3 C-SPAN, 35

Danforth, John, 17, 31 Darman, Richard, 14, 27, 28 Dole, Robert J., 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 18, 23, 24, 37, 38, 39 1988 campaign, 22, 23 and farm policy, 29, 30 and foreign policy, 39 and George H.W. Bush, 27 and Ronald Reagan, 10 and Social Security, 9 and Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, 7, 10 and Ted Stevens, 16 chairman of Senate Finance Committee, 8, 10 Domenici, Pete, 11, 12, 15, 17 Dowdy, Wayne, 9 Dukakis, Michael, 22

This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 41

Ferraro, Geraldine, 22 Foley, Thomas S., 29 Freedom to Farm legislation, 28, 29

Giaimo, Robert, 3, 4 Gingrich, Newt, 14, 27, 31, 32, 34 Goldwater, Barry, 19 Gore, Albert Jr., 22 Gramm, Phil, 9, 11, 12, 13

Hart, Gary, 22 Hatfield, Mark, 14, 17 Helms, Jesse, 16, 29, 39 Heritage Foundation, 7 Hollings, Ernest F., 5, 12, 13 Hume Brit, 35 Hunt, Al, 22, 23, 25, 32

Inouye, Daniel K., 20 Iran Contra, 34

Jones, Phil, 35

Kemp, Jack, 13, 14 Kennedy, Edward M., 2, 3, 4, 8, 17, 20, 32, 37, 38 Kerrey, Bob, 23, 24

Latta, Delbert Leroy, 9 Leahy, Patrick, 38 Long, Russell, 8 Los Angeles Times, 36 Lott, Trent, 13, 27, 30 Lugar, Richard G., 17

McCain, John, 23, 24, 38, 39 McClure, Fred, 15 McGovern, George, 29 Michel, Robert, 14, 32 Mitchell, George, 30 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 20 Mudd, Roger, 35, 36 Muskie, Edmund, 3, 4, 5

New York Times, 19, 32, 33, 36 Nickles, Don, 15 Nolan, Marty, 2, 32 North, Oliver, 20 Nunn, Sam, 30, 31, 34 This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 42

O’Neill, Thomas P. (Tip), 2, 9, 18 Obama, Barack, 17, 39

Packwood, Bob, 16, 17 Patterson, Michelle, 2 Patton, George S., 22 Politico, 36

Quayle, Dan, 25, 26

Reagan, Ronald, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 21, 23, 39 Reid, Harry, 37 Roberts, Pat, 29 Rodriguez, Felix, 21 Rogers, David and the Massachussets congressional delegation, 2 experience in Vietnam, 26 on Alan Simpson, 17 on Barack Obama, 39 on Bob Kerrey, 24 on Bob Packwood, 17 on covering House and Senate Appropriations committees, 3 on Dan Rostenkowski, 10 on Edward M. Kennedy, 3, 17, 37 on Freedom to Farm, 29 on George H.W. Bush, 21 on Harry Reid, 37 on Howard Baker, 2 on Iran Contra, 18, 19, 20, 21 on Jack Kemp, 13 on Jimmy Carter, 5 on John Chafee, 17, 26 on John Danforth, 17 on John McCain, 23, 24, 39 on Mark Hatfield, 17 on Marty Nolan, 2 on Newt Gingrich, 34 on Patrick Leahy, 38 on Pete Domenici, 17 on Robert J. Dole, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 23, 24, 29, 30, 37, 38, 39 on Robert J. Dole's 1988 campaign, 22, 23 on Ronald Reagan, 21 on Sam Nunn, 30 on Ted Stevens, 16, 37 on the Carter administration efforts to balance the budget, 4 on the media, 35, 36 on the Washington Post, 36 This document is from the collections at the Dole Archives, University of Kansas. http://dolearchives.ku.edu Rogers 4-05-08—p. 43

on Trent Lott, 13 on U.S. Senate, 35 on Wall Street Journal, 30, 33, 34 Roll Call, 36 Rostenkowski, Dan, 7, 10 Rubin, Robert, 28 Rudman, Warren, 11, 12, 13

Seelye, Katharine, 23 Shriven, David, 22 Simpson, Alan, 15, 17 Sive, Jerry, 25 Social Security, 9, 11 Stennis, John, 30 Sterva, Jim, 32 Stevens, Ted, 15, 16, 37 and Robert J. Dole, 16 Stockman, David, 11

Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11 The Hill, 36 Thomas, Clarence, 31, 32 Tower, John, 27, 30, 31, 32 Tsongas, Paul, 3

U.S. Senate, 35 Udall, Mo, 38

Vance, Cyrus, 5

Wall Street Journal, 12, 19, 22, 23, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36 Washington Post, 19, 32, 33, 36 Weinberger, Caspar, 14 Wilson, Pete, 13