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309955 26 GOOD INTENTIONS: THE RELENTLESS ruSE OF ANNE WEXLER

How she became Washington's Rolodex queen. by David Owen

NNE WEXLER'S office in Washington is still EXLER'S YEARS in politics have given so new that most of the furniture in it is her firsthand knowledge of the way rented. There are shiny antique reproduc- government works. She may like what A. tions alongside curving, tufted, modern W she does but she doesn't like what she things. The carpet is a shade of purple whose pre- sees. "I spent three years in the White House work- cise name must be known only to decorators and ing with interest groups," she says, "which made me children with lots and lots of crayons. Standing on question a lot of things about the way politics is or- the carpet, leaning against a wall, are a dozen or so ganized and think a lot about how it could be orga- framed photographs attesting to their owner's inti- nized better in the national interest. I worry about macy with various important persons: Anne Wexler the impact of special-interest groups on public pol- with a pope, Anne Wexler with a president, Anne icy, and about how it's possible to build consensus Wexler with Paul Newman. Up on the mantel, also in order to move issues on. It's hard to do. And it's waiting to be hung, is a silk-screened picture of the hard to create leaders who don't have to mortgage White House, inscribed-to Anne-by Jimmy Car- their souls in order to get elected." ter. The print was a reward for the two and a half Of course, as a lobbyist, Wexler is in the busi- years she spent as Carter's assistant for public liaison. ness of mortgaging politicians' souls at the behest Today Wexler is the leading partner in her own of clients who can afford to pay her fees. Major cor- lobbying firm, a booming "legislative strategy" group porations don't hire "legislative strategy" firms out . whose clients include Bendix, the National Football of an abstract fascination with the workings of gov- League, the Kellogg Company, the Motion Picture ernment. And while Wexler may indeed worry about Association, Aetna, and Tasca Corporation, the "the impact of special-interest groups on public pol- shale-oil people. has retreated to icy," her anxieties haven't driven her into a different Georgia and obscurity, but Wexler has risen to per- line of business. "You know," she says, "there are manent importance in Washington. Her firm has two chairs, one on each side of the desk, and the been so successful that, after just two and a half people in those chairs are really players in a game. years in business, she is already one of the capital's And I think that the thing to strive for is to get most sought-after influence brokers. seats at the table for all the people who ought to be Wexler scored a major strategic triumph of her there. I mean, I get paid to have a seat at the table own not long ago when she signed up Nancy Clark by a lot of people who think they have a right to Reynolds as a partner. Reynolds, you see, is a be there, and they do. But sometimes there are other staunch Republican and a close friend of the Rea- folks who don't have a seat at that table, but should." gans. Wexler is a lifelong Democrat whose political The particular table at which we are sitting right genealogy runs back through Gene McCarthy and now holds a White House ashtray, a standard ac- George McGovern. Their alliance, forged with un- cessory in Washington influence boutiques: there usually frank commercial calculation, impressed the aren't many people who can afford to stub out lobbying industry. "Between the two of them," fel- cigarettes here. But these ironies are vaporized by low lobbyist Loyd Hackler told The Wexler's substantial charm. She imbues her office Times, "they've got all the bases covered." The firm, with the feel of a friendly living room. She is fifty- Wexler says with a satisfied smile, is now "admin- three years old and there is a good deal of gray in istration-proof. " her sensible hair. She is wearing a purplish cardigan

HARPER'S/ AUGUST 1983 27 several crayons removed from the carpet on her OR MOST Americans in 1966, the war in floor. Her manner is charming but never frivolous. Vietnam was all light and no tunnel. The She is solicitous but unflatterable-"a Jewish moth- Tonkin Gulf Resolution was just two years er with a big Rolodex," a friend once described her. Fold, the Tct Offensive still two years away. The Rolodex is over on her desk, encased in a dull- Condemning the war was hardly the path of ambi- gray metal hood that could stop small-caliber bullets. tion in American politics. Yet John Fitzgerald, a The names and phone numbers it contains are the member of the Westport, Connecticut, zoning board, accumulation of thirty years in politics. When she decided to run for Congress on an antiwar platform. flips through it, the names fan by like turbine blades When the time came to select a campaign manager, in a small, powerful generator of access. he turned to a zoning-board colleague whose energy Access, Wexler emphasizes, is very important in and instinct for politics had impressed him deeply. Washington. But there has to be "substance behind Her name was Anne Wexler. the facade." Success in "this town" has a great deal Wexler's campaign strategy emphasized the pains- to do with "just liking people." Some people are taking grass-roots vote-building that reshaped the "people people," others are not. The former go far- Democratic Party in the late Sixties and early Seven- ther than the latter. But you can't be successful un- ties. Working out of cramped offices and borrowed less you "understand a lot of issues," too. Being dining rooms, her army of volunteers set out to ring successful also involves "knowing what happens" in every doorbell and dial every phone number in the Washington, and especially in the government. "And district. There were tremendous telephone banks and I don't mean at a superficial level," she says. "This piles of dog-eared directories. Teetering stacks of in- town revolves around people who work for the gov- dex cards. Yards of tangled cable. Wexler believed ernment, people who work for the press, and people that the way to approach a complex task was to break who work for people who want to influence the it down into its thousand constituent crises and re- government. In this town, that's what it's all about." solve them one at a time. She made lists of voters, "This town." That's how influential Washing- lists of addresses, lists of assignments, lists of lists. tonians like Wexler almost always refer to their city. She taught her volunteers to count their supporters The expression perfectly embodies the wa~ they like on one finger at a time. Their job was to sell a sin- to think of themselves, as commonsensical pragma- gle-issue candidate to people who by and large had ticians for whom politics is a folksy calling that falls not yet begun to think of the Vietnam war as an somewhere between growing alfalfa and playing a issue at all. When the local delegate primary rolled professional sport. In fact, Thistown might make a around, the campaign manager held her breath and better name for the nation's capital. waited for the returns. Fitzgerald won by four Anne Wexler's story is the story of how to suc- votes. ceed in Thistown. Whether the ending is happy or Wexler, a bored suburban housewife whose life- sad depends on your point of view. long fascination with politics had lately given her a

Ol ::J.• o :r 2! :s:E ..s:Ol Anne Wexler in the White House, 1980. "It's hard to create leaders who don't have to mortgage their souls."

HARPER'S/ AUGUST 1983 28 welcome escape from domestic tedium, was born in liberal who inevitably and consistently ran out on a New York City on February 10, 1930, the eldest limb, whatever that limb was, and spent the rest of child of a prominent architect. Her childhood was my time sawing it off behind me." comfortable, cosmopolitan, and Jewish. She was Wexler swallowed her misgivings and went to meet graduated from Skidmore in 1951. Two weeks later Joe Duffey, who surprised her by being other than she married her first husband, a future ophthalmol- a run-of-the-mill ADA-nik. He was a thoughtful, ogist. She worked in public relations at a New York soft-spoken Protestant minister who had a master's City radio station, and later as an assistant to the degree from Yale Divinity School and a Ph.D. in the- head of the Chesterfield account at an advertising ology. His dissertation had been on Lewis Mumford. firm. From her vantage point on the lower rungs of His professorial manner and horn-rimmed glasses the entertainment industry, she watched her employ- belied a humble background: born in a coal-mining ers submit to the pressure of Joe McCarthy's Holly- town in West Virginia, he was the son of a sometime wood blacklists. She rang doorbells for Adlai Ste- prizefighter who had become a barber after losing a venson in New York. And when her husband moved leg in the mines. Anne and their sons to Westport, Connecticut, she Wexler and Duffey liked each other immediately. threw herself into local political campaigns. At a long nighttime meeting at Yale's Ezra Stiles If Wexler hadn't been a housewife, if she hadn't College, McCarthy's top Connecticut supporters been a woman, she might never have become as named Duffey chairman of the statewide campaign deeply involved in politics as she did. "In the kind and Wexler vice chairman. of culture T grew up in," she says today, "your par- "In Connecticut," Wexler says today, "we found ents always pushed you to excel and to do well in ourselves in a situation where we had a very large school and to be special and to lead. And then, all constituency of people who had really never been of a sudden-when you were a senior in college- involved in politics before. And they found that they the pressure changed and you were expected to get liked it, they liked participation, and most of all engaged and get married. I guess -I was as much they liked what I thought was very important, which a victim of that as anybody else." Had she been a was the concept of working within the system to man, she might have built a heady career in busi- change the system." ness. The pleasure she took from' running complex Using the grass-roots vote-building techniques that organizations was almost tactile. She enjoyed coor- Wexler had honed during her effort for John Fitz- dinating large groups of people, she enjoyed setting gerald, the McCarthy campaign in Connecticut won goals for herself and then meeting them one by one a surprising 44 percent of the vote in the statewide by one. Volunteer work on political campaigns was primary, including upset victories in New Haven, simply one of the few outlets available. Stamford, and five other towns. Duffey declared the But Wexler had another motivation as well. She primary a triumph for McCarthy. At the felt strongly about the issue she was fighting for. convention Wexler was assigned to the rules com- After working hard for Lyndon Johnson's election mittee, where she took a key role in the organiza- in 1964, she now felt betrayed by his escalation of tional reforms that four years later would transform the war in Vietnam. She had a keen sense of injus- the Democratic Party. tice and a disdain for the corruption that tainted pol- After the convention, Wexler and Duffey worked itics in Connecticut. While the Fitzgerald campaign hard to preserve the emerging liberal constituency eventually fell victim to the state's labyrinthine, ma- they had stitched together for McCarthy. At a win- chine-controlled nominating system-the candidate ter meeting convened by Duffey in New Britain, they was eliminated at the district convention-she had formed the Caucus of Connecticut Democrats, an the chance to do battle both with the war and with antimachine coalition of liberals that fought for elec- the machine. tion-law changes and lobbied for the first incarna- tion of the Equal Rights Amendment. By 1970 they had solidified their organization ·to the point where HEN EUGENE MCCARTHY decided to Duffey believed he could make it the core of a cam- run for president in 1968, he asked paign for the . Like John Fitz- Anne Wexler to help him in Connec- gerald, he had no doubt about whom he wanted W ticut. "I got a call from someone on to run his campaign. Mcf'arthy's staff," she recalls. "He said, 'There's this other guy; Joe Duffey, who's head of Americans for Democratic Action in Connecticut, who we're think- OE DUFFEY'S campaign for the United States ing of asking to head up this whole operation.' Now, Senate was like a high school prom where ev- I didn't think a whole lot of ADA, and T especially erybody had a date and nobody went home be- didn't think a whole lot of ADA in Connecticut. So Jfore dawn. There were late-night strategy ses- I though, 'Oh, God, another one of those suicidal sions in New Haven coffee shops and early-morning liberals.' I mean, I had no illusions about myself. I vigils on Hartford picket lines. Typewriters clattered was a pretty liberal person, but I wasn't the sort of and telephones rang. Pizzas were ordered at improb- Continued on page 30 HARPER'sl AUGUST 1983 30

able hours. Volunteers staggered home at the end lyzing voting laws state by state, targeting the worst , of the day to soak their feet. Everyone, in short, had cases for immediate attention. In Texas, voter reg- a wonderful time. "I even saw a Duffey bumper istration closed six months before election day, ef- sticker on a car in Connecticut a couple of years fectively disenfranchising anyone too far from the ago," Wexler says. She, too, sees the Duffey cam- circles of power to anticipate issues half a year in paign as something of a high-water mark in her po- advance. Wexler's team put together lawsuits and litical enthusiasm. She believed in her candidate and new legislation and changed the rules. believed in his cause, and she saw his campaign as In retrospect it seems perfectly appropriate that an opportunity not only to help bring an end to it should have been the campaign manager and not the war in Vietnam and to take on the party ma- the candidate who ended up in Washington. Politics chine, but also to prove that working within the had become more than a pastime for Wexler. She system could work. reserved weekends for her husband and two sons in Outside observers of the Duffey campaign tended Connecticut, but her real life was lived in Washing- to catch the excitement but miss the essence. Paul ton, a city where politics was the only topic of con- R. Wieck, writing in the New Republic, could scarce- versation. Coming to work there from Connecticut ly contain himself. "Joe Duffey is more at ease," his was like being called up from a Double-A farm club article began, "with a mug of beer in his hand at a to pitch in the major leagues. In Wexler's ever ex- workman's pub across from the New London sub- panding Rolodex, phone numbers that started with marine yards than on Fairfield County's manicured area code 202 began to supplant those that started lawns .. ;' Wieck's encomium hit all the high notes with 203. but skimmed over the real secret of Duffey's success: his impeccable organization. After breezily describ- ing manager Wexler as "a gal who may be the best 1972N Anne Wexler went to work for the pres- technician to have come out of the 'new politics' in idential campaign of . As ex- 1968," Wieck ticked off a few of her campaign ac- ecutive director of Citizens for Muskie her job complishments and then reverted to the romance. Iwas to help build a grass-roots constituency for Looking back, it's hard to tell where the candi- the senator from Maine. It was clearly a step up in date's ambitions left off and his campaign manager's the political world, but many on the Left saw her began. Certainly Duffey's drive forthe Senate would alliance with Muskie as a desertion. Gene McCar- never have made it even to the primary without thy's heir in 1972 would be George McGovern, not someone like Wexler to lead it. Her knack for hold- Edmund Muskie. Wexler is quick to defend her de- ing together improbable coalitions gave him a strength cision. that astonished election watchers. To avoid an anti- "I guess I thought he would be a pretty good pres- student reaction among older voters, she put her nu- ident," she says today, "As it turned out, I think I merous college-age volunteers to work in their own was probably right. In a different year it might have neighborhoods, where they seemed less like young been a totally different situation, but in 1972 the activists than like grown-up cookie-and-Kool-Aid activists certainly dominated the Democratic Party, salesmen. That, much more than the candidate's and they were looking for a candidate who was far ability to inspire liberal myth making, was the salient more of an activist than Muskie was, in terms of all fact about the Duffey campaign. In the end, the only the special interests that wanted a piece." thing that kept Duffey out of the Senate was the This may all be true, but it's strange to hear it decision by a grumpy Thomas Dodd to run as an from Wexler, who was, by almost anyone's defini- independent for the office from which he had earlier tion, an activist herself. Her efforts on the rules announced his retirement. Dodd stole enough Dem- committee had played a major role in transferring ocratic votes to hand the election to . control of her party to the very activists she now Duffey was crushed by his defeat; Wexler wanted blames for the failures of Edmund Muskie. to plunge ahead. The campaign had hardly been a If Wexler's first intimate taste of Washington life total loss from her point of view. She had succeeded had helped fatten her Rolodex, it had also whetted in pulling off a victory in the first statewide Senate her appetite for a genuine victory at the polls. But primary in Connecticut's history, and she had great- by the time the ballots had been counted in the Penn- ly expanded her already formidable network of sylvania primary, the Muskie campaign was both political connections. She went home to her fam- broke and doomed. His staff began to drift away. ily for Christmas, then took off almost immediate- Wexler returned to Connecticut. ly for Washington, where John Gardner had asked A few weeks later, she got another one of those her to head a voting-rights project for Common phone calls, this one from Frank Mankiewicz, one Cause. of the principal architects of McGovern's campaign. Wexler pursued old ends with new means. Ex- He wanted her back in Washington. tending the vote and ending the war were tightly Wexler's work for McGovern focused on delegate linked issues in 1971. She began with her usual selection. She was also his chief strategist on the methodical care, filling thick notebooks and ana- convention rules committee, where she fleshed out

HARPER'S/ AUGUST 1983 31 the party reforms she had helped to instigate in Paris, where, in a borrowed apartment, they spent 1968. The party's new charter paved the way for six weeks. McGovern's nomination and put Richard Daley in "We were starting all over again with five suit- the bleachers at Miami. At the convention she helped cases and a couple of boxes," Wexler says. Even orchestrate the now legendary, but at the time wide- friends who were shocked by their divorces had to ly misunderstood, decision to "dump" a rules chal- admit that Wexler and Duffey made an appealing lenge that demanded greater representation by wom- couple. Their relationship had the intensity of an en in the South Carolina delegation. McGovern adolescent love affair. They roamed through Paris strategists realized they had to either win big or like newlyweds, then settled down to reevaluate their lose big on the question in order to avoid a par- lives. liamentary showdown that would almost certainly "After a while," Wexler says, "we decided we have cost them the nomination. When it became ap- wanted to come back. So we sat around and said, parent they couldn't win by a large enough margin, where shall we go? We can go anywhere. And final- Wexler and others urged that they accept a clear ly we picked Washington, because it seemed like the defeat. The Women's Caucus felt betrayed, even af- most interesting place." ter the reasons had been explained, and Wexler was An inevitable place, too. Duffey still had friends branded by some as a traitor to feminism. there from his campaign days. Wexler had her Rolo- Wexler's rise to prominence in the Democratic dex. But they arrived to find the liberal tide receding Party was beginning to put her into curious confron- at the very moment they were ready to begin new tations with main-line feminists. On the one hand, her careers. Duffey eventually found a job as chief ex- career had embodied a sort of feminist ideal: when a ecutive officer of the American Association of Uni- candidate asked her for help, he did so not because versity Presidents, an educational lobbying group. he wanted a woman on his staff but because he want- Wexler was rescued by Richard Goodwin, another ed her. On the other hand, her very success as a liberal in limbo, who had been hired to run Rolling political operator was bringing her into conflict with Stone magazine's brand-new Washington bureau. women who, in her view, preferred defeat to com- Goodwin introduced her to Jann Wenner, the mag- promise and saw her "pragmatism" as cooption. azine's editor. Wenner liked her and hired her as On the South Carolina challenge, the position of head of public relations. the Women's Caucus seems hard to defend. The Anne Wexler, Richard Goodwin, and Rolling challenge was of dubious legality in the first place, Stone were in more or less the same situation in 1974. and to risk McGovern's nomination over what could All three were waiting to find out if there would be never have been more than a minor symbolic victory life after the war in Vietnam. Whatever Wexler's and would have been absurd. And yet the feminists also Goodwin's ideals and ambitions, Wenner's were had a point. In her increasingly important position in transparent. had come to prominence the party, Wexler was having to make compromises as the national voice of the counterculture; its editor she hadn't always had to make III the past. Persuad- yearned to ride his emerging celebrity into the re- ing construction workers to oppose the war-as she spectable big time. Wexler's antiwar credentials and had done during the Duffey campaign-was one Washington connections made her, from Wenner's thing. Persuading her fellow activists to be less ac- point of view, the ideal go-between. She believed in tive was another thing entirely. Wexler had always all the right things, but she also knew how to get been a pragmatist, but never before had she had so her phone calls returned. People who wouldn't talk much to be pragmatic about. to Wenner would talk to her. "Anne's job," says a writer who knew them both, "was to teach Jann how to get invited to parties." Having come to Wash- FTER McGovern's defeat, Wexler had to ington four years before in order to change the sys- confront the disintegration of her marriage. tem, she had now come back to make her living by Without the frenzy of a political campaign exploiting it for the manifest destiny of rock 'n' roll. A to insulate her from her family, her home Anne Wexler has always been adept at putting the in Westport had begun to feel like alien territory. past behind her. When she and Joe Duffey were Her two sons were growing up. She and her hus- married in September 1974, her first marriage effec- band were drifting apart. She had sacrificed her tively disappeared. Her entry in Who's Who doesn't family to her political career; now that her family even mention it, much less her first husband's name. was coming unglued, it was to her political life that Keeping the tenses straight can sometimes get a lit- she looked for salvation. She and Joe Duffey had re- tle tricky. "My first husband was-is-a doctor," mained close since the end of his campaign. Duffey, she told a reporter. too, felt trapped in his life, and he wanted out of In the spring of 1976, Wexler and Duffey put the academic rut he had been digging for himself their political past behind them and decided to work since his Senate campaign defeat. In December 1973 for the election of Jimmy Carter. Some of their old the two of them left their spouses and their children friends on the Left found their alignment with Carter and went together to Washington, then took off for even more surprising than Wexler's early support for

HARPER'S/ AUGUST 1983 32 Muskie four years before. They wondered if the creasingly important since its invention by Charles couple's old idealism hadn't given way to a little Colson during the Nixon administration. But Midge garden-variety ambition. Costanza got the job instead. Wexler ended up in "The Left is not easily coopted," Wexler retorts. the Commerce Department as deputy undersecre- "People have strong opinions and strong feelings. tary for regional affairs and economic coordination. They were Willing to go with Carter because they Duffey went to the State Department as assistant saw in him a lot of things that they thought were secretary for educational and cultural affairs, a job embodied in somebody who did not come from that, according to a friend, "was about four levels where they came from, which they thought was a below his dreams." pretty good formula for winning." Having decided it was time to cash in their po- About Carter's formula for governing Wexler had litical IODs, Wexler and Duffey found them trading less to say. In the end, her paramount reason for at a substantial discount. backing Carter was probably nothing more compli- cated than a belief that he would be elected. "We were fairly sure Carter was going to win," she told HEIR rustication wasn't permanent, however. . Wexler and Duffey, after all, Late in 1977, after his job at the State De- had built their political reputations, up to that point, partment had been eliminated, Duffey was chiefly by losing elections. They had won some bat- T named chairman of the National Endowment tles, but they hadn't won any wars. John Fitzgerald for the Humanities, a significantly more visible posi- had lost, Joe Duffey had lost, Gene McCarthy had tion. And Wexler finally got her job in the White lost, Ed Muskie had lost, George McGovern had House. Amid public snickering about his failings as lost. For someone as concerned with being effective an administrator, Carter retired to Camp David in as Wexler was, repeatedly ending up on the short 1978 with his cabinet and his favorite advisers in end of ballot counts had to be frustrating. After a hopes of salvaging his term. One of the first heads to decade of uplifting defeats, she was ready to win roll when he returned to Washington was that of - something. . Wexler was asked to take her place. Wexler stayed on at Rolling Stone through the She moved to the White House so fast that some of election, taking time off to work the floor for Carter her old colleagues at the Commerce Department at the Democratic convention and to do another complained that she didn't even take the time to say stint on the rules committee, where by now she was goodbye. beginning to meet herself coming in the other di- Besides making their working lives more interest- rection, reforming her old reforms. Duffey, mean- ing, Wexler and Duffey's ascendancy made them while, had a more public role, serving as Carter's celebrities, "the Bob and Libby Dole of the Carter "director of issues" in Washington. years," a reporter says today. Rising at dawn to Duffey's job was less important than its name begin twelve- or fourteen-hour days, they stole time made it sound. "Joe had a one-way phone connec- together when they could. "They used to eat break- tion to Atlanta," explains an old colleague. "Carter's fast together in the White House mess," says an old people could call him, but he couldn't call them." friend. "They'd sit there and read the paper and As was also the case with his wife, Duffey's real hold hands. It was kind of cute." A reporter for The function was to give old-guard liberals a visible pres- New York Times Style page peered into their two- ence in the campaign. His office was intended to bedroom condominium and reported that "they jeal- keep establishment liberals from gnawing their paws ously guard their Sundays at home, a difficult pre- in Washington while the real decisions were being rogative to maintain, given the pressures of their made in Georgia. At convention time, columnists jobs." Rowland Evans and Robert Novak quoted an anon- Duffey and Wexler had arrived. Just a few years ymous state party chairman as saying, "Anne Wexler before, they had left their families to start all over . . . and people like that run around buying pretty in Washington with their suitcases and their boxes . liberal positions on Jimmy's behalf. But they aren't Now their daily comings and goings were grist for always speaking for the candidate." Wexler wasn't feature writers. so much building coalitions this time as helping to In November 1978, from the vantage point of her constitute one: she and her husband provided Car- new success, Wexler looked back on her first mar- ter's symbolic link to Gene McCarthy and George riage. "What the hell," she told the Times, "I had McGovern, helping to keep the peace with the par- nothing to complain about. I enjoyed my kids, and ty's anxious Left. I had all the Jewish princess stuff-a lovely home, Just how symbolic their role had been didn't be- a full-time maid, lots of vacations." The comment come clear until after the inauguration. They both was meant to show how far she had traveled since worked on the Carter transition team and had dis- those ancient days in Westport. But, in truth, the cussed their aspirations on a Christmas ski trip in "Jewish princess stuff" was the part of her new life Vermont. Wexler wanted to be assistant to the pres- that differed least. Duffey and Wexler's combined ident for public liaison, a post that had become in- federal salaries amounted to more than $108,000.

HARPER'S/ AUGUST 1983 33 If they took fewer vacations now, it wasn't because Fortune 500 executives as a grass-roots constitu- they couldn't afford them. And being an insider in ency. But that was what Wexler's new job demanded. Washington wasn't entirely unlike being a busy host- Her favorite forum was her exclusive "Wednesday ess in Connecticut. Every time you turned around group," a small collection of lobbyists, lawyers, and there was another party, another reception. businessmen who came to the White House to drink At the National Endowment for the Humanities, coffee and find out, sometimes from the man him- indeed, Duffey sometimes seemed to be spending self, what the president was up to. The members more time on parties than on the humanities. In of the group were the Washington wheelers and July 1978 the Washington Post counted forty events dealers Carter had once committed himself to alien- of varying extravagance, all of them intended to ating, including lobbyists from companies like Gen- improve, the endowment's apparently stodgy public eral Electric, General Motors, and AT&T. For Car- image. At a springtime luncheon on the Great Mall, ter, the Wednesday group provided occasional for example, 100 guests sipped wine and Perrier in opportunities to shape support for, or anticipate crit- the shade of a huge striped tent, then departed bear- icism of, White House initiatives. ing gifts in yellow tote bags that declared, "Human- But the major boon was for the invited guests. ities: Civilization's Study of Itself." Two months Private access to the White House gave corporate later a surprise birthday party planned by Wexler interests a chance to leave their fingerprints on ad- for her husband turned sour when the Post reported ministration policy. It also enabled lobbyists to im- that the 200 invitations bore her White House phone press their clients. "There were two times when one number and that NEH staffers had helped plan the of my clients needed help," one participant says, festivities on government time. Duffey's own assis- "and I took the liberty of calling Anne. And, wow, tant, it turned out, had dispatched a government it was like playing the net in tennis. In about two vehicle to pick up some posters depicting her boss minutes I got a call back from the person I had as "King Duff" (the King Tut show was the NEH's been trying to reach. If you put a rock down the hottest project at the time). well and you never hear it hit the bottom, you get King Duff and Queen Anne. Sometimes it was the feeling you're dealing with someone who is just hard to tell where work left off and the social whirl involved in the cosmetics." All of this translated, if began. not into better public policy, at least into higher fees and enhanced prestige. "If you were a lawyer over there, all the other lawyers knew you were do- "1HAD a wonderful feeling every time I walked ing it, right?" says another participant. "And it didn't through those White House gates," Anne Wexler hurt you, it didn't hurt you." says today. "It's very corny to say so, but I While she was busy returning phone calls for peo- really did feel that way every single day. I just ple she thought could help the president, Wexler walked through those gates and had to pinch my- was also weaving her own substantial network of self and say, My God, I'm really here, and it's really connections, which would later become the basis important, and it's something that I hope will help of her lobbying career. By the time Carter's term people and make a difference." ended, she was on friendly terms with just about For Wexler herself, winning friends and influ- every important businessman who had business encing people for Jimmy Carter didn't feel all that with the White House. different from going clean for Gene. "It was a' coali- tion-building, organizing, grass-roots lobbying ef- fort," she says. She still made lists, she still filled HEN Jimmy Carter was voted out of notebooks with strategies and agendas. But the cast 'W office in 1980, Anne Wexler wasted of characters had changed. little time in putting her connections "She reaches out," said reporter Martin Tolchin up for sale. in a glowing article about Carter in the Times, "to a "On January 20 the White House staff all flew broad range of power brokers, the outside world of down to Plains and back with the president as a corporate executives and union leaders, Democratic kind of last farewell on Air Force One," she says, sit- stalwarts, Rotarians, Kiwanians, environmentalists ting in her capacious office at Wexler, Reynolds, and other issue-oriented groups .... On the natural- Harrison & Schule. "And on January 21 we started gas bill, for example, Mrs. Wexler invited 1,000 this business." corporate leaders, including many chief executive Wexler and company have been in the black ever officers of the Fortune 500, to the White House for since that day-quite an achievement. But there briefings by James Schlesinger, the Energy Secretary, was never much doubt in Washington that she would Bob Strauss and Stu Eizenstat. These were, after succeed. all, executives whose companies are paying increased "Because of all her contacts," says Loyd Hackler, sums for the gas and oil they consume, and who "she had a lot of very substantial offers to go into therefore have a direct stake in energy legislation." corporate entities, as you can imagine. But I told It requires a certain' mental agility to conceive of 'her I wouldn't do it, I'd set up my own deal. When

HARPER'S/ AUGUST 1983 34 I left the Johnson White House and opened my was the complex Bendix-Martin Marietta-Allied- own office ... shit, I was naive. I was not nearly United Technologies deal that put William Agee and as smart as she was or as knowledgeable, and I Mary Cunningham back in the gossip columns and didn't have the contacts-I was assistant press sec- produced no clear victors except the lobbyists, law- retary-but even with a Republican like Nixon in yers, and investment bankers involved. "I don't have charge of the thing ... shit, you come out with that any comment on the rest of the effort," Wexler says White House dust all over you." today, "but I think our part of it was well done." Great glittering drifts of it had settled on Wexler's Another client is the Kellogg Company. "We're shoulders during her two and a half years on Car- helping them with a program they're doing on pub- ter's staff. Two of her firm's first clients, Aetna and lic television called 'Reading Rainbow,''' she says. Tosco, had even made "oblique references" during "It's a 'series designed to help kids want to read." those years that they might be in the market for a Kellogg is deeply committed to the program because little dusting later on. "But we were very careful Kellogg, as a major sponsor of trashy children's tele- about that," Wexler says. "We didn't want to be vision, is partly responsible for creating the prob- perceived to have any kind of conflict, so we kind lem that "Reading Rainbow" professes to address. of pushed people away. But we knew at least enough "One of the things we're doing," Wexler says, "is a to know where we could go to have those kinds of reception at the vice president's house that Mrs. conversations." Bush is giving to introduce the program." Not quite The Ethics in Government Act, passed by Con- the same as working to end the war in Vietnam. gress in 1978 at Carter's request, forbids the baldest But that's business. sort of cashing in on government employment, but Perched on a conference table in the corner' of there are plenty of loopholes. For instance, Wexler's Anne Wexler's office is a glass eagle given to her by firm recently helped Tosco win a $1.1, billion gov- Tip O'Neill and Robert Byrd for chairing the Dem- ernment loan guarantee for its doomed Colorado ocratic Party's congressional campaign dinner not shale-oil project. Because Tosco had had dealings long ago. "Isn't it gorgeous?" Wexler says. The cam- with the White House when Wexler was in it, the paign dinner is the biggest party fund-raiser of the potential for conflict was great. Of course, in Toscc's year. Congressmen now find her lobbying pitches for eyes, the potential for conflict was precisely what her corporate clients especially persuasive, because made Wexler's firm so attractive. Tosco was look- they understand that she exerts a powerful influence ing for access and influence, not an ethical debate. over their ability to finance their campaigns. The big And having an exploitable conflict of interest is what glass eagle is a tangible reminder of everything they being a lobbyist is all about. But in order to avoid have to lose. For a lobbyist to chair a party fund- violating the law, Wexler-whose office contains not raiser might strike some people as a conflict of in- only a White House ashtray and a portrait of the terest, but of course it is not. It is a magnificent White House autographed by Carter, but also a pho- unity of interest. tograph of her children standing in the snow at Wexler remains active in presidential politics. Her Camp David-had to stay at arm's length. candidate for 1984 is Walter Mondale. She really "When we took them on as a client," she says, likes Mondale a lot. "I personally never got involved in that issue until "He's a class act, let me tell you," she says. "I a full year after we got out of the White House, worked very closely with him in the White House. which was consistent with the conflict laws. I never I think he's very good and I think he ought to be did anything on that loan guarantee. You really president. And I feel about that probably as strongly have to be careful about that. The law is the law as I have felt since Adlai Stevenson ran in the Fifties." and you've really got to respect it." Since Adlai Stevenson? That's a hell of an en- Wexler's Republican partner, Nancy Clark Rey- dorsement. One is almost embarrassed to remember nolds, the friend of the Reagans, used to be a lob- that Wexler and Mondale are very close friends. byist for Bendix. When Bendix hired Wexler's firm And that her partner Gail Harrison was Mondale's in 1981, the two women became good friends, and legislative aide in the Senate and the head of his do- Reynolds eventually decided to join up. "Mrs. Rey- mestic policy staff in the White House. And that nolds and I pretty much do see eye to eye on every- Wexler's business would go right through the roof thing," Wexler says. "Nancy's background is entire- if Mondale were elected president. ly different from mine. I am much more of an Of course, for someone who's finally learned how activist politician and much more of an activist to succeed in Thistown,a Reagan victory would Democrat than Nancy is an activist Republican, and be fine too. her career has been very different from mine. But I "The thing that's unique about Nancy Reynolds can't really identify an issue on which we have real- and me is that there isn't anybody like us in the ly disagreed that has involved business." country. That's because it's the two of us, one a Wexler's most important work for Bendix, she Democrat and one a Republican. And I tell you, it says, involved "preparing for the Washington end really works. It's wonderful. Our clients are just so of the merger-and-acquisition effort." This, of course, happy." •

HARPER'S/ AUGUST 1983