Dispatches from the Eastern Front: A Political Education from the Nixon Years to the Age of Obama

By Gerald Felix Warburg

How does one arrive at a life in politics and policy? What happens to one’s ideals when confronted with the reality that the only way to get things done in Washington is compromise? Who are the men and women who help shape our national agenda, and what drives their work? Dispatches from the Eastern Front provides fascinating, intensely personal, yet universal answers to these central questions.
Recounting four decades inside Washington politics, Gerald Felix Warburg brings remarkable candor to a most unusual memoir. An idealistic California Baby Boomer transported to the intimidating world of Capitol Hill policymaking at a young age, Warburg finds himself working to reform nuclear energy, strategic arms control, and foreign policy. As his access and power grow, greater challenges loom: how to maintain principles while cutting deals, and how to balance public purpose with private interests. An eclectic career reveals the slow and often painful development of emotional intelligence for work at the highest reaches of the public arena.
Dispatches takes readers inside the closed conference rooms in the U.S. Capitol where leaders strike legislative bargains, to the inner circles of presidential campaigns where advisors jockey for position, and to the firms where well-paid lobbyists use their expertise to advance the interests of corporations and NGOs. Up close and personal profiles of many of our current national leaders emerge. Cycles of action, followed by academic reflection, permit the type of introspection and insight rare in our national politics.
With Dispatches from the Eastern Front, Warburg has crafted a highly literate memoir chronicling the political education of a generation, along the way offering a subtle but effective call to the young to enter the public arena. His sage advice tells how, and why, to construct a career in public service, with irrepressibly optimistic counsel that will make this book a political science standard for years to come.

Gerald Felix Warburg is Professor of Public Policy and Assistant Dean of the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. He teaches graduate school courses in national security policymaking and congressional strategy, and an undergraduate class in the public policy challenges of the twenty-first century.
For many years, he served as a legislative assistant to the leaders of the U.S. House and Senate, where he played a lead staff role in advancing such measures as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act and other nuclear reform initiatives; the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Sanctions Act; the Support East European Democracy Act; and legislation for a mutual, verifiable U.S.-Soviet nuclear weapons production freeze.
He staffed congressional leadership delegations to more than a dozen countries, and served as a consultant to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and several U.S. presidential campaigns. Formerly executive vice president of Cassidy & Associates, a leading Washington public affairs firm, he taught previously at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication, Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, and the Stanford in Washington Program.
His prior publications include Conflict and Consensus: The Struggle Between Congress and the President Over Foreign Policymaking (Harper); The Mandarin Club, a novel (Bancroft Press); two chapters on Congressional policymaking and lobbying in The National Security Enterprise: Navigating the Labyrinth (Georgetown Press); and “Nonproliferation Policy Crossroads: Lessons Learned from the U.S.-India Nuclear Agreement” in Contemporary Issues in U.S. Foreign Policy (CQ Press).
A graduate of Hampshire College, with a graduate degree from Stanford University, Warburg was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He lives now in Virginia.

“Gerald Warburg's Dispatches does at least four terrific things. (1) It is an engaging narrative for anyone who likes a good story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bancroft Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781610880879

Gerald Felix Warburg

Gerald Felix Warburg has worked in Washington on intelligence, trade, and international security matters since the Ford Administration. He has assisted several executive branch agencies, and served on the staff of leadership in both the United States Senate and House of Representatives, where he was a principal draftsman of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978 and other U.S. foreign policy initiatives. In addition, he has provided counsel to several American presidential campaigns and to two democratically-elected presidents of the Republic of China on Taiwan. As a visiting lecturer, he has taught history and government courses at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and with both Stanford and Georgetown university programs. The author of Conflict and Consensus: The Struggle Between the President and Congress to Shape U.S. Foreign Policy (Harper/Collins), he is currently Executive Vice President for a Washington government relations firm. A native of Marin County, California, Mr. Warburg holds an undergraduate degree from Hampshire College, and an advanced degree from Stanford University. He and his family currently reside in Virginia. The Mandarin Club is his first novel.

Book preview

DISPATCHES

FROM THE EASTERN FRONT

A POLITICAL EDUCATION FROM THE NIXON YEARS TO THE AGE OF OBAMA

Gerald Felix Warburg

© Copyright 2014 Gerald Felix Warburg

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.

Cover design: Ali Abbas

Layout: Tracy Copes

Author photo: Dan Addison/U.Va. Public Affairs

Published by Bancroft Press

Books that Enlighten

P.O. Box 65360, Baltimore, MD 21209

410-358-0658 | 410-764-1967 (fax)

www.bancroftpress.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012920739

ISBN 978-1-61088-085-5 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-61088-086-2 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-61088-088-6 (mobi)

ISBN 978-1-61088-087-9 (epub)

Also by Gerald Felix Warburg:

Books

Conflict and Consensus: The Struggle between Congress and the President over Foreign Policymaking

The Mandarin Club - A Novel

Text Chapters

Lobbyists: U.S. National Security and Special Interests and Congress: Checking Presidential Power in The National Security Enterprise: Navigating the Labyrinth

Nonproliferation Policy Crossroads: Lessons Learned from the U.S. - India Nuclear Agreement, in Contemporary Issues in U.S. Foreign Policy

For three gentlemen, wise and kind:

Dad,

who helped guide us west, and

Andy and Pete,

big brothers who led us forward.

Table of Contents

1. Resignation

2. The Nixon Brothers

3. The Most Interesting College in the World

4. What I Needed to Know at Twenty-One

5. Initiation: Working on the Joint Committee

6. Playing the Press: Playing with Fire

7. Jack Bingham, Giant Slayer

8. The Capitol, Through Fresh Eyes

9. How Our Laws Are Made

10. Roots: Return to Jerusalem

11. From the White House to Galvez House

12. No Final Victories

13. The Catbird Seat: Life on Senate Staff

14. Lobbying 101: The View from K Street

15. Cold War Days: Inside the Kremlin

16. Obama for America

17. Renewal

Notes

Supplementary Sources

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can . . . And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them, they will be there in the writing.

—Ernest Hemingway

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

—Søren Kierkegaard

CHAPTER ONE

Resignation

Cody, Wyoming

August 1974

The morning Richard Nixon resigned the presidency and helicoptered away from the White House lawn for the last time, I was busy cleaning the stables at the Dead Indian Ranch, deep in the high country east of Yellowstone Park in Wyoming. My job shoveling horseshit became a conversation starter when, quite improbably, I began looking for a job in Washington, D.C.

I was twenty years old when I watched the last act of Nixon’s fall on an old black and white TV, static and snow nearly obscuring the president’s face. I hadn’t a clue then, but the end of Richard Nixon’s three decades in Washington would mark the beginning of mine.

There is an old Chinese saying, variously described as a good wish for a friend or a curse to be hurled at an adversary: May you live in interesting times. To experience interesting times was a goal of sorts for many of us Baby Boomers who grew up in the comfort of suburban America in the 1950s. There would be no boring Eisenhower-era myopia for us. Adventure lay ahead, if only we would hit the road and find it.

As a restless California teenager, I was uncertain what the future held for me. My dreams were disparate and ill-formed. Turmoil at home offered an excuse to strike out on my own. For reasons I could not articulate, I wanted to flee the bucolic towns north of San Francisco. In Marin County’s string of new-money cities, from Sausalito and Belvedere to Kentfield and Ross, it seemed as if everybody’s father was in real estate and everybody’s mother was unfulfilled.

Our elders were battling something they called a mid-life crisis, whatever that was. We sensed it must be avoided at all costs. So we determined to live lives without regrets. All around us, the human potential movement was beginning to flower. Californians and returning veterans, shorn of the heavy survival burdens of World War II years, began to question the purpose of their life’s work.

In nearby Silicon Valley, new worlds were opening. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and an eclectic mix of Stanford graduates led an explosion of technology research that would bring about personal computers, the Internet, and the iPad. Even as the Sixties ended and the Vietnam War dragged on, the social climate in the San Francisco Bay Area offered infinite possibilities. On the University of California campus at Berkeley and across the Golden Gate in the Haight-Ashbury district, music was pulsing from local rock groups who had played gigs at high school dances: Steve Miller, Janis Joplin, Carlos Santana, Tower of Power, Boz Scaggs, the Grateful Dead, and the Sons of Champlin. As we listened to their lyrics and considered alternative futures, we determined that no roads would go untaken. We read Emerson and Ferlinghetti, eager to escape.

Beginning at the age of sixteen, I set off on a series of travels that led me far from the California suburbs. They included months of backpacking in Europe, trying to keep up with my mischievous older brothers, Andy and Pete, as we bounced from a Copenhagen youth hostel to a Mediterranean campground. We slept on Greek ferries and in Amsterdam crash pads. We discovered places where the Sixties had never ended.

On the road, tall, bearded young men with no parents in sight could get away with a lot. My brothers, then as now, were not just heroic figures to me, but best friends as well. We talked to strangers. We lied about our age. We inhaled deeply. That, as memoirist Barack Obama would later confess, was the point, wasn’t it?

When I returned to the California suburbs—I still had to finish high school—the privilege and provincialism felt stifling. Soon I headed out to explore once again, this time accompanied by a vague sense of mission.

My destination was simply Back East. I wanted to make a voyage to what, for me, was a mythical land—Back East, from whence my Harvard and Bryn Mawr-educated parents had come. They had escaped the insular world of childhoods in Manhattan and New Haven, bravely setting out to build a new life in California in 1953, the year before I was born.

By the time I was halfway through Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, I was still searching for a purpose. The Vietnam War was ending. The great social movements for civil rights and urban renewal were spent. Nothing had risen to replace them as a source of inspiration for the young.

I was a driven but directionless student. By 1974 I had already toyed with a half-dozen possible majors, from theater and history to literature, sociology, and education. I even had dreams one year that a professional baseball career might pan out.

My restlessness was matched only by my growing curiosity. I was trying to figure out what role I might play in the world.

My parents bestowed upon each of their sons a sense of obligation. It was an unspoken but inescapable assumption that public purpose offered a higher calling than the pursuit of private gain. Opportunity was accompanied by responsibility: To whom much was given, much was expected. Noblesse oblige meant that growing up to be merely, say, a real estate dealer flipping houses would be a waste of your talents. We were expected to have greater aspirations.

My father, Felix Warburg, had been an early environmental activist. As chairman of the Marin County Planning Commission, he played an important role in the effort to block construction of a commuter city of thirty thousand that developers planned to carve out of the shoreline wilderness. He helped to protect the coastline that would become Point Reyes National Seashore and Golden Gate National Recreation Area.¹ We spent days along the Pacific Ocean and camped in Mendocino, where he worked with Larry Halprin to design the Sea Ranch, and in Bolinas, where Mom would make us pancakes in the fog on an old Coleman stove.

My mother, Sandol Stoddard, was already an accomplished author and community leader. She had rejected the materialism and prejudice of an Alabama mother and Connecticut Yalie father to become an outspoken supporter of Jack Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Her fierce identification with the underdog and her hunger for justice dominated her work as an activist and writer.

My parents’ essential values were made clearer by their broad definition of community. Together with public-spirited neighbors, they repainted the dilapidated Victorian storefronts of Tiburon’s Main Street. They volunteered to help build up the local schools. They encouraged us to head out into the world confident we had a capacity to contribute to society and that collective citizen action to engage our government could yield positive results.

Dead Indian Ranch, August 1974.

That summer of 1974, the month I turned twenty, I found myself working as a wrangler at a dude ranch in the Absaroka Mountains. The nearest town, Cody, Wyoming, was fifty-six miles away on a dirt road, over the eight thousand-foot Dead Indian Pass.

Navajo rugs in turquoise and black hung on the walls, with an old grizzly skull above the fire crackling deep in the stone hearth. Through the television static, a crowd of guests and fellow ranch hands could barely make out the signal bouncing off the hovering mountains. President Richard Nixon was offering his tortured explanation for leaving office in the face of impeachment and a likely conviction.

Sunlight Basin, Wyoming, August 1974.

I saddled horses for wealthy East Coast dudes by day, then played poker down by the creek-side campfire most nights. My only prior interest in politics had been watching nervously as my older brothers maneuvered their way around the Vietnam War draft. Otherwise, Washington seemed a distant land, utterly foreign and unapproachable.

The raw emotion of Nixon’s delivery, all jowls and dark gesticulation, fascinated me as we watched. You couldn’t make this stuff up—not even a Shakespeare or an Ibsen could. Nixon’s anger at his fate was palpable. The stakes of his decision were so profound, the uncertainties for the nation’s future so real—no president had ever quit before—that my curiosity about the political arena was piqued.

What was this great drama unfolding in Washington, this contest of good versus evil? A tragedy of mythic proportions, it involved misplaced hopes and hubris, patriotism gone bad, and a struggle to shape the nation’s course that had collapsed in spectacular failure. Who were the men and women who had brought down this all-powerful King Richard, he of the forty-nine-state majority? I needed to know.

The questions careened about in my head later as I stumbled down the trail to fish out cans of beer from our stash in the creek. Who were these people who make a life of political contest? How could you get into the arena? I was just a sophomore heading back to an experimental college in Amherst. I felt as insignificant as any of the thousands of stars that overflowed the black Wyoming sky. Washington seemed so many miles away.

Less than a year later, I was there, inside the U.S. Capitol. In just three years, I would find myself at the White House, standing ramrod straight at the center of power, watching in the Cabinet Room as a different president signed a major nuclear policy bill I’d helped write.

If anyone at the Dead Indian Ranch that night had foretold such developments, I would have thought they were crazy. If anyone had gone on to predict a time when I would work as a Nixon family lob-byist—that I would witness his family’s tears and feel just a piece of their horror—then I would have known they were hallucinating.

Why do people choose a career in public policy? What makes political contest such an attraction? Why did working in Washington hold my interest for so many years? I could not have answered any of these questions that crisp August night four decades ago. Upon reflection, however, the truth seems clear.

It was the people who drew me in. It was the people in pursuit of power who fascinated me—their passions, their oft-compromised principles, and the endless testing of character they experienced. The politicians who populate official Washington, I soon learned, come from country and city, from Ivy League schools and community colleges, from hick towns and boom towns. They are the 4-H Club leaders, and the ambitious class valedictorians, but also the dissenters and rebels, the idealistic critics of the status quo. They share a common sense of mission. All yearn to have some impact on our national affairs. All are eager to leave some mark that can affirm a common existential desire to be present. All hope to leave evidence of their work. Their triumphs, as well as their failures, are reassuringly human.

They are drawn to Washington by the beckoning arena. Some come to do combat over policy. Many want to save the world. Others stay to make money, retailing their expertise to the highest bidder. Some acquire issues and adopt causes only as a means to an end: holding power. Potomac fever, they call it. It’s a disease, like drug addiction. They take just one hit, then cannot escape the craving for more. Their story ends badly, always. The individuals and the institutions they serve suffer as well.

Others seek power only as a means to an end, to advance their chosen cause. Each shares an illusion that Washington is, for a time, the center of the universe. We see the capital as the national movie screen, where we project our greatest hopes for progress. We feel called to Washington to engage, if only in a limited staff role. It is an irresistible call to public service, one fueled in equal parts by altruism and ego.

The following chapters are the stories of the characters I encountered in our nation’s capital—characters I came to know along my journey Back East to explore the science of politics. These are stories about the people—from Alan Cranston to Nancy Pelosi, from Jack Bingham to Dianne Feinstein to President Nixon’s daughter, Julie Eisenhower—that my work enabled me to know. This is the chronicle of one man’s political education amidst such searchers and doers. They were clever, humble, and occasionally profane, the very sort of interesting people whose trials and tribulations give our lives meaning. It is thus, first and foremost, a Washington story.

It is also a story recounting how idealism is tempered by reality. Just as second marriages represent the triumph of hope over experience, political memoirs should offer optimism as an antidote to the cynicism pervading most discussions about Washington. Such narratives need to be enriched by characters one cares about, not just pedestrian villains, of which Washington has plenty.

Memoirs of political life can become exercises in self-justification. Book-of-the-Month Club tomes on how right I was about the Iraq war quickly devolve into the settling of old scores. Such an approach is usually rife with cheap shots and self-puffery. Memoirs can slip easily into the realm of fiction.

The stories offered here try to avoid such pitfalls. These stories are true. In many cases, they serve to highlight my own naiveté and flawed judgment. Yet none is retold merely to embarrass or titillate. In thirty-five years in the political trenches, I’ve encountered plenty of skullduggery. I’ve known senators and White House aides who abused drink, congressmen who bedded interns, Appropriations Committee chairmen who lived by pay-to-play, and presidential candidates with whom we should never share the car keys.

So what?

Congress is much more like my Redwood High School class of 1972 than the Roman Senate. Any collection of 538 classmates has a few bums. A few years from now, we will not care about idiot congressmen posting lewd photos on their Twitter accounts. Their names are forgotten quickly. Therefore, unless central to narrative or character development, I have omitted most miscellaneous misbehavior as gratuitous. For the record, I screwed up plenty. I had far more than my share of fun, both wholesome and illicit. I plead guilty to zeal, to indiscretion, and to an often sophomoric pleasure in mischief perpetrated just for the thrill of getting away with it. I also cared deeply about the public policy issues I worked on, as well as the business and academic pursuits I followed as a consequence.

The stories that follow share a common point of view, that of a student of political science hoping to shape policy. My career advanced rapidly through a series of lucky encounters. My role was just that of a staffer, one of the thousands of ambitious aides who pass through the Capitol for a year or a decade. I never ran for election, so I wasn’t held accountable by voters for controversial positions championed. I shadowed powerful politicians, hovering in the background of camera shots, suggesting avenues of attack, feeding lines and drafting bills. I lived vicariously through risks elected officials took on the Senate floor or in presidential campaigns. I took satisfaction from triumphs shared and worked to weather the stinging defeats that usually followed. Politics humbles even the most righteous and self-confident. I was fortunate to gain admission to the councils of power, then to have a chance to step back and question what draws the moth to the flame.

The book isn’t so much about its author, however. Nor is it a personal memoir about the many family members and friends I have loved. It is about a political education in Washington—about how proximity to power tests all who enter the public arena. It describes how it felt to be in the room when the deal was made. It is about the many temptations that threaten to erode principles, only to highlight those convictions that endure. It is an exploration of why people feel called to public service, and a reflection on how the next generation of young men and women can prepare to shape public policy in the real world of our often brutal national politics.

Many of the scenes recounted here were observed as if viewed in a most improbable movie. A Hampshire College kid applauding in the Cabinet Room less than two years after graduation? The sensation was surreal, but the experience was genuine. There were weeks when my main source of energy was the adrenaline rush derived from pushing the envelope, from seeing how far I could go as an infiltrator. I would plunge in over my head, stimulated by the pull of the tide. Fear gave me energy and made me a fast talker. The excitement felt like hot coffee in the veins.

The work at hand, however, is neither a Baby Boomer confessional nor a plea for absolution. It is a story of the Washington of our lifetime, of very human characters who populate the drama we call politics. It is a story of patriotic individuals trying, for the most part, to do the right thing. It is a story of the fallible people who come to play a part in the national arena.

In narrative form, it is presented as a compilation of vignettes, betraying the idealism of a once youthful voice fueled by hope and curiosity. These stories are presented here serially, beginning with my first hint of an interest in a Washington policymaking career. They end shortly after the day when, finally, I left. This orderly chronological progress from 1974 to current times is bracketed by even-numbered chapters offering insights that echo parallel themes through the recounting of more recent events. These flash-forwards serve as bookends, looking back at events with wisdom brought by experience.

All are drawn from original notes, preserved from a quaint 1950s habit handed down by my irrepressibly literary mom: Sunday letters sent home. These were letters crafted in the years before e-mail was invented, handwritten in philosophical bursts to be shared with my California family. Letters of self-discovery and overwrought observation. Letters from an earnest and excitable young man reporting on the strange ways of Washington politicians. Letters scrawled feverishly, then bundled and sent off in bulging white envelopes with a haphazard cluster of postage stamps. Snail-mailed dispatches from the Eastern Front.

CHAPTER TWO

The Nixon Brothers

Yorba Linda, California

June 2003

In the searing heat of California’s inland desert, we climbed the narrow stairs to the attic of Richard Nixon’s childhood home. It was a late spring morning. John Taylor, the avuncular loyalist who served as executive director of the Richard M. Nixon Foundation, was prattling away behind me.

His mom was a homemaker, John reminded me. They had a grocery store. His dad worked as a butcher.

I wasn’t really listening.

We were in the late president’s childhood bedroom. I felt like a voyeur. It was a cramped attic crawl space. He had shared it with three brothers, bunks lining the eaves, as if on a small sailboat. It was not hard to imagine the familiarity he would later find in his close Navy quarters.

His brother died here, John continued. Then, mercifully, he stopped talking.

I stared at the place. You could sense the anxiety in the household after his kid brother succumbed to flu and fever. A second Nixon brother had died very young as well. Eighty years later— here in the museum setting, amidst the piano with chipped ivory keys where he’d learned to play and his parents’ bed, covered with a homespun quilt—the emotions were still present.

We circled the house, which his father Frank had built from a Sears catalogue. Back in 1912, he had ordered it from a book for $995, and then, weeks later, horses and wagons had dumped the lumber and assembly instructions on his Yorba Linda lot. Today, it remained a tiny cottage with white siding, the president’s mother’s Quaker touch still apparent.

We walked past President and Mrs. Nixon’s graves outside, simple black slabs tastefully offset by a modest garden of wild-flowers. We turned and came upon a broad reflecting pool as John recounted the troubled history of their efforts to bring the Nixon Museum and Birthplace into the federally run presidential library system.

I was there to be hired as the new lobbyist for the Nixon family. Some circle had, improbably, been closed. Some profound challenge lay ahead, I believed. Surely, the gods were laughing at this odd turn of events.

I wasn’t thinking about the job, however. I wasn’t thinking about Washington tactics, about how to get the unionized workers at the Steny Hoyer Research Center that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) ran in Silver Spring, Maryland to let go of the Nixon tapes. Thirty years after the fact, some folks still insisted the Nixon tapes had to be held inside the Washington Beltway, supposedly to aid in any possible prosecutions.

I wasn’t thinking about earmarked appropriations or riders on an omnibus bill. I wasn’t thinking about calling California Representative Nancy Pelosi, or persuading California senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein to help.

I was thinking about Richard Nixon, the boy who had been driven so obsessively to succeed. He had felt the snubs, first at Whittier College from the fancy fraternity boys, then later at Duke Law School and on Wall Street from the elitist white-shoe lawyers.

It surprised me to find that I could somehow relate to Nixon’s pique. My brothers and I had developed our own contempt for East Coast arrogance, that smug sense of entitlement that accompanied the careers of so many privileged Ivy Leaguers, trust fund fellows who had been to all the right schools and invited into all the exclusive clubs. We, too, had stuck together against the world, though much of our validation came from tight-knit family fabric and from simply bringing home the bacon. We had also left home early, and then urgently recreated our own strong nuclear families.

For Nixon, however, the struggle had never stopped. Life for him had been one endless fight for respect, against enemies both imagined and real. He went from the House to the Senate, where his colleague Jack Kennedy, the handsome war hero, was the life of every party. Nixon endured public put-downs from popular President Eisenhower and the Eastern press, from Georgetown elites and fickle voters.

What was it like, I wondered as we gazed back through the glare at the Nixon birthplace, to live an entire life with a fifty-pound chip on your shoulder? Even being twice elected President of the United States had failed to dislodge his burden. He had continued, even at the height