Lee Atwater
Harvey LeRoy "Lee" Atwater was an American political consultant and strategist for the Republican Party. He was an adviser to Republican U.S. presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and chairman of the Republican National Committee. Atwater aroused controversy through his aggressive campaign tactics, especially the Southern strategy.
Early life
Atwater was born on February 27, 1951, in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Alma "Toddy", a school teacher, and Harvey Dillard Atwater, an insurance adjustor. He had two siblings, Ann and Joe, and grew up in Aiken, South Carolina. When Lee was five, his three-year-old brother, Joe, died of third-degree burns when he pulled a deep fryer full of hot oil onto himself.As a teenager in Columbia, South Carolina, Atwater played guitar in a rock band, The Upsetters Revue. Even at the height of his political power, he would often play concerts in clubs and church basements, solo or with B.B. King, in the Washington, D.C., area. He released an album called Red Hot & Blue on Curb Records, featuring Carla Thomas, Isaac Hayes, Sam Moore, Chuck Jackson, and King. In the Los Angeles Times of April 5, 1990, Robert Hilburn wrote about the album: "The most entertaining thing about this ensemble salute to spicy Memphis-style 1950s and 1960s R&B is the way it lets you surprise your friends. Play a selection such as 'Knock on Wood' or 'Bad Boy' for someone without identifying the singer, then watch their eyes bulge when you reveal that it's the controversial national chairman of the Republican Party, Lee Atwater." During the 1960s, Atwater briefly played backup guitar for Percy Sledge.
Atwater attended W. J. Keenan Junior High School where he developed a reputation as a class clown and poor student. This frustrated his parents, and so they sent him to Fork Union Military Academy for his tenth grade year, where his grades saw an improvement. However, he wanted to move back to Columbia to attend A.C. Flora High School, and after lobbying his parents for the change, they obliged, and Atwater would spend his eleventh and twelfth grade years there before graduating in 1969. In 1973, Atwater graduated from Newberry College, a small private Lutheran institution in Newberry, South Carolina, where he was a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity and earned a bachelor of arts degree in history. At Newberry, Atwater served as the governor of the South Carolina Student Legislature. He earned a Master of Arts degree in communications from the University of South Carolina in 1977.
Political career
During the 1970s and the 1980 election, Atwater rose to prominence in the South Carolina Republican Party, actively participating in the campaigns of Governor Carroll Campbell and Senator Strom Thurmond. During his years in South Carolina, Atwater became well known for managing hard-edged campaigns based on emotional wedge issues.1980 and 1984 elections
Atwater's aggressive tactics were first demonstrated during the 1980 Congressional campaigns. He was a campaign consultant to Republican incumbent Floyd Spence when he ran for Congress against Democratic nominee Tom Turnipseed. Atwater's tactics in that campaign included push polling in the form of fake surveys by so-called independent pollsters, to inform white suburbanites that Turnipseed was a member of the NAACP. He also sent out last-minute letters from Senator Thurmond telling voters that Turnipseed would disarm the United States, and turn it over to liberals and Communists. At a press briefing, Atwater planted a fake reporter who rose and said, "We understand that Turnipseed has had psychiatric treatment". Atwater later told reporters off the record that Turnipseed "got hooked up to jumper cables", referring to electroconvulsive therapy that Turnipseed underwent as a teenager. Spence went on to win the race.After the 1980 election, Atwater went to Washington and became an aide in the Ronald Reagan administration, working under political director Ed Rollins. In 1984, Rollins managed Reagan's re-election campaign, and Atwater became the campaign's deputy director and political director. Rollins mentioned Atwater's work several times in his 1996 book Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms. He stated that Atwater ran a dirty tricks operation against Democratic vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro, including publicizing the fact that Ferraro's parents had been indicted for numbers running in the 1940s. Rollins described Atwater as "ruthless", "Ollie North in civilian clothes", and someone who "just had to drive in one more stake".
The day after the 1984 presidential election, Atwater became a senior partner at the political consulting firm of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly.
During his years in Washington, Atwater became aligned with Vice President George H. W. Bush, who chose Atwater to manage his 1988 presidential campaign.
"Southern strategy"
As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of the interview was printed in Lamis' book The Two-Party South, later reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name revealed. Bob Herbert reported on the interview in the October 6, 2005, issue of The New York Times. On November 13, 2012, The Nation magazine released a 42-minute audio recording of the interview. James Carter IV, grandson of former president Jimmy Carter, had asked and been granted access to the tapes by Lamis' widow. Early in the interview, Atwater argued that Reagan did not need to make racial appeals, suggesting that Reagan's issues transcended the racial prism of the 1968 "Southern Strategy":Atwater: But Reagan did not have to do a southern strategy for two reasons. Number one, race was not a dominant issue. And number two, the mainstream issues in this campaign had been, quote, southern issues since way back in the sixties. So Reagan goes out and campaigns on the issues of economics and of national defense. The whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference. And I'll tell you another thing you all need to think about, that even surprised me, is the lack of interest, really, the lack of knowledge right now in the South among white voters about the Voting Rights Act.
Later in the interview, Atwater was questioned about the implicitly racist aspects of the "New Southern Strategy" carried out by the Reagan campaign:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don't have to do that. All that you need to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues that he's campaigned on since 1964, and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.
Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater: Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968, you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger". So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.
1988 election
Atwater's most noteworthy campaign was the 1988 presidential election, when he served as campaign manager for Republican nominee George H. W. Bush.Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis supported a felon furlough program originally begun in 1972, under Republican Governor Francis Sargent. In 1976, the Massachusetts legislature passed a measure to ban furloughs for first-degree murderers, but Governor Dukakis vetoed the bill. Soon afterward, Willie Horton, who was serving a life sentence for first-degree murder for stabbing a boy to death during a robbery, was released on weekend furlough, during which he kidnapped a young couple, tortured the man, and repeatedly raped the woman. Horton then became the centerpiece of Atwater's ad campaign against Dukakis.
The issue of furlough for first-degree murderers was originally brought up by Democratic candidate Al Gore, during a presidential primary debate. However, Gore never referred specifically to Horton. Dukakis had tried to portray himself as a moderate politician from the liberal state of Massachusetts. The Horton ad campaign only reinforced the public's general opinion that Dukakis was too liberal, which helped Bush overcome Dukakis' 17-percent lead in early public opinion polls, and win both the electoral and popular vote by landslide margins.
Although Atwater approved of the use of the Willie Horton issue, the Bush campaign never ran any commercial with Horton's picture, running a similar but generic ad instead. The original commercial was produced by Americans for Bush, an independent group managed by Larry McCarthy, and Republicans benefited from the coverage it attracted in the national media. Referring to Dukakis, Atwater declared that he would "strip the bark off the little bastard" and "make Willie Horton his running mate". Atwater's challenge was to counter the "where was George?" campaign slogan Democrats were using in an effort to create an impression that Bush was a relatively inexperienced and unaccomplished candidate. Furthermore, Bush faced criticism from the Republican base, who recalled his pro-choice positions from the 1980 primary. Additionally, it was believed that the harder the campaign attacked Dukakis's liberal positions, the larger Dukakis's base turnout would become.
During the election, a number of allegations were made in the media about Dukakis' personal life, including the unsubstantiated claim that his wife, Kitty, had burned a United States flag to protest the Vietnam War, and that Dukakis had been treated for a mental illness. In the film Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, Robert Novak revealed that Atwater personally tried, but failed, to get him to spread these mental-health rumors.
The 1988 Bush campaign overcame a 17-point deficit in midsummer polls to win 40 states.
During the campaign, future President George W. Bush took an office across the hall from Atwater, where his job was to serve as his father's eyes and ears. Bush wrote in his autobiography, "I was an allegiance enforcer and a listening ear." In her memoir, Barbara Bush said Atwater and the younger Bush became "great friends."