-Caveat Lector-
http://www.msnbc.com/news/847739.asp?cp1=1
During a speech Thursday, President George Bush rebukes Sen. Trent Lott (right) for
remarks he made at Sen. Strom Thurmond's birthday party
Ghosts of the Past
It was a Washington classic: History suddenly rears up and threatens a safe pol’s
security.
Anatomy of the Lott firestorm
By Howard Fineman
NEWSWEEK
Dec. 23 issue — Mitch McConnell, who loves his role as Washington’s coldest-blooded
tough guy, got right to the point in a cross-country conference call last Friday night
with a
score of his fellow Republican senators. The topic: what to do about The Leader?
TRENT LOTT had just finished his fourth, and most fulsome, apologia for having praised
Strom Thurmond’s stridently segregationist presidential campaign of 1948. Many GOP
bosses —in and out of the White House—still wanted Lott bounced from his role as
majority
leader when the Congress returns next month. Lott, in their view, had come across as
too
much of a “seg,” an embarrassment in a party eager to sell itself as a Big Tent of
“compassionate conservatism.”
As the call began, McConnell—second in command and a Lott ally—delivered a history
lesson. “Leaders who are ousted tend to leave altogether,” he said in his voice-of-doom
baritone. “That is what Newt Gingrich did. That is what Jim Wright did. They don’t
stick
around.” If Lott left, he noted, the Democratic governor of Lott’s home state of
Mississippi
would name one of his own as a replacement. Republicans relishing the return of perks,
power and committee chairmanships could forget it. Instead, they would face the
kiss-your-
sister chaos of a 50-50 Senate. “I was just explaining the history,” McConnell told
NEWSWEEK. Other participants remember the moment differently. “He was raising the idea
that Trent would blow himself up,” said one. Lott, for his part, distanced himself
from the
threat—even as aides still were making it on his behalf. “My term runs through 2006,”
he
told NEWSWEEK. “I intend to serve it, whatever happens.”
This was Lott’s lot late last week: confident enough to discuss the possibility of
losing his
leader’s role—because, his aides contended, he felt he wouldn’t lose it. Still, behind
the
scenes, he was desperately trying to cajole support from colleagues warily assessing
whether the perfect storm that had engulfed him would abate—or sweep him into oblivion.
No one talked of a coup attempt. (“It would be pretty stupid to do that on a conference
call,” said one participant.) But a suggestion for a second meeting-by-phone went
unheeded, as did an idea, floated by a handful of senators in cross talk, for a signed
letter
of support.
MORE POWER THAN FRIENDS
The rise and folly of Trent Lott is a classical Washington saga. Here is the
plotline: A
politician with more power than friends fails to see that times have changed.
Oblivious,
even giddy, he mistakenly calls attention to an obvious fact about himself that the
establishment, for a variety of reasons, has tolerated or ignored. Suddenly, he’s too
outrageous for words, and he becomes the scapegoat for a city determined to show its
moral rectitude. Think: Tony Coelho and money, Gary Hart and sex. And now Lott and the
Southern, segregationist roots of the GOP.
Lott says he won’t quit
December 13, 2002 — Sen. Trent Lott held his first lengthy news conference Friday about
his remarks on the 1948 presidential campaign of now-Sen. Strom Thurmond. NBC’s Norah
O’Donnell reports.
All of Washington understood that Lott, proud of his background in the Mississippi
of the
’50s, was among the last— and most visible—of the Hill barons to have grown up in the
segregated Deep South. He had begun his career as a staffer to an ardently
segregationist
congressman. Blacks have a dim view of his record—against the Voting Rights Act,
against
a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, in favor of racially restrictive policies at Bob
Jones
University. Yet these days George W. Bush is trying to portray the GOP as an inclusive
party,
one that reaches out to all minorities and conveys an aura of tolerance to affluent
white
suburbanites looking for an alternative to the Democrats. With the GOP back in power on
the Hill, and Bush’s pushing centrist themes, Lott was —suddenly in a bigger—more
dangerous—spotlight. “He was an accident waiting to happen,” said a GOP strategist.
The accident happened, the world now knows, at Thurmond’s 100th-birthday party on
Capitol Hill. Thinking he was only among friends—or perhaps in Pascagoula, Miss., in
the
’60s—Lott buttered up the honoree by proclaiming jovially that the country wouldn’t
have
“all these problems” had the Dixiecrats won power in 1948. There were gasps when Lott
uttered his remarks. There was enough of a sense of history in the room to know that
Lott
was praising one of the nastiest, openly racial campaigns of modern times. “People were
shocked,” said conservative Armstrong Williams, who was on hand for the festivities.
INEPT DAMAGE CONTROL
The ensuing controversy gathered force slowly, helped along by some of the most
inept
damage control since the Maginot Line was built. Lott first said, dismissively, that
he was
“winging it”—until it was discovered that he had said the same thing 22 years earlier.
Lott
made this and other press “appearances” by phone while holed up with his wife on
vacation
in Key West, Fla. His aides assured White House officials that he would utter the key
words
“segregation is immoral” on “Larry King,” but he somehow forgot to do so. Bush went
ballistic at this point. He also heard that GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel was about to denounce
Lott.
The president ordered up a harsh condemnation of Lott’s remarks. “Senator Lott has
apologized, and rightly so,” a stern-visaged Bush said. Lott got the message, and
scheduled
his full-dress press conference—with the proper wording included—for the following day.
The usually brotherly Bush failed to praise Lott personally in any way, leaving it to
underlings to issue bland statements of support for Lott as leader. That, in turn,
encouraged many conservatives, including the editors of The Wall Street Journal and The
National Review, to demand Lott’s ouster. But White House officials, afraid of
offending “the
base”—the Southern white conservatives who elected Lott and Bush—were careful not to
openly work for Lott’s ouster. “They don’t want any fingerprints on this,” said one GOP
strategist. Democrats were glad to make trouble, but—on second thought—liked the idea
of
keeping him around as a convenient target.
As for Lott, he sounded like a man trying to stay calm in a hurricane. He’d been
reared in a
different day and time, he said. He wasn’t the angry young man he was—no longer “the
hot-blooded Scot.” “My daughter told me I’m much calmer than I used to be,” he said.
“I’ve
grown more mature and accepting as a result of deepening religious faith.” Now he knew
that his early views were wrong, unacceptable and, yes, immoral. Whether he was telling
the truth about his beliefs was a question to be decided in Another, Better, Place.
For now,
the more urgent issue was whether Lott had testified in time to help himself in
Washington.
With Eleanor Clift and Martha Brant
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
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