We’re re-upping Matthew Cooper’s April 1989 review of A Season Inside: One Year in College Basketball following the death of its legendary author, the sportswriter John Feinstein at 69. As March Madness approaches, it’s worth remembering how Feinstein transformed sports journalism with his deep reporting and storytelling. In a media landscape where the boundaries between sports, entertainment, and politics have largely collapsed (We hear ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith wants to run for president), Cooper’s observations about access journalism versus critical reporting remain as relevant today as they were 35 years ago.

The Editors

If you haven’t read John Feinstein, you’re missing a lot of fun. He’s one of those writers who loves something so much, and talks about it so vividly, that you can’t help but find yourself caught up in the excitement. This kind of infectious enthusiasm has made him rich in acclaim as the country’s best college basketball writer. It’s made him rich, too. A Season on the Brink, his story of Indiana University coach Bob Knight, rode the Times bestseller list for 25 weeks.

This time Feinstein takes on a broader subject—an entire season of college basketball. By weaving together profiles and you-are-there accounts of games into a diary, he tries to capture what he calls the unique “culture” of the game. During the 1987-1988 season, Feinstein went native. He hung out in motels and locker rooms with officials like Rusty Herring, whose license plate reads “Luv2ref.” He went court-side with lesser players and with stars like Steve Kerr of the University of Arizona whose father, the president of American University in Beirut, had been assassinated; the 22-year-old then had to endure chants of “PLO, PLO” when his team took on rival Arizona State. He studied how Danny Manning’s metamorphosis from great player to great leader took the Kansas Jayhawks to victory in the national championship.

But while Feinstein lauds what’s lovable about college basketball, he barely mentions what ails it—the abysmal SAT scores; the abysmal graduation rates; the drugs; or the insidious effect that big money has on 18-year-old kids and dollar-starved colleges. It’s not that Feinstein is blind to the seamy side of college ball. He covered it for 11 years at The Washington Post and is currently a special contributor to Sports Illustrated. But here he’s chosen instead to celebrate the sport rather than give it the warts-and-all treatment.

Even if it is a one-sided view, other journalists, including those beyond the sports desk, can still find a lot to learn from Feinstein’s dogged reporting, lively style, and, perhaps above all, his acute sense of organizational culture. These qualities are what mark top-notch sportswriting like his—a genre too quickly dismissed by other writers. The condescension toward sportswriters as a gang of good-timin’, would-be jocks found typical expression recently in an editorial in The New Republic. Criticizing the sportswriters’ coverage of the protest of NCAA rules by Coach John Thompson of Georgetown, the magazine opined that recent columns served as “a reminder of why society generally confines sports writers to the sports page.” This back-to-your-locker-rooms-boys view is ironic not least because the qualities that sportswriting embodies—vivid prose, deft narration, point-of-view—are precisely those that good political writers, from The New Republic to the newsweeklies, have increasingly displayed. And others could stand to display it more: even greats like David Broder could learn a trick or two from Feinstein. The opposite is true as well—Feinstein and his sportsdesk colleagues could learn from political skeptics too.

The one lesson political writers don’t need to heed might be called the George Will Fallacy—the idea that sportswriting is best when elevated to the level of parable. (“Life is vain, the world a moral void, the universe an empty shell,” Will writes, in a self-mocking style he can ill afford, since it comes so close to the real thing. “Then proper Americans look toward April, the horizon where the sun will rise. The sun is baseball.”) Will’s baseball chauvinism—flaunted, paradoxically, to prove both that he’s a regular guy and smart—gets impossible to swallow after a while. By writing more about the symbolism of the game than the substance, Will and other intellectuals miss the point about sportswriting: it doesn’t need embellishment to be sophisticated.

Hurling panties

The most obvious thing that grabs you about Feinstein’s book is the sheer number of great lines. “Rollie Massimino of Villanova is known as the Danny DeVito of coaches,” writes Feinstein. “It doesn’t matter how many thousands of dollars he spends on clothes, he always looks like an unmade bed by the end of the game.” And this nuanced notion: “Because basketball is still a newfound obsession in the desert, the crowd at Arizona games is still more innocent than those back East or in the Midwest. . . .Fathers take their sons instead of their bosses.”

Lines like these are part of a rich tradition of colorful sportswriting—a legacy of metaphor and narrative that was a bellwether for the New Journalism. Before there was Tom Wolfe or David Halberstam there was Red Smith, the New York Times sportswriter, who didn’t just describe a deep catch but wrote that the outfielder “stayed aloft so long he looked like an empty uniform hanging in its locker.”

But, beyond the prose, Feinstein has a good sense of organizational behavior. Being a basketball writer means you get to write a lot about teams, about how a group of people get along or don’t get along and why. This seems like an obvious point, but the ability to capture the personality of organizations is a quality that has distinguished political classics like Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus or Teddy White’s The Making of the President—1960, two of the first books to unveil the workings of presidential campaigns. A lot more of today’s political writing has this attention to organizational forces than it used to—think of all the stories about Susan Estrich’s feuding with John Sasso. But a scrutiny of organizational behavior—asking not just what happens but probing the institutional whys—can still be put to much greater use by those who cover politics and government.

When I worked at the Civil Rights Commission between 1984 and 1986, I was amazed at how few reporters, even those covering it as part of a regular beat, conveyed any sense of the internecine warfare in our offices—not just the familiar rankling between commissioners appointed by Reagan and the holdovers from Carter but among Reagan appointees. (Some, for example, opposed all race-preference programs; others took a more case-by-case approach.) It wasn’t until John Bunzel, a Reagan-appointed commissioner, called on Chairman Clarence Pendleton to resign that people got the idea that the Reagan appointees were not a unified block on issues like the ERA or set-asides. What’s more, the palpable tension between careerists and political appointees never seemed to make its way into print.

Feinstein conveys a great understanding of how teams work, especially the intangible, psychological dimensions of the game. Everyone’s heard of the home-field advantage, but Feinstein has the subtlety to point out why it’s such a big deal in college basketball. For one thing, the sport is played on an intimate scale compared to the stadiums that engulf football and baseball, so the crowd is much more of a presence. In such small confines, the special exuberance of a college mob—its bands, its cheers—can really affect a game. In 1984 at Duke, for instance, students hurled condoms and panties at a Maryland player who had been accused of sexual assaults. Rebuked for that, the students came back against North Carolina—skipping the “bullshit” cheer in favor of “We beg to differ,” and, instead of waving their arms at foul shooters, holding up signs saying, “Please miss.” One’s behavior, group or otherwise, is bound to be affected by flying Trojans.

Danny Manning’s laundry

There’s another side to organizational behavior—and that’s leadership and morale. A recent example of the sportswriter’s sensitivity to this was the Sports Illustrated cover story on Mario Lemieux, who’s leading the National Hockey League in scoring. “As Great as Gretzky?” the headline asked, referring to the NHL star, Wayne Gretzky. The author, Austin Murphy, resisted the temptation to write a puff piece on Lemieux, and concluded instead that his occasional slacking off and failure to inspire his teammates makes him less of a player than Gretzky, who brings out the best in his teammates. (After he came to the Los Angeles Kings this year, Gretzky helped make the franchise a respectable second place contender in their division.)

During the basketball season Feinstein covered, nowhere was leadership more important than in the case of Danny Manning, the star of the University of Kansas team.

Before his senior year, Manning was already one of the game’s greats, but until the last season he had been inconsistent. Back when he was the only starting freshman, Manning didn’t take the lead, for fear of riling the older players. And he was easily distracted himself.

By his senior year, the tension between Head Coach Larry Brown and Manning was, as Feinstein describes, almost a Hollywood story of the tough-but-concerned coach who gets his kids to be all they can be. One time Brown came down hard on Manning for not breaking up a locker-room fight. “You sit there and watch like one of the guys,” he told Manning. “Goddamn it, when are you going to realize you’re not one of the guys!”

During the course of the year, circumstances conspired to make Manning a leader. Two of his teammates got hit with injuries, placing even more pressure on him. Also, Manning faced the challenge of playing in the Olympics that summer. And, perhaps most importantly, it was his senior year—the last chance he’d have to take the Jayhawks all the way. What’s more it was the last time he would work with his Dad, who was an assistant coach with the team. Feinstein captures the transition to adulthood with a deceptively simple quote: “I think I’ve grown up a lot,” Manning told Feinstein. “Before, when I needed my laundry done, I took it home and let my mother do it. Now, I do it myself. If I ran out of food, I just went home for dinner. I don’t do that anymore.”

By the time the Final Four rolls around, Manning has hit his stride, scoring 31 points in one game and shouting instructions like a field sergeant. By themselves, the points tell only part of the story; in Feinstein’s hands, the important thing is that chemistry—between coach and star; between star and teammates—explains more than meets the eye. It was the chemistry that was missing from the coverage of the Civil Rights Commission and that continues to be missed in much metro and national reporting.

Obviously, the importance of chemistry can be overemphasized. This year, two winning teams in the National Basketball Association, the New York Knicks and the Detroit Pistons made big trades at mid-season in the hope of gaining an extra edge. The fear among fans in both cities was that the acquisitions would mess up the chemistry. But the former ball player Jerry West described it best when he said that while chemistry is important, talent is more so. Feinstein has a good appreciation of this. There’s a lot of personality in this book, but he’s not so enthralled with the psychological dimension of the game that he forgets to tell you basics, like who can shoot and who can’t.

The rapid deployment force

Where Feinstein goes wrong is where many reporters in all fields have problems: he is too kind to his sources. Not that Feinstein is a deferential kind of guy. His book on Bob Knight captured his notorious chair-throwing temper. But A Season Inside won’t earn Feinstein any threats. Aside from skirting the drug and money and race issues—which is a little like saying, “aside from Watergate”—it’s hard to see why any coach would take umbrage at what Feinstein wrote.

Amazingly, Feinstein goes easy on Lefty Dreisell, the University of Maryland coach who was forced out after the cocaine-related death of star Len Bias. “Dreisell had made mistakes,” is about the harshest thing Feinstein can think to say, adding that the administration shared blame for the abysmal academic standing of players and other problems that emerged after Bias’s death. But even if Dreisell is guilty of what Feinstein allows—failing to watch out for his kids’ grades and recruiting players who were academically unqualified—this is still a heavy burden that deserves more comment. Yet Feinstein devotes most of his chapter on Dreisell to an account of the two of them bar hopping with a pack of fans.

There’s no law that says every piece of writing has to be an expose or a hatchet job. (Indeed, most political reporters have become so cynical that they would feel embarrassed turning out a celebratory book like this.) But Feinstein goes too far—not only failing to give a skeptical, hard-news treatment of the issues raised by Dreisell’s demise but actually lauding him as “funny and charming and self-deprecating.” If you’re going to compose a rhapsody, dedicate it to Fenway Park or something unqualifiedly good.

When it comes to saying nice things about the important source, Feinstein’s not alone. After she finished her three-year stint covering the Redskins for The Washington Post, Christine Brennan wrote a tell-all piece for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Readers were treated to great stories, about players coming on to her, about management’s attempt to quash her stories, about who was decent and who gave her a hard time. Jack Kent Cooke, the team’s owner, sounded half nuts when Brennan tried to interview him about a pending trade. It’s not entirely Brennan’s fault. Had she run with any of those stories earlier, her access would have shut down. But this pressure toward deference is one of the faults of the beat system, and it makes it clear why it’s so important for news organizations to have not only beat reporters but also a rapid deployment force, off the beat, which can burn bridges without regret. Little wonder, then, that Sports Illustrated said that David Halberstam’s book on pro basketball, The Breaks of the Game, “asked the tough questions most NBA reporters are afraid to ask.” Questions about money, race, and the impact of television. Questions that Feinstein poses in only the most superficial way. (Feinstein will occasionally make a snide reference to CBS or Dick Vitale, but that’s about it for how TV affects the game.)

It’s telling that Feinstein never turns his considerable reporting talents on the policy makers in the NCAA. He fires off a lot of quips about silly rules but never seems as comfortable wrestling with academic standards and other questions of policy as he does with the action going on at courtside. In that way, he seems to have much in common with other sportswriters, who are only now starting to write about business and race and other important matters with the sophistication that the best political writers have long displayed.

Despite these flaws, this is a great time of year to read Feinstein, now that the NCAA tournament is underway. It’s also worth picking up because any week now we’re going to get a George Will column about baseball comparing opening day to The Resurrection. Feinstein understands that by just writing about the sport itself in a clear and simple manner, by just telling the story—the reader will know how good it is. That’s Feinstein’s achievement. And it’s a big one.

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Punjab, the state in northwest India where most of the country’s Sikhs live, is in a bloody mess. Last spring Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s central government took control of Punjab, declaring that the Sikh-dominated state government had failed to hold the line against Sikh militants fighting for a separate homeland. Paramilitary forces were increased; restrictions on citizens’ rights were tightened. The result: the killings rose. In 1987,1,230 people were gunned down in Punjab. This year the number of killings already stands at nearly 1,400.

The situation is not one of utter panic. The fields are still being tended, except on farms where whole families have been killed or forced to flee by gunmen. During the day the roads are still choked with the traffic of various centuries: bullock carts, bicycle rickshaws, water buffalo, mini-vans, tractors, and the ever present green trucks of the police and paramilitary. Stores remain open—even liquor vendors, the perennial targets of the militants (fundamentalist Sikhs condemn alcohol consumption).

Historically, invaders from the north and west have had to cross Punjab to get to the rest of India, and Punjabis have developed a certain comfort with weapons and violence. In one ten-block stretch of Amritsar there are five shops specializing in “Guns and Ammo.” Even before the terrorism began, the state had the highest murder rate in India.

But fear is there. It’s not just the number of murders people fear, but the seeming randomness of the attacks. Gunmen commonly spray busy street-sides with bullets. Furthermore—this is what American press reports don’t prepare you for—it’s not just the terrorists people are afraid of; it’s also the police and paramilitary. This is one reason the government is losing the war against the terrorists.

The government did win a major battle in May. For some time hundreds of well-armed militants had been living inside the Golden Temple complex of Amritsar, the Vatican of Sikhdom. This allowed them to force their views on the resident Sikh high priests who formulate the religious and political edicts of the faith. It was also a powerful symbol of defiance to the Gandhi government. On May 9 a militant inside the temple shot and seriously wounded a security officer. That sparked a siege during which government security personnel surrounded the complex, cut off all supplies, and engaged in gun battles. Several days later the last of the militants inside the temple surrendered.

What made the siege remarkable was the government’s restraint. Though a number of militants were killed, there was little damage to the sacred shrine, and were no civilian casualties. In June 1984, when the Indian army faced a similar force of Sikh militants inside the temple, it blasted its way into the complex with tanks, demolishing a revered gold-domed building, the Akal Tacht, the supreme seat of Sikh religious authority. A library that contained sacred Sikh scriptures written by the gurus who founded the religion 400 years ago also went up in flames. Worst of all, hundreds of innocent Sikh worshipers were killed—some, according to a well-documented book by two BBC journalists, by summary execution.

The army’s 1984 excesses fueled Sikh outrage and weakened the case of moderate Sikhs who advise cooperation with the government. The moderates’ work is rendered especially admirable by the militants’ practice of gunning down Sikhs who speak out against them. Even Sikh moderates, though, hype the “threat” that India’s secular democracy poses to Sikh religious identity.

The vast majority of Sikhs don’t support the terrorists or share their desire to secede from India. But nearly all Sikhs have grievances against the government in New Delhi. In 1984 Hindu rioters in New Delhi butchered thousands of innocent Sikhs in retaliation for the killing of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguard. The government’s own commission of inquiry found that the riots were organized with help from members of Gandhi’s ruling Congress (I) Party. Most of the organizers have yet to be tried. There are political grievances too, such as the government’s program of constructing canals to divert local river waters (a major source of Punjab’s famous agricultural abundance) to drier neighboring states.

In July 1985 Rajiv Gandhi signed an accord with the prominent Sikh moderate leader Sant Harchand Singh Lonowal. The accord took courage, and Lonowal paid for his: Sikh extremists assassinated him. The accord then bogged down. The terrorists’ ranks and the killings, which had decreased in 1985, began climbing again.

The government insists that its fight is only with the militants, not the Sikhs—a people who, until a few years ago, were widely admired throughout India. But the cultural defamation and the disregard for innocent lives convince many Sikhs otherwise. At the very least, most Sikhs (and many non-Sikhs) believe that for political reasons the government is purposely mishandling the terrorist problem to keep the crisis going. India is 80 percent Hindu, yet Gandhi—a Hindu—has been losing popular support. A violent religious minority threatening public safety and national unity might lead Hindu voters to rally around him.

Inderjit Kaur, a Sikh mother of four, was one of the worshipers trapped in the Golden Temple during the 1984 raid. Found barely alive, with two bullets in her body, she was taken to a nearby hospital. While recuperating, her name was entered in the official government records as one of the “innocent civilians injured during the army action,”
according to the newsmagazine India Today. Nevertheless, Kaur was later taken to a jail in the city of Jodhpur. There, she and 365 other Sikhs were kept, on vague charges, for almost four years. The “Jodhpur déténus,” as they are known, became a cause celebre with international groups such as Amnesty International as well as among Sikhs, both extremist and moderate. The government used the déténus as a bargaining chip in its negotiations with Sikh political and militant leaders, treating innocent civilians as political bait. Last March, as part of a larger peace initiative, the government released Inderjit Kaur and 39 other déténus. Over 300 remain in jail.

I heard numerous bitter accusations of torture at the hands of security personnel. A journalist in Amritsar who had just visited a nearby jail told us he saw inmates covered with welts. In 1986 a commission sponsored by the state government and headed by a respected former judge looked into reports of torture of Sikhs at an interrogation center in the Patiala district of Punjab. The commission concluded that the reports were true: tactics included the use of electric shocks, fecal matter, and wooden logs that cause great pain, but leave no marks, when rolled across the thighs.

Another practice that does not fill the average Sikh with affection for his government is the so-called “fake encounter”: deliberate killings of suspected terrorists during staged incidents or after capture. The government denies that its forces engage in such tactics. But another 1986 government-sponsored commission found that almost all of the 35 “encounters” it investigated were “faked.” Plenty of the victims are ruthless terrorists whom the government would have trouble prosecuting (the terrorists routinely intimidate witnesses from testifying against them). But such tactics naturally alienate Sikhs. Ashok Singh Bhai, who runs the Sikh Institute in Chandigarh, the Punjab capital, showed me a recent newspaper headline: “12 TERRORISTS KILLED IN PUNJAB, THREE POSITIVELY IDENTIFIED.” “If the police can’t identify whom they’ve killed,” complains Bhai, “how do they know they are terrorists?”

The security forces are trying to do a difficult job in rooting out Sikh militants, and they have the dead troops to prove it. But corruption within the forces, especially among the local police, undermines much of that hard-earned legitimacy. Dr. Shavinder Kaur Jauhal, a Sikh pediatrician from Ferozpur, complained: “The police take bribes. They arrest young men and demand 1,000 rupies for their release. If their families can’t pay, the boys are killed.” Police harassment, according to India Today, “has become a way of extorting money by force that has virtually no checks on it now. ” The Gandhi-appointed puppet governor of Punjab, S. S. Ray, receives hundreds of petitions each day about false arrests and disappearances of innocent people. (Describing his attempts to get close to the people of the state, Ray once said, “I have played tennis in every district in the Punjab.”)

The press in India only occasionally takes on the central government’s repression. American reporters in India almost never do. In April a pro-militant journalist was arrested for doing what a hundred other more objective journalists have done: interviewing terrorists inside the Golden Temple.

An impediment to the press is the lack of reliable, objective viewpoints. The politics of Punjab is a morass; people who criticize government actions, or defend them, usually do so to advance complicated religious or political agendas that have decades- or even centuries-old roots in Punjab history. I was introduced to a Sikh “civil rights” lawyer who said his clients were 300 innocent young Sikh men currently in jail. How did he know they were innocent? I asked. Because, he responded, no one could be found to testify against them. Pointing out that terrorists have been known to intimidate witnesses, I asked if his clients had killed anyone. “Oh yes,” he said, “but only enemies of the Sikhs.” When asked who these enemies are, the lawyer offered as an example “Nirankaris.” Nirankaris are followers of a peaceful sect of Sikhism that orthodox Sikhs consider heretical. The militants have been gunning them down for several years.

Two weeks before the recent siege, my wife and I went to the Golden Temple to talk with one of the militants’ chief spokesmen, Nirvair Singh. He is a leader of the Khalistan Commando Force, one of several armed groups fighting the government. It was evening when we took off our shoes and entered the temple complex. The marble tiles underfoot were still warm from the sun. We could see the temple sitting on an island in the middle of a large pool, its golden image shimmering on the surface of the water. As we moved along the tiled walkway that surrounds the pool we could hear the amplified voices of chanters inside the temple singing ethereal hymns from Sikh scripture. Along the walkways we saw young men wearing blankets across their chests, with rifle barrels poking out of the top.

We were ushered into a room where Nirvair Singh—tall and handsome, in his 30s—stood among a dozen younger bearded-and-turbaned men. Behind them on the wall was
a banner that read “Khalistan Zindabad”—long live Khalistan. Khalistan is the name of the Sikh nation the militants wish to create. “Like others, we are fighting a war of freedom,” Singh declared, “because people of every community have a right to have a place where they can feel free.” Asked how free Hindus and Muslims would be in a Sikh-controlled state, Singh insisted that people of all religions would be able to worship as they please. We then broached the subject of the killing of innocent people. The butchering of entire Sikh families is a gruesome trend that began last fall. Police, of course, blame the militants, who they say are slaughtering families suspected of cooperating with the security forces. Singh, however, claimed that “no true Sikh would kill women and children.” Who, then, is doing the killing? “The government,” Singh responded. “They have Sikhs killed by hired assassins and we are being blamed.”

The “hired assassins” line may sound farfetched, but it is believed by large numbers of non-militant Sikhs, and it’s taken seriously by many I talked to: from moderate Sikh intellectuals and journalists to a Western diplomat specializing in the politics of Punjab. They say the police, paramilitary, and Indian intelligence have organized ex-militants, smugglers, and other criminals willing to kill for money, into an army to hunt down the militants, their families, and other collaborators. In return, the gangs get the freedom to commit money-making crimes unimpeded by the government. After denying this for months, the government recently admitted it had financed and armed one such group. It has not admitted the group killed innocent families, only that the project “went out of hand” and had to be disbanded.

Proof of government complicity in these killings, if it exists, is certainly hard to come by. Steven Weisman, the New York Times’s New Delhi correspondent, told me he went to the village where one of these government “death squad” killings allegedly occurred. The villagers he interviewed gave such wildly different versions of the events— some insisting the killings didn’t even take place in their village—that he gave up on the story.

The killing of families remains a mystery, but it is understandable why the Sikhs put the government on their list of suspects, right beside the militants. If a solution to the terrorist menace in Punjab still exists, it undoubtedly includes the kind of courageous political settlement Rajiv Gandhi tried to bring about in 1985. But such settlements require trust; and with his own security forces jailing, torturing, ransoming, and killing innocent people, the prime minister these days is running a bit short on trust.

Republished with permission of The New Republic.

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One June day two years ago, James Douglas Nichols was pushing 70 miles per hour down a country road not far from his Decker, Michigan farm when he was caught in the crosshairs of a sheriff deputy’s radar gun. The deputy pulled Nichols over and issued him tickets for speeding and for driving without a valid license.

Soon after, before a courthouse hearing in Sanilac County in eastern Michigan’s “thumb,” Nichols offered a bizarre defense of his actions. The government, Nichols insisted, does not have the constitutional power to regulate private citizens in their cars. “I have put everyone concerned here on notice of what is going on here,” declared Nichols with paranoid melodrama, “to violate my rights to free travel as cited in the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of Michigan.”

Presiding District Court Judge James A. Marcus patiently explained to Nichols the long-accepted legal distinction between a private citizen’s constitutional right to travel freely and the government’s legitimate right to regulate the operation of a motor vehicle. But Nichols was not about to buy the judge’s fine distinction; he had done plenty of his own research. Nichols continued his losing protests, citing Supreme Court case after Supreme Court case. “He’d lift a sentence or phrase that he thought was applicable, but he’d do so out of context so that the meaning was completely incorrect or nonsensical,” recalls Judge Marcus.

The Sanilac County courthouse, a gracious brick edifice with a hideous concrete-block addition stuck on the back, is no stranger to twisted logic. Earlier that year, James’s brother Terry Nichols had tried his own hand at finding his salvation in do-it-yourself legal reasoning. He didn’t really owe that $31,000 in bank credit card debt, he announced to the court, because the banks had lent him “credit,” not “legal tender.” He offered to pay with what he called a “certified fractional reserve check,” a worthless piece of paper. “You can’t follow their arguments,” explains Judge Marcus, “because they’re listening to a different music no one else hears.”

But now, after the Oklahoma City bombing, plenty of people are straining to hear the melody. James and Terry Nichols were both picked up after the bombing, though only Terry, and their friend Timothy McVeigh, have been charged with being directly involved. The search for possible motives behind the worst terrorist attack in the nation’s history has turned the nation’s attention to the so-called “patriot movement,” the subculture of shadowy para-military groups and screwball ideas to which all three men were drawn.

The media has portrayed the movement as full of gun-loving, right-wing extremists, and Timothy McVeigh, given his obsession with weapons and Waco, certainly fits that description. But that portrayal obscures a key fact: Most members of the patriot movement are less obsessed with guns than with laws. (James Nichols, for one, never joined a militia.) For every camouflage-wearing amateur soldier drilling on weekends there are several amateur lawyers sitting at home reading federal statutes.

The patriot movement is a loose, motley affair. It includes plenty of racists and anti-semites, but also a good number of people who are not. Much of their ideology can be safely classified as extreme versions of contemporary conservative, anti-government dogma. Yet their absolutist notions about personal liberties put them closer to the ACLU and the New Left than to William Bennett and the Heritage Foundation.

What all “patriots” do seem to share, beyond the well-publicized fear that the federal government is stealing their rights, is a passionate devotion to the precise language of the nation’s founding documents. Imagine Robert Bork and Nat Hentoff dropping acid in the woods and you begin to get the picture.

Better yet, imagine a fundamentalist revival meeting where the Bible is replaced by The Federalist Papers. As I chased the Nichols story around the prairie-flat eastern Michigan farm country on the wind-swept shores of Lake Huron, time and again friends and neighbors of James Nichols would bring up the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or The Federalist Papers, chide me for not having studied them, and quote from them as if from scripture. The religious parallels were unmistakable, even down to the millenarian belief, almost universally shared, that Washington’s attack on individual liberty is a prelude to the imposition of a “New World Order”: a totalitarian, one-world government controlled by the United Nations.

Suspicious, even dismissive, of the interpretations of scholarly priests (i.e. judges), patriots prefer an extreme version of Martin Luther’s “priesthood of all believers” in which each individual can clearly grasp the framers’ intent by reading the sacred texts for themselves. But like Christian fundamentalists, these patriots are guided by an idiosyncratic political agenda. They tend to quote selectively and read literally, “isolating the part from the whole and pretending that there can be only one reading,” notes University of Chicago theologian Martin Marty. They are Constitutional fundamentalists.

One of the movement’s gentler, more thoughtful members is James Nichols’s neighbor and friend Phil Morawski, a bearded, pudgy, vaguely hippyish-looking farmer who sports a cowboy hat with a large silver crucifix and the words “To Live in Christ” scrawled on it. Morawski became a familiar figure on network television in the days after the raid on the Nichols home, speaking to reporters in a Foster Brooks-like hiccupy slur (“He doesn’t drink,” swears another neighbor, “he just talks that way.”) Morawski lives with his mother and brother only a mile south of the Nichols place, on a farm complete with braying goats and a red, American Gothic-style barn. On the barn, in large, faded-white letters, are the words “Happy Birthday America.” Though not a militia member, Moraski says he has attended some of their meetings where he “swore an oath to the Constitution.”

Like most “patriots,” Morawski’s frustration with the federal government arose from a personal trauma. Along with millions of other farmers, he took out large expansion loans at the urging of U.S. Department of Agriculture in the seventies, then found himself buried in debt in the eighties, when land and commodity prices plummeted. He spent years in and out of court fighting the farm credit system, and managed to hold onto his land only by learning the intracacies of agricultural law with the help of various grassroots farm groups, many of which eventually evolved into patriot organizations.

In the process he picked up some odd ideas. Nailed to the front of his farmhouse is a copy of the farm’s title, or “patent,” which the land’s first settlers received from the federal government in the nineteenth century. Morawski and many other patriot farmers firmly believe that the language of these patents exempt them from local zoning ordinances. (Only the courts disagree.)

James Nichols, too, was drawn into the orbit of the patriot movement after a bitter personal legal battle. During a nasty divorce settlement in the late eighties, his ex-wife Kelly accused him of child abuse. Nichols passed a lie detector test and the charges were dropped. But the episode, which included a police search of his house left him feeling both furious and humiliated.

After that, Nichols plunged into the literature of the newly emerging patriot movement. He read the Constitution and The Federalist Papers, along with “Spotlight,” a National Enquirer-like patriot paper, which runs pieces such as an exposé about concentration camps constructed to hold domestic political prisoners. During the winters, with little farm work to do, Nichols curled up with Black’s Law Dictionary and the Uniform Commercial Code, an encyclopedia-length volume of rules that regulate commercial transactions. He was looking, he told friends, for legal means to take himself “completely out of the system.” He attended meetings of We the People, a tax-protest group whose members believe the Federal Reserve system is unconstitutional. Soon, he, too, was marking all his money with a red stamp that said he was not responsible for its value. He even tried to get the county clerk to expunge his marriage license from the public record, and claimed to be “no longer one of your citizens of your de facto government.”

Nichols’ notions were not exactly original. Virtually all of them had roots in the Posse Comitatus, a radical anti-federal-government movement founded in Oregon in 1969 and popular in the rural Midwest during the eighties farm crisis. Posse members believed, among other things, that the Federal Reserve is in the pockets of a cabal of Jewish international bankers and that all constitutional amendments other than the first 10 were written by and for white Christians. The Posse died out in the mid-eighties after some of its leaders were jailed or killed in shoot-outs with federal authorities. But the movement’s legalist protests, such as refusing to carry driver’s licenses and paying debts with “fractional reserve checks,” made their way into the patriot movement and into the minds of the Nichols brothers.

Although he never joined the militia, James Nichols attended several of their meetings, usually to give informational speeches on how to “drop out of the system.” He won few converts. “He’s a little bit farther than we are,” admits Art Bean, commander of the Michigan Militia of Tuscola County (just west of Sanilac County). Not that the militia members are middle-of-the-roaders. Bean, among others, is “very disturbed” by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s statutory language, which he says gives the president the power to declare martial law: “Read the law and make up your own mind.” He fully expects Clinton to use that power before the 1996 election, in part to stop the militias.

In his search for ways to drop out of the system, Nichols came upon the teachings of a radical constitutionalist named Karl Granse. A self-professed legal expert, Granse runs an outfit called Citizens for a Constitutional Republic, headquartered in Apple Valley, an upscale Minneapolis suburb. In the fall of 1994, Nichols and several friends traveled to Minneapolis for one of Granse’s seminars on how to shuffle off the legal coils of taxes and licenses. Nichols returned to Michigan $600 poorer, the price of the weekend lecture plus various books and video-tapes.

Eager to watch one of the videotapes, I went to visit a Nichols friend, Jim LeValley, who had borrowed one. A member of the Michigan Militia, LeValley raises flowers and herbs in a commercial greenhouse next to his home on the banks of the Cass River. He greeted me in a camouflage cap, his boots caked with dirt. We settled into the Ethan Allen furniture in his living room and flipped on the videotape.

On the tape, Granse points to the wall behind him, where an overhead projector displays fragments of statutory language defining those people subject to the federal income tax as “residents of the United States.” He then posits that no one in the room meets the criteria because they live in the individual states. “The ‘United States’ implies more than one,” he proclaims with great flourish, teasing an audience member from Illinois to illustrate his point: “You can either live in the United States or in Illinois. Which is it going to be?. . . You see, we have to stop and analyze the words,” Granse instructs. “Law is a precise language.”

As the tape played on, LeValley told me why he finds Granse’s ideas so appealing. “If you are not part of the corporate entity of the United States you don’t have to worry about the laws set forth by the United States to govern its people,” LeValley explained. “It makes life a whole lot easier.” I thought of W.C. Fields, who once insisted that he had studied the Bible scrupulously for 18 years, looking for loopholes.

When the tape was over, LeValley pulled a dollar bill from his pocket, flipped it over, and pointed to the Latin words beneath the Masonic eyed-pyramid: NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM. “You know what that means?” he asked me. “That means ‘New World Order.’ It means eventually they want us to be in a one-world government. That’s why they want to take away our guns.”

As I drove off, I wondered whether LeValley and his self-taught colleagues would someday see through the patriot movement’s paranoid misreadings of history and the world. It might help if they knew that the words on the dollar bill, a quotation from the Latin poet Virgil meaning “New Order of the Ages,” were chosen not by international conspirators, but by a committee of this country’s first patriots, the revolutionaries who wrote the Constitution.

The post Patriot Games appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On July 16, 2019 retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens passed away. This is a review of his memoir, originally published in 2011.

In an age of judicial philosophies, abstract methods of interpretation, and trite baseball metaphors, John Paul Stevens was a common-law judge. Justice Antonin Scalia practices textualism; Justice Clarence Thomas practices originalism. Chief Justice John Roberts is developing a sort of reactionary legalism. Even the Supreme Court’s liberals have gotten in on the game. In a head-scratching 2005 book, Justice Stephen Breyer professed his theory of “active liberty,” which has not exactly caught on as a beacon for progressive constitutionalists.

Through the din of this nonsense one delighted to hear the strong plain chords of a Stevens, who harkened back to an earlier breed of jurist. His lights were not the socalled “neutral principles” hashed out in law review articles and perfected in warlike opinions by judge-partisans. They were centuries-old practices like judicial restraint, respect for the Court’s precedents and procedures, and, above all, an anachronistic faith in judges’ discretion. In his new book, Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir, Stevens favorably quotes Justice Potter Stewart, who famously said of obscenity, “I know it when I see it.” But where, cry the legal theorists, is the principle in that sort of decision making? Stevens might reply that it’s amazing how many cases a judge will get right when he has no dogma to uphold and no movement to lead.

Stevens’s retirement from the Supreme Court in 2010 after thirty-four years of service was a tremendous loss for the country. As the senior associate justice for sixteen years, he led the liberal wing through the Court’s highest and lowest moments since Watergate. The high point both for the institution and Stevens personally was the trio of war-on-terror cases in which the Court put a stop to President Bush’s lawlessness at Guantanamo Bay. Stevens wrote the two most important opinions—Rasul v. Bush (2004) and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006)—and supervised a majority in a third, Boumediene v. Bush (2008). (He dissented in two other war-on-terror cases in 2004.) The low point was a pair of decisions that might best be described as institutionalized lawlessness. In Bush v. Gore (2000) the Court reached out and handed Bush the presidency, and in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) it struck down most legal restrictions on corporate campaign spending. Stevens issued the two great dissents of his career in those cases, noting pointedly the damage the Court had done to itself. If only he were still there to help with the repairs.

The Court’s liberals stood behind Stevens in Citizens United—as they did throughout much of the 2000s. He proved a canny strategist and leader, assigning opinions in a way that preserved majorities and shaped future coalitions. He secured key victories in decisions limiting capital punishment and permitting affirmative action. In Five Chiefs he implies that he cultivated Justice Anthony Kennedy in gay rights litigation from the mid-1990s. Stevens assigned Kennedy to write the Court’s 1996 opinion in Romer v. Evans, which struck down a Colorado constitutional amendment that targeted homosexuals. He again gave Kennedy the honors in 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated Texas’s antigay sodomy law. It may simply be that Kennedy was the justice least sure of his majority vote and Stevens prudently gave him the assignment to solidify it. Then again, Stevens may have sensed that the subject matter would appeal to Kennedy, who never misses a chance to write for the ages. Regardless, in the gay marriage and Defense of Marriage Act cases that are sure to come, liberals can thank Stevens that we have a good chance at Kennedy’s decisive vote.

This recent leadership was a welcome surprise given that Stevens spent his early years on the Court as an unpredictable maverick. He arrived in 1975 as President Ford’s sole appointment and immediately displayed confident independence tempered with midwestern geniality. He politely declined to join the “cert pool,” by which the justices’ law clerks share the work of reviewing thousands of petitions for the Court’s attention. He dissented prodigiously and made a habit of filing concurring opinions to explain his quixotic views. As his biographers Bill Barnhart and Gene Schlickman note in John Paul Stevens: An Independent Life, during his first three terms Stevens “was the most prolific writer on the Court, authoring 65 dissents, 35 concurrences, and 36 opinions for the Court.” Uniquely among the justices, he did all his drafting himself. “John Paul Stevens has not yet begun to write,” went the saying at One First Street.

Stevens has a rare intellect, but unlike many of his colleagues he wore his learning lightly. Unlike Justices Breyer and Kennedy, he had no continental pretensions and did not look for the opportunity to speak a little French. Justices Roberts and Scalia are both brilliant in their way, yet they manifest that brilliance with disdain (Roberts) and shrill mockery (Scalia) of those who disagree. Stevens quietly but firmly pushed back, proving himself a match for any justice on the Court. In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which overruled a seventy-year-old precedent to hold that the Second Amendment creates an individual right to bear arms, he dissented with a historical analysis more persuasive than Scalia’s. In Five Chiefs Stevens bemusedly describes the “extensive and interesting discussion[s] of history” in Scalia’s opinions while making clear that such methodology is not the talisman that his brethren think. But he could play the game when he had to.

Another fine example of Stevens’s stolid fighting heft is his ninety-page dissent in Citizens United. His opinion was so thorough and devastating that the majority divided the task of responding to it among Roberts, Scalia, and Kennedy, each of whom took on a section. One of the main points of disagreement between the dissent and the majority was the conservatives’ assertion—in the face of 100 years of federal laws and Court decisions to the contrary—that the First Amendment does not permit distinctions between speech by corporations and speech by individuals. After listing an unanswerable litany of major distinctions— including the financial resources of corporations, their limited liability, and their perpetual “life”—Stevens wrote,

The Court’s facile depiction of corporate electioneering assumes away all of these complexities. Our colleagues ridicule the idea of regulating expenditures based on “nothing more” than a fear that corporations have a special “ability to persuade,” as if corporations were our society’s ablest debaters and viewpoint-neutral laws such as [McCain-Feingold] were created to suppress their best arguments.… In the real world, we have seen, corporate domination of the airwaves prior to an election may decrease the average listener’s exposure to relevant viewpoints, and it may diminish citizens’ willingness and capacity to participate in the democratic process.

Five Chiefs is a funny little memoir, as quirky and interesting as its author. Its conceit is a personal history of the Supreme Court arranged through the five chief justices Stevens has known. Two of them—Fred Vinson (who served from 1946 to 1953) and Earl Warren (1953 to 1969)—he knew very little. Vinson led the Court when Stevens clerked for another justice during the 1947-48 term, and Stevens occasionally gave him a ride in his beat-up car. Warren was chief during Stevens’s years of private practice; Stevens argued an antitrust case before him in 1962. Hence the book’s early chapters contain fewer personal recollections and more general remarks on the Court as an institution.

There are some notable early pages, though. Ever opinionated, Stevens levels criticism at two major decisions of the Warren Court. Brown v. Board of Education (1954), he writes, unquestionably reached the right result, but “[u]nlike most admirers of the opinion, I have never been convinced that the benefits of its unanimity outweighed what I regarded as two flaws in the Court’s disposition of the cases.” Namely, the Court held Brown over for an additional term to let the parties debate a remedy, and then it ordered desegregation to proceed “with all deliberate speed”— a famously baffling directive that led to southern foot dragging. Stevens also offers choice words about Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which laid the foundation for Roe v. Wade by invalidating a state law banning contraceptives. Justice Douglas’s opinion relied not on the text of the Constitution but on “penumbras, formed by emanations” that surround the guarantees of the Bill of Rights and “help give them life and substance.” Stevens calls this “virtual incoherence” and would have reached the same result on less mystical grounds.

Stevens joined the Court during Chief Justice Warren Burger’s tenure. Burger has been widely portrayed as a vainglorious boob: pompous, ineffectual in leadership, and incompetent in assigning and drafting opinions. Stevens decorously spends pages praising Burger’s stewardship of the Court’s heritage by commissioning just the right painting and so forth. But then Stevens reinforces the prevailing image by describing the way Burger withheld his views in the justices’ conferences and assigned opinions to himself or to others who did not command a majority, causing confusion and acrimony as a result. Stevens is no Scalia: he does not come right out and call Burger an ass. As he did in his opinions, Stevens makes his point with the subtle but telling comment. He writes that when he joined the Court, Justice Potter Stewart suggested that he “keep in mind the possibility that either the Chief or Harry [Blackmun], or possibly both, might not adhere to the position that he expressed at conference.”

The best sections of Five Chiefs concern the Court under the leadership of William Rehnquist and John Roberts (1986-2005, and 2005 to the present). Stevens genuinely liked both men and found them to be excellent administrators. Here, as elsewhere, the biggest value of Five Chiefs is its anecdotal color in filling in our understanding of the Court and its members. In a section on Bush v. Gore, Stevens recounts a story about the night Bush’s petition to halt the Florida recount arrived at the Court. Stevens happened to bump into Justice Breyer at a Christmas party; “we had a brief conversation about the stay application. We agreed that the application was frivolous.” The two parted ways “confidently assuming that the stay application would be denied when we met the next day.” The Court’s conservative majority thought otherwise and halted the recount in a flurry of opinions. Stevens concludes, with an understatement that belies the power of his famous dissent, “To the best of my knowledge no Justice has ever cited any of them. What I still regard as a frivolous stay application kept the Court extremely busy for four days.”

Similar comments reveal the limits of Stevens’s regard for Roberts. Stevens, a Chicagoan, built a vacation home in Michigan City, Indiana, in 1961. In 1969, he writes, “John Roberts was a high school freshman in a boarding school in LaPorte, Indiana,” only a few miles away from Michigan City. Stevens swore in the young chief justice, who told the Senate that judges, like umpires, merely call balls and strikes. Every lawyer in the country who heard that statement knew it was cant—especially Stevens, who was there at Wrigley Field in 1932 to see Babe Ruth call his shot. An umpire can’t send you to Guantanamo for the rest of your life with a sack over your head.

While Stevens clearly respects the abilities and achievements of both Rehnquist and Roberts, he uses Five Chiefs to dismantle several of their decisions. For Rehnquist he focuses on the trigger-happy death penalty jurisprudence and, more esoterically, the late chief’s enthusiastic development of the doctrine of sovereign immunity, which prevents individuals from suing state or federal governments and has frustrated many a civil rights plaintiff. Stevens contends that Rehnquist’s Eleventh Amendment cases—in which the Court constitutionalized the sovereign immunity doctrine without much regard for the amendment’s text—was the worst mistake of Rehnquist’s tenure.

For Roberts, Stevens singles out a case that was decided after his own retirement. In Snyder v. Phelps (2011) the Court overturned a jury verdict in favor of a plaintiff whose son’s military funeral was heckled by religious fanatics bearing posters saying “God hates fags” and “Thank God for dead soldiers.” The father sued under the tort doctrine of intentional infliction of emotional distress, but the Court held, 8-1 behind Roberts’s opinion, that the protesters’ speech was protected by the First Amendment. Stevens makes clear that he would have joined Justice Alito’s dissent. Common-law judge that he was, Stevens eschewed simple line-drawing for a detailed analysis of each case’s complexities. In Five Chiefs he notes a critical distinction overlooked by the Snyder Court:

It is easy to gloss over the difference between prohibitions against the expression expression of particular ideas—which fall squarely within the First Amendment’s prohibition of rules “abridging the freedom of speech”—and prohibitions of certain methods of expression that allow ample room for using other methods of expressing the same ideas.

In other words, the Court could have prevented the protesters from speaking at a certain location—a funeral—without taking the prohibited step of preventing them from uttering a certain message. The protesters could have said the same vile things elsewhere.

Both Snyder and Citizens United are First Amendment cases, and in them Stevens argues for less speech rather than more. This does not exactly put him at the vanguard of liberal constitutionalism. Nor did his dissents in the flag-burning cases of 1989 and 1990, in which he criticized the Court’s judgment that federal and state laws protecting the flag are unconstitutional. It is far more common in our legal tradition to celebrate First Amendment absolutists like Hugo Black than jurists who treat that provision with anything like nuance.

And therein lies Stevens’s tremendous appeal as a judge—regardless of whether one agrees with all of his decisions. He was an absolutist about nothing. Absolute positions on the law—be they on the subject of free speech or the framers’ intent—often require the judge to set down reason and common sense so that he can hold a banner with both hands. It is therefore unsurprising that the one justice about whom Stevens has no kind words in Five Chiefs is Clarence Thomas, who is more rigid in his vision of the Constitution than perhaps any justice in the Court’s history. If the Tea Party has taught us anything, it is that the absolutists will shout past each other until the whole damn operation grinds to a halt. Without Stevens, the Supreme Court is that much more likely to do the same thing.

The post Justice Served appeared first on Washington Monthly.

His name, you notice immediately, is nearly an American hero’s.

Rep. Patrick McHenry, 29-years old and a freshman Republican Congressman, is sitting calmly in front of an “ABC World News Tonight” camera, his prematurely grey hair parted on the side and pulled thick over his scalp. He is waiting for the show to begin. It is mid-July and a particularly perilous political moment. The House majority leader and conservative power broker, Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), is in hot water for taking a series of ethically sketchy trips–to the Mariana Islands, to Scotland, and to Russia–funded by lobbyists whose clients happen to have benefited from loopholes DeLay helped write into federal law. Even for Congress, this is shameless stuff and, with rumors of an indictment imminent, many conservatives are backing away from DeLay. But if the House leader has a more committed supporter on the planet Earth than Patrick McHenry, he is certainly not an elected member of the United States Congress. McHenry is one of only 20 Republican representatives who signed on with DeLay’s ultimately failed attempt to rewrite the House ethics process to grant himself effective immunity from indictment. DeLay needs something–a diversion, dynamite in the distance.

And here is McHenry. As the camera turns on, his face snaps into a bank teller’s automatic smile. McHenry is the kind of young person whom other young people can’t stand because he comes across as if he’s been prepping his whole life to be 40. His voice is high-pitched, his tone world-weary, measured, sighingly cynical. Twenty-nine years old, he’s seen it all before. “This is just the pot calling the kettle black,” he says, arguing that Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also took a trip she didn’t fund herself. This is the Republican line of the day, even though Pelosi’s trip was a non-profit-funded visit to a U.S. naval base while DeLay’s was a St. Andrews golf vacation financed by indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Nevertheless, McHenry’s eyebrows temple upwards, neat geometries of piety. “They call their own failure to disclose travel a mere oversight. But when Republicans do it, they call it an ethical scandal.” Dynamite in the distance. The news report pivots, and ABC correspondent Brian Ross spends most of the rest of the segment affirming that Democrats, too, have taken some trips they haven’t paid for. A pox on both their houses. For McHenry, this is mission accomplished.

No political movement can survive on talking points alone. It requires an endless succession of faces, flesh and bone, elected officials willing to impose their smiling mugs in front of the camera even when the talking points are ridiculous. In the nine months since he came to Washington, McHenry has cultivated a role as a kind of fraternity pledge for the House leadership, willing to do the dirty work on behalf of crusades that the rest of his caucus will no longer touch. He was still pumping Social-Security privatization this summer, months after the GOP leadership had given up on the bill. He was still attacking Terri Schiavo’s husband after other Republicans, with an eye toward opinion polls, clammed up. And in June, he was summoned by the cable networks to defend Karl Rove after it began to appear likely that the president’s chief strategist had identified Valerie Plame as a CIA agent while talking to reporters.

McHenry is perhaps the most successful and precocious of the endless string of those guys, the youngish Republican representatives who show up on cable television to defend the indefensible. But McHenry has also mastered, far more quickly than most, the inside game, the art of cultivating personal relationships with the powerful. Soon after moving to Congress, McHenry hired Grover Norquist’s press secretary as his own. More recently, he’s been dating Karl Rove’s executive assistant.

For his labors and for his promise, McHenry has won committee assignments and leadership positions like a row of shined medals, commemoratives for heroisms rendered. He’s the only freshman to be part of the majority whip’s team. He is co-chair for communications of the National Republican Congressional Committee, an exalted post that entitles him to help frame the national message for GOP candidates around the country. “He’s got an awful lot of promise,” House Majority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told National Journal for a profile headlined “Boy Wonder.” He has shared the stage with President Bush at the insurance industry’s annual convention. Both DeLay and the man who replaced him as House Majority Leader, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), have hosted fundraisers for McHenry, a rare privilege for a freshman. A puffy Weekly Standard piece praised McHenry’s “tenacity.”

When Newt Gingrich brought the Republican Party back to power in the House in 1994, he did it with a phalanx of gate-crashers–dentists, insurance agents, small businessmen–political rookies and ideologues, many of whom have recently been at odds with DeLay and the spendthrift House leadership. A decade on, the revolution has calcified into what is less an ideology than a system, a cluster of organizations that manage power and careers–a political machine. Like most of the post-Gingrich generation, McHenry’s ultimate loyalty is less to principle or ideology than to the machine itself.

To understand the values and pathologies of an organization, it often helps to follow the career path of its most precocious stars. Henry Blodget, the famous late-1990s Wall Street TV analyst, made it by grasping that his employer, Merrill Lynch, wanted him to talk up stocks that his firm had an extra hidden financial interest in selling to an investing public eager to believe the normal rules of share prices were suspended. Similarly with Sammy Glick, the fictional young Hollywood up-and-comer in Budd Schulberg’s satirical novel about the 1930s movie business What Makes Sammy Run?, who figures out that stealing scripts and snitching on members of the nascent screenwriter’s union is the way to get ahead in the studio system. Patrick McHenry is the Henry Blodget, the Sammy Glick of Republican power in Washington. “What Patrick understands is the same thing that George Bush understood,” the omnipresent conservative power broker Grover Norquist told me, “which is how the modern Republican Party works.”

“You had to hand it to him. He was always improving. I mean, he was becoming more and more expert at being Sammy Glick. The way he was telling this story, for instance. He wasn’t outlining it, he was acting it. What the story lacked in character and plot his enthusiasm and energy momentarily overcame.” –Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

McHenry represents North Carolina’s 10th congressional district, an in-between place where the hollows and dipping roads of Appalachia drop down into the golf courses and big lawns that spiral out from Charlotte. The district is caught in an aspirational middle zone, too: On a dark back road with a house maybe every half mile, with the lawns only mowed now and then and fingers of grass lingering listless upright in the heat like the unemployed, there’s a wood sign tacked to a tree, the kind of sign that in a Bugs Bunny cartoon would say, “Moonshine this-away.” But instead it says, “Cherryville Golf Shop.” The Almanac of American Politics has called the Tenth the “most blue-collar district in America.”

Historically, at least, that’s on account of the old textile mills, great long brick masses with broken windows, slung along the train tracks. The mills have been shut down for decades now, the work long since sent off to Mexico or China. But they have left this district with a particular quirk. The people who live here, many of them descendents of the mill workers who now commute to service jobs in Charlotte suburbs, still bank with the credit unions that originated in the mills, taking advantage of the better loan terms that tend to come from non-profit financial institutions. This is significant because one of the first bills authored by McHenry, whose district has 172,000 credit union members, would make it much harder for government to regulate or block the conversion of credit unions into banks, a process that tends to benefit the credit union’s directors (who get to cash in stock options and can sometimes make millions) and hurt the union’s members, who can no longer borrow and save at the same generous terms.

McHenry’s credit union bill, a high priority for the banking lobby, has received strong backing from DeLay. The Republican leadership awarded McHenry a seat on the House Financial Services Committee upon his arrival in Washington. “Most people would say it’s the most plum assignment you can get,” one conservative lobbyist told me, “because you can leverage it to do so much in fundraising.” But first you have to prove yourself. Asking McHenry to author a bill that undermines the interest of half his constituents is the political equivalent of demanding a young Mafia enforcer kill his cousin as a test of loyalty. “It’s a bill that a lot of us are watching,” a conservative activist from Mecklenberg County who has been skeptical about McHenry told me. “It’s pretty clear that here McHenry is picking Washington over his district, and we’re interested to see if he pays any price for it.”

The crowd that fills an old textile mill in Morganton, N.C., in early August to meet with McHenry is comprised mostly of elderly supporters, with one exception: a clutch of young, well-dressed women at the back, stickers pasted to their lapels, the hand-printed word “bank” with a crude red slash through it. During the question-and-answer session, they stand up and speak, a few in turn. They’re members of local credit unions, they tell McHenry, and worry that their credit union could now convert to a bank, leaving them high and dry. The older ladies and gents at the front of the room turn around, a little befuddled; so far, they’ve been nodding agreeably every time the sweet-faced young man tells them he’s been cutting their taxes; this is an unexpected bit of controversy.

McHenry handles it expertly. As the women at the back of the room speak, he nods constantly to show he’s taking them seriously; and when he begins to speak, McHenry commands the room, his hands moving forward to punctuate each essential word, model U.N.-style. He’s spoken with the leadership of their particular credit unions, the Congressman says, and the leadership strongly supports the bill. (That these credit union managers stand to benefit financially if their institutions convert into banks, he does not mention.) Credit union members may not be completely aware of the provisions of his bill; in any event, he’d be happy to “get with you” afterwards, to talk through the technical details of bank conversion. Then, with the room still unsettled, McHenry smoothly moves the discussion back to safe ground, focusing on big, national topics–the plans Republicans have for major tax cuts, for Social-Security reform, for defending marriage. The room bursts into spontaneous and lavish applause. There’s something openly paternal about the way the crowd reacts to him–they want to like him, want him to be doing good, this kid with their values, their politics, these hills in his veins.

“The first time I saw him he couldn’t have been much more than sixteen years old, a little ferret of a kid, sharp and quick. Sammy GlickAlways ran. Always thirsty.” Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

As it happens, McHenry’s not even really from this district. He grew up in suburban Charlotte, the son of the owner of the Dixie Lawn Care Company, and after high school enrolled at North Carolina State. There, involved in politics, he displayed an early aptitude for translating conservative politics into street theater; in 1997, a sophomore, he stood on a Raleigh avenue as President Clinton’s motorcade passed, a bearded Abe Lincoln mask over his head, and held a sign saying, “Who’s sleeping in my bed?”

Halfway through his college career, McHenry left N.C. State, transferred to tiny Belmont Abbey College, and moved into a house off campus in the small nearby town of Cherryville. For a young man on the make, the move seemed an odd choice. Cherryville is a little, unprosperous town with nowhere to go and nothing to do, a place where middle-aged men walk along the side of the highway because the car broke down again. The town, in other words, is the kind of place that animates the nightmares of college juniors. As a long-term political strategy, however, the move made sense. The part of suburban Charlotte where McHenry had grown up was and is represented by a young, well-liked conservative, Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) who figured to be around for a while. Cherryville was just across the border in a solidly conservative district whose man in Washington, Rep. Cass Ballenger (R-N.C.), was into his eighth decade and whose career seemed to be winding down. And this very conservative town was represented in the State House by a Democrat.

At Belmont Abbey, McHenry moved quickly. “He always managed to get his work done… but he made it clear from the beginning that he was going to miss a lot of classes, that his political work came first,” McHenry’s advisor, history professor Francis Murray, told me. Soon after arriving at Belmont Abbey, McHenry founded the school’s College Republican (CR) chapter, then launched a winning campaign for chairman of the state CR organization.

The College Republicans have legendarily been the starting point, the training and networking ground, for the careers of all of the party’s most influential activists: Lee Atwater, Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove. And producing Roves and Atwaters, tactical geniuses and election-winners, is exactly what the organization is set up to do: The organization is a four-year crash course in how to win votes from conservatives, in electioneering, with its members running endlessly for College Republican state board, College Republican state treasurer, College Republican national committee. There’s a balls-out element to these contests, to the infighting; when I talked to College Republicans in North Carolina, I heard constant, ridiculous allegations thrown at rivals within the organizations. This rival had an illegitimate son in Tennessee, that one paid for an abortion for some poor girl from Missouri. When I asked an innocent question about a network of political consultants in Raleigh, one College Republican stopped me immediately: “Surely you must have heard,” he said ominously, his drawl thick, “about them bisexual orgies.“

This training served McHenry well when, midway through his junior year, he declared his candidacy for the state House of Representatives. His opponent in the primary was a man named David Cline, a former county commissioner. McHenry prevailed upon College Republicans from around the state to volunteer, going door-to-door, and claimed in the course of his campaign that he was the most conservative candidate. The proof? He’d never voted to raise taxes, and once, as a county commissioner, Cline had. Cline said, essentially, of course he’s never voted to raise taxes, he’s a college junior. Didn’t matter; the charge stuck–McHenry won. In the general election, he faced off against a connected, conservative Democrat, a businessman, Rotarian and ex-County Commissioner named John Bridgeman. McHenry, who seems to have been working from a limited bag of political tricks, claimed he was the most conservative candidate in the race. When that didn’t work, he tried to link Bridgeman to the scandal-ridden Bill Clinton, charging that because Bridgeman was a Democrat, “he supported selling out the Lincoln bedroom.” McHenry–keep in mind, a 21-year-old college student–lost. Bridgeman had managed to raise far more money, and one of the critical lessons McHenry’s friends and advisors drew from the race, one told me, was that “Patrick had to get better at fundraising.” Soon after he graduated from Belmont Abbey, he moved to Washington.

“It’s queer to think how many little guys there are like that, with more ability than push, sucked in by one wave and hurled out by the next, for every Sammy Glick who slips through and over the waves like a porpoise.” Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“It wasn’t like he was a Bill Gates, someone who was the smartest guy in the room or the most charismatic guy in the room or something like that,” Dee Stewart, McHenry’s former chief of staff and longtime political consultant, told me. “But he did something else just as special: He figured out what the system was, and he worked it harder than anyone I’ve ever met.”

McHenry’s first full-time job in Washington was with the conservative communications group DCI. It was quite a choice. If there is a center to Washington conservative dark arts, DCI is pretty much it. They were paid consultants, for instance, to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth last year, although they are most known for attacking fellow Republicans. DCI’s founder is Thomas Synhorst; his expertise lies in “astroturfing”–developing fake grassroots groups to front for conservative and corporate causes–and “push-polling,” a subtle technique that can impart damaging information about a rival candidate in the guise of a hypothetical question for a poll. Synhorst conducted, for instance, push-polls for Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in 1996, in which Iowans were asked if they would be more or less likely to vote for Steve Forbes if they knew that the candidate had a “promiscuously homosexual father.”

This was McHenry’s political finishing school. The recent graduate started work at DCI’s New Media division in the fall of 1999; his main project was running a Web site, NotHillary.com, which peddled rumors that Hillary Clinton would run for president in 2000 in order to drum up conservative campaign contributions. Meanwhile, DCI was working for Karl Rove; Synhorst’s group helped defeat Sen. John McCain in South Carolina that year with a series of notorious push-polls that, among other things, called McCain “a liar, a cheat, and a fraud.” By June, with McCain no longer a factor and Bush breezing towards the nomination, McHenry used his connections to get an interview with Rove, who hired him to be the National Coalition Director for the Bush-Cheney campaign.

After the election, McHenry looked around for his next step. When a new administration sweeps into power, young partisans start looking for plum jobs–flipping through a book that is literally plum-colored to search for political appointee slots. The most coveted are jobs as “special assistants.” Such positions require no substantive experience but put a young person in the room with an agency’s principal decision-makers. They are also assignments that cannot be won without highly-placed contacts. So, when McHenry soon turned up as special assistant to the new Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao, the wife of influential Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), it caught the attention of some powerful conservatives. “He had a reputation that preceded him,” Norquist told me. “I was hearing from friends that Patrick was a rising star long before I met him.”

There is a streak of impatience, urgency, get-aheadness that runs throughout McHenry’s young career; he habitually stays at jobs for six or eight months, long enough to add a line to his resume, make the necessary contacts, and then move on. McHenry stayed with Chao for less than six months; his credential in hand, he returned to North Carolina and began scoping out a second run for the Statehouse. He used the same tactic–claiming he was the most conservative candidate in the race–and with a weak field of candidates, he won. He spent the first half of 2003 attacking the moderates who ran the Statehouse when, almost as if on schedule, the local congressional seat opened up. The incumbent Ballenger had been making increasingly odd public statements (among other things, he attributed the breakup of his 50-year marriage to the presence of an American-Islamic relations association next door to his house) and soon was coaxed into retirement. Congressional seats don’t come open too often in the one-party precincts of the South. Six months after he had taken his seat in Raleigh, McHenry announced that he was running for Congress.

At 27, McHenry was only two years above the constitutional age requirement for running for Congress, though with his prematurely graying hair he could pass for 35. His real problem was that he had never worked a day in his life in the district as an adult. McHenry needed to get something relevant into his resume, quickly. So he took an alternate route: In the fall of 2003, he sat for the real estate licensure exam and, almost instantly, Patrick McHenry the political operative became Patrick McHenry the realtor, proprietor of “McHenry Real Estate.” He didn’t appear to do much business–local newspapers list no transactions and note that the “company phone number” he listed for state records was actually his personal cell phone–but “McHenry Real Estate” gave his campaign room to claim that he was the “one small businessman in the race.”

Most politicians also need a local reputation, an organization, contacts, and a profile. McHenry didn’t have much local profile–he was, his consultant Stewart says, “virtually unknown” in the district when his campaign began, having represented only 2 percent of it in the Statehouse. In contrast, also running for the Republican nomination were two local businessmen–Sandy Lyons and George Moretz–who were able to self-finance their campaigns, as well as David Huffman, the popular, 24-year sheriff of Catawba County.

That, according to the old rules of politicking, would have been that. The young up-and-comer would have been told–or made–to wait his turn while the more experienced men fought to claim their right to the district. But McHenry understood the new, emerging set of political rules. He may have been unknown in the district, but McHenry was known in Washington. Soon after he officially declared his candidacy, checks were coming in from conservative godfathers such as Norquist and from the PACs of powerful lobbies such as the American Medical Association and the National Home Builders Association. And while McHenry couldn’t count on much of a local volunteer base, he could draw on his national contacts to staff his campaign with College Republicans. Volunteers from Alabama, Texas, and Missouri came to help out. In the North Carolina chapter, he brought in “what must have been every CR in the state,” one volunteer told me, to knock on doors. When this seemed as if it might be coming up short, he applied another rule of Rove’s GOP: Rules are made to be broken. His friends at the College Republican National Committee arranged to send 70 paid field operatives to work the district–a trip that may have violated the group’s bylaws, which forbid the organization from taking a position in primaries. McHenry snuck into second place and a runoff against Sheriff Huffman.

Sheriff Huffman occupies a position on the political spectrum that might fairly be called lethally conservative. “Patrick’s people called me anti-gun,” he complained to me, “but I was the only sheriff in the state to vote to make it legal to carry a concealed weapon without a permit.” This is an obvious point of pride for the sheriff. In the two-man race, he was the more established, the more well-known, and had staked out a political slot that was almost unimaginably right.

So how did McHenry convince voters he was the most conservative candidate? He simply said so. “It was our mantra,” Elizabeth Beck, a former campaign worker and then-president of the UNC-Charlotte College Republicans, told me. “We told voters Patrick was the most conservative candidate in the race, that he was anti-tax, anti-gun control, and anti-abortion.” The swarms of College Republicans also hustled: “We’d go knock on doors at 9 in the morning, and a lot of these places up in the rural areas seemed like it had been years since someone had knocked on their door–I never got turned away.” Once inside, the College Republicans opened up campaign-bought portable DVD players and let McHenry’s recorded address play away.

McHenry, a Catholic in an overwhelmingly Protestant district, also started attending Baptist youth groups. “I knew he was against abortion and against the homosexual agenda,” Pastor Ruffin Snow, a Baptist minister from Hickory who is considered a major power broker in McHenry’s district, explained to me. “But with him being Catholic, the most important thing was I asked him, actually, the same question I’m fixin’ to ask you, Ben. I asked him, Patrick, if God were to call you today and ask you whether you deserved to go to heaven, would you be able in your heart to tell him you did? Because,” the pastor added with a sly hint of the deep and dark, “everyone spends eternity someplace.” Pastor Snow let that sink in and continued: “And Patrick said to me, ‘yes, because even though I’m Catholic I’m also born-again, I’ve accepted Christ into my heart.’ And that was good enough for me.”

After a bitter election campaign, in which Bob Novak echoed the McHenry campaign’s cooked-up charges of ethical improprieties against Huffman and the sheriff charged his challenger with throwing beer parties for underage students, McHenry won the run-off by 85 votes out of 30,000 cast, and trounced his Democratic opponent in November to win the congressional seat.

“There is no word in English to describe it. You could say gloat, smile, leer, grin, smirk, but it was all of those and something more, a look of deep sensual pleasure.” –Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

Congress! McHenry arrived already a celebrity, thanks to his youth. C-SPAN recorded McHenry and his staff–virtually all of whom were fellow former College Republicans–setting up their office. In a first-day profile, the Winston-Salem Journal noted that McHenry had been more or less waiting for this moment since high school. When the youngest member of the 109th Congress headed for his first vote, “That’s when it hits you like a freight train,” he told the paper. “This is the first time you realize the responsibility voters have given you.” The first vote he had to cast was for speaker, a foregone conclusion. “When they called out my name,” McHenry told the Journal, “I stood up and said loudly, ‘Hastert.’”

“What stood out about Patrick from the beginning,” Charles Symington, the influential head of Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America’s government affairs program, told me, “was he was interested not only in policy but also in politics, that he was willing to work hard and fight on behalf of the Republican leadership.” The only thing that seemed strange, a conservative activist in North Carolina told me, was that “Patrick and his staff still seemed to have what you could call an obsessive involvement in College Republicans–this was a sitting Congressman and his staff, mind you, and they were making calls to try to go behind the scenes and figure out who was getting elected to the state board, kid stuff like that, what seemed like every week. It was odd.”

The shape of the College Republican national organization was beginning to shift, mud underfoot, the friends and allies McHenry had made were losing influence and power. During the lead-up to the 2004 election, the College Republican National Committee (CRNC) sent out a fundraiser that specifically targeted, as The Washington Post put it, “elderly people with dementia,” and misled them into thinking they were sending money to President Bush’s reelection campaign. The letter became a low-level scandal in the national press, a story helped along by the pathos of the victims: elderly conservatives with little to live on who were sending their savings on to a bunch of bow-tied college kids, smirking at their swelling bank accounts. But things really hit the fan when the letter’s author, a University of South Dakota senior named Paul Gourley (a close friend and ally of McHenry’s), announced he was running for national chairman, and a series of quick endorsements by the outgoing CRNC National Chair and the leaders of major state delegations followed. An outraged caucus within the CRNC came together behind an insurgent, Michael Davidson.

College Republican campaigns are big money–costs can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the rewards are big, too: The chairman, who gets a $75,000 salary and benefits, manages a paid staff with an annual budget of $2 million in salary and expenses. And the fundraiser was seamy stuff, the kind of thing that elected officials fight like hell to distance themselves from. National political figures from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, to Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Texas Gov. Rick Perry endorsed Davidson. The House Ways and Means Committee Chairman, Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), even held a fundraiser for him. At the convention, things got competitive, then grotesque. Convention speakers were deleted out of the program at the last minute, replaced by figures who supported Gourley. Delegations switched allegiances for mysterious reasons in the dead of night; virtually everybody accused virtually everybody else of being gay. As The New Republic‘s Franklin Foer reported in a recent account of the CRNC convention, the Gourley-Davidson contest began in earnest after Norquist reminded delegates from the podium that “there are no rules in a knife fight.”

This was when Patrick McHenry, sitting in his congressional office, picked up the phone. The tradition in Congress has been that it’s perfectly fine to endorse candidates, but it’s a little below the office to get personally involved in the organization’s races. But like his mentors in the Republican leadership, McHenry wasn’t much for tradition. North Carolina’s College Republicans had endorsed Davidson, and so McHenry and his chief of staff, Jason Deans, began to phone the leaders of the North Carolina College Republican chapters, asking for them to change their vote. “Patrick said that he had only won the election because of the field reps the [College Republican National Committee] had sent, that Davidson wouldn’t send them again, and that Patrick wouldn’t win reelection without the field reps, and if we wanted Patrick to stay in Congress, we’d back Gourley,” Elizabeth Beck, then the chair of the College Republican chapter at UNC-Charlotte, told me. In other phone calls, McHenry was more blunt: “He told me, and several of my friends that we were done in politics if we didn’t support him,” another College Republican chapter president told me. (McHenry has admitted that he and Deans made the calls but denied that they threatened anyone’s career). Over the course of two weeks, after a couple of a dozen calls, McHenry prevailed upon those in the North Carolina delegation to change their votes, removing three votes from Davidson’s column and putting them in Gourley’s. Gourley ended up winning by six votes; had North Carolina voted the other way, Davidson might have won.

In late September, the day after Tom DeLay was indicted for criminally conspiring to funnel corporate money into state elections, New York Times columnist David Brooks tried to cast a hopeful spin on the situation, declaring: “The old team is dead.” He meant that the indictment signaled an end to the kind of political world in which McHenry had ascended, where “loyalty to the team matters more than loyalty to the truth.”

Dead? Well, maybe. But there remains a whole generation of conservatives in Washington who came up through that system and who have rallied to defend it. That includes McHenry, who appeared on FOX News the night that the indictment was announced to debate his 68-year-old Democratic congressional colleague Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.). The two batted their talking points back and forth–“it’s a culture of corruption”; “no, it isn’t”–when McHenry hit a little lower. Interrupting Pascrell, McHenry said he couldn’t believe someone from New Jersey had the nerve to talk about ethics. Pascrell blew up, as did most of the Garden State delegation. McHenry later apologized to Pascrell privately, but never publicly. And the attack did nothing but burnish his image among fellow conservatives as a nervy team player.

“You know, I see him as someone who could someday be vice president,” McHenry’s political consultant Dee Stewart tells me. “Not president, because you’ve got to be more bipartisan for that, but a vice president, someone who could become a conservative legend.”

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