Ed Rollins: Hired Gun or Loose Cannon?

Flashback. It’s October 1994. Michael Huffington, “such a complete cipher he gave empty suits a bad name,” sees his chances spoiled in the California U.S. Senate campaign. It is disclosed that his household employed an illegal immigrant.

What does this “carpetbagging megamillionaire” do, as his celebrated campaign manager, Ed Rollins, now tells the story in a memoir that often damns the very candidates he once championed? Huffington blames his wife.

And what does his “scheming . . . ruthless, unscrupulous” wife, Arianna Huffington, do? In secret, she deploys a dozen investigators to dig up similar dirt on Huffington’s opponent, Dianne Feinstein--agents who locate and then deceive Feinstein’s Guatemalan maid into thinking she had inherited $30,000. It is a cruel lie in which a rich man’s campaign toys with a hapless domestic worker to gain photographs of the woman’s immigration papers.

Ah, politics.

Winning is part of the game. But so is getting even. And Rollins, renegade Republican campaign consultant and hard-boiled TV pundit, is out this week to settle some old grudges and confess his sins. Not always in equal measure.

As campaign strategist for Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot, Huffington and many others, Rollins made himself famous and infamous in American politics. Particularly after he guided Reagan to the White House, he became one of the rare few consultants whose profile and reputation sometimes exceeded those of the candidates who hired him.

Now Rollins is setting fire to the last of his bridges in what he says is a valedictory memoir to nearly three decades in campaign politics, “Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms.” Written with journalist Tom DeFrank, formerly with Newsweek, the book goes on sale Wednesday, only five days before the GOP national convention, and is excerpted in this week’s Time magazine.

Other portions of the manuscript provided to The Times--covering the California race and the 1993 New Jersey gubernatorial campaign--read as if they also could be titled, “I’m bad, politicians are worse, and sometimes their families are worst of all.”

A native of Vallejo, Calif., Rollins writes that he accepted the job of managing Huffington’s 1994 Senate race “for the dough” and also to try and regain his reputation after two previous campaigns had left him damaged. Huffington ultimately lost after spending $28 million of his inherited fortune, but remains a name floated from time to time as a possible GOP candidate for high office in California. His wife, meanwhile, has become a notable figure in Washington’s New Right salon politics, as well as a commentator and columnist, whose work appears regularly on The Times’ op-ed page, among other places.

In his memoir, Rollins spares neither, offering a soap opera-noir account of the 1994 campaign in which:

* Huffington confided that he could not release his tax returns because his wife would discover he’s even richer than anyone thought “and try to spend it all.”

* Arianna Huffington was overheard ordering detectives to investigate and prepare a report on journalist Maureen Orth, who was writing a profile of her for Vanity Fair magazine.

* To accommodate Arianna Huffington’s demands, “we were the only campaign in history with an in-house masseuse and personal chef, but no get-out-the-vote effort or field staff.”

* After bruising fights among the Huffingtons and Rollins over the direction of the campaign in its closing weeks, Arianna Huffington turned on the charm and insisted that Rollins stay in the Four Seasons Hotel in Newport Beach and take advantage of her personal masseuse. Then she inquired about the state of Rollins’ marriage and offered “to supply me with ‘company.’ ”

The Huffingtons could not be located Sunday for comment, although messages were left with Arianna Huffington’s answering service.

But another figure mentioned in the manuscript immediately challenged one detail of Rollins’ account. The Times, which Rollins contends “hated our guts,” broke the 1994 story of Huffington’s household worker. Rollins recounts a conversation with reporter Dave Lesher on the afternoon before the article was published in which the reporter declared, “Ed, your candidate’s got a nanny problem.”

On Sunday, however, Lesher said he never spoke with Rollins on that day--that his contact with the Huffington campaign was with Arianna Huffington and a campaign aide.

In the book’s excerpts, Rollins also recognizes but does not resolve one of the contradictions of the modern celebrity hired gun: While supposedly serving democracy, the professional handler also can deepen public cynicism about it. As this book shows, the consultant sells advice but--even in his own mind--not always for public good. And loyalty is not part of the deal.

“I still believe that public office is a sacred trust,” Rollins writes at one point. But later, he describes his client Huffington as one of those “arrogant seekers of power who don’t understand the purpose of government, the value of public trust, or their own responsibilities as caretakers of democracy. Such predators with unlimited resources pervert the political process.”

And Rollins perpetuates the myth that the consultant is not so much a hireling as a demigod. “You alone,” he writes of himself, “make the tactical decisions that win or lose the race.”

That kind of haughty egotism has landed Rollins in trouble before. Two instances, in particular, are recounted in the partial excerpts provided to The Times and the excerpt published in Time.

In 1992, Rollins bolted Republican ranks to co-manage insurgent Perot’s third-party run for the presidency, an impossible match of oversize personalities--the headstrong political insider and the even more headstrong tycoon who professed contempt for politics as usual.

Rollins calls Perot “the wrong man at the right time” who “tossed away” a chance to be president.

Although willing to assist Perot’s ambitions, Rollins writes that the Texas billionaire, the same as Huffington, was unsuited for the office he sought.

“If he had been elected,” the author says of Perot, “. . . his government would have been a managerial disaster. Perot is chemically incapable of delegating authority. He’d have been a little dictator, ruling over government in chaos.”

The next great upheaval in Rollins’ career occurred in 1993 after he managed the come-from-behind campaign of New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. After the victory, Rollins told reporters that the campaign gave $500,000 in “walking-around” money to African American ministers to suppress voter turnout for Whitman’s opponent, Democratic incumbent James Florio.

In a partial mea culpa, Rollins now kicks himself for trying to sound the know-it-all and for his “weakness for grandstanding.” Actually, he writes, he had little knowledge about the supposed payouts, and in any case inflated the amount involved.

At the same time, Rollins sticks more pins in the Whitman campaign, shifting the responsibility for the contacts with ministers to Whitman’s husband and her brother, “who were locked in a close race to see who’d get the prize as the most pompous, abrasive and cocky. . . .”

And what of Rollins next? In his book, he says politics was the most lasting passion in his life. “Now, I’m finished,” he announces.

Well, not quite. His publisher at Bantam Doubleday Dell’s Broadway Books says Rollins is booked next week to be a political commentator on television, looking in on his old friends at the GOP convention in San Diego.