Robert Strauss

‘I don’t have the faintest idea who the next president will be,” House Speaker Jim Wright once cracked, “but I know exactly who the president’s best friend is going to be: Bob Strauss.”

Over a span of four decades, that was often true. When trouble hit, President Lyndon B. Johnson turned to his fellow Democrat. So did President Jimmy Carter. So did a couple of Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Blessed with a canny sense for both politics and poker, Robert S. Strauss was their “go-to” man, someone who could quietly broker a deal behind the scenes, protect a confidence and, all the while, deliver up a rich brew of wisdom and humor.

Strauss became a legend in Washington, the “insider’s insider,” as a journalist called him. Born in West Texas, he graduated from the University of Texas law school in 1941 and later helped elect his classmate, John B. Connally, governor of the state. Connally made him chairman of the Texas Banking Commission, and with the accession of LBJ to national office, both began migrating toward Washington.

After two consecutive Democratic debacles--the party convention in Chicago in 1968 and Sen. George S. McGovern’s overwhelming defeat in 1972--Strauss was the man who picked up the pieces. He became the party’s treasurer in 1970 and its chairman after McGovern lost. In 1976, he ran Carter’s successful bid for the White House, and Carter made him his special trade representative, then his envoy to the Middle East. Four years later, he managed Carter’s second campaign and felt it was done in by a stiff challenge from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Twice, he was on the verge of running himself, first in 1972, when he thought of taking on John Tower in a Texas Senate race, then in 1984 for the Democratic nomination for president. Higher-ups in the party--there were still power brokers on the scene in those days--had sought him out as an alternative to Walter F. Mondale and Gary Hart, who were locked in a death duel. It was thought he could raise money fast and, with his silver tongue, might do well in the primaries. “I came close to getting in, and then I lost my guts,” he later told editor Ken Adelman.

Strauss, 81, is semiretired from the law firm he founded (until recently, the firm of Vernon E. Jordan Jr., as well). He and his wife of 58 years, Helen, have two sons and a daughter. When the curtain rises tomorrow on this week’s Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, Strauss will be attending his 11th consecutive convention. This past week, he ruminated on Democratic politics, present and past, in a telephone conversation.

Question: Was the 1960 Los Angeles convention your first?

Answer: The first one I had anything to do with.

Q: What role did you play?

A: I was actively engaged in trying to get the nomination for [then Sen.] Lyndon Johnson. . . . The nominating process was altogether different. We had only a handful of primaries. Delegates came out of the power structure of each state. We in the Johnson campaign did not understand the process anywhere near as well as [John F.] Kennedy’s people. The Johnson effort was put together the last six weeks [before the convention]. Johnson and the people he primarily relied on thought that the powerful Democratic senators who chaired all the committees could deliver the delegates in their states, or at least have great influence on where the delegates went. We were dead wrong. Kennedy’s people went to the governors and captured their votes. . . . The governors controlled the politics of the state, not the senators, and we should have known it. I was one of the 10 to 15 people going to the various states trying to solidify delegate support. . . . I was heartsick when Johnson took the second spot.

Q: Why was that?

A: I thought that giving up the powerful position he had as [Senate] majority leader--he was really the most powerful politician in the country then--to be vice president made no sense at all. A couple of days after the convention, Helen and I, [Texas Gov. John] Connally and his wife, Nellie, and [LBJ aide] Walter Jenkins and his wife were sitting around the pool at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas all moaning about Johnson taking the vice presidency. Sen. George Smathers of Florida came by and said, “What are you fellows doing with all these long faces? Put a smile on your faces and let’s go get Johnson elected. Things will work out. They always do for Johnson.” We all kind of looked at each other shamefaced and went about our business.

Q: How have conventions changed over the years?

A: The conventions have changed dramatically--and not for the better, necessarily. In the past, they were not cut and dried; they were more substantive; they captured the public’s attention. You had real political arguments that were at times vicious, particularly in the Democratic Party. You had things like the Mississippi fights over which delegation to seat. Think of Chicago in ’68.

Q: It was the ’68 convention that began to tear the party apart.

A: It was already badly divided; that ripped it apart. The ’68 convention was an incredible experience. On the Saturday night before the convention opened, about 1 o’clock in the morning, I got a call from Jenkins. He said to me, “Bob, I’m sorry to wake you up, but I’ve just had a call from [Sen.] Gene McCarthy, and he wants to know the best way of getting in touch with John Connally.” Now, keep in mind that Connally represented the forces that were trying their best to keep McCarthy from having anything to do with that convention. Walter said, “I told them the best way to reach Connally, only way he could reach him, was go through you. So you’re going to get a call from him.” I said, “About what?” He said, “I think he wants to try to give Connally a deal.” I said, “Well, I can’t guarantee that he will talk to him, but I’ll be glad to get the call from Sen. McCarthy.”

[LBJ aide] Dick Goodwin, who was with McCarthy in his suite, called at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning. He said, “Mr. Strauss, I’m calling for Sen. McCarthy, and the senator would like to come and visit with Gov. Connally. He has something very private he wants to talk to him about.” I said, “Well, Connally’s asleep. I can’t guarantee he’ll do it. But when he wakes up in the morning, I’ll give you a ring.”

So about 7:30 in the morning, I told Connally the story, and we agreed he ought to talk to McCarthy. So I called Goodwin. [Connally] and I spent three hours with Goodwin, who neither of us knew. . . . He told stories about the McCarthy campaign and ended up by saying, “Gene McCarthy wants you [Connally] on his ticket. He wants you to publicly agree to go on his ticket. And if you do that, we’ll stop Hubert Humphrey from getting this nomination. And McCarthy will guarantee that you if you go on the ticket with him, you’ll have half the patronage and you’ll have ample power, power never before in the hands of a vice president, over appointments and everything else.” Of course, Connally said no. . . . That took place while those kids were out there in the street, in the park.

Q: They were all McCarthy forces out there.

A: Exactly. And we were in there talking about a deal.

Q: After the ’72 convention, you started to change the way conventions were done?

A: I was party chairman, and I went to three or four heads of the advertising agencies in New York and said to them, “I need someone who will help me stage a convention, someone who really understands television. This thing is now a television show, and the Democratic Party’s image is so terrible after ’68 and ’72 that we’ve got to put on a television event.” And they recommended Al Vecchione [former MacNeil-Lehrer Productions president]. . . . He took off a year and a half and showed me how to produce and helped produce that ’76 convention.

Q: I remember the night that Carter gave his speech. You all held the cameras on him for an hour and six minutes, or something like that, without a break for advertising.

A: It was the damnedest thing.

Q: And we--I had worked in the ’72 Republican convention--just marveled at what you did in that convention.

A: I had that floor, those rules, so tied up that no one could get their hands on those microphones. We were used to somebody on the left getting up, the far left, and then the far right. . . . They dominated our convention floor and our microphones. Well, we stopped all that for ‘76, and we put on a clean show and brought Carter out [of the convention] with close to a 20-point lead, or something like that. He needed every bit of it, because he finally won by about one percentage point. But that’s what a convention can do.

Q: And that had to do with the primaries selecting people early, so the convention became a television show.

A: That’s exactly right.

Q: How important is this Democratic convention?

A: It’s a critical convention, and it opened last Monday with the story of the vice-presidential selection. As a matter of fact, Democrats need a convention even more than Republicans did. The Republican base was home. The Democratic base has not come back. The first thing that Gore has to keep in mind--the Democrats have to keep in mind--is the absolute necessity of getting their base back while reaching out to independents. . . . It should be easier than in some years because there are no real divisions in the Democratic Party.

Q: What role should Bill Clinton play in this convention and beyond to best help Gore?

A: Well, I think he’s got to have a very, very good Monday-night speech. Then I think he’s got to get off the stage for a while--not totally offstage--and quietly help all he can. . . . I have a strong feeling that Gore’s best two weeks as a presidential candidate came during the time President Clinton was doing very important presidential work at Camp David with [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Barak and [Palestinian President Yasser] Arafat.

Q: You’ve known George W. Bush for at least 20 years.

A: Oh, I’ve known him longer than that.

Q: Well, I read that he came to you when he was running for Congress way back in the 1970s.

A: In ’78.

Q: He came seeking advice about . . .

A: No, his father called me.

Q: Tell me about that.

A: Well, his father called and said, “Bob, when are you going to be in Dallas?”

Q: You were in the Carter administration at the time?

A: Yes. . . . He said, “Bob, I want to talk to you about--George W. wants to run for Congress, for that seat out in West Texas. I would like to come by with him and talk to you about the campaign.”. . . And the two of them came in, and we had a nice visit, and I told [George W.] that I didn’t think he could win the race.

Q: He was running against Kent Hance.

A: Yes. And I said, “There’s a tough, real tough, half-mean junkyard dog kind of candidate out there who is going to run a mean campaign, George. And you think you’ve got the Midland-Odessa area sewed up in that district. He’s got the Lubbock area sewed up and has been working Midland-Odessa for a long time.” Anyway, the bottom line was that I said to this nice young man, George W., that he couldn’t win that race, but he was going to run, anyway. “If you do,” I said, “it’s my guess that you’re going to have a continuing interest in politics. So be sure you run the kind of campaign that won’t come back to haunt you, whether you win or lose.” He took it graciously, thanked me and left.

His father and I sat and talked. And his father said, “Bob, I know how close you are to John”--he was talking about Connally, who was seeking the Republican nomination. “But I want to tell you: Do you think I’m crazy if I think about getting in this Republican race?” And I kind of laughingly said, “George, for whatever it’s worth, I think you’ve got a better chance of winning the Republican primary than George W. does of beating Kent Hance for Congress out in West Texas.” We both laughed about that.

I think the next conversation I had with George Sr. was the night he was selected by Ronald Reagan to be his vice president. . . . In early ‘91, when [then President Bush] asked me to serve in his administration as ambassador to the Soviet Union, I was hesitant. I said, among other things, “Hell, Mr. President, you don’t want to appoint me: I didn’t even vote for you.” He responded, “Bob, I think you are the first person since I’ve become president who sat in this Oval Office at this desk and told me he didn’t vote for me. Now, I’m absolutely convinced you are the person I need to send to Russia.”

Q: How long have you known Gore?

A: Oh, since he first came to Washington, early on in his career. We have never been close friends. After all, there is a tremendous difference in our ages. I relate more to the generation before him.

Q: How would you assess him?

A: I liked him well enough that when he ran for president [in 1988], the first time he came by my office to ask my advice about getting into the race, I certainly encouraged him. As a matter of fact, although I was closer to [Richard A.] Gephardt, I took Gore around my law firm in Washington and in Texas and introduced him to my partners and had him speak to them as a group and helped him with a bit of fund-raising.

Q: How does the choice of Joseph Lieberman as veep affect the campaign?

A: Since I have been on the national scene, I have looked hard, from time to time, at the Jewish issue in terms of national politics. I’m amazed and impressed by the growth and maturity of the body politic insofar as religion is concerned. . . . Forty years ago Helen and I went to our first national convention--this is our 11th consecutive convention. In that first one in Los Angeles, an overriding issue was Jack Kennedy’s Catholicism, and it was not a pleasant issue. It was very unpleasant for an awful lot of people in this country.

Lieberman’s faith is a big story--but it will only be one for a few days, and that is because it’s new and it’s groundbreaking. But as the campaign moves forward, I think those who think [the choice] will be of any real consequence are mistaken.

Q: So the country has moved.

A: The country has moved, yes--and for the better. *