Alpha Dogs E-Book

James Harding

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

David Sawyer dreamed of a career as a film-maker; Scott Miller, the son of a shoe salesman, was a brilliant copywriter. Unlikely partners, together they became a political powerhouse. Directing democratic revolutions from the Philippines to Chile, steering a dozen presidents and prime ministers into office, and instilling the campaign ethic in corporate giants from Coca-Cola to Apple, the consultants of Sawyer-Miller were the Manhattan Project of spin politics. In this pulsating book, James Harding tells the story of a few men whose political savvy, entrepreneurial drive and sheer greed came to alter the landscape of global politics. Alpha Dogs charts the creation of a new style of political campaigning and its triumph across the world.

Leseprobe

ALPHA DOGS

James Harding is the editor of The Times. He was previously Washington bureau chief of the Financial Times. This is his first book.

For my parents

First published in the United States of America in 2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 18, West 18th Street, New York 10011.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2008 by Atlantic Books Ltd.

This edition published in 2014 by

Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © James Harding 2008

The moral right of James Harding to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 9781848873117

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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

CONTENTS

Introduction: “What’s in the Bag?”

PART ONE

ONE: “The Loner in Love with the City”

TWO: “Democracia con Energía”

THREE: “The Real Thing”

FOUR: “A Dangerous Combination for Israel”

PART TWO

FIVE: “Stand Up and Fight Like a Woman”

SIX: “No”

PART THREE

SEVEN: “It’s Time for a Great Change”

EIGHT: “What Is a Junk Bond?”

NINE: “Quit and Move”

Epilogue: “Vote Different”

A Note on Sources

Acknowledgments

Index

From this we can deduce a general rule, which never or rarely fails to apply: that whoever is responsible for another’s becoming powerful ruins himself…

Niccolo Machiavelli

The Prince

INTRODUCTION: “WHAT’S IN THE BAG?”

THIS IS THE STORY of three drop-outs who changed the world’s politics. They didn’t mean to do it. One had hoped to be an actor; one dreamed of playing American football; the third was a disenchanted spy. They stumbled into the election business because it paid well, because it seemed meaningful, because it was more fun than real work. They had a knack for television, the new medium of politics. They had an ability to read the public mind. They recruited a handful of other canny men, each with insuperable egos and the gift of the gab. And together they built a short-lived but influential little company that sold American politics to the world.

The firm was called the Sawyer Miller Group. The people who worked there were not politicians, even less political thinkers. They were political consultants, the campaign trail’s crossbreed of roadies and impresarios. Starting out in the early 1970s, they cut ads and they wrote speeches, they polled voters and they devised strategies, they planted yard signs and drove candidates around. They learned their low-brow science running election campaigns for presidents, senators, governors, and mayors. They then sold the lessons of America’s television spots and battleground states around the world: the men from the Sawyer Miller Group helped Cory Aquino to lead the People Power revolution in the Philippines and advised democrats in Chile on the removal of General Pinochet; they led their clients to victory in Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador, as well as to defeat in Greece and Peru; they worked pro bono for Tibet’s Dalai Lama, and they got paid in sweaty bundles of hundred-dollar bills in Nigeria.

In its prime, Sawyer Miller worked in dozens of countries around the world, touching the lives of more than a billion people. Their headquarters was a discreet little office on East Sixtieth Street in Midtown Manhattan. Next door was the famed Copacabana nightclub, a frisky place that was packed every Friday and Saturday night and described in song by Barry Manilow as the “hottest spot north of Havana.” Up on the top floor of Sawyer Miller’s building, the great entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., had his apartment. And halfway in between, David H. Sawyer rented a floor of the neoclassical office block. He furnished it with matte black desks, wide leather sofas, and vogueish deep purple walls. He built a bank of TV screens into the wall of his office and a wet bar from which he offered candidates advice and a scotch and soda. Against the prime-time glow of the Reagan presidency, Sawyer Miller became a discreet political powerhouse.

The forty or so people in the firm set out to sway elections across Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, working on every continent, they used to boast, where the people outnumbered the penguins. “At its best, Sawyer Miller sat around the conference table and walked around the world and talked about our clients and it was like the National Security Council,” remembers David Morey, who worked there for a couple of years in the mid-1980s and then spent a decade trying to get Kim Dae-Jung elected in South Korea. “In fact, we were more armed with facts. Probably more accurate intelligence than most of the agencies. It was that well penetrated. There was so much talent. You could have run the country out of that conference room.”

The firm was never short of such boosterish self-confidence. Still, there’s more than an echo of the truth in there: in its day, Sawyer Miller had a bigger global reach than McDonald’s.

They all started out as idealists. They wanted to do good and make money. They were generally antiestablishment and anti-intellectual. They were smart, entertaining, and, most of all, passionate. They believed that politics and politicians could make a difference. They believed that democracy—in particular, the new “electronic democracy” made possible by televisions, telephones, and computers—challenged elites and empowered common people.

For all that, they ended up with a decidedly mixed record. On the one hand, their clients included five Nobel Peace Prize winners—the Dalai Lama, Shimon Peres, Kim Dae-Jung, Oscar Arias, and Lech Walesa. On the other, the firm was also named by a Washington think tank as part of the “Torturers’ Lobby,” blamed for working on behalf of governments, such as Colombia’s, that had ugly records of human rights abuses. In the United States, Sawyer Miller worked almost exclusively for Democrats; internationally, they were more promiscuous. They worked on the left and the right, and sometimes both. In the 1970s, they worked against and then for Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela. They worked for and then against Manuel Noriega in Panama. In the early 1990s, they helped campaign to get Václav Havel elected in the Czech Republic; they advised Lech Walesa in Poland.

Very often, they lost. Sawyer Miller’s clients lost every time they ran for the U.S. presidency. They lost congressional races from North Carolina to Florida, Illinois to Utah. They lost in Argentina, they lost time and again in Israel, and they lost most spectacularly in Peru. When Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, invited the firm to come down to Lima to help his presidential campaign in 1990, he looked like a shoo-in: more than half the people of Peru were preparing to vote for him, while his rivals languished in single digits in the polls. Still, he lost—brought down by colossal misjudgments, allegations of racism, high-pitched shouting matches, feuds within a family-run campaign, and an embarrassing episode with an incontinent monkey. It was a humbling defeat. But, as they say in the industry, there are only two kinds of political consultants: those who never lose and those who cannot lie.

Sawyer Miller was in the vanguard of innovation, when television gave birth to the modern era of politics. Many people then feared an Orwellian future, a world of electronic political propaganda in which Big Brother controlled public thought. Others hoped that TV would create a new kind of dialogue, bringing substantive debate into the living room, pulling politicians down from their pedestals, and cutting out the rotten corruption of the party machine. Neither of those things happened. Instead, the men at the Sawyer Miller Group and a whole new breed of political professionals realized that the power of television was more profound, but less ennobling: they grasped the supremacy of image. They told their clients to “go negative”; they peddled “spin”; they placed their faith in continuous polling; they championed the permanent campaign; they put greater emphasis on character than on policy; they sliced and diced the electorate into myriad little targeted constituencies. They did all this because it worked.

Their intention was to engage voters. The irony is that they helped to usher in a political culture that has turned ordinary people away in droves. More than a third of voters seem to have deserted the ballot box for good. There is more to this, of course, than slippery PR: access to information has eroded the authority of government and loosened the hold of the political party; ideological differences have narrowed, prosperity has increased, the isms of the twentieth century have been superseded by pragmatism, and politics, thankfully, does not shape and twist human lives as it did a generation or two ago. The education system and the media have failed to nurture civic involvement; the power of the nation-state has, increasingly, seemed dwarfed by the multinational corporation, the electronically empowered individual, the asymmetry of modern warfare. Still, the backdrop to the Sawyer Miller story is the disenchantment with democracy. The march of freedom in the past thirty years has brought hundreds of millions of people to polling stations for the first time, but disillusionment with politics has driven nearly as many away. Spin reinforced a vicious circle of suspicion in politics, while a calculating politician, a cynical media, and a distrusting public reinforced one another to hollow out the national conversation.

The men from Sawyer Miller were not the only ones to fashion a new style of politics. And they were not the only, or even the first, American professionals to whisper in the ears of the world’s presidents and politicians. They were the servants of change as much as they were the agents of it. The world’s politics has been governed by the defining forces of our times: the triumph of capitalism’s argument with communism; the transforming power of technology; the spread of democracy. But Sawyer Miller understood quicker than most that the information revolution lay at the root of all three. They harnessed the power of television. They learned to apply the wisdom of psychology and the verve of advertising to winning elections. They seized upon the opportunity of taking the American campaign ethic overseas and became the progenitors of a discreet international industry in American political know-how. At the same time, even as they pioneered the Americanization of world politics, they were pulled back home by the politicization of U.S. business. They found that what they had learned in New Hampshire and Iowa, Venezuela and Israel—that to communicate was not just to “inform,” but to “relate”— applied just as much to Apple and Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs and Continental Airlines.

Together, David Sawyer and Scott Miller did for international political consultancy what Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice did for the world of musicals. They did not invent the art form, but they helped forge a massive modern industry.

They proved that, language, history, and national pride notwithstanding, the ballot box is as susceptible to the forces of globalization as the box office. Since Sawyer Miller, “political communications” has become an international business. American advisers have been behind the scenes when a dancing Boris Yeltsin ran for office in Russia, when a modernizing Tony Blair remade the Labour Party in Britain, and when Silvio Berlusconi swept to power promising a “Contract with the Italian People” (drafted by the same pollster who helped draw up Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” a few years earlier). One of the more subtle expressions of the Pax Americana has been the triumph of U.S.-style politics and the ubiquity of American political consultants.

Mark McKinnon was one of several Sawyer Miller men who went on to help get a man elected to the White House. A hip Texan who used to show up for work in Washington, D.C., dressed like a country-western singer minus the hat, McKinnon ran the advertising campaigns for George W. Bush in 2000 and again in 2004. In the run-up to the 2008 election, he worked for John McCain. During his time at Sawyer Miller, he advised candidates and parties in Ecuador, Colombia, and Nigeria. “There is a parochial notion that elections are different everywhere. They are not. They are the same everywhere,” McKinnon says. “The things that drive elections are the same in Nebraska as they are in Ghana.”

Politics in country after country has become as similar as Starbucks—and about as surprising. The assumption underpinning the international consultancy business is that the same principles apply everywhere, that a foreign country is just like another swing state, just like Ohio. Elections are carnivals. Message discipline has supplanted ideological debate. Parties have been in long decline, with personalities taking their place. Politics is estranged from policy-making. The battle is ever more for hearts, not minds: America’s winning and irresistible formula has been to repackage an intellectual argument inside an emotional appeal. We are all fans of The West Wing now.

The world increasingly speaks in the same terms. London sounds more than ever like Washington: John Major tells the BBC he does not want to play “Monday-morning quarterback”;The Daily Telegraph has a front-page story on the Conservative Party courting the “religious right”; Labour heckles the new Tory leader David Cameron for being a “flip-flopper,” an echo of the Republican attack on John Kerry in 2004. For the rest of the world, the U.S. presidential election is not just a spectacle. It is a preview.

The Sawyer Miller Group accounts for just one twisted strand in the curiously underreported story of the globalization of politics. The office on East Sixtieth Street was a chaotic and sometimes farcical place: the company travel agent generally had a better idea of where the partners were going and what they were doing than David Sawyer. But the firm made an enduring difference. It epitomized how U.S. politics has become a global business. Its experience helps makes sense of the political world we live in now—and the new one we are on the threshold of entering. This book is the story of the life and times of the Sawyer Miller Group. At its most banal, it is the biography of a soon-forgotten PR company; in its more ambitious moments, it is an archaeology of the present, an investigation into the crime scene that is modern political culture, a short and selectively edited history of how political spin became a global business—all told through one New York office drama.

Like many political stories, it did not end well. Not for its founders, at least. Not, you might say, for any of us.

ALTHOUGH I didn’t know it at the time, I started writing this book on a humid summer morning in Troy, Ohio, the kind of deliberately retro town where you wouldn’t be surprised to bump into Jimmy Stewart walking down the street. That morning, thousands of people had thronged into the town square to cheer George W. Bush. The president was setting off on that modern political pilgrimage, the whistlestop bus tour through Middle America. I was standing on the sidelines, deeply involved in the groaning buffet of barbecue and fried chicken that gets laid on for the White House press corps at every stop, because I was covering the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

Quite unusually, Karl Rove wandered over. Rove was, at this point, a man of mythical proportions. He was the singular commander of the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign. He was the most intriguing man in American politics, the master of modern micro-politics, and the man entrusted with making the big strategic decisions. Bush called him his “Boy Genius,” “Turd Blossom,” and his “architect.”

As the president headed over to the podium to give his standard stump speech, we hacks descended upon Rove. He was peppered with questions—about the state of the race, the state of Ohio, the state of John Kerry’s campaign . . . the usual. After about half an hour, people started to peel away to jot down notes or listen to Bush. Soon there were only a handful of us standing around Rove, and the gaps between the questions and answers grew longer. The journalists, addled by too many consecutive predawn starts or simply too unimaginative, seemed to have run dry of things to ask the closeted mastermind of the Bush campaign.

After another pause, a Japanese journalist pointed to Rove’s canvas shoulder case bulging with papers and manila folders and asked him, half question, half small talk, “What’s in the bag?”

“Secret shit,” Rove said, letting out a laugh and putting a hand protectively on the case.

“The codes,” he went on, making his own silly mockery of the Myth of Rove. “I have the codes . . . name any city you want.” He chortled and I, being well brought up and English, politely chortled back at this joke about nuclear Armageddon.

Then Bush was done; Rove hurried back to the president’s bus to head to the next town hall meeting. The press scrambled to get on the buses that follow in convoy. Sitting on the coach as it rolled through the small towns of western Ohio; the fields of corn, potatoes, and soybeans; the streets of the small towns lined with people cheering the presidential motorcade or brandishing their own homemade Kerry banners, you couldn’t help wondering: What is in that bag? If you like, this whole book is an attempt to find out what was in that bag.

The Bush-Kerry race, much like the Bush-Gore contest in 2000, was not about a fundamental ideological choice. It was not a watershed in public opinion. It was about personality, perception, and organization. In the noisy blur of the election year, at least one thing was clear: the campaigns mattered. The Swift Boat ads, the evangelical vote, the online fund-raising and the get-out-the-vote operation all really counted. The election seemed to exemplify the primacy of tactics, the special place of a master tactician like Karl Rove, the sense that real power lies today in the hands of the political consultant, the modern Machiavelli. That intriguing, disheartening realization lies at the heart of this book: it is about politics in a tactical age, not an ideological one. It is also about how technology can transform politics. The Sawyer Miller Group flourished thanks to television, a new medium that a generation ago had an impact that was as profound as it was unpredictable. Today, the Internet is just beginning to have an impact on elections and the exercise of power, promising to rewrite the rules of the political game in ways that are, if anything, more sweeping and less certain. Part of the fascination in going back to the original innovators of modern political communication has been trying to come to grips with the election business on the brink of another information revolution. After two perplexing elections in America, and before the frenzied caravan starts barreling across the United States once again, the antics of the people at Sawyer Miller can help explain how the modern election machine works.

Television has simplified politics. It has done the same for history. We are seduced by the neat historical narrative, the idea that history is made by great men: the lone statesman in a political wilderness, the solitary inventor in the laboratory, the courageous soldier willing to confront the military establishment. The fact is, though, history is generally a team effort. It is not a soliloquy; it is a chorus line. And nowhere is this truer than in politics, a field that needs committees of people to agree to a new picture on a postage stamp and a congressional hearing to ascertain that American sportsmen take steroids. The “swarm theory” of history applies here: the idea that groups of people, not one or two individuals, change the course of our lives and the culture in which we live. The story of Sawyer Miller is much more than the story of the two men whose names were on the door.

But they were not all men at Sawyer Miller. There was one woman. Mandy Grunwald came straight out of Harvard and joined the firm in the late 1970s. When it came to putting together a political ad, she could make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. She was also difficult, abrasive, and rude. Seen as one of the guys, she was the kind of woman with a booming laugh and a sewer mouth who liked a bloody steak and a strong martini. She started as an intern, and after working on more than a hundred campaigns, she left New York a dozen years later to work in Little Rock for a no-hope presidential candidate named Bill Clinton.

Sawyer Miller was a place that relished its machismo; where people worked through the night on takeout, coffee, and cigarettes; where men found their wives—and lost their wives—in office romances and chance encounters on international flights; where every new candidate meant a gladiatorial battle that would ultimately end in victory or defeat. It hummed to the electronic pulse of television and thrilled at its own proximity to power. In 1986, Sidney Lumet made a movie about a successful political consultant that was based on the character of David Sawyer and played by Richard Gere. The film was called Power. (The catchline read: “More seductive than sex … More addictive than any drug … More precious than gold. And one man can get it for you.”)

“It was,” in the words of Mark McKinnon, “a damn mean business. All alpha dogs.”

It was the same phrase Ned Kennan used when he described the firm to me a few months later. Kennan had been a pivotal figure in Sawyer Miller, the pioneering pollster who had delved deeply into the public mind and provided the voter research that dictated the political message. When I spoke with him he had long retired from Sawyer Miller and moved out of New York City to live in the New England countryside. He was exploring Buddhism. Over a burger in Taylor’s, a dank downstairs bar in the faded town of Greenfield, Massachusetts, Kennan looked back at Sawyer Miller and the “alpha dogs.” He explained: “The alpha dog is the one who calls the shots. It comes from watching dogs. There’s always a dog in the pack who controls things.” It’s a curious boast, but several other of Sawyer Miller’s alumni have used the same term to describe their breed. “Alpha dogs” makes them sound like a crack troop of guerrilla forces who parachute behind enemy lines, sleep rough, and live off woodland berries, which is ironic for a bunch of guys who used to fly business class and write memos by the hotel pool. It is also a name that is ambivalent, hinting at both the brilliant and the dastardly, the inspiring and the manipulative. It is a name that fits.

PART ONE

As for the little lean, shrivelled, paunchy old man, of five feet two, in a jacket and breeches, there is no majesty in him at any rate . . . Put the wig and shoes on him, and he is six feet high:—the other fripperies, and he stands before you majestic, imperial, and heroic! Thus do barbers and cobblers make the gods that we worship.

—W. M. Thackeray,

“Meditations at Versailles”

ONE

“THE LONER IN LOVE WITH THE CITY”

ON A BRIGHT WINTER’S DAY in late 1978, Kevin White, the mayor of Boston, breezed into the grand reception room at his official residence, the Parkman House. He had come for a meeting to discuss the prospects of his reelection, nearly a year away, and he was trailed by the people he liked to call his “political family”—his chief of staff, his press secretary, his diary scheduler, a clutch of local Democratic grandees, and a couple of Beacon Hill pals. White stood broader and taller than most of them, a thickset, handsome man with a smile as wide as the Charles River. That afternoon, Ned Kennan would be responsible for wiping that smile off White’s face.

“The people of Boston really do not like you,” Kennan said in his thick, guttural Israeli accent. “In fact, they hate you.” He grinned, and paused for effect. “They view you as an aloof, arrogant, son-of-a-bitch bastard.” Kennan beamed at the mayor like an insolent child goading a teacher. “You don’t give a damn about people. You are seen as the boss of a huge political machine. You are . . . not liked.”

White’s entourage of aides had scattered themselves across the plush sofas and Italianate furniture of the reception room in the Parkman House. Now they sat silently, watching the blood rise in the mayor’s cheeks. They volunteered nothing. They were not used to seeing anyone address the most powerful man in Boston and one of America’s most successful politicians in such a way. They were deferential to his authority, afraid of his temper. Worse, they knew it was all true: Kevin H. White’s long rule had achieved nothing quite so much as the distrust of Bostonians.

In the words of White’s own chief of staff, the people of Boston thought that he had become “an emperor.” By the late 1970s, the mayor’s hopes of a historic fourth term were in danger. He was under threat from a clean-cut, handsome young challenger. White had drafted Kennan and a little-known team of political consultants from New York because, at some instinctive level that operates in even the haughtiest of politicians, he could sense his imminent extinction.

Kennan continued: “The people of Boston think you are inside the temple, they are outside the temple. They think you are selfish.” He explained to the mayor that the pollster has one question that counts more than the rest, one that serves as a weathervane for any campaign: “Does he care about people like me?” It is a simple, elemental test that asks not just if the candidate has a caring image but if the electorate cares for him. The favorable responses to Kevin White were near zero. “ ‘Does he care about people like me?’ ” Kennan asked again. “No. They say no. They think you don’t care for anybody.”

White, a trim, handsome Irishman, stared back at this short, scruffy Israeli. “On the other hand,” Kennan said, “you are seen as a good mayor of the city. Not a nice person, but doing a pretty good job.”

Night after night in the previous few weeks, Kennan had gathered with small groups of people from across the city. In long, rambling conversations with them, he brought his curious collection of skills to bear: he was born in Jerusalem and his first job had been as an intelligence analyst for the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. He then went to college in California, where he studied psychology. In the previous ten years, he had developed new methods of understanding popular attitudes toward such everyday products as Listerine mouthwash and Dentyne chewing gum. He was one of a new, innovative breed of public opinion researchers who were trying to put the entire American public on the couch. In Boston, he had been developing a relatively new technique in politics: it was called the “focus group.”

The mayor listened to Kennan’s jumble of expletives, the biblical deconstruction of his character, and the painstaking explanation of his unpopularity. With admirable restraint, he asked: “So, how do we change my image?” “I don’t believe we can,” Ned said, “because, frankly, Kevin, I’ve only met you a couple of times, but you appear to me to be someone who is an aloof, arrogant son-of-a-bitch bastard who doesn’t care for anybody.”

Kennan explained that people do not change. More important, the public does not believe people change. It would be pointless to try to manage, let alone manufacture, White’s image. Over the past twelve years, the people of Boston had come to know the mayor for what he was: uptight, opinionated, and superior. They liked his record, but they most decidedly did not like him. You could not suddenly dope them into thinking he was an all-around nice guy.

“Does it mean I’m going to lose the election?” White asked.

“No, I believe you are going to win the election.” Kennan said. Then he offered his prescription: “Tell the truth. Say, ‘I’m Kevin White, I’m a selfish, aloof, son-of-a-bitch bastard. I run a big political machine. But I love this city, Boston, and I’m using all of that machine politics and power to make the city prosper.’ ” Kennan stood by his flip chart looking at White’s family of political advisers. He paused to admire his handiwork. It was as if a man had given a master class in wallpaper hanging to a wisdom of blinking owls.

“I want to be liked,” White said, an afterthought.

Kennan smiled again, sympathetically this time: “Not everyone can like a person like you, Kevin.”

KENNAN—part shrink, part show-off, part statistician—was an exceptional pollster. He viewed the body politic much the way a psychologist judged a human individual, as a mixture of competing sexual impulses and social prejudices, emotional needs and value judgments. He also had an essential gift for anyone who has to inform a politician of public opinion: he presented unwelcome truths with relish. Anyone who has worked in politics for any period of time will tell you that the trick in polling is not just setting the questions or analyzing the answers. The difficult bit is convincing the average, insulated politician that the polls are, actually, true. Ned was a brilliant storyteller. He could bring numbers to life. When he spoke, he blended the voice of God with a Borscht Belt comedy routine. And, of course, Kennan was used to unwelcome truths: he had grown up in Israel.

His boyhood was spent by the radio, the herald that announced the birth of the new state of Israel in 1948. Ned—or, to use his Israeli name, Nadav Katznelson—was born on Mount Scopus and into a family of well-known Zionists. He made his contribution to the Zionist cause in short trousers, as a bicycle courier during the War of Independence. When he finished school in Jerusalem, like all other boys, he was drafted straight into the Israeli military. By the age of seventeen, he was working in Israeli intelligence.

One night in 1957, Kennan crossed the border to meet one of his informants in Jordan. He started out on the long walk back a few hours before dawn. Just before sunrise, a man jumped him. Kennan took out his knife, but his assailant kicked it from his hand. The man pulled his own knife and swiped at Kennan. Kennan remembers grabbing the man’s arm and twisting the knife back in on him. With the man bleeding on the ground, Kennan reached for one of the large rocks that litter the Judean hills and killed him. As the day began to brighten, he crossed back over into Israel. He did not mention the incident for five years. (His attacker’s knife—a beautiful one with a carved handle—today lies in a drawer in Kennan’s Massachusetts home.)

When he got the chance, he quit the Israeli intelligence service, severing ties with the army, his family, and his homeland. It was 1960. He and his new wife, a physical education instructor in the Israeli army, took a boat called The Jerusalem to New York. From there, they headed to the West Coast, where, a little late in life, Kennan started his studies. He brought a contrary intellect to his understanding of social psychology and a frisky libido to the UCLA campus. He did his master’s dissertation on Friedrich Nietzsche and European nihilism; he did his Ph.D. on “Classification of Juvenile Delinquents Based on Their Psychological and Behavioural Attitudes”; he peppered discussion with his thoughts on priapism and the female orgasm. When his studies were done, he had to get a job.

Kennan moved into the research wing of the consumer goods industry just as the relationship between corporate America and the public psyche was changing. The polling industry had already been around for decades. Gallup had become a household name even before the war. Lou Harris had made a reputation for himself in the 1950s, sealed in 1960 by his work for John F. Kennedy. But in the 1960s, a second generation of pollsters was developing a much more penetrating form of market research. During World War II, the U.S. military had begun developing the precursor to the focus group: sociologists were asked to assess the American audience’s reaction to military propaganda films. They realized that when viewers were questioned and probed smartly and repeatedly, they could identify which lines in the film, which images, and which ideas chimed most deeply and which had no effect. America’s big consumer goods companies, the sellers of soaps and shampoos, who rely so heavily on effective advertising, were quick to seize on the business potential of the focus group. While the Gallup generation of pollsters was driven by politics, Kennan and his colleagues were driven by commerce. They did not want to find out only how many people liked the product but also how to sell more of it. That meant they did not want just to know what people were thinking, but to understand, too, what drove those opinions. To do this, researchers needed to develop new ways of understanding how the public thought—better yet, how it felt. They replaced the blank questionnaire with the in-depth interview and the focus group.

One of Kennan’s first projects was working on Listerine, the mouthwash. The company had run a bunch of studies, and the findings had been utterly predictable: people with higher incomes used Listerine; there was more usage among smokers; there was less usage among blue-collar workers; people gargled with it after meals of garlic and onions. Kennan pointed out that the executives at Listerine could probably have worked this out without leaving the office. More important, this information told them where the market was, but not what drove the market, which were the levers on consumer behavior. At a meeting of the board, the directors were discussing plans that might add two, perhaps three, percentage points in sales. Kennan announced grandly that he had a plan to increase sales by exactly 25 percent. He had conducted what he called, pseudo-scientifically, a series of FGIs and IDIs—focus group interviews and in-depth interviews—with Listerine users. And what he had found over hours and hours of conversation was that they tended to be work-hard, play-by-the-rules kind of people, the types who would never run a stop sign and would help an old lady across the road, the sort of people who buy an appliance and follow the instructions in using it. In short, the kind of people who read the label. Kennan’s point was that the vast majority of Listerine users did what they were told to do by the instructions on the side of the bottle: they poured the concentrated mouthwash into the cap, added water, gargled, and spat it out. Kennan’s proposal was to make a 25 percent bigger cap.

Kennan was an impish young man in the body of an old hippie: he was short and fattening, a man with a round face, a bushy prematurely gray beard, a bulbous nose, and a wicked glimmer in his eye. He was into Off-Broadway theater and smoking weed, and he carried his lunch—a sandwich in waxed paper—in the pockets of the one sports jacket he owned. Nonetheless, he soon found himself ushered into the boardrooms of corporate America and, very quickly, the offices of American government. For he was one of the leading figures in a changing of the guard in public opinion research.

The pioneers of quantitative polling were being superseded by a new generation of researchers who were harnessing the power of the computer as well as the science of psychology. They were going beyond traditional demographics, which divided people by age, gender, and income, and slicing and dicing the population into groups defined by their behavior. At the same time, they were delving more deeply not just into what people thought but how they thought. One of Kennan’s mentors was Seymour Lieberman, who had developed new methodologies for differentiating groups within the broader population that built on the original segmentation studies and motivation research done by the likes of psychologist Ernst Dichter in the 1940s and 1950s. The group psychology approach appealed to Kennan’s fascination with popular attitudes, private sexual appetites, and public values. It was also new, experimental, and unconventional.

KENNAN’S JOB in the Parkman House that afternoon in the winter of 1978 was not just to tell the mayor he was unpopular, but to tell him why. White needed a dose of unwelcome reality. The mayor was twenty-six points behind. As White’s tenure in city hall had rolled on, his popularity had slipped further.

Boston born and bred and the son of Irish Catholics, Kevin White had started out in city politics on a populist platform. When he first ran for mayor in 1967, one of his slogans was “When landlords raise rents, Kevin White raises hell!” He quickly came to be seen as one of the most charismatic politicians in America. He was dubbed, in those early years, “Kevin from Heaven,” and was described in the same breath as John Lindsay of New York, a mayor who treated city hall as a national stage. White had adapted Lindsay’s idea of “little city halls,” creating neighborhood organizations that decentralized power. He seemed able to cut across the communal lines that had so long hemmed in Boston politics. And he liked to play to the gallery: when the Rolling Stones were arrested on the way to Boston, the mayor released them into his own custody. He told the awaiting audience at Boston Garden: “The Stones have been busted, but I have sprung them!”

In 1972, White was being bandied about as the “Mayor of America.” He was five years into the job in Boston—spurring development; speaking out against the Vietnam War; holding together the fractious constituent parts of the Democratic Party; straddling communities of Italians, Irish, and Jews, labor and business, black and white. He not only commanded the begrudging respect of the people of Boston but also was making a name for himself nationwide.

That year, George McGovern chose White as his running mate to mount the Democrats’ challenge to Richard M. Nixon. He was on the ticket for about four hours. McGovern called White to tell him he wanted him to be the vice presidential candidate, but he still had to square it with that dynastic force in Democratic politics in New England, the Kennedys. As ever in politics, the opposition is the other party, but the enemy lies in wait within your own. The Kennedy Democrats would have none of Kevin White. They nixed his candidacy. McGovern was steered away, and the mayor of Boston, who had been told he was on a shortlist of one, was dropped. White got the call from McGovern asking him to join his presidential ticket; he never got a second call inviting him down to the Democratic convention in Miami.

Having hoped for higher office, White more than made do with Boston. Through the 1970s, he presided over the revival of the city, throwing up skyscrapers downtown and attracting shops and restaurants to Quincy Market. Following the federal drive to integrate neighborhood schools, White struggled to keep a lid on the racial tensions in the city. (The violence that erupted during the busing crisis included the unforgettable image of an African-American man, Ted Landsmark, being attacked by a white man with an American flag.) There was also the whiff of corruption about the White administration, a scent that has filled the noses of the voters of Boston for so long that they smelled it whether it was there or not. (This was, after all, the town that had elected James Michael Curley, the “last hurrah” mayor who brought not just charisma but also a criminal record to the job.) White—or “Mayor DeLuxe,” or “King Kevin,” as he was sometimes known—was another in a long line of Boston officials getting a reputation for enjoying the discreet indulgences of the mayor’s sumptuous public residences and extensive entertainment account.

Over time, he seemed to grow more embattled, more dictatorial. The “little city halls” were scrapped, and by the late 1970s, White was being criticized for running a network of ward henchmen who gave city jobs and contracts to those people who supported the mayor. As White seemed to slip further out of touch, Joe Timilty, a local state senator and a good-looking neighborhood candidate with the backing of the lunch-bucket Democrat crowd, stepped up once again to challenge haughty Kevin White and his rarefied friends from Beacon Hill.

White was bitter that, having done so much for Boston, he still had to fight so hard for its approval. He had forged an extraordinary coalition of Italians, blacks, and liberals, winning the mayor’s office without banking on the Irish vote. Increasingly, though, he was being cast by his opponents as a wheeler-dealer politician, not a presenter; a master of the backroom bargain not cut out for life at the front of the house. This was a time when television was cleaving the unsuspecting world of politicians in two: on the one hand, there were those who knew how to wield power but who looked distinctly uncomfortable asking for it—Lyndon B. Johnson, for example, or Richard Nixon; on the other hand were the natural performers, the likes of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, who seemed to know instinctively how to campaign in front of the cameras but who sometimes looked out of depth behind the big desk. Kevin White was being painted, he thought quite unfairly, as a politician from the old school, a Democrat in the LBJ mold. His talent, as his political biographer George Higgins later put it, was “in holding office, not in seeking it.”

He was, though, grudgingly aware of the problem, as his responses to Kennan later made clear. As the 1979 election loomed into view, White sent Micho Spring, his chief lieutenant, to New York to find some professional political help. Spring had been given a bunch of names of these so-called “political consultants.” (The term was still relatively new.) Many of them, she found, were unimaginative or unconvincing. After a long day in Manhattan, she was weary of being told things she already knew and was tempted to cancel the last appointment with one little-known political shop that had come highly recommended but that she had never heard of. Out of politeness, she stayed to hear their pitch. She headed back to Boston convinced that she had found the two smartest guys around. One was really a copywriter in the advertising business; the other was a documentary filmmaker. At the time, politics was for them much more than a hobby but still a little less than a business. They were called Scott Miller and David Sawyer.

ALTHOUGH NO ONE IN THE ROOM at the Parkman House appreciated it then, they had all seen Scott Miller’s work countless times before. He was the most sought after creative talent at the advertising firm of McCann Erickson, where he was responsible for, among other things, the Coca-Cola account. As a result, more people in America had seen his work than watched any single movie, listened to any particular song, tuned in to any one TV program. “Have a Coke and a smile!” was Miller’s line. “Coke is it!” was his, too. While Ned Kennan practiced the art of telling the truth bluntly, Scott Miller was a subscriber to H. K. McCann’s philosophy of advertising: “The truth well told.”

Dressed in blue jeans and sneakers, Miller looked—as he so often did—as though he had just come from the gym. His first and enduring love was sports. During the 1960s, that tumultuous decade for America, he mostly thought about football. In 1960, when John F. Kennedy was beating up and down the campaign trail, Miller was running laps. He was fifteen and a receiver for the Pioneers, the football team at his school in Hudson, Ohio, where he harbored dreams of playing professional football. In that pivotal year in politics, when Kennedy met Nixon in the first televised debate and America was witness to a revolutionary new technology in politics, Scott Miller was aware of only one news event outside Ohio: the Ole Miss football team won its second national championship in a row.

Miller’s family was all-American but not upper-class. His father was a shoe salesman, selling wholesale to department stores across the Midwest. He knew he would be on the road much of the time, so he could choose where to live. He settled the family in Hudson, which back then was a small farming town, halfway between Cleveland and Akron. Miller’s father had come from the boot heel of Missouri, the southeastern corner of the state, where his own father had run a hunting lodge. Before that the Millers had been in Texas, cattle-ranching. The family was at home more or less anywhere in America. They had a blue-collar history and white-collar aspirations—not wealthy, but affluent enough to send their sons to private school and to college.

Washington and Lee, a small private men’s college in Lexington, Virginia, was a blithely happy place in the 1960s. College campuses elsewhere were in open revolt. Demonstrations against the Vietnam War drew thousands of people, not to mention tear gas and riot police, at other colleges, but not at Washington and Lee. Miller’s friends on the football team were not dodging the draft; they were volunteering to fight. America was losing 1,200 men a month, but boys at Washington and Lee wanted to be forward observers. Miller and one of his other roommates were disqualified from serving because of knee injuries; his two other roommates went to Vietnam. Of course, being pro-Vietnam was no way to get laid, which, other than football, baseball, and track and field, was Miller’s preoccupation as a graduating senior in 1967. So he was pro-war with the guys, antiwar with the girls. Deep down, Vietnam was not the battlefield he was interested in.

That summer, he went for a tryout with the New England Patriots. He arrived strong and quick and hoping to make it through the morning’s passing drills and fitness tests to join the team for preseason training at Amherst. Within minutes, he found himself lying on his back on finely manicured grass, looking up at the sky, wondering who was the sixteen-wheel linebacker who had sideswiped his left knee. The coaches told him to go see the doc. He did not need to. He lay there, crystal clear in the knowledge that his sporting career was over.