JOHN ANDERSON, THIRD MAN OUT
THE 1980 INDEPENDENT CANDIDATE, RATING THIS YEAR'S PLAYERS AND STILL HOPING
THE RULES CAN BE CHANGED
By Jane Leavy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 17, 1987
; Page C01
Lafayette Park, across the street from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., is a nice
place to read -- "Live by the Bomb, Die by the Bomb!" -- to sleep, to
remember. It is also as close to the White House as John Anderson has come
since he ran for president as an independent eight years ago and became a
political pariah. He squints and smiles at a photographer: "No wistful
captions -- 'Anderson looks at the White House and thinks what might have
been.' "
The park is almost empty at noon except for an irreverent bird perched on
Lafayette's head. "No respect," Anderson says. An old man snores -- "at least
I haven't taken to sleeping on benches since my overwhelming defeat." A
homeless man sprawled on the grass -- "there's one unfortunate individual left
behind in the prosperity of the Reagan era."
The voice is wry, almost merry, and sounds somehow too big for him. The
white hair seems whiter than in memory -- a halo atop a cherubic grin. It's
hard to believe this is the man House colleagues once called St. John the
Righteous.
Anderson pauses, reading aloud from a placard beneath a tree. " 'Wanted in
'88 -- wisdom and honesty,' " he says, his voice booming into the wind. "Now
there's a platform for '88. Maybe this will give me the inspiration I've been
lacking."
He still lives in Washington but leads a life -- writing, teaching,
lecturing -- far from the political fray. "Turning my back on the White
House," he says, walking on. "You know, I have a confession to make. I thought
I should prepare for this, sit down and read things. And then I said, 'Oh,
what the hell. I'm not running for anything.' "
But everyone else is -- even Gary Hart. "I think it's kind of sad,"
Anderson says. "He's once again demonstrated a truly lamentable lack of
political judgment. He probably senses, despite the proliferation of
candidates, that there is no one exciting universal attention and acceptance
... I think he's going to find out time has moved on. The time for Gary Hart
is no longer.
"You have to accept there is a season, to quote Ecclesiastes. There was a
season. Does it make me think, 'Why not I?' No, not at all. That would
completely contradict the judgment I just made on him."
"Is it a bad time?" Anderson asks the maitre d' at the Members Dining Room
in the Capitol. "No sir," he replies, showing him to a window table. Anderson,
who rarely returns to the House, where he served 20 years, 10 as chairman of
the House Republican Conference, follows quickly, nodding to a few familiar
faces. He has no urge to work the room. What he has an urge for is a tuna
sandwich. "You forget," he says, "I don't have to be nice to anybody anymore."
These are some of the words Anderson uses to describe the current political
condition: desolate, decayed, desiccated, fallow. He also says: "I think the
parties are just a disgrace."
Honesty -- telling a constituency what it least wants to hear -- can be a
volatile commodity. Suddenly, improbably, briefly in 1980, Anderson was
politically combustible, igniting a disillusioned, disaffected electorate. He
went to Iowa and told the farmers that Jimmy Carter's grain embargo was the
right thing for the country even if it wasn't right for them. He went on
television and told Ronald Reagan there was no way you could cut taxes,
increase defense spending and balance the budget, unless you did it with
mirrors.
A lobbyist whose name Anderson has forgotten sidles by and murmurs
something about "smoke and mirrors." Anderson smiles. "What the heck," he
says. "Some people remember."
There is vindication in his prescience. "I'm only human," he says. "I'm no
paragon of virtue. I've got to feel -- I don't want to say a sense of
satisfaction, because I'm not gloating. I'm genuinely worried. I've got five
children."
Like most Americans, Anderson does not have a candidate for 1988. He
supported Walter Mondale in 1984 and has been approached by a few seeking his
support this year. He isn't ready to commit himself. He doesn't believe the
Democrats will nominate anyone currently running. He doesn't believe in much
the Republicans have to say. He calls the current campaign "a drama played out
in the theater of the absurd."
Between bites, he rates the players.
Bush: "If the country feels they need the consummate Reagan loyalist in
1988, then surely he will be nominated. But I doubt, after the mess Reagan has
made of everything he has touched, the country will come to that conclusion."
Dole: "I knew Bob Dole when he was more interested in Kansas wheat farmers
than anything else. But Dole's biggest disability in 1988 is that he is so
much a Beltway candidate. But after what people have learned about what's gone
on in this administration, I'm not sure that's the stellar quality people are
searching for."
Kemp: "Curiously, I feel grudging admiration for him, in the sense that he
is clearly the most ideological candidate on either side. I don't subscribe to
his ideology -- mine is 180 degrees in the other direction -- but I have some
admiration for someone that even while sitting at 7 percent in the polls
apparently is going to go down to the wire talking about specific things that
constitute the framework of his approach."
Robertson, du Pont, Haig: There is a pause and a sigh.
"I think they're just excrescences," he says finally. "Pardon me. I don't
mean to be irreverent. Du Pont was through and had nothing better to do,
apparently. I have to agree with George Bush. He sounds kind of nutty at
times.
"Haig. Hmmm. Well. I should think of some Haigspeak. He's a real cipher in
the campaign. I don't even know what his constituency is unless it's retired
Army officers.
"Pat Robertson, the man who, like King Canute, would try to command the
tides to stand still. In a sense, there's a little bit of the lightning rod
quality to the Robertson campaign because he's getting the evangelical
charismatic Christians to come out of the woodwork on his behalf. But he has
no program. He has no vision. His is merely, 'Let's put Bible reading and
prayer back in school, let's drive the homosexuals underground with mandatory
{AIDS} testing, let's get rid of evil in our midst, and out of that
purification process will come this stronger, more militarily powerful
America.' "
Across the room, a former colleague catches his eye. In an instant, for an
instant, he is on -- a pol again. "There's one of the good guys," he says.
"Tony Beilenson of California. He was the only Democrat who put in my 50 cents
{gasoline} tax bill."
Many people, including his wife Keke, believe he could have found a home in
the Democratic Party. He had come to Washington in 1961 as a fire-breathing,
born-again Christian conservative who would propose a "Jesus Amendment" to
make America a Christian nation and end up casting the decisive vote for
open-housing legislation in the aftermath of Martin Luther King's
assassination in 1968. Anderson disagrees, though he admits he is more liberal
than he was eight years ago -- the result, he says, of "the excesses of the
Reagan administration, as they have fed the greed of the rich."
He considers the Democrats.
Jackson: "I think he has a real feeling of empathy with the problems of the
poor. But I don't have the feeling that for all his good intentions he
possesses the kind of qualities the next leader of this country must have."
Babbitt: "If they gave merit badges, as they do in the Boy Scouts, I think
he'd have more than his share. He merits badges for candor and honesty. So I
have to say, almost with a twinge of regret, that he's just one more of many
good men who sooner or later will leave the race."
Simon: "I feel a real affection for him. He's flinty of character, honest.
On education and conservation I find it very difficult to fault any of his
substantive ideas. But he was burned badly on taxes in 1972 in his campaign
for the Democratic {Senate} nomination. Maybe that's why he's gun-shy."
Dukakis: "One cannot spend an evening with Mike without being impressed
with his intelligence. He certainly understands the importance of economic
growth and the necessity of this country maintaining its economic leadership.
I have to fault him, as I do Paul Simon, on the broad issue of telling people
there are going to be times when it's not going to be easy, that we're going
to have to pay higher taxes and live less well."
Gephardt: "Despite his energy and uncommonly good intelligence, I'm vaguely
bothered that there's a little pandering to those elements in the Democratic
Party that are looking for the quick fix."
Gore: "He has tried to carve out a rather stern and conservative posture to
shore up the Democratic Party against charges they are soft on communism. The
Democrats can rebut it easily enough without building more missiles."
He sighs. "We need someone who will acknowledge that the world is not only
economically but politically interdependent. Maybe I should start a boomlet
for {former Federal Reserve chairman} Paul Volcker."
Anderson gulps his diet soda and checks his watch. He is late for a seminar
at the National Defense University -- or at least he thinks he is. Someone
once said of his administrative skills: He couldn't organize a three-car
parade. Old friends call his name and reach for his hand as he tries to make a
quick getaway. "I met you at a rally for Fritz Mondale," he tells Rep. Frank
Guarini (D-N.J.). Guarini looks at him blankly.
"Was it raining?" he says finally.
"Yes," Anderson replies. "It rained on our parade and then we went and
stood on a toxic waste dump or something else equally heroic."
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), an old friend, looks up from his table.
"Aren't you running?" he asks.
"For what?" Anderson says.
"For president."
"You going to carry my petitions?" Anderson replies and exits leaving them
laughing.
He was 45 minutes early for the seminar. Now he's stuck in rush hour
traffic. Gridlock is also a metaphor for how he sees the current political
scene.
The only prediction he will make about 1988 is that the percentage of
eligible voters casting ballots will drop below 50 percent. He argues that the
swelling numbers of those not voting is prima facie evidence of the
"deformation of the political process." And the public pining for Mario Cuomo
is "almost another sign how desperately ill this political process has become,
to have to cling to that slender reed of hope that maybe out of the mists will
emerge, if not Magical Mario, someone to rescue us from the totality of this
ridiculous circus that's been going on for two years."
Anderson calls this an age of individual political entrepreneurs, "a
mediacracy," in which the parties have become "disembodied, spectral in their
influence, hollowed out rather than hallowed." In the absence of strong party
leadership, he says, candidates who once would have been taken aside in a
smoke-filled room and told the facts of life flourish.
He points to Robertson and Jackson as examples -- preachers on either end
of the political spectrum who have considerable support and leverage if not
electability. "A decayed, desiccated political process lends itself to the
proliferation of candidates of the most unusual stripes because there is an
existing vacuum. They somehow sense an ability to rush in and fill at least a
portion of it."
His voice deepens with incredulity: Democrats wooing fiscal "buccaneer"
Donald Trump. Reporters grilling candidates about marijuana and adultery ("I
hope I'd tell them ... 'As long as they don't do it in the streets' ").
And then in New Hampshire, "people assaulting each other with stapling guns
about where we're going to hang our posters. And amid the cacophony a few
pallid speeches."
He shakes his head. "We vainly wait for this ridiculous winnowing process
to produce a leader," he says. "We have denigrated and disgraced the whole
nominating process for years now ... It isn't that we've got such a political
drought because none of these seedlings has sprouted and showed signs of
becoming that great oak we need. It isn't the men at all. It is a systemic
failure. Nobody, but nobody, is going to run in these primaries and be
selected in this way and look good anymore."
Anderson argues that the parties must recapture their historic functions or
die. His solution: a third party, to fill the ideological void. He believes
the legacy of his candidacy will be as "a historical reference point to a
growing recognition, not yet complete, that the old structures of the present
political system are going to have to be replaced by something. It's not yet
clear what it will be or who that person will be who will lead it."
There are those, such as Rep. Morris Udall (D-Ariz.), who see Anderson's
candidacy as a political comet, one of those celestial events that happen once
every century or so, destined to be remembered as a footnote, not a harbinger.
"He performed a function," Udall says. "To prescribe that medicine for the
indefinite future, I don't think history justifies it."
And there are those, such as William Schneider, a political analyst at the
American Enterprise Institute, who agree with much of Anderson's diagnosis but
not his conclusion. "The third-party route is doomed to failure," he says.
"Our political parties change in response to events. There are always
casualties of those changes, interesting, colorful people who often say
shrewd, insightful things, people who represent the older political traditions
gone by the board. They're always predicting dire catastrophe. They never pan
out because the parties are so pragmatic and opportunistic."
"If the political parties are spectral, so would any third party be," says
Rep. Lynn Martin (R-Ill.), who now holds Anderson's seat. "The intellectual
fallacy is not that the two parties are wonderful but that the third party
would suffer from the same things."
Anderson shrugs. "I was accused of tilting at windmills," he says. "I was
called Don Quixote. They even named the campaign plane after his horse.
"They called it Rocinante."
A year or so ago, Anderson went to lunch at Duke Zeibert's with Mark
Bisnow, the formerly disheveled press secretary made famous in the early days
of the campaign by the "Doonesbury" comic strip. "Duke personally escorted us
to a table in the far corner of the room," Bisnow says. "We deluded ourselves
into thinking he recognized Anderson and was giving us privacy. Then he comes
running over five minutes later and says, 'Mr. Anderson, I didn't recognize
you. Please come to the front.'
" 'Fame is so fleeting,' he said."
Says Anderson: "I couldn't have cared less."
He misses the platform but not the glare that goes with it. After the
campaign, he worked for a while as a television commentator in Chicago but, he
notes wryly, was preempted during sweeps week for a series on sex over 60. He
is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a "peripatetic
professor," most recently at Nova University Center for the Study of Law in
Florida, where he taught constitutional law last semester. He called home
every morning to awaken his youngest daughter, who is still in high school
here.
At 65, Anderson says he is at that awkward age -- too young to retire, too
old to begin anew. "I'm still a little bemused by this thought people have
that you can't be actively engaged in politics and then turn your attention to
something else for a time," he says. "If you write that I can escape all of
this and be perfectly happy and content in myself, the cynics will read it:
'Aha, who's he trying to kid? He'd be the first one back there if anyone would
have him.'
"I had my chances, my offers to do the conventional thing of lobbying and
taking an office on the K Street corridor. I've enjoyed a more contemplative
life. I'm not Thoreau. I'm not about to go out and sit by Walden Pond all by
myself ... But I am content within myself."
In 1983-84 he tried and failed to get the National Unity Party on the
ballot in Ohio and California. In the early flush of Reaganomics, no one
wanted to hear about alternatives or smoke and mirrors. He wrote a book, "The
American Economy We Need -- and Won't Get From the Republicans or the
Democrats," a platform of sorts, which was published the day after he
announced he would not run in 1984. The coup de grace was a letter signed by
most of the constituent groups he expected to support him that said, in
essence, "You'll reelect Reagan."
In 1986 he was approached by a group wanting him to run for the Senate as
an independent from Illinois but he declined. As for the House, he says, "Even
with a life sentence, in most states you get parole after 20 years."
Cliff Brown, a former aide, now teaching at Union College in New York,
says, "I think he would like to be back involved but I don't think he knows
the vehicle for it. He's said, 'If it turns totally horrible, I might run
again. But the situation would have to be so horrible for me to run again that
we wouldn't want to see it happen.' I reminded him of this after the {October}
crash. He said, 'Well, we still have a ways to go.' "
Anderson laughs and nods. "I'm certainly not going to renounce and take the
veil any ambition for contributing something to a future administration if
that opportunity were to present itself."
In 1978, the last time he ran for Congress, Anderson survived a bitter
primary challenge from a born-again Christian minister who mobilized the new
right against him and in so doing sowed the seeds for his presidential
campaign. William Galston, once his senior speech writer, now director of
economics and social programs at the Roosevelt Center, says that by 1980
Anderson was so contemptuous of the new right, he could no longer conceal it:
"The critical moment came during the Illinois debate, when Ronald Reagan
leaned over and said, 'John, would you really prefer Teddy Kennedy to me?' "
He has been a political exile ever since -- which may, ultimately, be his
legacy. There are those, such as Schneider, who see Anderson as a casualty of
political realignment, a man with no political home, typical of many
Americans. "Like Anderson, most voters feel uncomfortable {with the
Republicans and the Democrats} ," he says. "He's right. The old parties were
less ideologically consistent and fit the voters better."
Anderson continues to argue the merits of a third party in that sonorous
voice of his even as he accepts the unlikeliness of the enterprise. It's hard
to know whether he is a visionary able to see and say what those in power
cannot or a man whose vision prevents him from seeing what others can.
He stands in the kitchen of his Northwest Washington home, the sun setting
behind him. Backlit against the window, he threatens to disappear. "You can't
have this constant litany of disappointment, those failed leaders, Lyndon
Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, without
eventually, and I do not think too much longer, maybe this historical
breakthrough will occur where people will say, 'We've got to change the
system.' The movers and shakers in Washington notwithstanding, things will
happen and events will move and change."
He seems genuinely perplexed that the people have not already come to this
conclusion. He ponders for a moment what it is they want in 1988. "Maybe it
goes back to that sign we saw in Lafayette Square," he says. "Wisdom and
honesty. You can't reinvent the wheel and you can't reinvent better words."
Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington
Post and may not include subsequent corrections.
Return to Search Results