The Secret Papers of Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized

[Nevilledog]

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David Rohde
@RohdeD
@JaneMayerNYer obtained Lee Atwater's unpublished memoir and other private papers. They suggest that, far from dying along with him, the nihilism, cynicism & scurrilous tactics that Atwater brought into national politics have become normalized under Trump.

The Secret Papers of Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized
An infamous Republican political operative’s unpublished memoir shows how the Party came to embrace lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost.
newyorker.com
5:03 PM · May 6, 2021

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-secret-papers-of-lee-atwater-who-invented-the-scurrilous-tactics-that-trump-normalized

It’s a Washington axiom that when a power player dies, their influence and secrets do as well. One night this spring, my phone chimed with a text message that showed otherwise. Sally Atwater, the widow of the legendary Republican political operative Lee Atwater, had died. She had been married to the bad boy of the G.O.P. during the Reagan and Bush years until his untimely death, thirty years ago. The Atwaters’ eldest daughter, Sara Lee, who lives in Brussels and is a Democrat, invited me over to her parents’ home to read through cartons of papers from her late father, whom I knew well when I covered the Reagan White House. They included seven chapters of Lee Atwater’s unpublished draft memoir, which had remained untouched since he succumbed to brain cancer, in 1991, at the age of forty, and at the height of his political career.

The house on a quiet street in Northwest Washington was the kind of tidy, brick place that bespeaks proper family life. The scene inside was something else. Its first-floor rooms were filled with a jumble of cardboard and plastic containers, overflowing with manila folders, crammed with everything from the former Republican Party chairman’s elementary-school papers to his dying thoughts, dictated to an assistant during his final days.

Some of the memorabilia was surprising. Despite Atwater’s well-deserved reputation for running racist campaigns, there were friendly private notes and photos of him with Al Sharpton and James Brown, whose onstage acrobatics Atwater was famous for trying to mimic in his own blues-guitar performances. There were also personal notes from underground-film stars of the John Waters era. According to his daughter, Atwater was a huge underground-film aficionado. While the Republican Party he chaired trumpeted family values and the Christian right, on the side he helped a friend open a video store in Virginia specializing in pornography, blaxploitation, and his own favorite genre, horror movies. Atwater experienced horror in his own life early. When he was five, his baby brother died of burns from an overturned vat of hot grease in the family’s kitchen. Atwater’s papers contained no mention of the tragedy, but he said that he heard the sounds of his brother’s screams every day of his life.

Atwater died before he could finish his memoir. What remains of it are hunks of yellowing typewritten pages, held together by rusting staples and paper clips. But the seven surviving chapters suggest that, far from dying along with him, the nihilism, cynicism, and scurrilous tactics that Atwater brought into national politics live on. In many ways, his memoir suggests that Atwater’s tactics were a bridge between the old Republican Party of the Nixon era, when dirty tricks were considered a scandal, and the new Republican Party of Donald Trump, in which lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost have become normalized. Chapter 5 of Atwater’s memoir in particular serves as a Trumpian precursor. In it, Atwater, who worked in the Office of Political Affairs in the Reagan White House, and managed George H. W. Bush’s 1988 Presidential campaign before becoming the Republican Party’s chairman at the age of thirty-seven, admits outright that he only cared about winning, not governing. “I’ve always thought running for office is a bunch of bullshit. Being in a office is even more bullshit. It really is bullshit,” he wrote. “I’m proud of the fact that I understand how much BS it is.”

*snip*

[Progressive Jones]

1. That scum bag Atwater did a lot of damage. He lived too long. nt

[elleng]

2. he died of brain cancer, sorry GOP didn't.

[OAITW r.2.0]

3. He invented ratfucking.

No, wait, that was learned in the Don Segretti School of Nixonian governmental politics. Republicans have been rat-fucking the American people since they got rid of Eisenhower.

[CatWoman]

4. funny

last week I watched "Boogie Man -The Lee Atwater Story" and came to the same conclusion.

Trump and his motley crew operated like Atwater on steroids.

Atwater was best buds with no other than Roger Stone, and Karl Rove was his protege.

GW Bush got on well with him, but the snobbier Bushes (Pops and Babs) didn't care for him. I don't think they even visited him during his hospitalization. He was just the help, nothing more.

BTW -- the documentary can be viewed free on Pluto TV: https://pluto.tv/on-demand/movies/boogie-man-the-lee-atwater-story-1-1

[Skittles]

7. I didn't know Lee's wife Sally passed a coulple of months ago

lung cancer

[niyad]

5. Bookmarking.

[liberal_mama]

6. I have to agree with Roger Stone on this part of the article

“We both knew he believed in nothing,” Stone told me. “Above all, he was incredibly competitive. But I had the feeling that he sold his soul to the devil, and the devil took it.”

[dalton99a]

8. A thoroughly evil, sadistic asshole

But throughout his life he displayed more than a tinge of amorality. In his memoir, Atwater describes, without remorse, falsely accusing another student of instigating a fight that he had started, and remaining silent after the student was paddled twenty-five times. “I didn’t tell the truth worth a shit,” he admits. He describes organizing six hundred and fifty students to spew spit wads at a female official who, he writes, hadn’t “been screwed in 20 years.” The best moment, in his view, was when a fellow-student threw a glass of ice at her, “and it really hurt her which was the funny part.”

The first presidential campaign that Atwater managed was a bid to get a friend of his elected as student-body president—against the friend’s wishes. He created a list of false accomplishments and devised a fake rating system that ranked his friend first. He plastered the school with posters declaring his friend’s platform of false promises of “Free Beer on Tap in the Cafeteria—Free Dates—Free Girls.” The campaign took a darker turn when Atwater’s sidekicks stomped on the bare feet of a hippie-like student until his feet bled profusely. Afterward, the group threatened to do the same to younger students unless they voted for Atwater’s candidate. Atwater recalls that he privately revelled in the tactics, and was proud that he could participate in “intimidating” his fellow-students. But publicly he feigned concern, or, as he writes, “I was acting like Eddie Haskell saying, ‘My gosh young people, you could be next.’ ” His candidate won an upset victory, but the school declared it void owing to a technicality. “I learned a lot,” he writes. “I learned how to organize . . . and I learned how to polarize.”