Governing under the influence; Washington alcoholics: their aides protect them, the media shields them

Washington Monthly, Jan, 1988 by Steven Waldman

Governing Under the Influence

Deaver Cites Alcoholism as Perjury Trial Defense.

The New York Times, October 3, 1987

Give me a break, I thought. Who's Deaver trying to fool? It just doesn't add up. First, if he was so intoxicated, could he really have survived as a top White House aide or superlobbyist? Second, if he were constantly guzzling scotch as he claims, wouldn't his colleagues have been suspicious? And if he were that blitzed, wouldn't reporters have jumped on the story?

Deaver's defense may or may not have been contrived, but the scenario behind it is plausible. Yes, alcoholics can do their jobs at the same time they ruin themselves. Yes, olleagues can be oblivious to the effects of even heavy drinking. And finally, reporters usually fail to cover the drinking problems of Washington officials. While Deaver's defense is unusual, alcoholism in Washington isn't.

"I suspect," writes former Senator Herman Talmadge, "alcoholism is as much of an occupational disease among politicians as black lung is among coal miners."

Washington is certainly not the only place where both alcoholism and misunderstanding about alcoholism are widespread. But Washington has its own elaborate system that can disguise the problem and conceal its effect on the city's work product, public policy. Often, it creates a special alcoholic's trap: the more important a public officials is, the less likely he will be forced to confront his problem drinking. "I knew several alcoholics," says Richard Bolling, former chairman of the House Rules Committee and a recovering alcoholic, "and they all were in important positions."

One would think that this would be a point of interest to the media. Ironically, the recent press willingness to peep through the bushes at a public figure's private conduct has focused on fuzzy "character" and "judgment" issues. Reporters have often overlooked a problem that would seem to relate much more directly to "job performance," the one criterion both critics and defenders of the press agree is fair game. So where are all the drunk politician stories?

From 1965 to 1980, some of the most important leadership positions on Capitol Hill were held by congressmen with drinking problems, including the majority leader (Hale Boggs) and the chairmen of the Ways and Means (Wilbur Mills), Rules (Bolling), and Armed Services (L. Mendel Rivers) committees.

The noticeable effects of their drinking ran quite a spectrum. At one end was Rivers, who was regularly drying out at Bethesda Naval Hospital during the same period he had access to top classified defense and intelligence information. At the other was Bolling, who showed no signs of excessive drinking but later conceded he was an alcoholic.

Reporters who covered Rivers knew about his drinking. But it wasn't exposed in print until columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson began writing about it. They focused on Rivers's sensitive position as chairman of the Armed Services Committee and a separate committee that oversaw the CIA. "While Congress has spent millions exposing communists and non-conformists," Pearson and Anderson wrote in 1967, "it has carefully protected its own security risks." They reported that the markup for the $18 billion military authorization bill had to be delayed five times while Rivers was "resting" in Bethesda Naval Hospital. Committee colleagues, they wrote, "have urged [Rivers] to stay on the wagon at least long enough to win" key battles against the Johnson administration. One of his former secretaries said "sometimes we would come into his office and find it strewn with bottles and the safe would be wide open."

Alcohol problems stalked Majority Leader Hale Boggs too and similarly went unreported until Anderson and Pearson got the story. "House Speaker Carl Albert is so wary of Boggs's behavior," Anderson wrote, "that he is afraid to step down from the chair and turn control of the House over to the man who is supposed to be his prime assistant." Questions about Albert's own drinking were raised in Anderson's column and later spilled onto the news pages when the speaker smashed up his car outside his favorite bar, the Zebra Room. Witnesses described him as "obviously drunk."

Across the rotunda in the Senate, alcohol problems among top leaders were just as prevalent. Former senators who have acknowledged alcoholism included the chairman of the Agriculture Committee (Herman Talmadge); the chairman of the Finance Committee (Russell Long), who went on the wagon in the 1970s; and a senior liberal (Harrison Williams), who later went to prison after an Abscam sting caught him taking bribes. According to Robert Parker, the former maitre d' of the Senate dining room, and Louis Hurst, the former doorkeeper of the Senate, the list of problem-drinking senators should also include Warren Magnuson (chairman of the Commerce Committee), and Parker adds Joe McCarthy and Estes Kefauver, Adlai Stevenson's running mate in 1956. One Senate leader in the 1960s was so drunk that he urinated in his pants and passed out on the Senate floor, according to Parker. As Wayne Morse, who served in the Senate from 1945 to 1969, once said: "There has never been one night session of the Senate in all my experience that hasn't witnessed at least one senator making a fool of himself and disgracing the Senate."