The GOP's master strategist - William Kristol - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1994 by Jon Meacham

Access to the Council's lobbying powers was for sale: The Washington Post reported that "In almost every city he visits as a campaigner, Quayle holds closed-door roundtables with business people who have made sizable contributions to the local or national GOP." And the Council met in secret, claiming to be like the National Security Council. The difference, of course, is that the National Security Council doesn't solicit problems from paying constituents and then pressure federal agencies to reverse course.

In late 1990, the Council's first victory was to remove a recycling requirement for municipal incinerators. Emboldened by this success, the Council reviewed the EPA's first set of regulations implementing the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which Bush had enthusiastically signed into law. Quayle's office marked up the proposals with 100 suggested changes, including giving industries the power to unilaterally increase their emissions of pollution without public notice, judicial review, or agency oversight.

There were other cases of interference with regulations intended to provide safe factories and intelligently protect the environment: The Council tried to change the definition of "wetlands" to open more land to development (this after Bush promised "no net loss of wetlands" in 1988); tried to stop OSHA from regulating formaldehyde, a carcinogen; and tried to allow power plants near the Grand Canyon to pollute more than the EPA wanted them to.

Nevertheless, few figures in the Bush administration came out as well as Kristol, who spearheaded the Council. This is because Kristol brought the same strategic skills that he uses to promote the GOP opposition line to promoting himself.

Quayle alumni report that journalists streamed in and out of Kristol's office, and that the chief of staff rarely failed to return reporters' phone calls. He was close to Fred Barnes, whose columns in The New Republic frequently argued that the technocratic John Sununu and Dick Darman were wrecking Bush, and the young conservatives were the president's hope for salvation. (After one especially Kristolian Barnes column, White House staffers joked that "Barnes must be mainlining Kristol this week.") Kristol was also attentive to writers at work on books: Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame, Time correspondents who wrote Marching in Place, an unflattering portrait of the static first three Bush years, used Kristol as a source. And John Podhoretz, whose Hell of a Ride skewers Bush's "solipsistic presidency," "practically had his headquarters in Kristol's office," recalls one Quayle staffer.

Because Kristol was so close to reporters, people who might criticize him were reluctant to do so; his influence in the White House was based, in part, on the fact that he could always get his spin published or aired. In a July 5, 1992 New York Times Magazine profile of Quayle in which Kristol's staff was called "one of the leanest and meanest operations in Washington," the reporter wrote of the mood inside the White House in the spring of 1992: "For months, Quayle and his staff had been on the verge of panic about the Bush decline. From their perspective, the White House, despite major staff changes since the beginning of the year, had let slip a series of opportunities to win back the affection of American voters." And on September 9, Kristol told the Times, "I'm much less sure that we deserve to win than that the country doesn't deserve for the Democrats to win."