Politics

I ran for president of the student body of Tuscaloosa Junior High School when I was in the eighth grade in 1958. I took the campaign pretty seriously, having pencils manufactured with my campaign slogan on it. It didn’t work, but I came in second.

I got some exposure to real world politics when Daddy supported a candidate for state school superintendent in Alabama– primarily because the candidate promised to press for the statewide adoption of a series of text books on English and Communications that daddy had co-authored. I'm not sure I ever met the candidate, but I remember being impressed when the campaign manager pulled in an enormous wad of currency out of his pocket and peeled off bills to give to me and some of my high school classmates I had talked into handing out literature on the streets of Birmingham.

I was elected secretary treasurer of the student body at the small (my graduating class numbered twelve) high school, I attended, Birmingham University School. Daddy was the headmaster. I successfully promoted one of my closest friends, John Bayliss, for president, and another close friend, Tommy Krebs, for vice president. We comprised will we called the "Bunny Rabbit Party" and pretty much dominated student government, and rather terrorized the teachers. I looked upon it—even then—as being a very big fish in a very small pond. The faculty resented Daddy’s sometimes heavy-handed reform efforts for the school. The natural accusation was that I got special treatment. It was a bit tough to prevail on that argument, because I got straight A’s in everything.

After Daddy was fired, my closest friend at the time, Shelby White, and I nearly got expelled and served suspension of a week or two when we had all been drinking beer off the school premises and decided it would be a good idea to leave a sack full of beer cans on the desk of one of the teachers. Subsequently, I realized the faculty undoubtedly concluded that we had drunk the beer in the school. Shelby did not tell his mother; I picked him up in the morning each day to “take him to school,” and we played tennis.

In my freshman year at MIT, I pledged Sigma Alpha Epsilon. The SAE Chapter emphasized "justification of existence," meaning that every pledge and every brother had an obligation to take leadership positions in student activities. I wasn’t going to do it in athletics.  I ran for vice president of the class and was elected. My mentor the fraternity, Joe Kirk, was very interested in politics – there was only three or four of us in a sea of would-be engineers that were interested in politics public affairs– and together we plotted my political career in the fraternity and in MIT student government. I was elected rush chairman for the beginning of my sophomore year, EDA (vice president) for second semester, and then EA (president) for the second semester of my junior year. I almost certainly could've been reelected, but I found the responsibility of EA not altogether to my liking and elected instead to run for pledge trainer. I was elected served a very gratifying term the first semester of my senior year, implementing some anti-hazing reform proposals that I had been developing in pushing through my position as a faculty member at national leadership school for the fraternity.

Although Tom Jones, a Sigma Chi whom I got along with well, wanted to run for reelection. I opposed him for junior class president and won. I'll never forget. Several of us had retired to a bar in Technology Square – the old Kendall Square was just beginning to be gentrified – to celebrate the end of the campaign over several martinis. When I got back to the house, everybody was assembled on the first floor. John Butler, one of the bigger brothers, picked me up and carried me up the spiral staircase while everyone clapped and cheered.

The main responsibility was organizing junior prom. I was not much into popular culture at the time, but recruited the Beach Boys, who played a good concert and drink immense quantities of beer backstage.

The natural progression from there in student politics was to run for undergraduate association president. My fraternity brothers (Joe Kirk had graduated) organized an aggressive campaign, with posters all over campus. I worked the dorms at night as well as the fraternities, as I had done in my candidacy for junior class president, but was bested by a dormitory resident named Bill Byrn.

There was no question in my mind when I graduated that I wanted a political career. For me that meant getting elected to office.

Then, as now and throughout my life, I was committed to vigorous exercise every day. I remember running bridge circuits thinking about future campaigns and formulating speech material.

Endicott Peabody was the Democratic nominee for governor of Massachusetts in the 1962 campaign. I persuaded some of my fraternity brothers to go to a rally with me. We picked up bumper stickers and flyers and had a great time. Beer and home-prepared food was plentiful and everyone in the large crowd sang “Happy Days Are Here Again” over and over again with great gusto.

Later, in the Sears for Mayor Campaign, I was giving out literature in the North End and approached several firemen sitting in front of a fire house. “I ain’t voting for no Republican,” one of them said. “I’m a Democrat.”

“I’m a Democrat, too, sir!” I said. “John Sears appeals to both Republicans and Democrats. John Sears cares!” (“John Sears cares” was the campaign slogan.)

“You ain’t no Democrat,” he said, “giving out flyers for a Republican.”

That got me to thinking. Maybe I wasn’t a Democrat any more.

After that I decided that we should get more explicitly political and use the foundation of Operation Back Bay to reach out to the members of the city council, state representatives, and state senators representing the Back Bay. I considered myself a Democrat of the time and approached the democratic state representative. She wasn’t interested. I then approached John Sears, who had a budding reputation as a liberal Republican member of the city council. Sears embraced my idea. I turned out several hundred MIT fraternity men to work in Sears’ reelection campaign, and then, when he decide to run for mayor, turned out an equal number. More than I realized astthe time, the large number of college volunteers was unheard of for a state or local campaign. It really turned heads in the political community.

The Sears for Mayor campaign headquarters was in the second floor of a building on the corner of Cambridge and Bowdoin, overlooking the North End and the then-new Government Center. I spent hours working in the campaign headquarters–although I preferred canvassing North End and Back Bay neighborhoods – looking out over the North End and recalling stories about John Kennedy's first campaign, which was centered there.

Afterwards, Sears was eager to express his appreciation – we had had a fair amount of contact with each other and really liked one another. I told him I wanted to be on the Ward Five Republican Committee, intending to launch my political career in Boston.  I was absolutely smitten with the Kennedy myths and stories of Honey Fitz and other Boston political rogues. (So were my political science professors at MIT.) The chairman of the committee was reluctant, arguing that students were unreliable: they would get appointed to something and they would move way. But Sears pushed him. I was appointed to the committee, and left Boston to join the Navy within six months.

Jack Saloma, a member of the MIT political science faculty, was a member of my master's thesis committee. I had taken a couple of seminars from him and we got to know each other. He had been an organizer of the Ripon Society, an organization for liberal Republicans. That's what I considered myself at this point in my political development.

When I moved to Atlanta, after my brief period as an aviation officer candidate at NAS Pensacola, I identified several Atlanta officeholders who were perceived as being liberal Republicans and wrote each a letter, saying, in essence, "I'm moving to Atlanta. I'm involved with the Ripon Society, and I would like to organize a chapter in Atlanta. I hope you would be willing to have lunch." Now, I'm amazed, but then, I was optimistic and suffused with self-confident. They all responded favorably. We did not organize a chapter of the Ripon Society, but I succeeded in making myself reasonably well known as a political activist. 

Rodney Cook was a popular state representative and Atlanta alderman—one of those I invited to lunch. Ivan Allen, the longtime mayor of Atlanta who had deftly shepherded the city through civil rights controversies, was retiring, and the campaign was heating up over who would succeed him. I enthusiastically joined Cook’s effort in that regard. He had been courageous on civil rights, getting a cross burned on his lawn at one point. I spent hours collecting data at the precinct level on voting behavior in Atlanta, matched it census data on race and recent income, and surreptitiously used Lockheed-Georgia's big mainframe timesharing system to run a series of multiple regression analyses showing how Cook could win. Before long, Cook was parading me before the business elite – including one featured appearance at the Capital City Club to present the data and my conclusions. Cook was already close to Robert Woodruff, the scion of Coca-Cola and the CEO’s of a couple of Atlanta’s major banks.

I doubt that anyone understood the data or analysis, but they understood the conclusion, and they certainly were impressed with all my 35-mm slides with images of computer printouts. The result was that the business establishment united behind Cook, although with limited passion. The election is formally nonpartisan, but the Establishment liked having someone everyone knew was a Republican do well.

My statistical methodology was sound, but I made a seriously flawed assumption. I assumed that higher income and better educated blacks – there were lots of them in Atlanta because of the presence of three highly regarded black universities there – would be more open to vote for a Republican than lower-income less-educated blacks. That was backwards. The higher the income level and education, the more assertive African-Americans were toward  black solidarity and a more aggressive civil rights agenda. Sam Massell, the young president of the board of aldermen, aligned himself with Maynard Jackson arising black Atlanta politician who subsequently was mayor himself, and galvanized black support, subtly running against the Atlanta business establishment. Until then, city politics had been dominated by a coalition of the white business establishment and liberal black leaders. In the end, Cook lost. It marked a watershed in the shift of the political center of gravity away from the white business establishment toward the African American community. My role in the campaign was like a fantasy come alive. As assistant campaign manager, I somewhat roughly whipped volunteers into shape and loved driving around in the van with “Rodney Cook for Mayor" on the side, using the PA system and the mobile telephone.

The campaign sent me to a campaign manager school in Nashville run by the Republican National Committee. The campaign consultant from Washington, Roy Pfautch, and I decided that President Nixon should call the CEO of Lockheed and get me detailed to work on the campaign. The President of the United States does not do such things himself, and eventually word filtered down through my chain of command that Harry Dent, a special assistant to the President, had called the vice president for governmental affairs at Lockheed about me. I decided (with the encouragement of my Lockheed bosses) that taking a political leave of absence was a bad career move, and so I declined the offer.

Paul Coverdell (later a United States Senator from Georgia and Director of the Peace Corps) was Cook’s young campaign manager, and I got to know him well. Paul was 30 (I was 25) and had run unsuccessfully for one of the countywide state senate seats before getting involved with the Cook campaign.

When he decided to run in the state senate district encompassing Buckhead after the loss, I jumped aboard enthusiastically. Paul was tireless – many voters would stop him while he was working traffic intersections at 6 o'clock in the morning and say, "I don't really know who you are, son, or what you stand for, but I'm going to support you because you work so hard." It also didn't hurt Paul was young, single, and attractive—in a geeky sort of way. Young single women were the mainstay of his volunteer force.

On election night, Tyler Mauldin, an army vet my age, who had lost part of his left leg when he stepped on a mine in Vietnam, and became one of my closest friends during the course of the campaign, and I went to the Fulton County court house to get the election results. This was the era of mechanical voting machines, paper tally sheets, and chalk on blackboards. It was nip and tuck for much of the evening. Tyler and I periodically phoned the latest results to campaign headquarters. When it finally became clear that Paul had won, Tyler expected that we would make another phone call. "Hell no," I said. "We're not going to let them celebrate the victory while we’re enroute. We’ll tell him in in person." We ran out to my aged and cranky Mercedes 190SL, jumped in, and raced back to the Peachtree Street campaign headquarters with the final tally sheet. Paul greeted us with a quizzical look when we walked in.

"Why didn’t you call?" he asked.

I walked over to him, trying to keep a stern face, stuck out my hand and said "Congratulations, Senator!"

"What?" he said, and then we hugged each other. Cheers started almost immediately.

After the Coverdell campaign in 1970, I thought I was ready to run for office. I surveyed possible seats and concluded that an incumbent Republic state representative was a good target. He represented a legislative district that covered the northern part of Fulton County, from Sandy Springs in the south, where I lived, north to the town of Roswell. I didn't really appreciate at the time everything that is required for successful campaign, particularly not the money part, but I was full of myself after Cook and Coverdell campaigns. I began talking up the idea that I would mount a primary challenge to the very conservative state representative, who had an undistinguished record and particularly poor attendance in the state house.  Rodney was encouraging, in a vague way, and Paul also promised support, although I could tell he had reservations. I went to a few Republican Party events to get better acquainted with opinion leaders.

In the end, a husband-and-wife couple who chaired the Republican Party for the northern part of Fulton County took me to dinner and talked me out of running, promising to help me find another seat to run for and also promising to support me when I ran later.

A few months later I moved to Washington.

The version of the Hatch Act then in effect prohibited almost every kind of partisan political activity by federal employees, but I still planned to run for office. Having obtained some kind of glory and additional credibility from my federal service, I would return to Georgia and run for office. As much as two years into my Washington residency, when I got some kind of formal commission from the head of the Cost-of-Living Council, I made sure that it said "Henry H. Perritt, Jr., of Georgia."

I was lucky that, when the opportunity presented itself to work "in the White House" (it really was the Executive Office of the President, not the White House Office itself), it was in a highly sequestered Phase III planning effort for Don Rumsfeld. My level of enthusiasm for politics, for Nixon, and for the Republican Party, and my quest for further excitement in political campaigns easily could've got me tangled up with the dirty tricks of the Nixon reelection campaign. None of that was visible, and nobody thought everything was deeply wrong with dirty tricks until Watergate was exposed over the two years later.