In the End, Southern Senators Rose Against Lott
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 22, 2002; Page A01
URL:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23904-2002Dec21.html
Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) had decided Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) could not and should not survive as the incoming majority leader. Allen, serving as a front man for one of Lott's likely successors, picked up the phone to tell him so.
It was late Wednesday afternoon, 36 hours before Lott resigned as Senate GOP leader. Allen and several other southern senators had been conspiring for four days to replace Lott with Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), a heart-lung transplant surgeon President Bush affectionately calls "Fristy."
After Lott's birthday party gaffe about segregation, he had been frozen out of the strategy session as a part of his own caucus, which was holding conference calls without him. Sources said Allen's ultimatum, an uncharacteristically aggressive move for a politician who nurtures a down-home image, was one of the pivotal moments in behind-the-scenes maneuvering following the careless Dec. 5 comment by Lott that ultimately cost him his job.
Until that point, according to sources close to Lott, no senator had directly told him he should step down. Some senators had been calling Lott in seclusion at his home in Pascagoula, Miss., and using the elegant yet murky language of the Senate to warn of "negative assessments" about his political viability. Many pledged their support, although friends say it weighed on Lott's mind that he had won his first secret-ballot leadership election, as whip back in 1994, by one vote after thinking he had commitments for a wider margin of victory.
Allen recalled in an interview yesterday that after small talk about how torturous the situation must be for Lott and his family, "I got to the point, which was that we needed a new leader."
Lott acted surprised, according to several sources.
"Trent said he thought he had a had a lot of good support, strong support and that he could be a strong leader and a strong campaigner," Allen said. "He mentioned that he had a majority of senators with him. And I said: Well, regardless, I just thought it was in the best interest of the country, and our principles, our philosophy, the issues we were trying to advance that he step down."
Much public attention has been focused on the role of the White House in Lott's downfall. A public repudiation by Bush, followed by his silence on the issue, set the climate for the coup in the Senate. But the opposition didn't come to a head until a small group of senators, acting out of their own ambition as well as concern about the damage the spectacle was doing to their party, forced Lott out long before the leadership meeting that had been scheduled for Jan. 6.
Frist's backers said the clubby Senate was quite slow to turn on Lott for his remarks at a centennial salute to Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), in which Lott spoke wistfully of Thurmond's segregationist campaign for president in 1948.
"This unguarded comment, meant as a compliment, had unleashed something unbelievable," said a Republican strategist who still sounded stunned by what he had just lived through. "Through the end, there was a huge sense among most senators that the new caricature of Trent Lott was not the real Trent Lott. I don't think anybody thought this was fair, but a majority concluded it was necessary."
Sources said that during their Wednesday conversation, Lott asked Allen if he could "hold off on this a day" before going public with the fact that he had asked Lott to resign. Allen agreed. But Lott did not act swiftly enough to satisfy Allen, who accelerated plans to depose him.
Frist, 50, was still basking in the midterm victories that he helped secure as chairman of the Senate GOP's campaign committee, and he is a specialist in medical policy at a time when Bush is preparing to make health care his signature domestic issue next year.
Allen, also 50, will replace Frist next month as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the two message each other constantly on their BlackBerry wireless e-mail terminals. "Call me," Allen wrote Frist on Saturday morning, Dec. 14. Frist called Allen when he was in a Fairfax County park, playing quarterback for both teams in a touch football game with youngsters from the neighborhood.
"I said, 'Bill, I can foresee no scenario where this issue is going to get any better. I only see it getting worse,' " Allen said. "I asked him to consider running or standing for leader. Over the weekend he at least said, 'If it doesn't get like that, I would consider.' "
Allen's role was but one part of a multidimensional drama. Participants cautioned that no one knows the full story. "There were thousands of conversations, and no one was privy to all of them, including Senator Frist," an official said.
At least one other group of coup plotters was working on a separate but parallel track, according to aides. Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.), who believed he had the support of several conservatives, telephoned Bush's senior adviser, Karl Rove, that same Saturday and told him he planned to use a Sunday, Dec. 15, interview program to call for a leadership election. Rove did not stop him. Rove made and took calls about the issue throughout the week, but White House officials insisted he was gathering information and not influencing the process.
"The White House deftly did Lott in with deadly public silence, and left very few fingerprints," said William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard.
Frist, who started with the votes of the eight incoming senators he had helped elect, swiftly outstripped Nickles in building support to succeed Lott. Aides said Frist stayed cagey about his intentions until Thursday morning. Then, he authorized Allen and roughly a half dozen other senators to begin calling Republicans to ask their opinions, with the real mission of promoting Frist as a replacement.
An aide called this group "Frist's offensive line." Participants would not identify all of them, because some of them were believed to be assuring Lott at the same time that they supported him. But numerous sources agreed that the core group included Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) and former representative Jim Talent, a White House favorite who is the newly elected senator from Missouri.
It was made to look like a draft. Associates said that Frist had been initially reluctant to run for the job. Some associates said Frist wanted to be available if Vice President Cheney decided not to run for reelection with Bush, and these associates said the job of majority leader could distract from a possible run for the White House in 2008.
But with Lott at his weakest and with Bush's inner circle subtly promoting him, Frist pounced. Wearing alligator-skin boots as he dialed, Frist followed up the linemen's calls with his own. "Our caucus needs help," he told one senator, fretting aloud about the possible damage to the Senate as well as to the party and its agenda.
All week, Frist and his brain trust had been taking soundings about the Senate from a circle of outside advisers that included Vin Weber, a former member of the House Republican leadership who now is managing partner of the Washington office the Clark & Weinstock management consulting firm.
Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah) talked to Frist on Wednesday, Dec. 18. "I wasn't entirely sure he was going to run," Bennett said. "He didn't say he wouldn't, but he said his personal goals centered mainly on health care and moving that issue along. Obviously he had had some conversations with people in the administration, but I didn't have the sense that he was acting as the president's agent, or that Karl Rove had put him up to this."
A source said Frist consciously avoided contact with Rove.
With word of the calls racing through the Capitol on Thursday afternoon, Frist issued a statement saying he would consider challenging Lott. Lott gave up the next morning, after his friend Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who as the incoming whip will be second in the GOP leadership, told him the situation was hopeless. McConnell said in an interview that he suggested Lott "step down immediately."
Frist had such a head start on the race to succeed Lott that three possible challengers, including McConnell, folded within hours. Nickles endorsed Frist. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who will be third in the leadership, continued prospecting for several hours after Lott's announcement but then bowed out under pressure from McConnell and others who told him unity was essential.
Staff writers Dan Balz, David S. Broder and Helen Dewar contributed to this report.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company |
