[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 29 (Wednesday, March 6, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E280-E281]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 JACK VALENTI--ADDRESS TO THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS BAR ASSOCIATION: 
            LESSONS OF ONE OF WASHINGTON'S KEENEST OBSERVERS

                                 ______


                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, March 5, 1996

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, Jack Valenti, the president and CEO of the 
Motion Picture Association of America, is one of the most distinguished 
and insightful observers of the Washington scene. As my colleagues 
know, Jack arrived in Washington aboard Air Force One with President 
Lyndon Johnson on November 22, 1963. In the three decades since Jack 
arrived at the White House, he has been a thoughtful and careful 
eyewitness to the administrations of seven Presidents and every 
Congress from the 88th to the 104th.
  Jack shared his wisdom and thoughts about our National Government 
based on his first-hand participation and his perceptive observations 
in an outstanding address to the members of the Federal Communications 
Bar a few weeks ago. The lessons he shared with these attorneys are 
lessons that would be beneficial to all of us in the Congress as well. 
Mr. Speaker, I ask that the address of Jack Valenti be placed in the 
Record, and I urge my colleagues to give it thoughtful attention.

 Washington, DC: ``It's a Make You Town or a Bring You Down and Break 
                              You Town.''

                           (By Jack Valenti)

       As one who has spent his entire adult career in two of 
     life's classic fascinations, politics and movies, I have 
     known in both those worlds the great, the near great and 
     those who thought they were great. The latter category 
     outnumbers the first two by a long ton. I have become 
     convinced that movie people and politicians spring from the 
     same DNA.
       They are both:
       Unpredictable.
       Sometimes glamorous.
       Usually in crisis, imagined or otherwise.
       Addicted to power.
       Anxious to please.
       Always on stage.
       Hooked on applause.
       Enticed by publicity.
       Always reading from scripts prepared by someone else.
       Constantly taking the public pulse.
       Never really certain, except publicly.
       Indeed, it's difficult to say which deserves more the 
     description of entertainment capital of the world, Hollywood 
     or Washington, D.C.
       The lyrics of the song ``This Town,'' as sung by Frank 
     Sinatra explain most accurately what Washington is all about. 
     Sang Old Blue Eyes: ``It's a make you town or a bring you 
     down and break you town.''
       Which is why I would like to talk tonight about what I have 
     learned since I arrived in the Federal City aboard Air Force 
     One on November 22, 1963. In the intervening 32 years I have 
     in turn been an intimate participant at the highest station 
     of this government, serving my President with loyalty and 
     fidelity, as well as a clinical observer through the 
     administrations of seven Presidents, from the 88th Congress 
     through the 104th Congress. Perhaps some of these musings 
     will be some casual interest of a few of you. They are quite 
     interesting to me.
       So, let me count the lessons I have learned. Or more 
     accurately, lessons learned as defined by my experience, not 
     necessarily by yours.
       I learned that in the White House there is one enduring 
     standard by which every assistant to the President, every 
     presidential adviser, every presidential consultant must 
     inevitably be measured. Not whether you went to Harvard or 
     Yale, or whether you scored 1600 on your SATs, or whether you 
     are endlessly charming and charismatically enable or whether 
     you made millions in what we sardonically call ``the private 
     sector.'' These are all attractive credentials which one may 
     wear modestly or otherwise. But when the decision crunch is 
     on in the Oval Office they are all merely tracings on dry 
     leaves in the wind. What does count, the ultimate and only 
     gauge, is whether you have ``good judgment.''
       I learned that no presidential decision is ever made where 
     the President had all the information he needed to make the 
     decision. There is never enough facts. Very quickly, the 
     decision corridor grows dark, the mapping indistinct, the 
     exit inaccessible. What is not useful are precedents or 
     learned disquisitions by Op-Ed page pundits, some of whom 
     would be better suited to raising pigeons. Finally, the 
     decision is made on judgment alone. Sometimes the judgment is 
     good. Sometimes it is not.
       You don't learn ``good judgment'' in the Ivy League or by 
     reading the New York Times, the Washington Post or even the 
     Weekly Standard. It is well to remember, as Oscar Wilde once 
     said, that from time to time nothing that is worth knowing 
     can be taught. Judgment is something that springs from some 
     little elf who inhabits an area between your belly and your 
     brain, and who from time to time, tugs at your nerve edges, 
     and says, ``no, not that way, the other way.'' This 
     mysterious inhabitant is called instinct, intuition, 
     judgment. It is the one ingredient on which the rest of human 
     condition depends for guidance.
       I learned that the one political component above all else 
     which can insure electoral victory or crushing defeat is 
     timing. A whack to your political solar plexus six to eight 
     months before an election is survivable. Two weeks before the 
     election, and you're dead. Ask Jimmy Carter. In politics, 
     twenty-hours is a millennium.
       I learned that economic forecasts beyond about two weeks 
     have the same odds of accuracy as guessing the winning 
     numbers in the D.C. lottery. If you truly believe in long-
     term predictions of economic activity, estimates based on so-
     called ``real numbers,'' which is the mantra of the current 
     budget debate, then you are enrolled in a defunct mythology. 
     Economic forecasts are usually unwarranted assumptions 
     leaping to a preconceived conclusion. Just remember, whenever 
     an economist can't remember his phone number, he will give 
     you an estimate.
       I learned that when there is no unamiable issue like war, 
     or prospect of war or recession or economic disaster, most 
     people vote for a President viscerally not intellectually. 
     Most people choose a President romantically, a choice made in 
     unfathomable ways which is now romance is formed. Like John 
     Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
       I learned never to humiliate an antagonist and never desert 
     a friend. In a political struggle, never got personal else 
     the dagger digs too deep. Your enemy today may need to be 
     your ally tomorrow.
       I learned that nothing lasts. What is up will inevitably go 
     down and sooner or later in reverse. It took forty years, but 
     the House changed masters. Victory is often the prelude to 
     defeat. President Bush can rise to testify about that. 
     Failure is often the precursor of triumph. Ask Bill Clinton. 
     Richard Nixon tasted both ends of those beguiling equations. 
     The breeding ground of politics is irrigated and nourished by 
     change. As one who has fallen from political power, I can 
     instruct George Stephanopoulos in how quickly you lose your 
     charm and your enticements when you no longer sit at the 
     right hand of the Sun King.
       I learned that a political poll is Janus in disguise. The 
     life of a poll is about 10 nano-seconds. It is already in 
     decay when it is published. A political poll, like the 
     picture of Dorian Gray, is the face of entropy. The veteran 
     professionals know that. The old pols use polls to raise 
     money. When polls are up, go for the fat wallets. But the 
     politician who persistently lifts his wet finger to test the 
     political polls before he acts, usually leaves office with a 
     wet finger.
       I learned that if a President, a Congressman, a Senator 
     does not have convictions, he or she will be right only by 
     accident. I must confess I have a grudging admiration for 
     those freshmen House Republicans who won't budge from their 
     fixed convictions. They truly believe, heavily, explicitly. 
     Which is why Speaker Gingrich is finding out what Mirabeau 
     finally knew: When you undertake to run a revolution, the 
     difficulty is not to make it go. It is to hold it in check.
       But I have also learned that the frustrating constant of 
     modern day American politics is perennial gridlock, caused by 
     forces at either extreme. It has been said that a man does 
     not show his greatness by being at the end of one political 
     boundary or the other, but rather by touching both at once. 
     In our free Republic, political parties argue and shout, but 
     finally they touch both ends of the extremes and draw them 
     together. That is called ``compromise.'' It is not an ignoble 
     word. Compromise is the canopy under which men and women 
     finally behave wisely, once they have exhausted all other 
     alternatives. Without compromise, parliamentary bodies will 
     ``split into a bundle of unfriendly and distrustful 
     fragments.''
       I have learned that if we live in the incestuous world of 
     Washington long enough we become, in the main, skeptics, 
     cynics, who view with lacerating contempt the boobs and the 
     rabble, the unlearned and unlettered, who live out there, 
     somewhere east of Beverly Hills and west of the Beltway. But 
     those boobs are the very folks who over two centuries of 
     cruel disjointings have sustained this free and loving land.
       I have a special feeling for the rabble. My grandparents 
     were part of that rabble. They came to Texas from Sicily, 
     poor immigrant peasants, strangers in a strange and wondrous 
     land. They became unabashed patriots, which to them meant 
     fierce loyalty and unbreakable fidelity to their new country.
       These days we are uneasy with the designation ``patriot.'' 
     We regard it in much the same queasy manner as one does 
     holding a wolf by the ears. Too bad. When the night is full 
     of knives, when lightning is seen and drums are heard, the 
     patriots are always there, ready to fight, and ready to die 
     if need be, to defend their country and to protect

[[Page E281]]

     those who stayed home, for sound and convenient reasons, of 
     course.
       But the greatest lesson I have learned, the most important 
     of my education, is really the essential imperative of this 
     century. It is called leadership. We brandish the word. We 
     admire its light. But we seldom define it. Outside Caen in 
     the Normandy countryside of France is a little cemetery. Atop 
     one of the graves is a cross on which is etched these words: 
     ``Leadership is wisdom and courage and a great carelessness 
     of self.'' Which means, of course, that leaders must from 
     time to time put to hazard their own political future in 
     order to do what is right in the long term interests of those 
     they have by solemn oath sworn to serve. Easy to say. Tough 
     to do.
       I remember when I first bore personal witness to its doing. 
     It was in December, 1963. Lyndon Johnson had been President 
     but a few short weeks. At that time I was actually living on 
     the third floor of the White House until my family arrived. 
     The President said to me on a Sunday morning, ``call Dick 
     Russell and ask him if he would come by for coffee with you 
     and me.''
       Senator Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia was the single 
     most influential and honored figure in the Senate. His 
     prestige towered over all others in those years before the 
     dialogue turned sour and mean. When in 1952, the Senate 
     Democratic leader's post fell open, the other Senators turned 
     immediately to Russell, imploring him to take the job. 
     ``No,'' said Russell, ``let's make Lyndon Johnson our leader, 
     he'll do just fine.'' So at the age of 44, just four years in 
     his first Senate term, LBJ became the youngest ever 
     Democratic leader and in a short time the greatest 
     parliamentary commander in Senate history.
       When Russell arrived, the President greeted him warmly with 
     a strong embrace, the six-foot four LBJ and the smallish, 
     compact Russell, with his gleaming bald head and penetrating 
     eyes. The President steered him to the couch overlooking the 
     Rose Garden, in the West Hall on the second floor of the 
     Mansion. I sat next to Russell. The President was in his wing 
     chair, his knees almost touching Russell's, so close did they 
     sit.
       The President drew even closer, and said in an even voice, 
     ``Dick, I love you and I owe you. If it had not been for you 
     I would not have been Leader, or Vice President or now 
     President. But I wanted to tell you face to face, please 
     don't get in my way on this Civil Rights Bill, which has been 
     locked up in the Senate too damn long. I intend to pass this 
     bill, Dick. I will not cavil. I will not hesitate. And if you 
     get in my way, I'll run you down.''
       Russell sat mutely for a moment, impassive, his face a 
     mask. Then he spoke, in the rolling accents of his Georgia 
     countryside. ``Well, Mr. President, you may just do that. But 
     I pledge you that if you do, it will not only cost you the 
     election, it will cost you the South forever.''
       President Johnson in all the later years in which I knew 
     him so intimately never made me prouder than he did that 
     Sunday morning so long, long ago. He touched Russell lightly 
     on the shoulder, an affectionate gesture of one loving friend 
     to another. He spoke softly, almost tenderly: ``Dick, my old 
     friend, if that's the price I have to pay, then I will gladly 
     pay it.''
       Of all the lessons I have learned in my political life, 
     that real life instruction in leadership on a Sunday morning 
     in the White House was the most elemental, and the most 
     valuable. It illuminated in a blinding blaze the highest 
     point to which the political spirit can soar. I have never 
     forgotten it. I never will.

                          ____________________