Strong on Defense
The political road taking Mike Dukakis to “national defense” week, and Matt Bennett’s tank, detoured at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Derry, New Hampshire, on Sunday, February 14, 1988, two days before the First-in-the-Nation Primary. Dukakis had placed third in the Iowa Caucus behind Dick Gephardt and Paul Simon, but he returned to New England with a comfortable lead in the state neighboring his own.
I was working for Simon at the time. Our hopes had been pinned on Iowa, but the caucus-goers didn’t deliver. In New Hampshire, I began watching Dukakis more closely, sensing he had the name recognition and money to endure early setbacks and emerge as the front-runner. My own future as an advance man would depend on ultimately joining his team.
Dukakis would eventually win New Hampshire with 36 percent of the vote, almost doubling Gephardt’s tally.1 His lead in the closing days of the race allowed him to pivot to issues that would be top-of-mind for southern voters, the next key battleground. Fourteen states would go to the polls for “Super Tuesday” on March 6. Facing contests in Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia, among others, Dukakis and his staff knew that these states were home to military bases housing millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen and their families, and military assembly lines and shipyards filled with defense workers.
The speech to the Knights of Columbus in Derry was billed to the media as “Renewing America’s Strength: A Foreign Policy for the 1990s,”2 in which Dukakis did his best to draw a line in the sand close to where James Monroe had drawn it with the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. In his remarks in Derry, Dukakis said, “As President, I will not hesitate to use force to defend our territory or our citizens or our vital interests; to meet our treaty commitments; and to respond to, or deter, terrorist attacks.”3 News reports noted that the governor used some construct of the word “strength” nearly thirty times during his speech.
Super Tuesday was also the last best hope for Dukakis’s opponents. Al Gore, then thirty-nine, tried to salvage his fifth place in New Hampshire by going nuclear at stops in the South. “Governor Michael Dukakis does not have a single day of foreign policy experience,” he said at one speech during a southern swing through Louisiana and Texas. “He said it would be perfectly all right with him for the Soviet Union to establish a client state on the mainland of the American continent. Now that reflects a lack of experience. After seven years of Ronald Reagan, do we want another President who doesn’t know beans about foreign policy or what this country ought to be doing in the world?” Gore asked his audience.4
Dukakis responded in Atlanta, a city that had risen in prominence both from Jimmy Carter’s presidency and as the headquarters of CNN, which Ted Turner launched in 1980. Turner opened CNN Center as the network’s headquarters in 1987, and it quickly became a regular stop on the campaign. Dukakis arrived there the day after his New Hampshire victory to address a lunchtime crowd of 400 people. When asked by a reporter whether he thought Gore was the toughest Democrat on national defense, he responded, “I don’t think he’s the toughest. I don’t think he’s the toughest at all. I don’t yield in toughness to Al Gore in any way, shape or manner.”5 Dukakis won six states on Super Tuesday, including Texas and Florida, the victories finally distancing him from the rest of the field.
When the battle returned north for the New York Primary on April 19, Dukakis grabbed 51 percent of the vote, with 37 percent for Jesse Jackson and 10 percent for Gore. Paraphrasing Frank Sinatra, the victor declared, “If we can make it here, we can make it anywhere.”6 With Gephardt and Simon on their last legs and Jackson on the verge of withdrawing, the campaign went through the motions of collecting delegates in the later primaries and caucuses to secure the nomination, ultimately returning to Atlanta for the Democratic Convention in July.
Eyes on the Omni
I flew down to Atlanta from Boston on Monday, July 18, for the start of the convention. By then, I had been working for Dukakis for a few months in his finance department after dusting myself off from the wreckage of the Simon campaign.
I checked into my room at the Hyatt Regency, eager to set foot on the floor of my first convention. With an all-access pre-convention credential, I walked into the Omni Arena, which had been transformed from the home of the Atlanta Hawks to a massive theater to stage political spectacle. It was, to my eye, gorgeous, and purpose-built for television, with materials that would sparkle for the cameras when the lights went on. Looking up into the rafters, I spied massive nets holding thousands of balloons ready to descend on the delegates when Dukakis formally accepted his party’s nomination. The unique engineering of a timed balloon drop was something I had long sought to add to my repertoire of visual stunts, effective as they are to drive front-page coverage.
At the center of activity stood the podium, elevated twelve feet from the floor, where the convention’s production designer, René Lagler, was surrounded by his blueprints of the Omni that mapped every camera angle in the house. A contingent of order-takers also enveloped Lagler to help him put finishing touches on the show. They tested a hydraulic lift that raised and lowered the podium to perfect height for each speaker, with glass teleprompter panels that rose magically from the floor. Secret doors allowed for grand entrances and exits by political celebrities. Another blueprint documented where each lighting truss would hang, where the lights would be targeted, and how much luminosity they would throw on the scene. It was a movie set. At that instant, I saw how political spectacles grew from Hollywood creativity, and Lagler was the magician who would bring it to life.
The Zurich-born Lagler wasn’t the first person I would have expected to play a major role in shaping the image of American politicians, but it made perfect sense. He had won an Emmy for his design of the Academy Awards and was called into service to design the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1984 Olympic Games. He created the sets for TV specials for the likes of Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand and had also put his touch on Pope John Paul’s mass at Yankee Stadium. When the Statue of Liberty needed a showpiece to celebrate its 100th anniversary and Mount Rushmore required a splashy setting to mark its fiftieth birthday, Lagler got the call.
Now, in Atlanta, Lagler was presiding over his newest creation: a stage that softly echoed in pastel colors the motif of the American flag—salmon for red, eggshell for white and azure for blue—the choices carefully selected for how they would translate on television. I leaned in to eavesdrop. I could learn a lot from this guy just by watching and listening to Lagler talk about not only color, but also camera angles, “jib cranes” and choreographed “blocking” of the politicians as they strode on set.
On the grandest stage of American politics, the national party conventions, Democrats have enlisted Hollywood talent since 1988, and they’ve consistently put on a better visual show than Republicans who, until recent years, relied more on political operatives than stage producers to plan, design and orchestrate their marquee shows. My path would cross again with Lagler’s at the 1992 convention in New York, the Presidential Inaugural Gala in 1993 and the 1996 convention in Chicago, each time with my role in the show inching a little closer to the position of big event producer that artists like Lagler bring to the intersection of entertainment and politics.
I appreciated more and more the varied theatrical elements of production that go into political stagecraft. Every political event has elements that smack of Cecil B. DeMille. A stage built from lumber by craftsmen beat rented platforms any day. And arranging the crowd in such a way that the candidate must interact with them on a human scale increases the odds for a great picture. DeMille parted the Red Sea for Charlton Heston, and René Lagler would do the same for Dukakis.
I remained in Atlanta for the entirety of convention week, heading to the Omni each night to watch the big speeches. I saw Ann Richards, then the Texas state treasurer, bring down the house with her keynote address on Tuesday, July 19, that eviscerated Vice President Bush. “Poor George, he can’t help it,” she said. “He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”7 Richards whipped up the partisans, taking shots at Reagan-era defense policies. “When we pay billions for planes that won’t fly, billions for tanks that won’t fire, and billions for systems that won’t work,” she bellowed, the delegates rising to their feet, “that old dog won’t hunt.”8 Her rhetoric worked in the room and, for the moment, with the media, but her attacks emboldened the Republicans.
On Wednesday, July 20, I watched Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, putting in Dukakis’s name for nomination, endure the low point of his rhetorical career. He was supposed to speak for fifteen minutes, but at the twenty-five-minute mark, it was hard to miss the image of thousands of overheated delegates fanning themselves with their Dukakis placards.
The producers wanted to get on with their tightly timed script, and from my vantage point, the production served Clinton poorly. They didn’t seem to dim the arena lights when he spoke, a cue to the delegates to direct their attention to the podium. Instead, the house lights allowed TV cameras to cut to images of delegates chatting away amongst themselves. Watching replays of the speech, the chatter gives way to booing and, finally, cheering, as the forty-one-year-old Clinton finally says, at the thirty-three minute mark, “In closing . . .”9
Up in the broadcast booth, NBC’s Tom Brokaw broke away from what Clinton was saying to offer his own analysis. “You’re listening to the lengthy nomination speech of Governor William Clinton of Arkansas. . . . He’s now seriously in overtime. He’s only about halfway through his prepared text and he should have been done about five minutes ago because he was scheduled to go only twenty. We say all this—we’re going to be here, we have to be here, until this proceeding is over—at the same time, they have to be aware of the television audience and whether or not it is staying with this lengthy speech and a recitation of a lot of the stuff we’ve been hearing the last couple of days,” Brokaw told his viewers.10
To keep the viewers tuned in, Brokaw invited correspondent Chris Wallace, standing among the New Jersey delegation, to weigh in. “I can tell you that this place is just ready to explode, and I think they’re long past the period, Tom, of listening to Governor Clinton,” Wallace said from the floor as delegates used placards as megaphones to amplify their protests. “This has been very carefully planned, the idea that Bill Clinton would give a speech—a short speech, of about 15 minutes—listing Michael Dukakis’s qualifications, talking about what kind of governor he’s been and why he would be a good president . . . but it has gone on so long that he has completely lost this crowd,” Wallace added.11
When the speech was finally over, TV producers and Clinton’s close friends Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason knew he needed damage control. They reached out to Freddy de Cordova, Johnny Carson’s longtime producer, and asked if Clinton could come on The Tonight Show to make amends. As Thomason recounted the story for a PBS documentary, when Clinton flew to Burbank the next week, he was ready to go on stage with a trick up his sleeve. “Linda got a big hourglass,” Thomason remembered, “and she gave Clinton the hourglass. And she said, ‘When you walk out on the stage of The Tonight Show, and Carson is going to say, “How you doin’, governor?,” you’re just going to pull this out and set it on the desk.’”12
The stunt worked, but not as planned. Spying Clinton holding the hourglass, de Cordova demanded he not use the prop. Instead, when Clinton sat down on Carson’s set for the taping, Johnny used the same gag, but in reverse, producing his own hourglass from beneath his desk, the prop eliciting howls from the audience and the humbled guest, the first-ever example of the redeeming political firepower of late-night comedy.
In some ways, Clinton’s poor showing in Atlanta let Dukakis exceed expectations when he took the stage on Thursday, July 21, the closing night of the convention. On ABC’s World News Tonight, which preceded Dukakis’s big speech later that evening, Peter Jennings reminded viewers as he introduced the first segment of his broadcast that “the battle with the Republicans is about to begin in earnest. From the moment that Dukakis begins his acceptance speech tonight, all of the party’s best hopes, and worst fears, will be identified with him. He is about to get the kind of scrutiny that might make him long for the campaign as it’s been up until now.”13
The scrutiny was left to correspondent Sam Donaldson, to whom Jennings tossed for a report that typically precedes an evening of programming focused on a nominee’s acceptance speech. “Like a prize fighter with his handlers inspecting the ring,” Donaldson began, “the Democratic nominee went to the hall this morning to fiddle with the microphones, fiddle with the prompter and fine-tune tonight’s big speech.”14
With Donaldson reminding viewers that Dukakis was “no great orator,” the piece cut to a sound bite from a Dukakis news conference that day. “Just before I left the hotel room,” Dukakis said, “Kitty arrived from another wild round of appearances and interviews and she said, ‘Have you got the speech in final form?’ I said, ‘It’s pretty close to final,’ and she said, ‘Well, let me have it.’ I said ‘Okay,’ and she went into the room. And then I went into the room to get my jacket. My wife was fast asleep on the bed.”15
Donaldson closed his package by reiterating that Dukakis’s “cadence is wrong. He sometimes swallows his words. His inflections are often off. Above all, he exhibits very little passion.” Suggesting that maybe, this night, Dukakis could defy expectations, Donaldson hyped the drama to come. Echoing the campaign’s hope, Donaldson predicted that “not only his wife, but everyone else, will stay awake.”16
I was in the crowd at the Omni that night as the governor’s cousin, Olympia Dukakis, an Oscar winner for her role in Moonstruck, introduced a video that she narrated from a car she drove through the governor’s hometown of Brookline, Massachusetts. With Olympia leading us through her cousin’s life, we saw him as a young boy, an athlete at Brookline High, a soldier in the army and through the early stages of his political career. She even brought us to the nominee’s humble two-family home on Perry Street where, she reminded us, Michael mowed the lawn with his twenty-five-year-old manual mower. It was more evidence, if any were needed, of the governor’s prudence and frugality, implying that these attributes would serve him well as president.
At 10:10 p.m., the video ended and the spotlight returned to Olympia at the podium as she narrated a closing stanza. Music swelled under her words and then took over from the speaker entirely. It was Neal Diamond’s “Coming to America,” the hit 1981 single from the soundtrack to the movie The Jazz Singer, the ultimate anthem of the immigrant experience.
The cameras pivoted from the stage to the back of the arena. There, led by his Secret Service detail and his “body man,” staffer Nick Mitropoulos, Dukakis slowly made his way through the joyous crowd—the DeMille moment—shaking hands and being lifted, musically, by the rhythm of Diamond’s song. The cinematic walk from the back of the house mirrored the path Ronald Reagan took each January when he was ushered by his own Secret Service detail through the House Floor to deliver the State of the Union Address, a moment as “presidential” as Dukakis would get in his campaign.
Walking through the crowd surrounded by a sea of placard-waving Democrats formed the four most triumphant minutes of Michael Dukakis’s life. As Diamond’s anthem wound down, all of the Stars and Stripes–themed Dukakis placards waved in unison as the nominee’s father-in-law, Boston Pops conductor Harry Ellis Dickson, led the orchestra in the “1812 Overture.” The usually stoic Dukakis basked in the extended ovations and smiled broadly, acknowledging the applause.
“I remember looking across at the Massachusetts delegation,” Dukakis would say later. “It was kind of like the story of my life—just looking at people who had been with me from the time I was a young state representative and had campaigned so hard at the grassroots, and suddenly here we are.”17
Defying the expectation-lowering comments of pundits, the speech was well-received. Dukakis’s moment at the podium filled the front pages. Although it contained the buzz-killing line, “This election isn’t about ideology. It’s about competence,” it allowed Dukakis to hit the key commander-in-chief themes, first voiced in Derry, New Hampshire, that his speechwriters believed would be crucial against Vice President Bush.
Dukakis told the TV audience, “My friends, the dream that began in Philadelphia 200 years ago; the spirit that survived that terrible winter at Valley Forge and triumphed on the beach at Normandy; the courage that looked Khrushchev in the eye during the Cuban Missile crisis—is as strong and as vibrant today as it has ever been.”18 When he finished, and thousands of balloons fell gently onto the convention floor, few could conclude anything other than that the convention, with all of its dramatic elements, had been a grand success.
Target Practice
Unlike Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1992, who exited their triumphant convention for a nine-state bus tour from New York City to St. Louis and the vote-rich Rust Belt states in between, the heights of Dukakis’s oratory and excitement faded after Atlanta.
In August, to reinforce the defense theme launched in Derry, New Hampshire, Dukakis hit the road on a rare summer outing outside Massachusetts. On August 11, he traveled to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey and then on to Fort Dix, where the one-time “Private Dukakis” had been stationed in 1955 before being shipped off to Korea as a teletype operator.
At Fort Dix, he was reunited with fellow bunkmates Dominic Donato and Nick Antonicello for a tour of their old barracks, a visit that included target practice with an M-16, the Army’s standard-issue rifle. To shield the moment from imagery, the hands-on weapons work was closed to the press. David Blomquist, a reporter for the Bergen County Record newspaper, wrote that “the governor’s two friends wouldn’t tell reporters whether Dukakis hit anything on the range, saying only that they all seemed ‘a little rusty.’”19
A turn on a rifle range, even one invisible to cameras, is an essential ingredient for articles like Blomquist’s. It was the same recipe used a month later in Sterling Heights. To give life to the dry substance of his defense proposals, and to make it into packages for the evening news, campaigns have to serve up what reporters call “color.”
Creating “color”—the illuminating interstitial tissue of news reports—is a joint effort of the policy, communications, speechwriting and scheduling departments of a campaign. The policy shop fleshes out a stand. The communications shop turns it into a message. The speechwriting shop puts it into the candidate’s voice. The scheduling shop finds time in the candidate’s day to sell it. The candidate then falls into the awaiting arms of the advance team, tasked with finding a venue to buttress the message with color to accompany the story.
The first stop of that August trip was New York University in Manhattan where Dukakis, introduced by New York governor Mario Cuomo, delivered a speech to an audience of about 300. Ben Bradlee Jr. of the Boston Globe wrote that the speech “broke no new ground, but was an effort by Dukakis to reassert his views on national defense in the wake of two addresses on the subject by Vice President George Bush.”20
Advocating for his “Conventional Defense Initiative” at NYU, Dukakis said, “Deterrence does not require the seemingly endless development of new and more expensive nuclear weapon systems—particularly when, thanks to President Reagan and Secretary Gorbachev, we may have the best opportunity in our lifetime to build a safer world, to cut strategic arms by 50 percent or more.”21
In the wings at NYU, the campaign’s policy advisors were in spin mode, providing amplifying comments to the reporters present to reinforce the governor’s message. Senior Advisor Madeleine Albright, the future secretary of state during the Clinton years, said Dukakis is “going to look at what the needs are. I know he wants to take a look at the Pentagon books.”22 Deputy Issues Director Jim Steinberg, a future deputy secretary of state for President Obama, said, “He was defining the quality of leadership that the American people are going to need for the challenges of the next decade.”23 Both quotes made it into the major newspaper coverage of the day.
Notwithstanding the spin, the Boys on the Bus seemed to yawn through their reporting. “Dukakis received considerably more applause when he arrived than after he spoke,” Bob Drogin wrote for the Los Angeles Times.24
These were the dog days of August. Dukakis made it home from that trip largely unscathed, and even when some press coverage got prickly, it could be easily dismissed as coming when most voters were still on vacation and even fewer were focused on election news. Maybe the Dukakis team could even learn from this early foray—they needed more media ammo than some closed-press target practice. Within days, between August 15 and 18, Vice President Bush would headline the GOP Convention at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans. The heavy firepower would come out in the Big Easy, and Dukakis was still looking for his own big gun to match his opponent’s arsenal.
Quayle Hunting
The Republican Convention began curiously, and hopefully, from Boston’s perspective. When Air Force Two landed in New Orleans, Vice President Bush whispered to President Reagan, there to greet him on the tarmac, that he had selected Indiana senator J. Danforth Quayle as his running mate.
Bush’s selection surprised even members of his own senior staff. Jim Pinkerton, the director of research and a member of Bush’s inner circle, remembered that his team played the role of unwitting decoy. “I had people’s confidence such that they could lie to me and feel good about it,” Pinkerton mused, “and so one of my duties was, in that time, to pull together sort of briefing books on all these vice presidential wannabe types. I now realize this was in the best CIA tradition. I was sort of the cutout, you do all this work, sit over there, it’s like the entire mythical first army on Operation Fortitude on D-Day that’s going to invade Calais, as opposed to Normandy.”25 The Pinkerton decoy worked.
The smart money was on Bob Dole, South Carolina governor Carroll Campbell or New Mexico senator Pete Domenici. One was a party elder who shared the national ticket with Gerald Ford in 1976; another was a mentor of campaign manager Lee Atwater; the third was a westerner with a Reagan-like bearing. Any of the three might do.
Instead, it was Quayle. Pinkerton’s research team found itself flat-footed on the candidate’s background, a scenario that would repeat itself twenty years later when John McCain asked Alaska governor Sarah Palin to join him on the ticket. Within hours, questions from the national press corps about Quayle’s military service in the National Guard began to drown out the Republican’s carefully crafted convention message.
Pinkerton told a campaign intern, Dylan Glen, to find the nearest bookstore to buy a copy of the Almanac of American Politics. “I started just reading,” Pinkerton said. “We knew nothing about him. We knew nothing. That was probably an hour, like up to 4:30 in the afternoon. Six-thirty that night is Dan Rather clobbering him on the draft and everything like that—that was definitely a mess,” Pinkerton recalled in an oral history for the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.26
As loud as the questions were about Quayle, and as unprepared as Bush’s campaign was to deal with them, they didn’t reverse a polling trend that took root during the Dukakis August siesta. While Dukakis enjoyed a seventeen-point lead after his convention, the tables turned after the Republicans left New Orleans. Thanks in part to the speechwriting of Peggy Noonan, a “kinder and gentler” George H. W. Bush asked voters to “read my lips” about no new taxes. They did, apparently, and a CBS News poll of 1,282 registered voters taken after the convention showed an advantage for the vice president, 46 percent to 40 percent.27
Dismissing the numbers, Tubby Harrison, Dukakis’s pollster, said, “[Voters] may not yet have come to realize the meaning of choosing someone like Quayle. They may not yet be connecting it to Bush’s judgment. We’re waiting for the dust to settle.”28
Whispering Death
While they waited for the dust to settle, members of the Dukakis campaign were also searching for their own big gun to counter the fusillade shot their way in New Orleans. What they found was the sixty-eight-ton mainstay of the U.S. conventional arsenal: the M1A1 Abrams Tank.
The M1A1, a marvel of modern warfare, stood in contrast to the Reagan-era infatuation with the “Strategic Defense Initiative” and its paradigm-shifting technology of a missile shield. Dialing back the imaginations of Pentagon planners to confront the real-life Soviet menace on the European frontier was exactly the wedge Dukakis needed if he was to make a dent in public perception that he was not a foreign policy heavyweight.
As Jim Steinberg told me, “From the time I arrived, there was an issue of how to develop Dukakis’s credibility on foreign policy because, one, he had essentially no experience on that, with the exception of his Korean War experience and, two, he had early on staked out a number of positions which, to put it charitably, did not burnish the sense that this guy was going to be a strong and effective commander in chief.”29
Dukakis’s new stand on defense emerged ten months before his rendezvous with destiny in a helmet and coveralls. At the Dallas Democratic Forum on November 13, 1987, he unveiled his Conventional Defense Initiative, or CDI, to trump Reagan’s SDI. “My top priority as president will be to improve our conventional defense,” Dukakis told his audience, adding that, “We may not be able to make nuclear weapons obsolete, but a [CDI] might be able to make the current generation of Soviet tanks obsolete.”30
An extension of this logic was putting Dukakis in a tank for a test ride. At this point, it was only an idea on file in Boston, but it had advocates. “The M1 tank was kind of the poster child of this because the Reagan administration had cut the production runs of the M1 tank and so it was possible to make the case that, despite the argument that the Republicans were strong on defense, they were actually short-changing the army and conventional weaponry,” Steinberg told me, “and that is what suggested the tank plant as kind of the perfect symbol of the Dukakis approach to national security.”31 The Abrams tank became the heavyweight symbol to reverse public opinion.
The M1A1 was named after General Creighton Abrams, a famed World War II tank commander who led U.S. forces in Vietnam and became Army Chief of Staff. Twice earning the Distinguished Service Cross, Abrams had many admirers, including General George S. Patton, who said, “I’m supposed to be the best tank commander in the Army, but I have one peer—Abe Abrams. He’s the world champion.”32 Fittingly, when the Army retired its fleet of M60 Patton tanks, its successor would be named for Abrams.
Equaling the weight of nine elephants, the Abrams first rolled off the assembly line in 1979 with over 9,000 units produced since then. If NATO couldn’t match the Warsaw Pact in sheer numbers of tanks, its M1A1s would be better able to shoot on the run, using its superior speed to evade the numerically superior enemy. Powered by a 1,500-horsepower Honeywell turbine engine, making the Abrams run quieter than diesel predecessors, the Abrams earned the nickname “Whispering Death” from fans for its stealthy hunting and killing efficiency.
Motor Trend magazine, stacking up the aging M60 and the new M1A1 side by side, wrote that it was “as hell compares to heaven.”33 The tale of the tape spoke for itself: with its 750 horsepower diesel engine delivering top speeds of thirty miles per hour, the M60 had half the power and required twice the maintenance of the Abrams. Under the belly, the old tank’s suspension system took eight times longer to fix than the M1A1. Using the cannon’s laser sighting system, the Abrams could fire its 50 armor-piercing rounds at full speed of 70 mph. If the cannon had too much firepower, the Abrams could use its two 7.62 mm machine guns, for which it carried nearly 12,000 rounds, or the tank commander’s .50-caliber gun in the turret. “It is the Mercedes-Benz of battle tanks,” reported Motor Trend.34
While his event in Sterling Heights would not test the extremities in which the M1A1 could excel, General Dynamics representatives were also quick to remind its VIP test drivers—including Matt Bennett during his advance work—that there were few scenarios, whether on land or in water up to seven feet, in which “Whispering Death” couldn’t perform its mission.
England Takes Up Arms
Gordon England, the General Dynamics executive who formally issued the fateful invitation to host Governor Dukakis, was a career engineer and an ardent fan of the Abrams. “We had lots of concern that Russian tanks could come across Europe,” England told me, noting these Russian models were the same ones used by the Iraqis in Operation Desert Storm, the first time the M1A1 was actually used in combat. “We beefed up our systems and added armor in the Abrams. These were fantastic tanks. When Desert Storm happened, the Abrams absolutely dominated,” England added proudly.35
England, a future secretary of the Navy under President George W. Bush, was no ordinary tank salesman, if one exists. He would be the perfect copilot for Dukakis’s ride. Joining the company in 1966, he had climbed through the ranks of General Dynamics and was seen as an engineer with a rocket scientist pedigree (he was a veteran of NASA’s Gemini Program) who could handle the company’s toughest challenges. His bosses assigned him to move his family from Fort Worth to Sterling Heights to integrate Chrysler’s Land Systems Division after General Dynamics acquired it, working through the many manufacturing and personnel challenges that had beset Chrysler when the automaker owned the division. He would need to oversee a complete overhaul of the division to right its course.
In August 1988, while Bush was introducing Dan Quayle onto the national stage, while the Dukakis campaign was grappling with its poll numbers and while Matt Bennett was an anonymous young man working his advance magic from city to city, England was knee-deep in the M1A1’s production challenges. He brought from Fort Worth engineering techniques he had used at General Dynamics as director of avionics for the F-16 fighter, a workhorse of the U.S. Air Force and other customers around the world. If there was anyone who could turn the tank’s fortunes around, it was Gordon England.
On the job in Sterling Heights for two years when the 1988 campaign revved into full gear, England identified the request by Dukakis to visit General Dynamics as an exercise in political one-upmanship, with Boston trying to beat Bush into the turret of a tank. “The way I remember that this came about is that, originally, Vice President Bush had planned to visit the tank plant,” he told me, referring to the nearby Detroit Arsenal, owned by the Department of Defense, where the M1A1s were assembled piece by piece. According to England, planning for the Sterling Heights visit accelerated when the Dukakis campaign learned of Bush’s interest to execute a similar event.36
John Eades, the Michigan state director for Dukakis, had the General Dynamics facility on a list of potential sites that his office prepared during the summer. Such a visit might resonate with Reagan Democrats, he reasoned, and he needed their support to win the state. He also knew that many defense workers who manned the tank’s assembly lines were members of the United Auto Workers union local, with whom he had good relations. Still, Eades hoped that, when the time came for the candidate to devote more campaign days to the state, Boston would opt for venues like schools and hospitals more closely aligned with Dukakis’s work as governor.
Eades’s office called Land Systems to schedule a tour, a speech and test ride for the governor at the Detroit Arsenal. As England remembers, “I believe that [Bush’s interest] got the attention of the Dukakis folks and then they decided, for embellishing his credentials on defense, he would also tour the tank plant.” But as the Bush campaign also discovered, a political visit to a working government facility was off limits. “So, when that didn’t work, I made the comment, ‘You can always do this at our headquarters because we had a whole facility with tanks and we had a test track outside.’”37
Soon thereafter, Matt Bennett and Neal Flieger arrived at England’s offices, thus beginning the drama that would soon unfold on the test track. “When they actually said, ‘We’d like to come talk to you,’ it became a serious activity,” England remembered.38
England initially deferred to his bosses the honor of riding shotgun with Dukakis, but they kicked the honor back to him. “My view was we’ve got to do this. He could be president and you want to have a good relationship. Any corporation would respond if a candidate wanted to visit. Defense is a political process, so you need political support,” he told me.39
England’s insight was a simple lesson followed by defense contractors through decades of appropriations battles on Capitol Hill. To this day, political battles buffet tank production. Thirty years after Reagan’s “Star Wars” became the faded star of Pentagon spending, the Abrams still roams the battlefield with new layers of steel, ceramic, plastic composite and Kevlar armor to thwart improvised explosive devises, and in a vastly different combat role than originally envisioned.
For his part, Don Gilleland, the clean-cut public relations chief for Land Systems, saw an enormous media opportunity with the Dukakis visit. The chance to bring the national press corps to Sterling Heights, where they would see the Abrams put through its paces, pleased the longtime military man, a veteran of Vietnam MIA repatriation operations.
Gordon England, too, recognized the goldmine before him, remembering, “You can be actually in the weapons system and be seen. It is dramatic—ninety tons of firepower. It’s a logical place to showcase your interest in defense.”40 Deciding to move forward, England instructed Gilleland to work with the advance team to prepare for the event.
As August wound down and Americans returned from a Labor Day respite, skirmishes flared all over the political landscape. General Dynamics worried about incoming fire from Star Wars advocates. Republicans were attacking Dukakis over his readiness to serve as commander in chief. And the Dukakis camp fretted over how their candidate should show his mettle, even as the campaign’s own leadership was divided on the topic. Everyone was playing with firepower, and the plan was about to explode.