Bad Boy: The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater.

The Prince

Of Spin

At the height of his powers Lee Atwater attained a level of spin that made you stand in awe. He was just so good at it. Obsessive bright, paradoxical, ambitious, a scheming but likable guy. From Bad Boy: The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater by John Brody emerges a portrait of a man who was all of these things. Trustworthy? You could trust Atwater to always act in his own interests. Lee Atwater was a man who was obsessed with Lee Atwater, and now here's this book obsessed with the same thing.

Brody is the Jack Webb of political biography - "Just the facts, ma'am," - and his book is relentless in its details. If you wanted to know that Atwater named his first political consulting firm Baker & Associates after a man whose portrait he had purchased at a garage sale and that its office was situated above a chicken-wing restaurant, here's the goods. It's fascinating that someone went to the trouble. Not only does Brody tell you that James Brown attended Atwater's funeral, he gives you the color of the Godfather of Soul's shirt (black) and tie (white).

Brody had access to Atwater's childhood scrapbook, his high-school letters to his mother, his incomplete doctoral thesis, his medical records. (My wife, however, takes vehement issue with Brody's assertion that Atwater was abandoned by the Republican National Committee. It's not my role to defend the RNC, but I was dating my wife at the time, and I do happen to know first-hand that they paid for the staff that was attending to him at the end, his car, his driver, the hot tub that was built in his backyard, and his around-the-clock nursing.) Brody also accumulated a tape deck full of unvarnished conversations among the major Republican players in the White House and on the campaign trail. And I thought it was just Democrats who talked to reporters. These people talked about everything!

Atwater's political successes are well-documented here. After losing a South Carolina Republican gubernatorial primary for General William Westmoreland, he had the dry heaves for two days (I can relate to that), but things went pretty much straight up from there. It's been proved over and over again that the public likes stories about process, and there's some good inside baseball about Atwater's early technique. I liked his approach to manufacturing a response to a candidate's speech - strategically placing loudly enthusiastic supporters at home plate down in front of the microphone and then putting smaller pockets at first, second, and third base to create a home run effect on the rest of the crowd.

Atwater had a whole staff to generate stories about himself, to spin his past in order to weave his future, and some of that whole cloth has apparently been accepted here as fact. South Carolina Governor Carroll Campbell said, "He was a BS artist of the highest order," but Brody does his best to wade through. "I tell 'em I learned a lot about politics from going to wrestling. Audiences at professional wrestling matches are the swing voters in election." Who knows if Atwater meant it? Sounds good. On the other hand, Brody traces the development of Atwater's "Southern Strategy" and "permanent campaign" concepts to a 1947 memo by Clark Clifford.

Atwater called some of what he did "strategic misrepresentation" and bragged that he read Machiavelli's The Prince 23 times. He didn't read Machiavelli 23 times. I've read All the King's Men four times, and he didn't like The Prince as much as I liked All the King's Men. Machiavellian scholars haven't read The Prince 23 times, and it would be very un-Machiavellian to admit it if you did.

Bad Boy is most powerful when it's most personal. Brody presents the case that much of Atwater's development can be traced to a tragic childhood accident that killed his brother and let him live. The writer asks, "Had he wronged so many others because he felt so deeply wronged himself?" Brody never satisfactorily answers that question, but he goes a long way in documenting the Atwater transgressions, both political and personal. The book comes most alive when Brody is talking about Atwater's personal affairs, the career-defining office politics that are the heart of Washington and the extramarital experiences that were an open secret. Here you really get a sense of the kind of guy Lee Atwater was, and it all dovetails around the details of his death and the spinning of his legacy.

Brody asks, "Can someone who had so many flaws be considered great in the final analysis?" For all his details, Brody doesn't have the answer. He seems caught between the polar emotions of admiration and revulsion; admiration for a guy who really got the job done, revulsion for what Atwater did to the people he brushed up against in the process.

James Carville is a founder of the political consulting firm Carville & Begala and the author of We're Right, They're Wrong.