The Saturday night massacre; on "West 57th Street" a Congressional aide criticized Social Security; now he's out of a job.

On "West 57th Street" a congressional aide criticized Social Security. Now he's out of a job. The Saturday Night Massacre 

On a Saturday night in April, the pounding saxophones and rapid-fire shots of youthful reporters that introduce CBS's "West 57th Street" segued into a 13-minute report on the "elderly lobby." There were numbers: with 28 million members, the American Association of Retired Persons is twice "The elderly vote is political clout," said Mel Levitt, an AARP activist in Florida. There was dissent: Bruce Babbitt, recently obliterated in New Hampshire and Iowa, complained that criticism of Social Security and other entitlements had become "a forbidden subject."

But the person who got the most airtime was a 32-year-old writer named Phillip Longman. Short, bearded, and a little soft-spoken, he's made a livelihood examining and criticizing policy toward the elderly. He's worked on Capitol Hill and at thinktanks, knocking out speeches and articles about rising mortgages for the young and ballooning Social Security payments for the elderly. He's been in The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly; he's done interviews with Denver radio stations and chatted on the set of the "CBS Morning News." And, as you might figure, he's got a book (Born to Pay: The New Politics of Aging in America).

That Saturday night, as Longman chimed in about gray power, he offered this incendiary thought: "What we've got is a system that pays out most of its benefits to people who are middle-class and more affluent, while not providing enough benefits for the poor to bring them up above the government's own poverty line.

"This is a scandal."

So was what happened when Longman came to work the following Monday at the Capitol Hill office of Rep. Kenneth H. "Buddy" MacKay, a Florida Democrat. Besides writing his own articles, Longman had been writing speeches and legislation bearing MacKay's name. That morning, the phones started ringing. They were not calls complimenting Phillip on his fine performance.

"We got several phone calls that expressed dismay," says Gregg Farmer, MacKay's administrative assistant, adding that while they didn't number that many, they were the kind you return quickly. "These were people who were strong supporters and very influential people," he says.

A couple of weeks later, Longman was fired. Everyone involved, however, describes it as the sweetest of separations, calling it inevitable given the clamor. MacKay himself explains it by saying: "I feel very kindly towards Phillip, and I'm sorry this happened. I was being dragged into an argument that was not mine....The position of being an advocate and a staff person don't easily coincide." (Of course, Longman hadn't exactly been operating under a gag order, and his politics were no secret when MacKay hired him. While on the MacKay payroll he was out hustling for his book on dozens of radio and TV shows, even appearing on PBS's "Nightly Business Report," which originates in Florida.) Still, Longman says he sees MacKay as a victim, too. "If anyone has a right to be angry, I do," he said. "And I'm not angry." Farmer calls him a "talented writer and a friend."

Were the calls organized? It's hard to say, but it seems fishy. After all, since he wasn't identified on the show as a member of MacKay's staff (only as a "Washington policy analyst") an outraged resident of Florida's 6th District would have had to devote his Sunday to some pretty spectacular sleuthing to find out where Longman worked. Few calls came into CBS about the piece, says the segment's producer, Steven Reiner, and none about Longman in particular, so it's doubtful anyone got MacKay's name from the network. So whoever called already knew Longman was on staff.

Why the fuss? Phillip Longman violated one of the great taboos of American politics: saying something bad about entitlements. Of course, his sound byte was not the first transgression. In 1985, when the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Paul Kirk, suggested that, maybe, entitlements might have to be restricted to those in need, he did what few thought possible: he brought Democrats together--to rebuke him. Kirk quickly took it back. "I should not have mentioned the possibility of a means test," Kirk said. "Our party, led on this issue by Claude Pepper, is unilaterally opposed to any cuts in Social Security." In 1984, Donald Regan had the audacity to tell "Meet the Press" that "[At] the lower end of the scale we shouldn't do anything to Social Security. But at the upper end we should reexamine it." The White House rushed to distance itself from the remarks. He was attacked on the Senate Floor by the Majority Leader Robert Byrd, who said that trusting the Reagan administration to protect Social Security is like "trusting a pyromaniac to guard your firewood." Just last fall, the AARP's own executive director, Jack Carlson, was forced out of office. His crime? Reports have cited his preference for private solutions to the problems of the elderly, such as a "reverse mortgage" plan that would allow the senior citizens to sell their homes to pay for medical care.

Phillip Longman's unexpected vacation won't rank as one of the world's great tragedies. But it's a perfect illustration of the country's political gridlock. As a society, we've become incapable of talking about the $400 billion in entitlement programs that are doled out regardless of need. It doesn't matter if the issue is raised by an honorable man, in an articulate, reasonable way. He still winds up having to redo his resume.

Table pounding

Phillip Longman's path to becoming a pariah began innocently enough. The son of an ad executive and a nursing school professor, he grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. At Oberlin, he studied philosophy, and when he graduated in 1979, he got a job as a writer at the New Jersey Monthly, a kind of grab bag of writing about politics, culture, and where to buy good sushi. Longman wrote the magazine's history column (still have your copy of "Blasts from the Past: The Worst Disasters in New Jersey History?"). He did profiles of gubernatorial candidates and TV weathermen.

Longman also found himself writing about the cost of a home and, as he recalls, "how come nobody my age could afford one." A whole slew of policies, he discovered, had made it easier for his parents' generation to buy homes. Zoning ordinances, restricted credit, and minimum acreage requirements had left people his age paying $800 a month for a one-room walk-up. As he later wrote in The Washington Monthly, the average 30-year-old male in 1973 doled out 21 percent of his income in mortgage payments for a medium-priced house. By 1984 that had jumped to 44 percent.

A child in the actuarial wilderness, he began picking up real page-turners, like the Census Bureau's Household and Family Characteristics or back issues of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board Journal. "A few years ago I could not have done this without the computer," says Longman. "But you know I don't crunch the numbers, I report them."

Gradually, a kind of Longmanian worldview came into focus. It had a populist twist. For instance, in a 1982 piece for this magazine, he noted that 130,000 households with incomes of more than $75,000 nevertheless received Social Security. But it wasn't all resentment. Longman talked seriously about The Future--what will happen to the country when, for instance, the $537 billion worth of pensions owed civil servants comes due.

"I think I was influenced by the environmental movement of the seventies," he says. "You had the ethos of stewardship of natural resources and that kind of led to thinking about the husbandry of financial resources. You can deplete aquifers, and you can deplete capital."

And his writings also had a strong theme of generational equity. It wasn't just the poor elderly who were getting a raw deal, it was the young. In a 1985 piece for The Atlantic, he argued for "justice between generations," and he looked at how the regressive Social Security tax was hurting younger, poorer workers. The tone was deliberate but civil. "We don't go in for a lot of table pounding," says William Whitworth, editor of The Atlantic.

That was my experience with Longman, too, having both edited and read him. He hasn't gotten facts wrong, which is a joy. Less pleasurable were attempts to wrest him away from such demagogic statements as this one.

"While these and other accrual-based estimates of the government's fiscal position remain controversial, in part because of the uncertain assumptions about the future that necessarily underlie them, there is a strong and growing consensus among fiscal policy experts that the government's current method of keeping its books is simply inadequate to the reality it faces."

Honey, did you hear that? What's Buddy MacKay's phone number!?!

"That guy"

By 1985, Longman had a new byline: Washington writer. He moved to Washington, D.C. from the Princeton offices of the New Jersey Monthly not only to write, but shape policy. (He worked up a huge Amtrak bill visiting his wife, Robin, who remained in New Jersey.) Senator Dave Durenberger, a Minnesota Republican, had asked him to be the research director for his new think-tank/lobby, Americans for Generational Equity (AGE). This was a hotbed of Longmanism as the group whipped out papers on topics like entitlement reform and deficit reduction.

After two years, though, Longman realized that elderly politics was hardball politics. Durenberger's open-minded approach to entitlements like Social Security was bringing the senator heat. "Durenberger Link to Controversial Group Threatens His Reelection Bid," read a report in the National Journal. The St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch: "Durenberger's Baby Boomer Group Stirs Controversy." This year, the flame is being turned up by, of all people, Hubert Humphrey III, who's running against Durenberger. Addressing a senior citizen's group, Humphrey charged of AGE: "Those who would preach the gospel of young against old and dawn against darkness are misjudging you and your children and your children's children." The Happy Warrior hasn't gone after Longman directly, but, in a conversation I had with his press secretary Karen Chandler, she kept referring to "that guy with the Yuppie lobby." After two years at AGE and with reports continuing to circulate in the National Journal that Longman's views were an embarrassment, he quit. An aide to Durenberger told the Press Dispatch that he "got rid of Longman."

But last fall, redemption seemed on the horizon. Longman took a job with a congressman who, like Durenberger, dared to be different. More so. Buddy MacKay wasn't your power suit and empty mind. As a freshman, he screwed up the courage, along with Tim Penny, a Minnesota Democrat, to argue that Social Security cost of living allowances (COLAs) be considered for a budget freeze. (Just what Florida wants to hear.) And he bucked his state's delegation in 1986 when all its members but he cast votes for contra aid. Again, this courted no capital with the state's Dixiecrats, not to mention the Cubans. What's more, MacKay took on liberal shibboleths. As a bill to increase the minimum wage was gathering momentum this spring, MacKay opposed it in an editorial in The Washington Post (written by Longman). This wasn't some Chamber of Commerce screed. It made the case for an innovative tax credit for the working poor. Since fewer than one out of five of those who make the minimum wage are poor heads of households, a raise would wind up subsidizing all those teenagers more likely to use the money "to put gas in the Camaro than food on the table," MacKay (via Longman) argued. But when it came to entitlements, dissent was just too costly. That a MacKay can be browbeaten into dismissing Longman says a lot about the state of political dialogue in the country.

Mad Mel

How could anyone get so worked up about Phillip Longman? I had a glimmer of that when I called Key West and spoke to Mel Levitt, who had appeared on the "West 57th Street" broadcast opposite Longman and had came off like a parody of South Florida's elderly--comfortable, contented, bitter. "The elderly person is not a burden to his country," Levitt told the audience, with his thin face and white moustache bobbing. "And if he is, he is entitled to be a burden." On the phone, however, he came off as an infectiously likable guy who kept calling me "Brother." It's easy to see why he takes entitlements seriously. He rose through New York City public schools. He worked to get into Stuyvesant, the city's top high school. He served in the Pacific during World War II. And like a lot of Americans he has given as good as he's gotten, building a business in Key West and serving on the board of the Florida Keys Memorial Hospital and the Key West Chamber of Commerce.

What's more, old age, even with this kind of comfort, has been no picnic. He talks not about golf but about his mother-in-law who died after massive strokes, and only after tortuous years in which Mel took care of her. "She defecated and urinated and couldn't swallow," Levitt says, describing how she had to be lifted and rotated in bed to prevent sores. Levitt visited others too, working on local hospital boards and listening to the sick. "Hate the food. Hate the food," they would tell him.

If the question was tax reform or environmental policy or antisatellite weapons, you could probably bring people like Mel Levitt and Phillip Longman together to settle their differences reasonably and calmly. But, as Phillip Longman has learned, entitlements are about more than money. Their currency is measured not only in Senate authorization bills and continuing resolutions; for millions, these programs have become synonomous with gratitude. When cuts are threatened, seniors cringe not only to protect their cash but because they see society flinching on a moral bargain. You could see that on "West 57th Street." When Levitt was asked whether he "needed" his Social Security check, he got upset. That was, of course, the right question. Common sense dictates that we help those most in need. But in his reaction, in that moment between him and Steve Kroft, the beefy and prosperous young reporter you could see Levitt wince. The question was taken as an insult, a withdrawal of the respect that the elderly desire and deserve. "I felt like asking him," Levitt says, "Do you need the money?" If we're going to wean the comfortable elderly from entitlements it won't come from calling them greedy geezers but from reasoning with them.

But there aren't many people willing to lower their voices about entitlements. After the stock market crash in October, as Congress rushed into an emergency summit meeting on the budget, there seemed to be, finally, a moment of repose to consider this day our daily debt. But the National Committee for the Preservation of Social Security dropped a quick note to its 4.5 million members telling them to fight cuts in Social Security. AARP officials were a little more reserved, saying officially that they would not rule out Social Security changes to reduce the deficit if the sacrifices were widespread. But, as Congressional Quarterly reported, the legislative director for AARP said that such cuts would be feasible only in a much more ambitious package than the ones being offered. The result: Social Security changes didn't even get serious consideration at a moment of true national crisis. We keep sidestepping it, hoping that guys like Phillip Longman just go away.