SHADES OF GRAY

by Hanna Rosin

With each new twist in the Clinton fund-raising scandal, you can count on one constant: no matter what the revelation, C. Boyden Gray will show up to denounce it. With a grave, scolding air that bespeaks a saint who has had his patience sorely tried, George Bush's former White House counsel will profess his shock and assure his audience that no such iniquity was tolerated under his watch. His act has become so convincing that it has pushed the old Common Cause regulars off the stage. "He's saved us from having to call Fred Wertheimer out of retirement," says one grateful talk-show booker.

Believing in St. Boyden is important to reporters because it confirms what they desperately want to be true: that there is a bright line the Clintons crossed. But if the Clinton crowd crossed that line, the Bush crowd helped show them the way. In the increasingly corrupt business of political fund-raising, the Bush administration under Gray's watch and the Clinton administration have much more in common than not. Not surprisingly, this is a story that Gray works hard to obscure; the pronouncements of St. Boyden would be a lot less compelling to reporters if they stopped to reflect on the holy man's secular life.

Gray's judgments are damning and absolute--and often hypocritical. One of his peak performances came in February when he branded Terence McAuliffe's memo on the White House coffees a "smoking gun": "We would never have allowed people to pay for this kind of time in the West Wing," he assured The Boston Globe. In fact, Bush held regular dinners and cocktail parties at the White House, including one single private dinner in 1992 which raised $9 million. As for face time, George and Barbara were pretty generous. Two examples: in 1990, donors to the "Republican Senatorial Inner Circle" were offered the opportunity to "meet the Vice President and his wife at their home, participate in closed-door briefings with national and international figures, and then top the evening off by joining a Senator, Cabinet member or U.S. Senate candidate for a private dinner." Earlier that year, $10,000 donors to the "Republican Senatorial Trust" were invited to a "traditional welcome dinner" with Bob Dole and Alan Simpson, where the donors could "get to know their fellow Trust members in a casual atmosphere." A White House reception with the Bushes was to follow the next day.

When reminded of these friendly gatherings, Gray turns suddenly from one of the holy hosts to counsel for the accused. "The ability of someone to lobby was very limited, to say the least, during a fifteen-second handshake with the flash bulbs popping," Gray told the Globe. Other Bush-era fund-raisers echo Gray's line. As for the Inner Circle, Bush only "dropped in during the reception," says GOP Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma, who signed the invitations. "He was probably there thirty or forty minutes." These are pointless distinctions, and an equally pointless one could make the Bush fund-raising look worse than the Clinton operation: at the Clinton coffees, donors were hit up for money after the klatch; at the Bush cocktails, donors had to pay to get in.

The important distinction is what donors got for their money. And in the Bush administration they got plenty: private briefings at the Old Executive Office Building, joy rides on Air Force One and, for at least eight of the $100,000 donors, plum ambassadorships. There were also scores of more specific favors. In 1991, New York lawyer Lawrence Levine, who had donated over $20,000 to the Republican National Committee, wrote to Dan Quayle asking to be included on one of Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher's famous trade missions. This particular mission was to Argentina, where Levine happened to have business interests. Three wealthy Central Valley farmers, all members of Bush's elite Team 100--donors of $100,000--received a 326-billion-gallon emergency allocation of water during a drought, personally ordered by Bush after a fund-raiser in California. These two apparent quid pro quos are among hundreds of Bush-era favors patiently laid out in Common Cause.

Modesty is Gray's favorite defense. "I am just a private citizen, a little guy involved in the debate," he says, only half-joking, when I request an interview. "People ask me questions and I tell them what I know." Like all good volunteers, Gray gives his all. During the FBI travel files scandal, he rebuked with abandon. In early 1996 Gray was quoted in The Wall Street Journal's lead editorial attacking George Stephanopoulos for touring Greece at the expense of a Greek publisher. "The Bush White House never allowed any foreign or domestic entities to pay for trips.... This administration has thrown ethics out the window." So Jack Quinn, then Clinton's White House counsel, dug through the old files and wrote a letter to the Journal pointing out that Bush staffers had taken 179 foreign-funded trips, including two that Gray had happily joined.

Parsing through the illegalities of Clinton fundraising is fair game for anyone. But mustering so much self-righteousness over the scandal requires a special sensibility. People like Fred Wertheimer have made an honest profession out of it. Even when no one listens, they howl about the constant, corrosive campaign finance scandal and wait until, bit by bit, the public becomes infected by their outrage and finally insists that something be done--get rid of soft money, cut off the PACs. They are the kind of people whose blood pressure rises each time they see a fat cat lobbyist extending the greasy balm of his palm to a smiling statesman. They are the kind of people who would boil over, in other words, each time they see a person like C. Boyden Gray.

So many different money trails lead to, by and through Gray it is bewildering. An heir to the Reynolds tobacco fortune, Gray was the top individual contributor of soft money to the Republican Party in 1995, weighing in with over $140,000. His Federal Election Commission list of hard-money contributions runs three pages long, for a total of almost $60,000, all to Republicans. In 1995, he held a fund-raiser at his Georgetown home; for $20,000, contributors got to clink glasses with Newt Gingrich. The event raised over $1 million.

Those are merely Gray's personal contributions. He also coordinates the industry front group of the moment, one of those temporary big business coalitions with Orwellian Newspeak names that mean their opposite. The Air Quality Standards Coalition, a group of oil, steel, trucking, agricultural and auto companies, formed last July to fight the Environmental Protection Agency's newly proposed air quality standards. Gray was their natural leader. The EPA came up with its new formula after a study showed that, during the thirteen months that the Geneva Steel plant in Provo, Utah, shut down in 1986 and 1987, the number of preschool children hospitalized for asthma dropped by two-thirds. Gray, it just so happens, is a lobbyist for Geneva Steel.

The coalition has at least 500 members, companies such as Texaco, Teneco, Philip Morris, Chevron and Monsanto, and is coordinated by the National Association of Manufacturers. It operates on the purest form of money-buys-access logic. PACs associated with the coalition gave $11.9 million to senators between 1991 and 1996. The group has been trying to woo the National Governors' Association since its newly chosen chairman, Ohio Governor George Voinovich, came out against the proposed EPA ruling. When that failed, it tried legal bribes. "The NAM has to pony up more cash for the NGA," reads the notes of one attendant at a November 1 meeting.

The coalition also uses standard tobacco-industry squelch tactics. In the notes of an October 6 meeting, one of the members, the American Iron and Steel Institute (aisi), commissioned a study in Pittsburgh on the cost of complying with the regulations. In December, preliminary results came back showing the costs were zero. "So let's deep-six them," said one member of the coalition, in a transcript of the meeting. "Won't see the light of day." Bruce Steiner of aisi admits that the institute canceled the study because "it only gives a partial view."

Except for lobbying, the coalition is almost too transparent to be effective. Which is why it depends on another of Gray's groups, Citizens for a Sound Economy, to carry out the "grass-roots" campaign. CSE is a think tank founded in 1984 to advocate lower taxes, less regulation and free trade. Officials at CSE keep a virtuous distance from the Air Quality Standards Coalition, and from all kinds of sordid lobbying and industry front work. "We are not a part of the coalition; we do not receive funding from them, and we do not work together," says Brent Bahler, a CSE spokesman.

But CSE footprints show up all over the coalition agenda. CSE officials met with coalition members last April to brief them on their $5 million educational campaign on the EPA rules. They got the American Petroleum Institute to agree to match all donations up to $600,000. Keeping up the appearance of a grass-roots effort by employing CSE is in fact crucial to the coalition. "NAM has recognized that re environmental issues, while the war will be won or lost in Washington, the battles will take place out there," says one member, according to the notes.

CSE is technically a grass-roots organization: it holds rallies, town hall meetings and talks at high school civic clubs. But it's not exactly an expression of the collective will of the people. Bahler says the education campaign is based on its latest opinion poll, which he would not release. A copy of the poll, however, shows it found the exact opposite of what CSE believes. "Most American voters (76 percent) consider themselves to be `environmentalists,'" reads the introduction. "Few voters say they know someone who has been adversely affected by EPA laws or regulations, while a larger number say they know someone whose health has been negatively affected by a poor environment." The report advises CSE field officers to convince voters they are "on their side": "Explain why you want a good environment," it says. "You have children, you are an outdoor photographer or sportsman, you enjoy the beauty of our natural resources, etc."

CSE no longer even gets a majority of its funding from individual donations. They make up less than a third of its total budget, which jumped from $4 million in 1991 to $17.6 million last year. And that's not from $15 checks. The annual report doesn't list the group's funding sources, but it used to. And they sound a lot like the members of the coalition: the American Petroleum Institute, Amoco, Chevron, Dow Corning, Union Carbide, to name just a few. Like politicians, officials at CSE maintain a chaste independence. "Donors don't play a role in the issues we take on, or the positions we take," Paul Beckner told National Journal. "We're principled and we're driven by a mission." It's almost an irrelevant question with CSE, because their mission coincides exactly with that of their donors. There are very few companies that want stricter EPA regulation and less free trade.

For all of Gray's checkwriting and fund-raising, his most noxious contribution to the business of access is this cheerful laundering of corporate cash and corporate interests into an apparent manifestation of civic-mindedness. Companies love Gray because he intellectualizes their agenda, turns dirty lobbying into activism. Gray does for CSE what he does for Geneva Steel, but, in the first incarnation, he's a policy wonk.

Technically, it matters whether a congressman makes a call from a cell phone or from his office phone, whether Maggie Williams handed over a check to the Democratic National Committee. But surely a more corrosive problem is the routine, legal, multimillion-dollar annual business between the jaded pros of the corporate world and the jaded pros of the political world--a business that is handled by men like St. Boyden Gray.