Republican Gomorrah Page 14

  By the time attendees of the “salute” to DeLay polished off their hammer-shaped desserts, however, hushed conversations about the majority leader’s chances of evading prison time had begun. The tribute was more like a funeral with the departed able to hear his eulogies. Five months later, Earle indicted DeLay for criminal conspiracy and money laundering. DeLay was forced to resign his leadership post; his resignation from Congress was inevitable. The Christian right sought to arouse defiance, unleashing a blizzard of attack lines recycled from its crusade against Judge Greer. DeLay set the tone, designating the prosecutor “an unabashed partisan zealot.”

  Dobson emerged to accentuate the outrage. “Today’s indictment of Majority Leader Tom DeLay bears all the signs of a trumped-up, political witch-hunt,” he stated in a lengthy press release. “The extreme left has seized this chance to take a swipe at one of America’s leading advocates of family values.” The irony of conservatives attacking a prosecutor as a “zealot” and a member of the “extreme left” was lost on Dobson and his cadre. They were like Richard Nixon’s last defenders in the Watergate scandal, blaming the law for the lawbreaker’s plight.

  DeLay’s trial date was not set by the time this book was completed. But the looming encounter with justice weighed heavily on him. I met DeLay in July 2007, in a cavernous hallway inside Washington, DC’s convention center, after he had just left Christians United for Israel’s (CUFI) “Washington-Israel Summit,” a massive gathering of evangelical Armageddon enthusiasts who had converged on Washington to lobby against a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis and the peace process. Earlier in the evening, when DeLay’s smiling face flashed on a giant screen above the stage, the crowd of 4,000 erupted in boisterous cheers. DeLay was still wearing a broad smile when we crossed paths. “The second coming of Christ is everything that I’m living for,” he told me. “And I hope the Rapture comes tomorrow.”

  When I asked DeLay about his legal troubles, he cast his struggle in apocalyptic terms. “Satan” is behind his prosecution, DeLay said, adding, “Satan is behind the left.” His explanation was eerily similar to that offered by two others who turned to James Dobson for eternal absolution: the born-again mass murderers Bundy and Berkowitz. The key difference was that Bundy and Berkowitz, as a kind of born-again insanity defense, claimed Satan had wired them to kill. DeLay, by contrast, maintained his total innocence while accusing his prosecutor of satanic motives. DeLay’s enablers, especially Dobson, supported his blameless attitude, encouraging him to view himself as a spiritually perfected being unfairly limited by the rules of secular devils. “Enabling thereby helps the addict remain in denial,” as Robert Minor, the expert on religious addiction, wrote.

  In the end the addict burned out, as addicts so often do. DeLay’s enablers, meanwhile, had used him to grow stronger. Tony Perkins, appointed head of the Family Research Council after a failed and tumultuous political career, had managed to squeeze himself into the national spotlight through his close alliance with DeLay. With DeLay gone, Perkins, who was far more youthful and energetic than Dobson or most other leaders in the Christian right’s pantheon, went searching for a new leader to tout, a new addict to enable.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE BAD COP

  Tony Perkins seems like the very model of an evangelical Republican operative—what Ralph Reed might have been had he never fallen in with Jack Abramoff. In naming Perkins to its list of America’s one hundred most influential conservatives in 2007, the British Daily Telegraph highlighted his personal qualities as critical assets: “Clean-cut, telegenic and highly articulate, he has a calm, unthreatening manner that makes charges of extremism difficult to level.” Perkins puts his family values forward as his best credential to lead. When his wife, Luanda, gave birth to their sixth child, Perkins introduced the baby to his supporters in a mass e-mail as “Louisiana’s newest pro-lifer.”

  As the president of the Family Research Council, the Washington lobbying arm of Focus on the Family and the most powerful of the movement’s bastions inside the Beltway, Perkins finds his opinions routinely sought by major cable networks such as CNN and Fox News, and for the editorial pages of the country’s most influential newspapers. His radio show, broadcast from a studio inside the Family Research Council’s expansive offices in downtown Washington, is beamed to hundreds of Christian-themed radio stations across the country. Perhaps most important, Republican presidential hopefuls beseeched him for his support during the 2008 primaries.

  A little-known former Louisiana state legislator named Woody Jenkins, publicly obscure but highly influential within the right wing, served as Perkins’s mentor and carefully crafted his early career. “To Jenkins, Perkins was like a son, and the feeling was and is mutual,” wrote his former staffer Christopher Tidmore. Jenkins, who lost a special election in 2008 to Democrat Don Cazayoux in a heavily Republican district, earned his influence in the conservative movement as the first executive director of the secretive Council for National Policy. The group later served as a vehicle for moving Perkins up through the right-wing ranks and into the nerve center of the Christian right’s political apparatus.

  “Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes, senators and cabinet members—you name it, almost anyone of consequence has been to speak before the Council,” Jerry Falwell told journalist Craig Unger. “It is a group of four or five hundred of the biggest conservative guns in the country. It is the group that draws the battle lines. It is on the right what the Council on Foreign Relations is for the left.”

  The CNP had its roots in the sordid saga of T. Cullen Davis, a Texas oil billionaire who inspired the character of J. R. Ewing, the diabolical and swaggering anti-hero of the hit 1980s TV mini-series Dallas. Davis’s name exploded into national headlines when he was first accused of hiring a hitman to kill his ex-wife and her family and then of personally attempting the job himself, murdering his step-daughter and his ex-wife’s boyfriend, while paralyzing an innocent bystander and badly wounding his ex-wife in the process, according to his prosecutors. Two trials later, and after burning through three million dollars in legal fees to convince jurors that his former wife, a glitzy Dallas socialite, was a harlot and pathological liar, Davis emerged a free man.

  Exhausted and anguished, Davis was impelled by his narrow escape from prison to his “escape from freedom.” His savior was a local televangelist named James Robison, who was known as “God’s angry man.” Born to a rape victim who had tried and failed to abort him, Robison grew into a dark-visaged, draconian Pentecostal preacher who railed against gays and liberals with a degree of vitriol that even contemporaries such as Jerry Falwell could not match. When his antigay rhetoric provoked the cancellation of his television show in 1979, Robison submitted to an exorcism procedure that he credited with delivering him from the dark demons dragging his career downward. He claimed afterward to have gained the power to deliver others from the hosts of darkness. (His personal assistant was a young evangelical minister from Arkansas named Mike Huckabee.)

  Bringing Davis to evangelical Christianity in 1980 was the preacher’s first act of spiritual beneficence. Grateful for his deliverance, the born-again billionaire offered to donate to Robison’s ministry the million-dollar collection of ivory, gold, and jade Asian religious artifacts that he and his ex-wife had purchased. Instead, Robison demanded that Davis destroy the objects in obedience to Biblical restrictions against idolatry. As Robison looked on ecstatically, Davis smashed his treasures and then threw the shards in a nearby lake. With several strokes of a sledgehammer, Davis’s sins (which almost certainly included the murder of a little girl and an innocent man), were expiated once and for all. Now, through the grace of the Reverend James Robison, he was anointed a member of the Family.

  “My goal,” Davis told reporters David Gates and Nikke Finke-Greenberg in 1983, “is to make it to heaven. I’ll do anything that it takes to get there, and I’m not going to let anything stand in my way.”

  To pave his stairway to heaven, Davi
s devoted himself to right-wing causes. His money bankrolled some of the first major Christian-right rallies, including one where Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan famously told the crowd, “I know you can’t endorse me, but I endorse you.” But Davis’s most significant contribution was the hundreds of thousands of dollars in seed money he plowed into the Council for National Policy, sewing a cash crop that enabled the incipient conservative movement to grow for many seasons.

  Upon the Council for National Policy’s founding in 1981, Woody Jenkins made a bold prediction to a Newsweek reporter: “One day before the end of this century, the Council will be so influential that no president, regardless of party or philosophy, will be able to ignore us or our concerns or shut us out of the highest levels of government.” Jenkins’s dream came true eighteen years later when Texas Governor George W. Bush appeared before the Council for National Policy to promise the appointment of exclusively anti-abortion judges to the high courts if he were elected. By this time, however, Jenkins had fallen from the national stage, having suffered a crushing loss in his bid for the Senate. It was up to his protégé, Tony Perkins, to fill his shoes. During Bush’s second term, Perkins proved his mettle, ably mobilizing the evangelical grassroots in support of Bush’s contentious appointments to the federal bench and Supreme Court.

  In one of his most strident editorials written during this momentous period, published by the Washington Post in May 2005, on the eve of the Senate debate on President Bush’s far-right judicial selections, Perkins laid out his vision of the coming apocalyptic battle over Bush’s nominees between people of faith and Democrats determined to wage a “campaign against orthodox religious views.” Only if the Senate voted for Bush’s appointments, Perkins argued, would the judiciary eventually come to respect the law. “In their zeal to preserve an imperial judiciary,” he wrote, “liberals have taken abuse of the confirmation process to a new low.”

  Time and again during his campaign to confirm Bush’s judges, Perkins hit on the theme that the Democrats were out of step with the law. He played up his former career as a policeman to emphasize his authority. “A former police officer,” his Family Research Council biography stated, “Mr. Perkins brings a unique perspective to the public policy process.” But an incident from Perkins’s past revealed his relativistic interpretation of the law—an episode that Perkins conspicuously omitted from his biography.

  The long, hot summer of 1992 marked the climax of anti-abortion protests in Baton Rouge. Declaring a “Summer of Purpose,” organizers from the militant Operation Rescue came to town with the intent of shutting down the city’s Delta Women’s Clinic—a longtime target of anti-abortion terrorists, who firebombed it in 1985. Inspired by the “direct-action” tactics advocated by Francis Schaeffer, Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry shepherded hundreds of shock troops from local fundamentalist churches onto clinic property, where they staged daily protest vigils, confronted patients in the clinic parking lot, and attempted on several occasions to attack the clinic.

  At the time, Woody Jenkins operated a local television station called Woody Vision that served as a low-budget predecessor of the Fox News Channel. When the abortion wars of the 1990s spread to Louisiana, Jenkins’s network became a de facto propaganda arm of the movement, determined to stop abortion by any means necessary. Jenkins dispatched Perkins as a reporter to cover the ongoing conflict outside Delta Women’s Clinic.

  Serving as Jenkins’s top correspondent was part of Perkins’s grooming as his political protégé. But for Perkins, who simultaneously worked as a reserve officer for the Baton Rouge Police Department, there was a stark conflict between his loyalty to his mentor and his sworn oath to uphold the law. As the protests outside Delta Women’s Clinic intensified, so did the clash between Perkins’s interests.

  In the end, Perkins chose his conscience—and political career—over the law. According to Victor Sachse, owner of a classical record label in Baton Rouge who volunteered as a patient escort for Delta Women’s Clinic during the protests, Perkins positioned himself and a camera crew from Woody Vision among the Operation Rescue demonstrators and focused on the supposed injustices visited on them by the Baton Rouge Police Force—his employer. Perkins’s reporting was so consistently slanted and inflammatory, Sachse said, that the clinic demanded his removal from its grounds.

  “Perkins never dealt with the fact that people were illegally trying to bar access to the clinic,” Sachse told me. “He never talked about the fact that the protesters who were there, even when they weren’t breaking the law by going onto the property, would yell at women entering the clinic. They would walk right in front of [these women] to intimidate them and do things like imitating the baby screaming out to the mom, ‘Please don’t murder me.’ Perkins wasn’t even trying to be objective, and we didn’t see any reason to let him stay on clinic property.”

  The protest might have caused far worse damage to the clinic and the city’s reputation were it not for the actions of Baton Rouge’s newly appointed police chief, Greg Phares. On the advice of an officer he had dispatched to observe Operation Rescue protests in Buffalo, New York, Phares ordered the erection of a chain-link fence to separate anti-abortion forces from pro-choice counter-protesters who had also gathered outside the clinic. Phares called in sheriff’s deputies and prison guards to shore up his ranks. Although anti-abortion activists bitterly attacked him in the media, some confessed grudging respect for his levelheaded handling of the situation. “Greg has done a yeoman’s job with what he’s had to work with,” Richmond Odom, a lawyer for the anti-abortion protesters, told the Baton Rouge Advocate on April 10, 1994.

  Perkins, however, was outspoken in his criticism, even violating departmental policy to write a commentary for a right-wing Christian publication denouncing the police department’s tactics, according to the Advocate. When Perkins learned of plans for anti-abortion protesters to break violently through police lines and send waves of protesters onto clinic grounds, he kept silent rather than informing his superiors on the force. Instead, Perkins waited outside the clinic with his camera crew, poised to report on the action as it unfolded. Scores of anti-abortion protesters were arrested that day.

  Perkins’s actions infuriated the police department. He was immediately suspended, and Phares asked Perkins to surrender his reserve commission for six months. The disgraced lawman-turned-anti-abortion activist rushed to the media to blame Phares for his suspension. “I think he was green for the position,” Perkins complained to the Baton Rouge Advocate in 1994. When his suspension ended, Perkins resigned.

  Shed of his badge and uniform, Perkins jumped into the rough-and-tumble of Bayou country politics. His first experience came as the campaign manager of Jenkins’s quixotic 1996 campaign for the U.S. Senate. Before facing off against a daughter of the Democratic Landrieu dynasty of New Orleans, Mary Landrieu, Jenkins had to vanquish several foes in the state’s notorious “jungle primary.” Notable among these rivals was David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who had nearly won election to the Louisiana governorship in 1990 and still maintained a substantial base of loyal supporters.

  When Jenkins defeated Duke and moved on to the general election, he and Perkins hatched a plan to consolidate his conservative support. Under the table, Perkins paid Duke $82,500 for his phone banking list, which the candidate used to target voters with robo-calls on election day. In one of the closest elections in Louisiana history, Jenkins lost to Landrieu by two percentage points. When Jenkins contested the election, Perkins’s surreptitious payment to Duke was exposed through an investigation conducted by the Federal Elections Commission, which fined the Jenkins campaign for attempting to cover it up. The FEC disclosed Perkins’s signature on the check to Duke as Exhibit A in its case against the Jenkins campaign.

  Even after the Duke imbroglio, Perkins continued to mingle on the fringes of the racist right, headlining a 2002 fundraiser for the Louisiana chapter of America’s largest white-supremacist organization, the
Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC). Descended from the White Citizens’ Councils that battled integration in the Jim Crow South, the CofCC is designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In its “Statement of Principles,” the CofCC declares, “We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called ‘affirmative action’ and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.”

  The CofCC had hosted several conservative Republican legislators at its conferences, including former representative Bob Barr of Georgia and ex-senator Trent Lott of Mississippi. Lott, who spoke to the Council five times during his career in Congress, told its members during one appearance that they “stand for the right principles and the right philosophy.”

  In 2003, former Republican National Committee chairman and Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour took a photograph with revelers at the CofCC’s “Blackhawk Rally,” a fundraising event for whites-only “private academies” not unlike those that Jerry Falwell and other fundamentalist ministers founded decades earlier. In the subsequent hailstorm of media criticism after reporters discovered that the CofCC had posted photos of Barbour on its website, Barbour pointedly refused to demand that the group remove them. Although Barbour came from an influential old-line Mississippi family in Yazoo, his long lobbying career in Washington complicated his attempts to appear authentic. “In Mississippi, one of the biggest problems he had was they thought Barbour was a scalawag. So [the photos] didn’t hurt him in Mississippi,” CofCC national president Gordon Baum told me. “Nobody said, ‘Oh my golly!’” Despite the CofCC photos becoming a campaign issue, or perhaps partly because of it, Barbour handily won reelection in 2003.