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Mr. JOHN BRADY (Author, "Bad Boy: The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater"):
That's music from "Red, Hot & Blue," an album that Lee Atwater recorded with
B.B. King and an all-star cast of blues musicians in 1989, the year that Lee
was chairman of the Republican National Committee, a very unusual thing for a
chairman of the Republican National Committee to do. But as you can see
from the cover of the book, Lee was not your average Republican. He was sort
of a stand-up Republican. He was an Elvis like performer in the Republican
arena. And he--in the picture on the cover of the book, dropped true.

This is also a picture from 1989 that appeared in Esquire magazine for a
feature called One Leg at a Time, and it was a photograph taken by Lou
Salvatore, a--a young photographer who covered a lot of celebrities and
included Atwater in the mix because he had become a political celebrity--very
unusual. Most Republicans don't have the celebrity or the notoriety that Lee
acquired in office. And he was one of a kind.

LAMB: When did he die?

Mr. BRADY: He died in late March of 1991, after battling brain cancer for
about 13 months.

LAMB: How old was he?

Mr. BRADY: He was 40 years and one month and three days when he died.

LAMB: Somewhere in your book you say he was the best political campaign
manager in history?

Mr. BRADY: I believe he was.

LAMB: Why?

Mr. BRADY: Well, he seemed to bring all of the forces that other campaign
managers had together, along with tremendous power of personality. He had--he
had a hard-driving spirit and an ability to organize things and to motivate
and manage others and to know exactly where he couldn't do something and where
he had to hire someone else to do the same thing. He had a remarkable record.
He won over 40 races in a rather short political lifetime. You see rather
well-known political managers today who perhaps have won eight or 10 races in
their careers.

Lee had done a lot more along the way to learn every little aspect of the
craft. He didn't just become a strategist after a handful of--of races. He
learned how to conduct mail campaigns, how to organize telephone campaigns,
how to change the message for a--a candidate who may have been too
complicated--how to simplify things, how to streamline things. He had
incredible intuition as a campaign manager. He also knew how to step in front
of the campaign--in front of the candidate, occasionally, and take the heat to
deflect things from the--the candidate.

So he did a lot of things that today, I think, are probably taken for granted
in certain quarters. And a lot of people have learned from him. A lot of
people imitate him or try to imitate him, and--and they get maybe a little bit
of his--his persona. But he was--he was unique. He was distinctive. There
was certainly a downside to what he represented as well as an upside. He was
controversial, and he died at the peak of his powers.

LAMB: In a moment I want to show a picture that was originally published in
Life magazine. But before I do that, I want to ask you about his brother
Joe...

Mr. BRADY: Yes.

LAMB: ...because you write about that a lot.

Mr. BRADY: Right. In the early research for this book I came across what I
would call the family secret, and it occurred in 1956--in the fall of 1956
when Lee was five years old. And it occurred in the kitchen of the family
home in Aiken, South Carolina.

LAMB: By the way, which one in this picture is Joe?
Mr. BRADY: Joe is on the right-hand side, age three, and--although he's about
two and a half in this picture. And that is Lee on the left. And this was
taken about six months before the--the tragic accident. In the--in the fall
of 1956 Lee and his brother, Joe, were at home with their mother, Toddy, and
she was waiting for Harvey, her husband, to come home from work. He was an
insurance adjuster, and he had always been on time. And on this one
particular day he was running late. A--a customer--someone had come by and
had gotten his attention; he couldn't seem to shake him, so he was going to be
home late. And in order to put some--to keep the kids distracted for a
certain period of time, Toddy decided to make doughnuts.

She put a deep-fat fryer on the stove and plugged it in and started to make
the--the batter for the doughnuts. When she turned around she saw that little
Joe had wandered over toward the stove and climbed up on a basket near the
stove to see what was going on. And as she said, `Joe, get away from that,
that's hot,' the basket slipped and Joe started to fall. He reached up and he
grabbed the cord and, of course, he pulled the--the boiling oil down over
himself as he hit the floor. He started to scream, and Lee came running in
from the next--from the living room, where he had been watching some
television show. And at that moment Harvey came through the front door, and
everybody was in a state of panic and there were screams. They put Joe in a
blanket and took him to a hospital. Even a--as he was being treated at the
hospital, the doctors were--were weeping. It was--it was such a devastating
thing to--to be a witness to and to be part of. And that--later that
afternoon Joe died.

For the rest of his life Lee Atwater forbade anyone from talking about Joe.
In his family, no one spoke of Joe. They internalized everything. And even
when there was some slight mention of this event, both Harvey and Toddy would
start to cry. So Atwater grew up living with his younger brother, even though
he was dead at the age of three, competing with a--a presence. And h--he
became a--someone who desperately wanted attention, not that he was lacking in
love. I think his--his mother, who was the strongest person in his life, was
very, very loving, but there was still a gap here at home. A sister was born
later, and it was, I think, a--a good family relationship. There were no--no
traumatic events after this. But they could not talk about Joe, and it
affected Lee's personality, as--as I've said.

Not until he was on his deathbed could he talk about Joe with his mother, and
at that point he was so far gone and had been so devastated by cancer that
even though Joe had died in a matter of 16 hours and Lee died over a period of
13 months, he said to his mother, `Wasn't Joe lucky? Wasn't Joe lucky?' He
told a few confidants toward the end of his life that he heard Joe's screams
every day for his life, even though there was nothing he could do about it
except suffer along with it.
LAMB: Here's a photograph of President Reagan, Lee Atwater there in the
middle, Strom Thurmond. And who are the two people on either side?

Mr. BRADY: On the left is Harvey Atwater, Lee's father, and on the far right
is Toddy Atwater. Harvey died six weeks after Lee's death in--he died in May
of 1991. He was battling cancer as well while his son was dying at the age of
40. So Toddy buried in her lifetime her s--her son Joe at the age of three,
her son Lee at the age of 40 and her husband. She's a remarkable woman.

LAMB: Here's a photograph that was in Life magazine originally, and it's the
last photograph in your book. When was this taken?

Mr. BRADY: This was taken in November of 1990 when Lee was on the ropes with
his--in his battle with brain cancer. He was stuck with a brain seizure in
March of 1990, and he shielded from the press and from all inquire--inquiries
the actual nature of his illness. And he was told when it was diagnosed that
he would have perhaps one year to live. He decided on an aggressive form of
surgery, interstitial--an interstitial procedure whereby 10 holes were drilled
in his head and radium seeds were dropped into the tu--in--into the holes, and
in effect they bombed the tumor.

Well, the operation was a success in a manner of speaking. The tumor was
bombed, and th--there were enormous amounts of dead brain
ti--tissues--br--dead brain cells, but the side effects, as I said, were
devastating. He lost the left side of his body in a matter of weeks, and
gradually he lost complete control of the left side of his body. He had
always had a leg twitch. His--his left leg was always--always twitching. If
you were around him, it would be jittering. It was very difficult to--to sit
still in his presence. That stopped. But then the twitch moved to his right
leg. He increasingly was dependent upon drugs. And the drugs, especially the
steroids, had the bloating effect on his appearance, making him look almost
Mongoloid. He was in a wheelchair. He had very little self-control. A--a
man who would, in his prime, run six hours a day was now in the hands of his
handlers.

And that photograph was taken by a remarkable photographer for Life magazine
named Lynn Johnson who accompanied Lee for about 10 days total as he went
about certain forms of business that he could--could conduct in Washington and
went to his hometown in in a last journey to Columbia for a fund-raiser
there; his medical bills were considerable. And that showed the--the state of
affairs as he stared death in the face for the first time. He never thought
that--he--he somehow thought he was going to beat this demon, and even when
the doctors told him he had a year to live, he thought that this new procedure
would extend it to five or even 10 years. There was some medical optimism
there that was just unrealistic.
LAMB: Did you ever meet him?

Mr. BRADY: Never met him.

LAMB: Why did you get interested in doing this story?

Mr. BRADY: I'm not sure. It is really a biz--it's been a bizarre journey for
me. In 1992 I was working on another book, a revised edition of my book, "The
Craft of Interviewing." And all the books that I've done have been for
journalists or for writers. I did "The Craft of Interviewing," I did "Craft
of the Screenwriter." And during the fall--or the--during August of 1992 my
daughter, Lindy, a teen-age daughter, age 14, was visiting me in Boston.
Lindy lives in Cincinnati; I'm a divorced dad. And we were traveling around a
little bit, doing some things, and she wanted to go to L.L. Bean in Freeport,
Maine.

So we were driving from Boston up to Freeport and, of course, the talk shows
on the stations in Maine were filled with discussions of the '92 campaign.
And you may remember that it was a terrible campaign for George Bush. He was
sputtering. He was off message. He was giving interviews from the backs of
golf carts at country clubs. And Bill Clinton was looking formidable. Ross
Perot was doing damage in the Republican ranks. And one of the talk show
hosts on--on this radio show that we were listening to said, `If Lee Atwater
were alive today, George might have a chance.' And my daughter looked at me,
she said, `Who was Lee Atwater?'

And I told her what I could remember, which wasn't much--just that he had been
this hard-charging campaign manager and that in 1988 he had taken George
Bush's campaign from a 17-point deficit after the conventions that summer to
an 8-point victory; it was a 25-point swing. I said, `Along the way Atwater
disemboweled Michael Dukakis, who was governor of Massachusetts.' And it was
a campaign that I had watched slightly. I'm not a very political person. I'm
a registered independent. I'm from Massachusetts, which doesn't have very
warm feelings toward Republicans or toward Geo--George Bush in light of that
campaign.

But I'm also, I--I guess, a--a curious journalistic type. And so I said to
Lindy, `When we get back from this trip, why don't we go to the library and
get a book about Atwater?' We always read something as a summer project.
Well, we went to the library and there was no book about Lee Atwater. And the
librarian in this little town where I live, just north of Boston, said that
it's very unusual because there are over 3,000 references to Lee Atwater in
either other books or in major magazine and newspaper articles, but there is
no book about Atwater. And then she looked at me and she said, `There
probably should be a book about Atwater.'
So I asked for a couple of those articles about Atwater, began reading them
and I answered my daughter's question that week. But I--it became an interest
in--in--in the--the details of a man's career and his life that were almost
obsessive. I--I calls Columbia--I called Columbia, South Carolina, to see if
Harvey Atwater was in the phone book, and I ended up talking with Toddy. She
said that her husband had died, and she filled me in on a few of the
particulars. And we began a series of conversations each morning for about 10
days. I told her, `I'd like to do a book about your son.' She said, `Several
have tried, and they've all ended up nowhere.'

So I sent her my credentials, a copy of one of my books, and I began to
interview her each morning for about an hour--45 minutes to an hour. I would
talk until she started to cry because it was very painful for her to go
through some of these details. I recorded the conversation,
use--conversations, used them as the beginning of a book proposal that I
pulled together.

I called Mary Matalin in Washington. She was in the phone book at the time,
not quite as--as famous then as she is these days. And I asked her if I could
talk about Lee. She said she hadn't been able to talk about him and that she
was reluctant to do so, but she might give me 10 or 15 minutes. About an hour
and a half later we were still talking. And it became apparent that people
who'd been around Atwater over the years and who had watched him rise and then
be struck down by this tumor were still not quite over the shock of his death
and what it had done to them and certainly to the Republican Party and to
camp--cam--campaigns subsequent to the '88 campaign.

And it's just--it was a fascinating story. It had almost--elements, almost,
of a Shakespearean tragedy: a guy who came out of nowhere, who had no--no
particular political calling except for what he made--what he made on his own,
and who at the age of 29 was in the Reagan White House and at the age of 38
was chairman of the Republican National Committee.

I probably, if--if I were to meet Lee Atwater in person, probably would not be
his friend. I don't think that he was particularly likable, that is for
journalists. I think if I worked for him I would find him fascinating and
maybe hate him and love him at the same time. But as a subject for a
biography, he was fascinating. I ended up talking with over--almost 400
people; about 150 are mentioned in the book. Many would only talk to me on
the basis of confidentiality or for--off the record. Many of them are in
politics or--or are still doing business today.

And I will only say that it took about four years to do this book. I started
it in 1992 as that campaign wound down. It's now in--in print after the '96
campaign. Along the way I went through a divorce, and my ex-wife, who's a
good sport and she and I are on very good terms--but at one point she said to
me as we were heading for the mediator, `You know, if I were to name a source
of difficulty for this--this whole thing, it would be Lee Atwater.' It was as
though I invited him into my life and into the house, and he just consumed
four years of my writing life, certainly.

LAMB: Where is home right now?

Mr. BRADY: Home is Boston--north of Boston.

LAMB: And what do you do for a living?

Mr. BRADY: Well, I'm a magazine consultant. I work with magazines that are
having some difficulty. I'm a former magazine editor. I've edited Boston
Magazine, Writer's Digest. I'm a founding editor of the Artist's Magazine.
And so I have a consulting firm that works along those lines. I also teach.
I recently spent a semester at the University of Missouri as the Hearst
visiting professor in the journalism department. And I write books.

LAMB: The mention of Mary Matalin brings to mind this picture right down
here. What was their relationship?

Mr. BRADY: Well, it started out as a...

LAMB: That's the two of them there. Where? Do you know?

Mr. BRADY: Right. Oh, where? That is at the--the--one of the--the--one of
the inaugural balls that Lee put together, and it was called the Festival for
Young Americans. And it was, for the most part, a blues celebration, and they
are dancing in the aisles while the--the party went on. It was a--the--the
relationship began actually during the '88 campaign. And Lee knew Mary, but
he knew her mostly through Rich Bond. And Rich Bond was not his friend; they
were, in fact, political enemies.

LAMB: Rich Bond went on to be Republican National Committee chairman...

Mr. BRADY: Right. After Atwater.

LAMB: ..after Atwater.

Mr. BRADY: After Atwater's death, actually. Mary came up and was there for
sort of a Bond person or a Bondite. And Lee hired her, begrudgingly, to
assist with the Iowa campaign in the primaries of the '88 campaign for George
Bush. Things were not going well in Iowa, and George Bush ended coming in
third in Iowa behind Dole and--I'm--I'm drawing a blank on the...
LAMB: Was it Pat Robertson?

Mr. BRADY: Pat Robertson--came out of nowhere and somehow won that--that
primary. And in a moment of--of anger, Lee went out to Iowa on Air Force Two
and ceremoniously fired Mary Matalin from her duties as field director. She
sort of hid out and ended up in Michigan running another campaign for the
Republican cause. She worked her way back into his favor. But they started
out as--I won't say enemies, but he did not think much of her.

She worked her way up the Republican structure, and by the time--after the '88
campaign when Lee was putting his staff together, he hired her as his chief of
staff. And they were very close. They were--she, in effect, ran the office
while Lee was on the road. As you probably know, the--the role of Republican
National Committee chairman requires a lot of road work, a lot of
fund-raising. And someone has to run the office, and that was Mary's job.
They were--they were a--a good team, in that after a while Mary was really on
his wavelength; she could anticipate things. She knew what he was thinking,
and they worked well together.

LAMB: I want to play for you just a minute of a clip. She appeared on a
program here and was asked about this book, and here's what she said about it.

Mr. BRADY: Sure.

Ms. MARY MATALIN (CBS Radio; Talk Show Host): (Excerpt from C-SPAN program)
I loathe the expert in the--excerpt in The Washington Post which--not
surprising to me, because it was The Washington Post--pulled out the most
heinous of the chapters. It's other--otherwise a not very well-done biography
of an--of an incredible man. The Washington Post ran a--the--the last weeks
of his life when he was--and did not--and the--this is why the book is not
that well-done: It--this author did not make it clear--and there's some
really tragic and horrible and psychotic events taking place at the end of Lee
Atwater's life when he was dying from a brain tumor, and this author did not
make it clear that the biological organic effects of a brain tumor,
whether--which were--was what was causing this irrational behavior, not that
Lee was irrational or those caretakers around him were irrational. But he
literally--his brain was literally being disintegrated. And I thought it was
ugly for The Washington Post to put only that part in their excerpts, and I
think the book is otherwise not a very well-chronicled biography of a--an
extraordinary man.

Mr. BRADY: Oh, I beg to disagree. I think that there--there are two parts to
Mary's answer. One, The Washington Post expert--excerpt is a condensation of
the last chapter. And because The Post did take some rather lurid events and
crunch them together using a little bit of seamwork between them, there--there
is a--a quality--almost a--a sensational quality to The Washington Post
excerpt. And it also had an in-your-face style of design. That is, the
pictures and photos that were used by The Washington Post were a little more
tabloid like. And...

LAMB: They weren't the ones in the book.

Mr. BRADY: They were--no, they--they were--they took one photo from the
book--or from the photographer who provided a photo, and they just used, like,
a tight cropping of the face of--of Brooke Vosberg. And there just was
a--more of a tabloid style to The Washington Post because that's a weekly
magazine. I think the--the book itself, the biography, shows clearly the
effects of medic--of medication and of the--and--and the gradual decline and
the physical debilitation of this man. The--the book, I think
I'll--I'll--I'll stand on it--on its own merits. I don't think that Mary made
that c--that point clear, that--that the book does point out, for example,
that Lee had spent, by the end of his first year, 160 days in the hospital.
And I chronicle all of the side effects that the--that the
medicine--medication clearly had.

LAMB: Do you have any sense of why she s--feels so strongly about the book,
though? I mean, did you know this?

Mr. BRADY: No, I don't. No. I--I can't imagine. She was a source for--for
some information in the book. But, of course, I spoke, as I said, with
hundreds of people, and I--I'll stand by the book. So far I've--I've not had
anyone tell me that I got anything wrong in it.

LAMB: Let me give you an--a reaction of people that live in this town because
I want to get to this part of the book...

Mr. BRADY: Sure.

LAMB: ...when they opened up their Washington Post on that Sunday morning a
couple weeks ago. And I've heard this from more than one person: They looked
at it and they said, `I--I don't want to read any more about Lee Atwater,'
because his story had been told, and they began to read it and then they
began to say, `I--could you believe that, and how painful it was?' And then
we've--I--I found a lot more people, you know, had read it than you would
expect to because of--his death was a number of years ago.

Mr. BRADY: Yeah.

LAMB: Are you surprised at that, that somebody would have that reaction to
that Washington Post excerpt?
Mr. BRADY: The reaction being--I...

LAMB: Being a strong reaction, that they couldn't believe what they were
reading.

Mr. BRADY: They couldn't believe what they were reading. Well...

LAMB: Not that they couldn't believe that you were right. They just couldn't
believe how painful it was.

Mr. BRADY: Well, it's...

LAMB: I mean, I--I guess I'm asking for you to characterize that last 50
pages. I mean, was it hard to write?

Mr. BRADY: I--I will tell you this. The first draft of this book was 1,600
pages long; that's half a million words. When the publisher saw that, he
said, `There's no way we can do this--this book.' I said, `How about two or
three volumes on Lee Atwater?' And I was joking, of course. He said, `Well,'
my edit--editor said, `If we can get this down to 400 or 500 pages, we'll have
a book.' So I crunched half a million words down to about 140,000 or 150,000
words. Everything that is in the book is--as Hemingway once said, is like
the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot more that isn't in the book so that
everything in the book is, I think, accurate and--and carefully documented.
And it is a--I think, a pretty sound piece of journalism. The events are
often shocking.

What Lee did, how he did things, the backstage story--these are things that
have never been told because Lee controlled the message. Mary was part of the
business of controlling the message. And--and I will say that I spoke with a
lot of sources that were still spinning the same old Lee Atwater tales. `Oh,
Lee--Lee read two books a week.' `Oh, Lee this.' `Oh, Lee that.' And I
would listen politely, almost naively, which is interviewers' technique, and
you get more information that way. And then you go back and you--you check
for the accuracy of this source, as opposed to other people who were in the
room and who really--who knew what was really going on. That is, Lee wasn't
reading books; Lee was getting summary of books fed to him by his research
staff, and he would get an index card summarizing exactly what the book was
about. And he could memorize what the gist of the story was, could go into a
conversation. And he had tremendous conversational skills, tremendous
interpersonal skills. And you would swear that he had read the book. He
hadn't. Didn't have to. Didn't have time to do it. And as he got bigger and
bigger, it became more apparent that Lee was dependent upon others to do
things in his spirit and in his manner. That created some problems, too.

LAMB: Let me show you three pictures you've seen--the audience probably
hasn't--of--it looks like the same scene. Let's look at the first one. And
tell us who these people are.

Mr. BRADY: OK. This is Lee Atwater with Brooke Vosberg, and it's part of
the series of photographs taken by Lynn Johnson for the Life magazine piece.
And this was not a published photograph. I saw the entire file at Life
magazine, nearly 2,000 photographs. And this is a picture of--of Lee with
Sally, his wife, in the back the limousine.

LAMB: The first one was a limousine, too, wasn't it?

Mr. BRADY: Yeah. These are all taken in the same limo, I believe.

LAMB: This is his wife. That's Sally.

Mr. BRADY: Right.

LAMB: And then who's this?

Mr. BRADY: And this is Linda Reed O'Meara and Lee, and this is in front of
the White House, which you can see in the background there; same limo, a day
of driving around Washington. Linda Reed O'Meara was an old friend of Lee's
who had--who he knew from South Carolina who had helped him on and off over
the years in various political functions and who spent the last six months of
her life in the Atwater home cooking, helping Lee out, reading the Bible to
him, being a personal assistant and helping ease the pain as he--as he
dwindled and died.

LAMB: Let's go back to the picture of Brooke Vosberg because she plays a role
in the last 50 pages that, I think--that's what everybody's talking about
around after this was published.

Mr. BRADY: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: Who is she and what was her role in the last year of his life?

Mr. BRADY: Brooke Vosberg is a--is--was Lee's personal assistant. She came
to that job just before--or at--at the beginning of his--his term as chairman
of the Republican National Committee. Previous to that, she'd been in the
White House. She had been Donald Regan's personal assistant. She had
assisted Regan in his year of writing his book. And she'd worked for various
other politicians in the--on the Washington scene.

And she became a--an intimate of--of Lee's so much so that he pretty much
turned a lot of his personal life over to her in the last year of his life.
And there was a certain amount of confusion in the household as a result of
that, and it's--it's something that I--I chronicle in the--in the context of
that last year.

LAMB: But what kind of--I mean, explain what you're talking about, confusion
in the household.

Mr. BRADY: Well, Lee had, of course, a longstanding marriage with Sally and
they had three children, three little girls. In fact, Sally was pregnant with
their third child when Lee was struck with a--a brain seizure in March of
1990. And the--the marriage, while it was longstanding, was not--not without
some difficulties along the way.

The--the marriage was a difficult one in that Lee was married, I'd say, to his
job more than to his--his wife and to his family. He was not around for a lot
of things that dads are usually around for. Sally was very tolerant. I think
that she at one point acknowledged to a friend that she perhaps was--was not
strong enough--was not strong enough with Lee and that he--he got away
with--with a lot of misbehavior.

The--the--what I--I'm talking about in the last year has to do with the fact
that Lee took his office and--after the seizure, he had to move it into his
home. His home became not only a home, but a base of operations for
everything that he was doing; therefore, his staff--his personal staff took
some precedence over his family in his home. And you have this upstairs,
downstairs kind of arrangement.

And he told Sally that--that Brooke was going to be central to this. He also
told his--his mother and his father that Brooke was very important to him and
that that was the way things were to be. And, by and large, they went along
with that arrangement.

LAMB: And then you, in your book, you talk about Vosberg--who--it--where is
she now, by they way?

Mr. BRADY: I'm--I'm not able to talk about my sources or their whereabouts.

LAMB: She still in Washington?

Mr. BRADY: No.

LAMB: She's not.

Mr. BRADY: No, she's not.
LAMB: And--and did you talk to her? I mean, do you quote her at all?

Mr. BRADY: Brooke is a source for the book, yes. She's doing very well
elsewhere.

LAMB: But it was the first time it was ever published that she was very much
in that house every day and she would be upstairs with Lee and it--the wife
would be downstairs. I mean, that--that's what--I guess what Mary Matalin was
talking about, is that this was the first time that was ever published.

Mr. BRADY: It--it--I--I think that there are a lot of details that are
i--in--that are part of the true story of Lee's life as opposed to this--the
spun version, which was manufactured by Mary, among others.

LAMB: And Sally, Lee's wife, was pregnant at the time during this...

Mr. BRADY: Right.

LAMB: ...his last year of his life?

Mr. BRADY: Right.

LAMB: And ha--I--I think I wrote the--the date down; had a child on April the
16th...

Mr. BRADY: Middle of April, yeah.

LAMB: ...19...

Mr. BRADY: '91.

LAMB: ...90.

Mr. BRADY: '91.

LAMB: He died in '91?

Mr. BRADY: Excuse me, 1990. You're correct.

LAMB: Yeah, 1990. why did you feel it necessary to tell the whole
personal side of this?

Mr. BRADY: It's actually the personal side of Lee's life that interests me.
That is--that's the human drama. I think that the political story, which is
told as well, is impossible to separate from the personal story because his
personality was such a part of his career.

What he was is large--in large measure a reflection of who he was. And it
seems that the way that he conducted his life, the way that he used people is
very--very much a part of who Lee Atwater ultimately is. I felt that that was
my responsibility: to stay with the story, for better and for worse.

LAMB: You--you write on Page 282, `There was great tenderness and intimacy
in their relationship,' talking about Brooke.

Mr. BRADY: Yeah.

LAMB: `Brooke bathed Lee, cared for him like a loving spouse, but no one
could determine whether they were, in fact, lovers. An aide came into the
bedroom one night and found Lee and Brooke fast asleep but saw an innocence to
the scene. He tip-toed out and got the third degree from Toddy the next day.'
Toddy was in the house?

Mr. BRADY: Yes.

LAMB: Where was she?

Mr. BRADY: That varied. People were sleeping often, you know,
where--wherever they--they might be able to--to find a spot. I'm not sure
that Toddy was in the house that specific night. She may have come over in
the morning from another location.

LAMB: But she was in the house during this whole situation?

Mr. BRADY: Toddy was in and out of the house on a regular basis, yes.

LAMB: But you say during this period that he found God.

Mr. BRADY: Yes.

LAMB: In what way and how did you find that out and how--I mean, that was
part of the Life magazine story, too, I guess.

Mr. BRADY: Lee found God, but here, again, there is a certain quality to this
religious conversion that I would say is--is subject to a different kind of
evaluation. I don't think that he was a born-again Christian. I think that
he arrived at a point where he was physically struck down and he was looking
for various things that he could use in his battle against this enemy, against
this cancer.

He saw religion as a possibility and he traveled that road. He spoke with
Billy Graham. He spoke with a Catholic priest; he was baptized by a Catholic
priest. And he spoke with a lot of non-denominational religious leaders. He
had Buddhist monks visit.

There is a--a quality of desperation in this religious search. It has, to me,
the--more the aura of someone who is looking for religion not out of fervor,
but out of fear. I also came across some tape recordings that he made on his
death bed of his prayers.

LAMB: Where'd you find those, by the way?

Mr. BRADY: I cannot tell you. I have--I have a lot of things that were given
to me by individuals, and--and they're--they're for my use, but not for
attribution.

LAMB: And--and--but you tell us in the book that he recorded them by himself
in his--on his death bed.

Mr. BRADY: He had a little micro-cassette recorder. And Lee had another
habit during his life; he would often record people who were unaware of the
fact that they were being recorded. He would conduct--give interviews to
journalists and they would have their recorders, but he would have a recorder
somewhere else to make a copy of it so that he could check their quotes, get
back to them later if they had misquoted him. And he would have t--evidence.

I found some long interviews that he did. He recorded a lot of the
conversations he had with the writer who did the Life magazine piece towards
the end of Lee's life. A lot of these things came my way in the process of
making my rounds with various sources. And I felt that I got as close to
Lee Atwater's psyche as you can get in listening to these private
recordings, where there's no one but Lee talking to himself. And these were
recordings that often had other things on them as well, some household
business and things that you might put on a tape recorder if you used it as a
little bit of a memory device, because he couldn't write. And he was--he was
somewhat incapacitated. He couldn't even take notes.

These prayers are all pretty much of the quality that, `Dear God, if you will
help me through this, if you will make me better, if you will give me a
victory in this, I will be the best foot soldier you could ever want in your
army.' There's usually a quid pro quo in Lee's prayers, and I think that he
was trying to make a deal with God, much as you'd make a deal with someone in
order to get a political victory. I think that was Lee's nature. I think
that was the essence of Lee to the end: trying to manipulate, trying to
manage people, trying to have his way with them, trying to serve some inner
need, something that was within himself, that was almost insatiable.

So I found myself dealing with someone who was, in some ways, not particularly
admirable. But there was a price that he paid for it as well. In the
public arena he became someone who was known as a--a trigger man, someone who
could pull the trigger, a cold-blooded political killer; therefore--and he--he
often encouraged this. He liked to take credit for things that were bad,
campaigns that were nasty, mean, had some elements of dirty tricks in them.
He liked to take credit for that because it was good for business. Being a
bad boy in politics, well, there's a market for that. A lot of politicians
like that in their managers.

The downside of it was that Lee was easy to accuse of things. And he would
often--he couldn't deny the things, even though he perhaps had nothing to do
with them because he lacked a certain amount of credibility. This occurred
most tellingly after the '88 election. During the 1988 election perhaps the
most famous ad was the so-called `Willie Horton ad.'

Well, there are two Willie Horton ads. There is an ad that was done by the
Republican National Committee--excuse me, by the Bush-Quayle campaign.
It's an ad that does not mention Willie Horton's name. It's an ad that does
not use Willie Horton's image. It's called the revolving door. And in the ad
there are prisoners going through this revolving door out in a desertlike
setting. And there's commentary on the furlough--the prison furlough system
in Massachusetts and how Governor Michael Dukakis was allowing convicted
murderers who were not eligible for parole--these murderers were allowed out
on the street on weekend furloughs unsupervised.

And as a result of that Willie Horton, a murderer who was in a Massachusetts
prison in Concord, escaped to Maryland where he terrorized a--a couple. He
tied them up, he raped the woman twice, he slashed the stomach of the guy 22
times, threatening to kill them at any moment. And eventually he was captured
by the Maryland police. But what the--what this case did was it showed how
questionable the the Dukakis style of crime control in Massachusetts was.

And Atwater decided to use this case and to help create this ad. But the ad
did not mention Willie Horton by name and did not use his--his image. It
showed prisoners going through this revolving door. I've read articles even
by pretty well-known journalists in which they say most of the prisoners going
through this door are black and it's a racist ad. Well, it's not. Of the 19
prisoners who go through the revolving door, 16 are white, two are black, one
is what might be called Mexican or Mexican-American.

The problem is that there was another ad which was done by an independent
group, the National Security Political Action Committee.

LAMB: Floyd Brown?

Mr. BRADY: Floyd Brown. And Larry McCarthy was the guy who did the actual
ad. This group came out with an ad at about the same time. We're talking
about late September and early October of 1988. And this featured an image of
Michael Dukakis and an image of Willie Horton and mentions this case that I've
just outlined. And this was for a group called Americans for Bush, a very
ambiguous effort to raise money for the independent expenditure group, and it
created a lot--a lot of confusion.

The confusion was so complete that people to this day blame Lee Atwater for
the so-called Willie Horton ad. It was mentioned in--in--I've seen it in a
review of my book that misunderstood completely who did what. And when
Atwater died in 1991 when his obituary was the lead item on the three network
shows, two of the three, CBS and ABC, got it wrong. As an image on screen
while they were talking about Lee Atwater, they ran excerpts from the Willie
Horton ad that Lee had nothing to do with.

I've gone through all the files, all of the correspondence between this NSPAC
group and the Bush-Quayle campaign. There's no evidence to indicate any
connection between the two. There's only suspicion. And there's--and because
you have Lee Atwater there, there's a tendency to think the worst. Susan
Estrich took advantage of this. In December of '88 after the
campaign was over at Harvard, there's...

LAMB: She used to--she ran the Dukakis campaign?

Mr. BRADY: Two--Susan--Dukakis--ran the Dukakis campaign. Some would say
that she probably did a very poor job of running that campaign, could not keep
the candidate on message. And actually the Democrats ran a racist
ad in California. It's an ad that features a Mexican-American murderer, a man
who killed his wife in front of their two children. This image--the image of
this murderer and George Bush are brought together in an ad that ran in
California. And if there ever was a racist ad, it is that in a state that is
often defined by its racial content.

But in the aftermath of the '88 campaign during which racism was not a charge,
Susan Estrich began to suggest that in using Willie Horton as an example of
the Dukakis ineptitude, Lee Atwater had created a racist campaign. And she
qualified it, to some degree, in discussions. But later in March--or rather
it was in May of--of 1989, The Washington Post magazine ran a cover story
called Willie Horton and Me, by Susan Estrich, in which she laid out an even
stronger case for it being a racist campaign; equating the crime issue
with--with a--with--saying that it was a racist issue.

People equate crime with blacks. That was her logic. I'm not sure that that
would play. I don't think that that's a fair statement to
say that when people think of crime, they think of blacks. I don't
think that that's an accurate assessment of the American intelligence. And
yet it reinforced this idea that Atwater and Willie Horton and racism had a
lot to do with that campaign. That campaign was a lot of things, but it--the
Willie Horton issue was distorted.

LAMB: Now that was in '88 and he ran that campaign...

Mr. BRADY: Yes.

LAMB: ...and they won, and George Bush became president in '89.

Mr. BRADY: Yes.

LAMB: When was he struck--first day, when did he know the first time that he
had a brain tumor?

Mr. BRADY: On March 6th of 1990 he had a seizure what--during a fund-raiser
for Phil Gramm in Washington. And it occurred in the morning. He'd been
feeling ill for several days, but it came out of nowhere. And he had a limp
for about six months in his left leg, but they attributed it to his--his heavy
schedule of travel and--and normal fatigue, plus the fact that he ran six
miles a day.

And he was--he was struck with a seizure in March of 1990. He knew at the end
of the next day that it was a--a high-grade tumor. And by the end of that
month he was talking with medical specialists who were estimating that he had
a year or two to live. Then he decided to go for this interstitial procedure
that I mentioned earlier.

LAMB: And they--you actually--somewhere you say that you got some record--all
the records at George Washington Hospital?

Mr. BRADY: Yes.

LAMB: Did they just give them o--over to you?

Mr. BRADY: No. No, I had to get permission from Sally and fr--of course,
from all the--from Sally basically to--to look at all the--the medical
records.

LAMB: How cooperative was Sally with this book and what does she think of it?
Do you know?

Mr. BRADY: Sally was very cooperative. And I admire her quite a bit for her
openness and candor. I think this is probably a painful read for Sally in
part. There are things here that obviously a biographer learns that--that
people in the story do not know. And that's probably true for many people who
knew Lee Atwater. He was a very complex man who kept everybody in a little
box. And they only knew so much about him; enough to be useful for him,
enough to serve purpose. But they did not get to know
the whole man. And I think that it was John Singer Sargent, the painter,
who said that, `Every time I complete a portrait, I make an enemy.'

LAMB: Where's Sally today?

Mr. BRADY: Sally's in Washington raising three children and is somewhat
active in Republican political circles.

LAMB: And at the very end of their life together, when he died--by the
way, where was he when he died?

Mr. BRADY: He died here at George Washington Hospital.

LAMB: And you say that George--at least Ronald Reagan and his wife visited
the hospital, right, in the end?

Mr. BRADY: Yeah. Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan were the last visitors
actually. James Baker came in that same night. Maybe he--I think he came in
after the--the Reagans.

LAMB: What was Sally and Lee's relationship at the end?

Mr. BRADY: At the end they were together at the finish line. They had
resolved a lot of their--their problem areas and...

LAMB: You say there was a time that Lee Atwater wanted to go through
a marriage ceremony with Brooke Vosberg there at the hospital.

Mr. BRADY: They had a little wedding, a little marriage ceremony in the
chapel at the hospital, yeah--somewhat symbolic. And but eventually Lee
separated himself from Brooke and she was not at the funeral.

LAMB: In the back you have this picture of the grave site. Where is this, by
the way?

Mr. BRADY: That's in Columbia, South Carolina.

LAMB: And you can't see it here in the photograph, but we've transferred it
to a picture so that people on the screen can see it. And that's what it
looks like there and--1951 to '91, you say he was just a little bit over 40.
And you say, `Teacher, leader, husband, father, son,' and then it goes into
the Republican creed. And we can put that on the screen so people can read...

Mr. BRADY: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...exactly what it says. where'd you find the Republican creed?
Is this his?

Mr. BRADY: The Republican creed is a statement of purpose that is used at
certain Republican functions. And the decision to put it on his gravestone
was Sally's.

LAMB: Let me read it so folks who are trying to read and listen to you
can do one thing at a time.

`I do not choose to be a common man. It is my right to be uncommon. I prefer
the challenges of life to guaranteed security, the thrill of fulfillment to
the state calm of utopia. I will never cower before any master, save my God.'

And who wrote that? Do you know?

Mr. BRADY: I do not know the author. But the first two lines, `I do
not choose to be a common man. I choose to be an uncommon man,' are--are
certainly very characteristic of Lee Atwater's credo. It was something he
learned in his first summer of politics in August of 1971 as a college
student. He was in the office of Strom Thurmond as an intern. And he did
mostly, oh, clerical work. He drove the senator around a little bit and then
he, Lee was a terrible driver, so I can imagine what those trips must
have been.

He did not have good coordination skills. Lee was so--somewhat klutzy. And
for most of their married life, Sally did the driving. He said he needed the
time to focus on politics. But he had a conversation with Strom Thurmond
toward the end of that summer and he came back for another internship the
following year. Strom Thurmond was actually a runner during these early years
and Lee picked up that habit from him.

He--Strom Thurmond told Lee that, `You have a choice in this world. You can
be a common man or you can be an uncommon man.' And Lee took that to heart.
At one point Lee had been just a hard-drinking, college guy. His weight went
up to 200 pounds one summer. He started running six miles a day. He lost
weight. He ca--he was always 155 pounds. He was very disciplined, very
orderly. And he could resist many, many things.

He stopped drinking; he was once a pretty very heavy drinker. He stopped
smoking, except one day a week and that was Friday. He smoked a pack of
cigarettes each Friday. And he used that as an example of self-control.
People who smoke cigarettes know how difficult it is to stop smoking
cigarettes.

LAMB: Did he really read "The Prince" by Machiavelli 21 times?

Mr. BRADY: No.

LAMB: Did he tell people he did?

Mr. BRADY: Well, the number changed. It was a little bit like Joseph
McCarthy's Communists in the--in the government. The number was 10, it was
11, it was 20, 21 and I've heard 23.

LAMB: What's this? And this is--the dots without the lines drawn are--are
available earlier in the book. And what's this about?

Mr. BRADY: Yeah. This is that little challenge I think we all have seen,
connecting nine dots with four lines without lifting your hand from the paper.
This has--this is the solution. And in order to connect the nine dots with
four lines and not remove your hand from the pen from the paper, you have
to go outside the dots. And that was another metaphor that Atwater used.

Thinking, he said, `When you think of a solution, you have to go outside the
dots. You can't stay within the dots to sometimes solve a problem or a
puzzle.' And that's how he approached any political puzzle you could throw at
him.

LAMB: You said earlier you wrote 500,000 words.

Mr. BRADY: Yes, sir.

LAMB: What are you going to do with the 140,000--no, I guess it would be
260,000 that didn't make it in here--or was it more than that?

Mr. BRADY: I'll...

LAMB: All those that--or how many did you end up in the book with?

Mr. BRADY: It was about 150,000 words.

LAMB: So what--what are you going to do with the other 350,000?

Mr. BRADY: They're in the--the Atwater archives right now at--at my--at my
residence. I'm not sure. It's so...

LAMB: Is there something you're doing?

Mr. BRADY: I don't know. There might be a longer treatise someday. It's
also filled with tapes--I listened to 18 hours of his recording sessions with
B.B. King, Chuck Jackson, Billy Preston and all these great blues artists.
It's interesting thing to listen to the--that is, the tape recording of
Lee and these blues artists, because he begins as someone just
strumming along with B.B. King, trying to learn the tunes. And there's this
engaging quality between the two of them.

But after a couple of hours you hear Lee telling the engineer how to handle
things. And then by the second session Lee's pretty much telling everybody
how to perform their music. He did not--he did not like to be anything less
than a leader. And he was a quick learner and could be quite formidable.

LAMB: Before we run out of time, I want to ask you this, then I'll get
back to some more of the substance. But on the back, I don't know that I've
ever seen this before, you say in order to get the index, you got to go to the
World Wide Web. And we've actually plugged into the World Wide Web to show
what it looks like, and there it is on the screen right there and I've got a
hard copy here. Why didn't the publisher want to put your index in?

Mr. BRADY: Well, the index, while it's--it gives you ease of access to
the book, is a little bit at odds with what I was trying to do with
this story. I wanted this story to be told as a whole. I wanted--I tried to
create a certain narrative flow to it that made it move from page one to the
end. Books that I studied in order to put this together included a biography
of Elvis Presley, "Last Train to Memphis," by Peter Guralnick or the book by
Connie Bruck on Steve Ross, "Master of the Game," and also, "Indecent
Exposure," that wonderful biography of David Begelman--the study of David
Begelman by David McClintick.

These are great biographies, I think, of contemporary figures that are told
with--in the narrative way so that there's a story. And a lot of the
books of Washington figures have indexes that make them seem more scholarly
and more pedantic than I think that this book is. So there's that.

Secondly, the publisher decided after studying other books that a lot of
people in Washington buy a book by reading it backwards. They look at the
index, see if they are in the book or someone they know is in the
book and then make a purchasing decision. Richard Ben Cramer's book,
"What It Takes," has no index. And it was packaged for the same
purpose.

Why should there be an index when you should buy the whole thing without
wondering who's in it? The paperback version will have an index, I am told.
But the goal here is to get someone interested in the book and the index is
there if you want to follow through on the instructions at the back
end.

LAMB: There are a couple restaurants in this town called Red Hot & Blue...

Mr. BRADY: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...and then in the back--and we--we played some of the music going in,
we'll play some of it going out, but here's a--is that the--is that the CD
cover?

Mr. BRADY: That's the album cover.

LAMB: Album cover?

Mr. BRADY: And the album, of course, has been replaced by a CD that is now
sold--it--the album is rather hard to find. It's a collector's item actually
because it has B.B. King and Chuck Thomas and...

LAMB: Chuck Jackson.

Mr. BRADY: Chuck Jackson and David...

LAMB: And Sam Moore...

Mr. BRADY: Sam Moore.

LAMB: ...of Sam and Dave...

Mr. BRADY: You got it.

LAMB: ...and lots of other folks. Yeah.

Mr. BRADY: And Lee Atwater singing "Bad Boy," among other things. He was,
as I said earlier, unique in so many ways. One thing that he brought to
the--the job of chairman of the Republican National Committee was a sense of
showmanship that I don't think will ever be seen again. He put together blues
festivals, fund-raisers, he carried a guitar that Ron Wood of the Rolling
Stones gave him. On this occasion, this is the inaugural gala that he put
together.

He was on stage with George Bush kind of mugging along pretending to be a
bluesman. And that Stratocaster that Ron Wood gave Atwater was like a
traveling companion for the next year that he was in office. He carried it
everywhere. Sad to say, that Stratocaster has disappeared. It's one of the
things that was lost in the confusion of his final year. And all the traffic
that came and went in his home, which had been turned into an office and then
finally into a--a hospital room.

LAMB: We're going to close this--again, we don't normally do this, but we're
going to close it with some more from this album. "Bad Boy" is a song--did he
write it?

Mr. BRADY: No, he didn't. But he customized the lyrics that he used to
fit his unique political career. He added his own touch to it. He was a
bad boy from Washington, DC.

LAMB: Well, here's the--as we listen to the music, here's the cover of the
book and our guest has been John Brady and the name of the book is "Bad Boy:
The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater."

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Bad Boy: The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater