Well, Jack, thank you. Those remarks were moving to me and I’m so relieved you didn’t tell some of those stories you’ve been threatening to tell. No, but Jack, that was-I didn’t recognize the person you were talking about. But thank you. Senator Bennett, congratulations to you on your award. I feel very blessed to celebrate my career and my retirement with so many colleagues and friends. Linda Dooley, Peggy Hudson, Connie Tipton and other board members of the Bryce Harlow Foundation, thank you for this honor.
When I went to work for then Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd in 1979, the first issue I worked on was the Chrysler loan guarantee. He endorsed the bail out subject to Chrysler creating an employee stock ownership plan for its employees with 15% of its share. The ESOP was my contribution to the effort. In 1984 when Lee Iacocca sent Bob Perkins to run the Washington office, Bob told Bill Timmons of Timmons and Company and Howard Pastor that he wanted to hire a Hill Democrat.
Howard recommended me and the rest is history. My path to a career as a corporate lobbyist was not entirely predictable. As a student activist at Georgetown, I found myself on the Pan-American Highway in an old truck heading for South America on an independent study boondoggle. Salvador Allende was elected the first Socialist President of Chile and the first Socialist elected in Latin America in September of 1970. So my classmates and I decided that we would drive from Panama to Chile where we could observe the revolution firsthand. [LAUGHTER]
And we did. As an idealistic 21-year-old, I learned an important lesson from my six months in Chile. I learned that Vladimir Lenin was right in his book “State and Revolution” where he wrote about the dictatorship of the proletariat, “If you threaten capital so that international banks will not lend to you and dairy farmers slaughter their Holstein dairy cows for beef,” (which is what they were doing in Chile), “then you have to seize the instruments of power in society” – the military, the police, the courts, the means of production.
This was the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Well, since I didn’t like that approach much, I came to understand that you must bring change at a different pace and in a way that does not discourage the investment of capital. Several years later that lesson repeated itself for me. I was a young international lending officer at Chase Manhattan in New York sent to Jamaica to lend money to the private sector as Prime Minister Michael Manley campaigned on the slogan “Socialism is Love, Man”.
The results on the Jamaican economy were predictable and I didn’t make many good loans in Jamaica. So I left Chase and came to the Senate in 1975 through the intercession of my college roommate and close friend Jack Quinn. That began my 10 years on the Hill. Later working for Senator Byrd I witnessed the blood bath for Senate Democrats in the 1980 election. They found themselves in the minority for the first time in a generation and I found myself as staff director of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. Pat Griffin, who’s here tonight, who was then Secretary of the Minority, and I encouraged Senator Byrd to start having weekly caucus luncheons like the Republicans under Howard Baker had been doing since about 1978.
I bet you think these weekly caucus luncheons were a long lived tradition of the Senate. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In the ’70s and before, the Senate was run by powerful committee chairmen, not by party leaders, and largely on a bipartisan basis. The change to party-driven leadership controlled agenda in the Senate is a recent phenomenon and clearly these caucus luncheon party strategy sessions are a culprit in the partisan battles in the Senate.
Don’t get me wrong, they made being in the minority more fun, like the time we fed the Democratic caucus the Reagan school lunch where ketchup and relish were a vegetable. It led the network news that night and the school lunch menu was withdrawn immediately. In 1985 I went to work for Chrysler and fell in love with Bob Perkins, who ran the office then. A career international vice president and graduate of Dartmouth and Wharton, he was a veracious reader and a very savvy guy.
I learned so much from Bob and he encouraged me to learn what made our business tick. In 1987 I had a one-on-one session with Lee Iacocca. He asked me how old I was. I was 38. He snorted that when he was 36 he was vice president of the Ford Division and if I hoped to have a meaningful career at Chrysler, I better get my ass to Detroit! So I moved to Detroit in late 1987 where I worked for Lee and Jerry Greenwald, then the president of Chrysler, and I served as the committee secretary for a couple of our major management committees.
I returned to Washington and succeeded Bob as the vice president of the Washington office when he retired in 1992. I was lucky to work for a company that understood the power of healthy relationships with government and which invested in its Washington office the resources and the corporate support to get the job done. And I was really fortunate to work with industry leaders like Andy Card and Jo Cooper and Dave McCurdy (who now runs the AAM) who were able to harness the industry’s broad economic reach.
Many of us remember the debate over the 1990 Clean Air Act. The whole bill got hung up for a long time over future automotive emissions standards, called tier two. John Dingell, of course, was the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. All of the engineering and regulatory affairs people in the industry insisted that these standards, these new tier two standards which would take effect 12 years from the date of enactment, were unattainable and we fought their inclusion in the bill with great effort.
Finally, John Dingell bought us a little more lead time and some minor changes and the bill was enacted with the impossible tier two standards. Much to my chagrin, most of the companies were meeting or exceeding the impossible standards, only about five years after the bill was enacted, not 12 years, when we said we couldn’t do it. And in the late 1990s, Carol Browner, then EPA chief, used her regulatory authority to call for much stricter tier two standards, this time led by Jo Cooper who was the head of AAM at the time, the Alliance of Automotive Manufacturers.
The industry agreed to a regulatory negotiation with EPA that led to really revolutionary standards. But rather then fight like we did in 1990, we agreed to do our best to meet them with a tremendous impact on air quality. This was one of the brightest moments for the auto industry, for me and for my fellow auto lobbyists. By the time Daimler Benz came into my life in 1998, I had some pretty amazing experiences in my lobbying career. I took Joe DiMaggio to lunch in the Senators’ dining room along with Tom Eagleton and Jay Rockefeller.
I flew to Japan to meet a CODEL lead by Jack Danforth, then chairman of the trade subcommittee and staffed by Susan Schwab, now USTR. That group of Senators convinced the Japanese that they might want to continue to self-restrain their exports to the United States for another year or two.
I choreographed Lee Iacocca’s role as spokesman for NAFTA and his ads supporting the agreement. Lee and I were in the White House the night NAFTA passed the House and he spent the night in the Lincoln Bedroom that night. I participated in too many CAFE fights for words. I will say that my biggest disappointment in my lobbying career was failing to convince – and this was years ago – failing to convince the senior management at Chrysler that we needed to fundamentally change our product plan for the day when high gas prices and regulatory onslaughts or both, would bring the dyke crashing down on us.
A good lobbyist is part of senior management. His job is not simply to hop to and do the company’s bidding with government, but to interpret trends and likely outcomes with government and to inform corporate strategy. When Daimler bought Chrysler in 1998, my role in government relations changed dramatically. My reporting lines switched from Detroit to Stuttgart and my focus evolved from Washington to world capitals. I was still involved in CAFE battles early this decade, but much less so personally after that.
In fact, I’ve not registered as a lobbyist for four or five years. From 2003 on, my job was to manage our global government affairs activities and our corporate foundation. It would have made sense for me to live in Stuttgart, but I managed to stay here. During this Daimler-Chrysler period I was fortunate to work with great people who ran the Washington office, first Tim McBride and later John Bozzella. Tim now runs Freddie Mac’s government relations group and John is the head of Chrysler’s Washington office.
I’m proud of these great professionals who made my life easy and of others like Jake Jones who now runs the Daimler Washington office. Good people make good offices and we always had a bunch of them. As I spent almost half my time overseas in these last years, I’m grateful to be going to the German Marshall Fund as a fellow which will keep me involved with Europe. I also expect to devote time to the Federal City Council which, as Jack noted, I’ve tried to be active; the National Democratic Institute, Faith in Politics Institute and some other non-profits where I’ve been involved.
Which leads me to some final thoughts. If you’ve not had the opportunity to involve yourself with groups which improve the life of people in the Greater Washington Area, I hope you will convince your company that it is in its interest to support you in doing so. You’ll certainly benefit from it. Another thought, don’t accept the status of being the shoe-leather guy in Washington, who’s only expected to open doors and fix things when they go wrong. Figure out a way to become part of your management team, where your input is expected and respected.
This can take a lot of work, but it makes our job so much more rewarding. If you can’t get it done in your company, go somewhere where you can. I end with another word of thanks. I thank the four CEO’s that I had during my time at Chrysler and Daimler-Chrysler and Daimler, especially Dieter Zetsche, who was my last boss and friend. I’m grateful to everyone who supported this dinner. I thank my close friend, Kathy Elias, my executive assistant for 23 years, and congratulate her on her retirement.
I thank Steve Greer, our car coordinator, driver and my running buddy for the last 15 years. I thank my family, especially my Italian father and my Irish mother, my sister MaryAnn and other fountains of familial support. I thank my stepsons David and Patrick who have enriched my life more then they will ever know and who worked to keep me humble, and my wife Patty who has been my partner in every aspect of our lives. When we met at a Christmas party, at Chris and Kathy Matthews 10 days before I started at Chrysler, we began what has been this great partnership.
We’ve had some health scares over the last 18 months, Patty with breast cancer and me now with tonsil cancer. These challenges have strengthened our bond and reminded us how much we have yet to do together and how fortunate we are, especially for having found one another. I shall never forget this honor; I share it with Patty and with you and I thank you.