Atwater died before he could finish his memoir. What remains of it are hunks of yellowing typewritten pages, held together by rusting staples and paper clips. But the seven surviving chapters suggest that, far from dying along with him, the nihilism, cynicism, and scurrilous tactics that Atwater brought into national politics live on. In many ways, his memoir suggests that Atwater’s tactics were a bridge between the old Republican Party of the Nixon era, when dirty tricks were considered a scandal, and the new Republican Party of Donald Trump, in which lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost have become normalized. Chapter 5 of Atwater’s memoir in particular serves as a Trumpian precursor. In it, Atwater, who worked in the Office of Political Affairs in the Reagan White House, and managed George H. W. Bush’s 1988 Presidential campaign before becoming the Republican Party’s chairman at the age of thirty-seven, admits outright that he only cared about winning, not governing. “I’ve always thought running for office is a bunch of bullshit. Being in a office is even more bullshit. It really is bullshit,” he wrote. “I’m proud of the fact that I understand how much BS it is.”
In the nineteen-eighties, Atwater became infamous for his effective use of smears. Probably his best-known one was tying Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, Bush’s Democratic Presidential opponent in 1988, to Willie Horton, a Black convict who went on a crime spree after getting paroled in the state. A menacing ad featuring Horton was a blatant attempt to stir fear among white voters that Dukakis would be soft on crime. At the very end of his life, Atwater publicly apologized to Dukakis for it. But Atwater’s draft memoir makes clear that he had already mastered the dark political arts as a teen-ager. In fact, it seems that practically everything Atwater learned about politics he learned in high school. It’s easy to see the future of the Republican Party in the anti-intellectual dirty tricks of his school days.
Born in Atlanta, Atwater grew up in a middle-class white family in South Carolina. His father worked in insurance, and his mother was a teacher. But from the start, Atwater was an ambitious and charismatic rebel, or, as he put it, a “hell-raiser.” While secretly gorging on history and literature—Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was one of his favorite books—he went out of his way to seem unstudious at school. He sneered at the top grade-getters and student-government leaders. His aim, he wrote, was to be seen as too smart and too cool to care. In high school, the only office he sought was to be voted the “wittiest.” To that end, he tried every day to do something funny. “If it wasn’t funny, it at least screwed somebody up. Every damn day, I’d screw people up. And that’s fun and funny. And I pulled a lot of shit.” Over time, he organized a group of about a hundred students to disrupt the school at his command. When speakers came to assembly, Atwater would signal his followers to rise in unison and turn their backs for a few seconds, or cross their legs in synchronized motions, or break out in wild applause. But Atwater was cunning. He writes that there was a “secret to screwing everything up” successfully. He always “understood the line” that he needed to stay within in order not to get caught. The No. 1 lesson was to be “so subtle that they can’t nab you for anything.”