Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJune 5th, 2016
House Speaker Tom Foley (D-WA)
Just as Rep. Tom Foley (D-WA) was about to take the gavel from recently-disgraced former Speaker Jim Wright (D-TX), the Republican National Committee’s communications director Mark Goodin began circulating a memo among state party chairmen and GOP Congressmen titled, “Tom Foley: Out of the Liberal Closet.” The memo compared Foley’s voting record with that of Rep. Barney Frank’s (D-MA), who had come out of the gay closet only two years earlier (May 29). GOP Chairman Lee Atwater, who had made his reputation smearing other reputations left and right, stood by Goodin’s memo, calling it “no big deal” and “factually accurate,” and professed astonishment that anyone could interpret the memo as a slur. The memo didn’t come right out and accuse Foley of being gay (labeling someone as gay in 1989 would have been taken as an accusation rather than a mere description), but the subtext was unmistakable. And while Atwater was protesting the memo’s innocence, other Republicans cheered the memo and sought more personal assaults on Democratic leaders.
GOP Chairman Lee Atwater
Republican minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-GA) even spent several days calling dozens of reporters trying to get the rumor into print. One of those reporters, Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News, finally ran with it on June 5 after one of Gingrich’s top aides called him saying The Washington Post was going to run the story. “We hear it’s little boys,” Nelson was told. The Post confirmed that they had been contacted but refused to run it. When Rep. Frank learned of the memo, he blasted GOP leaders for circulating it and threatened to expose closeted House Republicans, of which there were a few.
Other Republicans quickly began disassociating themselves from the memo, including President George Bush, whose White House Chief John Sununu told reporters that both he and Bush had reprimanded Atwater. “The President was very upset,” Sununu said. “I was upset. It went too far. It was wrong. The innuendo was wrong. It’s wrong not because it damages our relationship with the Democrats. It’s wrong because it’s wrong. It’s a terrible thing to happen at this time. It was not appropriate or fair.” Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS) called the memorandum “garbage” and House Minority Leader Robert Michel (R-IL) also denounced it.
Goodin took the fall, resigning on the same day that Bush rebuked Atwater. Atwater also tried to remove his fingerprints. “I think it was bad taste and bad judgment,” Atwater said. “I told Mark that. I play hardball politics, but I don’t cross the line. This memo crossed the line.” With Goodin’s departure, Bush stood behind the GOP chairman. “Lee Atwater is doing a great job,” he said during a meeting with state party chairmen a week later. Dole quickly fell in line: “The president has spoken and Lee Atwater is staying.”
Atwater didn’t stay GOP chairman for long. The following year, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer, and died a year later in 1991. During that interval, he converted to Catholicism and personally apologized to many of the politicians who he had personally attacked over the years. One of those receiving an apology was Tom Turnipseed, who Atwater mercilessly attacked during a 1980 Congressional campaign in South Carolina. Atwatter planted a story that Turnipseed “has had psychotic treatment.” When Turnipseed’s campaign demanded an apology, Atwater said he wouldn’t respond to someone who had “got hooked up to jumper cables.” A decade later as Atwater was confronting his own mortality, he wrote to Turnipseed. “It is very important to me that I let you know that out of everything that has happened in my career, one of the low points remains the so-called ‘jumper cable’ episode,” he wrote. “My illness has taught me something about the nature of humanity, love, brotherhood and relationships that I never understood, and probably never would have. So, from that standpoint, there is some truth and good in everything.” It’s not clear whether anyone who Atwater gay-baited also received an apology.
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