The Death Bed Confession of a Boogie Man
Lee Atwater was a genius of dog-whistle politics, architect of the notorious 'Willie Horton' campaign strategy. But as his final days drew near at the age of 40, he regretted it all.
Most people never knew how badly Lee Atwater was scarred during his childhood. Or if they did know, they forgot about it. What they remember is the bad stuff. And no wonder. His bad stuff was a Pandora’s Box, unleashing the evil Atwater is known for.
The infamous political operative died more than 30 years ago. But several pieces about him have cropped up during this neverending 2024 presidential campaign season. All of them conjure his bad stuff. All blame him for the fear-mongering and hateful tone of today’s political rhetoric. And he certainly deserves credit for that.
But no one talks about the childhood scarring. And no one remembers the deathbed confessions that went on for nearly a year as his physical strength and boyish looks deserted him.
It’s easy to cast judgment on Lee Atwater
But put yourself in his shoes for a moment. You are five years old when you witness something that will haunt you for the rest of your life. You wish you could not remember the moment your baby brother died one of the worst deaths imaginable. But you keep seeing it in your mind whether you want to or not.
No one will ever know why the baby reached up like that. Was it fate that compelled him to pull a vat filled with hot grease onto himself? And to die most horribly from the burns? No one will ever know the answers to those questions. But Lee Atwater said he heard his brother’s screams for the rest of his life.
A similar story
During my first year as a TV reporter in San Francisco, I covered a similar story. That child was from Mexico. He had fallen into a vat of hot oil intended for cooking a pig—but unlike Atwater’s brother, this child lived.
In a humanitarian gesture, a group of doctors in San Francisco agreed to treat his wounds. Unfortunately, the hospital’s public relations department notified the media on the day of the child’s arrival.
I’ll never forget the look on his disfigured face when the elevator doors opened, and he was confronted with us. The many headed monster with bright lights, telescoping lenses, and phallic microphones, which goes by the name news media.
Years later, cameraman Hank Schoepp published a memoir that described what happened next. How I told him to shut off our light and stop his camera, promising to take full responsibility. “We’re not participating in this,” I said.
I expected to be fired when we returned to the station and was ready to accept the consequences. Instead, the news director praised my sensitivity and arranged for me to return to the hospital for a bedside interview with the child in Spanish, with Hank shooting at a discreet distance through a window.
But before the interview began, I waited in a hallway outside the burn ward. From time to time, someone would open the door to admit staff or a patient. That is when I heard what Lee Atwater heard when he was only five years old. I was in my mid-20s when that happened. And I will never forget it. Is there any wonder that Atwater was haunted by the sound of his dying brother for the rest of his own short life?
The Jesuits used to say…
“Give me your son before he turns seven, and I will return him to you a man.” It was their version of the old saw, ‘The child is father to the man.” Television’s Dr. Phil would call the death of Atwater’s brother a defining moment.
Since I’m no psychologist, I can’t analyze the man. But if I were a lawyer pleading his case before a celestial jury considering his damnation, I would ask them to take into account that early childhood incident.
Perhaps that would explain the boogie-woogie bad boy he became. Born into a comfortable middle-class family in Atlanta, Lee Atwater had become a nihilistic cynic as early as high school. Believing in nothing, he got a kick out of playing dirty tricks on others. Like enlisting 650 students to throw spitballs at a female school official, then laughing when the gag went too far and someone chucked a glass of ice that hurt her.
“Every damn day, I’d screw people up,” he wrote in his unfinished memoir. And I pulled a lot of shit.” Like instigating a fight someone else got blamed for, then keeping silent when that kid was paddled 25 times. Or running a friend for student-body president against the friend’s wishes on a platform of free beer, free dates, and free women. “I learned how to organize,” he wrote. “I learned how to polarize.”
Is it any wonder that he took his well-honed high school game into national politics, where he used push polling, planted fake opposition research, and other “dirty tricks” to help Ronald Reagan win the presidency in 1980? Or that Reagan rewarded him by making him deputy political director and deputy manager of Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign?
The New Southern Strategy
During his Reagan years Atwater gave an interview about the implicitly racist aspects of the "New Southern Strategy" carried out by the 1980 Reagan campaign. The goal of which was to play the race card without mentioning race. Here’s how Atwater explained it.
You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968, you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
If it is getting that abstract, and that coded, then we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this,"is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger." So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.
By 1988, Lee Atwater was campaign director for George H.W. Bush. That is when he distinguished himself by creating the notorious “Willie Horton” campaign ad. William Horton was a convicted African American murderer who had been released on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison. While he was out, he committed armed robbery and raped a white woman after brutally beating her fiancé.
Those terrible crimes occurred between 1986 and 1987 when Horton was captured and sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus 85 years. Although the incident came up in the early days of the 1988 presidential campaign when Massachusetts Michael Dukakis was the Democratic nominee, it didn’t take off until Lee Atwater got hold of it.
It was Atwater who came up with this notorious 30-second ad, which changed Horton’s name to Willie and posted his mugshot. “By the time we’re finished,” Atwater said, “they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.”
The ad never mentioned Horton’s race. But Atwater was a Southerner. He knew how it would affect white voters. At the time, his race-baiting tactics were shocking. In 2024, they are normal. That is Lee Atwater’s lasting legacy.
If you live in a swing state
Like I do, you can see the results of his invention in attack ads that stoke similar racial fear-mongering. Today Willie Horton is eating dogs and cats in Ohio. And maybe the geese, too. Today Willie Horton is transgendered. He is stealing across the US border— killing, raping, voting illegally, living in lavish hotels while ordinary Americans struggle financially.
This is a game plan we have seen before. It is Lee Atwater’s Frankenstein. The creation he spent his last days repenting. But no one remembers the letters of apology he wrote after he was diagnosed with brain cancer. No one remembers his public apology to George Dukakis for the naked cruelty of the 1988 presidential campaign. Most folks probably forget that Lee Atwater converted to Catholicism, issuing public apologies to many others he had targeted.
But no one remembers those things. Because Marc Antony’s eulogy got it right in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The evil that men do lives on. The good is oft-interred with their bones.
Did the stricken Atwater’s 11th-hour confessions and apologies reveal anything good about the man? Or was he merely clutching at straws as fellow political operative Roger Stone claimed?
Fortunately, it’s not for us to judge. We must leave that to the celestial jury that weighed his case. Though others have embraced Atwater’s Frankenstein monster in hopes they they too might win at any cost, perhaps that celestial jury considered what Atwater wrote in Life magazine in February of 1991.
My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The 1980s were about acquiring – acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most.
But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends?
It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.
I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society—this tumor of the soul.
One month later, Lee Atwater was dead. Some have compared his life to Greek drama. But I don’t know. He wasn’t exactly a hero with a tragic flaw, though he did possess an ample measure of hubris. When I think of Lee Atwater, I am reminded of mythologist Joseph Campbell, who said: Regret is enlightenment—come too late.
It’s a sad sad story any way you look at it. And a cautionary tale for us all. If you’d like to know more about the life and legacy of this complicated, troubled, and influential man, I’ve included a link to Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story below. And if you haven’t already done so, please get out there and vote!
©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill
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Great work as usual Andrew
I had heard of L.A. but didn’t know much about him - I really like the way you told his “story”. You showed your humanity in its telling, and it’s good to know regret kicked in towards the end of his life. Joseph Campbell’s quote was the perfect way to end your story. “Regret is enlightenment - come too late.”