Mitt & Ted, a healthcare story

NARRATION: In the fall of 1993, Frank Phillips at the Boston Globe got a phone call out of the blue. It was from a Republican political operative in town.

Frank Phillips: I wasn't crazy about him really, but he was a good source. And he said, ‘I got a guy who's gonna hire me to help him run against Ted Kennedy.’ I said, ‘Well, good luck to him.’ He said, ‘Well, listen, he is really good. His name is Mitt Romney.’ I said, ‘What? Mitt?’

NARRATION: In 1993, Mitt Romney was not a household name.

Frank Phillips: “What kind of name is that? I never heard that. “Is it Mitney or Matthew?” ‘No, Mitt Romney.’ ‘Oh, okay.’ Said, ‘could you have lunch?’ I said, ‘sure.’

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: Romney was new to politics at that time. He'd never run a campaign, never worked in government, and now he wanted to run for US Senate, against a Kennedy, in Massachusetts. A Kennedy who had cruised to victory in six straight elections. But this operative on the phone really believed Romney had a shot, and he was looking to try his new contender out with the media. Like a test run for the actual campaign.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: So the group of them all met for lunch at the Parker House, the place that gave the world both Boston Cream Pie and Parker House rolls. Frank Phillips liked to take meetings there, in the wood paneled dining room -- it's where all the old pols hung out.

Frank Phillips: Hey, how are ya? Hey, how are you Johnny? What you doing here? You know.

NARRATION: That kind of place...where you go to see and be seen.

Frank Phillips: ‘Hey Phillips, what are you doing with him? Huh?’ Or they'd say to Johnny, ‘what are you doing with Phillips here for Christ's sake?’ You know, ‘I gotta tell the speaker you're talking to him.’

NARRATION: Mitt Romney, needless to say, was not one of the old pols. He was 46 years old, a successful businessman, coming in from the outside because he wanted to shake things up in this town.

ARCHIVAL: I look at the policies that have been enacted over the last 30 years and they haven't worked in my view.

NARRATION: So Romney gave Phillips an early version of his stump speech, probably something like this...

ARCHIVAL: We have families leaving, we have businesses leaving, and so what do I wanna do in return? I'll hit three things…

Frank Phillips: And I kept on looking at him and he wasn't very avuncular, he wasn't a Ted Kennedy. He wasn't Irish American. Aye, aye, you know, that I knew around the State House.

ARCHIVAL: You make it more attractive economically for a business to locate there.

Frank Phillips: And I remember thinking he's gotta loosen up a little. But you know, he's good looking. Uh, he could be a serious candidate. It depends about how he could do it on a stump.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: It's easy to forget this now, but in the 1990s, Massachusetts -- and the nation -- were waking up to a new and uncomfortable experience: an aging Kennedy.

ARCHIVAL: To make that kind of possible, make that a possibility, uh, for, uh,

NARRATION: A faltering Kennedy.

ARCHIVAL: Uh, possibility, uh, for other Americans.

NARRATION: There simply was no template for this, no  precedent. Jack had died at 46, Bobby had died at 42. In our minds, they were frozen in time -- forever young, radiant, ascendant. In 1993, Ted Kennedy was none of those things. He was 61 years old, with white hair, a gut, and a crooked scar across his nose. He wore contact lenses. Sometimes when he went to sit down, he would get close to the seat, and then just kind of plop down the rest of the way.

Frank Phillips: Uh, he, he had some problems.

NARRATION: And it went beyond looks. You've probably heard of the famous Chappaquiddick incident, but that was only the first in a series of personal scandals that all together had given Teddy a bit of an aging playboy image.

Frank Phillips: There were stories of fooling around with waitresses in Washington.

NARRATION: There was the story of Ted disappearing with two women at his own mother's 100th birthday party. There was the story of Ted on a flight to Berlin, putting down two scotches, two vodkas, and three glasses of red wine. Those stories just kept coming.

Frank Phillips: And so, so this was getting around. Ted was falling apart.

ARCHIVAL: Kennedy's real opponent is Kennedy. It's his own baggage, his own history. That he is running against.

NARRATION: One headline in The Globe declared: "Kennedy Outliving Family Charisma."

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: And here comes Mitt Romney, like a challenger cooked up in a lab: young, handsome, squeaky clean. The New York Times called him the perfect "anti-Ted Kennedy."

So in November of 1993, Phillips wrote up a short piece announcing the entrance of this new candidate. It included a quote from Romney himself, saying: "Ted Kennedy has never been more out of step with the people of Massachusetts." And Romney was right: Ted was in trouble. In fact, this would be the political fight of Kennedy's life. But it wasn't the only fight he had on his hands.

MUSIC: Theme

NARRATION: From GBH News this is the Big Dig Season 4: Mitt & Ted. I'm Ian Coss.

By the 1990s, Ted Kennedy had become the most recognized champion of healthcare reform in the United States Congress. He'd been at it for decades, through the Nixon years, through Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush. Even as big government fell out of favor and de-regulation became a buzzword, Kennedy kept the dream alive, waiting for the planets to once again align. And it looked like 1993 might just be that time.

This is Part 2: There's Got To Be A Better Way.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: When Bill Clinton first ran for president, his campaign gave us one of the most enduring political mottos of all time: "It's the economy, stupid". That phrase came from a hand-written memo taped to the wall of the campaign war room. It wasn’t a slogan for the public; it was a reminder for themselves. But the memo actually listed three key points for the team and candidate to keep front of mind. They were:

" Change vs. more of the same"

"The economy, stupid"

And finally..."Don't forget about healthcare."

ARCHIVAL: Have the high privilege and distinct honor of presenting to you the President of the United States.

NARRATION: Now as President in September of 1993, Bill Clinton was trying very hard to not forget about healthcare. Because when he got up to deliver his first major speech on the topic, before a joint session of Congress, he realized his teleprompter was showing the wrong speech. Appropriately, it was a speech about the economy that he had given a few months earlier.

Clinton had a moment of inner panic, but he quickly composed himself and turned around to his VP, Al Gore, who was clapping away dutifully behind him. In the footage you can see the whole comedy play out during that endless opening applause. First Gore leans in to look. ‘Oh yeah, definitely the wrong speech.’ Then he turns to the person next to him, ‘Fix it.’ That person hurries off. Gore goes right back to clapping, and if you listen closely you can hear him say to the President: ‘He’s gonna fix it.’ ‌

NARRATION: However, that fix did not come quick enough to help Bill Clinton when the clapping finally stopped. It was 9:10 pm, time to start talking. So, he just went for it. No script.

ARCHIVAL: We come together to write a new chapter in the American story.

NARRATION: In the end it took seven minutes to fix the teleprompter. Seven long minutes on live national TV. And to Clinton's credit, you really can't tell.

ARCHIVAL: We must make this our most urgent priority, giving every American health security. Healthcare that can never be taken away. Healthcare that is always there. That is what we must do tonight.

NARRATION: Ted Kennedy was in the audience watching. He told Clinton at one point, he had been waiting thirty years to hear a president give that kind of speech.

NARRATION: That said, the teleprompter mishap was not the only sign of trouble.

Ian Coss: Were you there that day?

Julie Rovner: I was.

NARRATION: Julie Rovner is a longtime healthcare reporter.

Julie Rovner: This was the culmination, this was the unveiling of the plan, um, and it was kind of a mess to tell you the truth.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: The issues with the Clinton healthcare effort have become kind of legendary at this point. They’re lessons, passed down between staffers on the hill, a cautionary tale of what not to do when launching a big legislative effort.

Julie Rovner:  which is that you can't do something like this from the White House. You have to do something like this from the hill.

NARRATION: Instead of leaving it to members of Congress like Ted Kennedy – who knew both the substance and politics of the issue – the Clintons decided to assemble their own team and write their own health plan: a whopping 1,342 page document detailing a complete re-engineering of the American healthcare system.

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL: A combination of private market forces and a sound public policy that will support that competition.

NARRATION: This is what Clinton was attempting to introduce that September day before Congress.

Julie Rovner: I mean, this was part of the problem is that their program was so complicated.

ARCHIVAL: If you're an employer and you aren't insuring your workers at all, you'll have to pay more.

Julie Rovner: Even today, I'm not sure I can explain it, you know,and it made it easy for people to demonize it.

NARRATION: And there were people who wanted to demonize it. Because even as the Clinton team was drafting their mammoth bill, they were also making enemies.

Julie Rovner: The stakeholders were immediately cast as the villains.

ARCHIVAL: It means companies should no longer charge three times more for prescription drugs

Julie Rovner: you know, saying The insurance companies are terrible and the drug companies are terrible.

ARCHIVAL: Responsibility means insurance companies should no longer be allowed to cast people

NARRATION: Now in fairness to the Clintons, many of these industry groups had opposed healthcare reform in the past, and as one Clinton staffer told me: it is actually helpful, politically, to have a bad guy in a legislative fight like this. But when you take on all the bad guys at once, then something dangerous can happen, which is they team up on you.

Julie Rovner: I had a sense of the scale of the opposition. I didn't have a sense of the organization how sophisticated and clandestine that effort was.

MUSIC: Transition

ARCHIVAL: …the challenge of our time. Thank you very much, and God bless America.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: The coordinated effort to influence, impede, and ultimately kill the Clinton healthcare bill would cost over $100 million - more than any political operation ever, up to that point.

Chip Kahn: The key objective in any advocacy campaign is to define the narrative.

NARRATION: And you can think of Chip Kahn as a field marshal in that operation. He worked for an organization that lobbied for the health insurance industry.

Chip Kahn: And the health insurers that we represented, were clearly not getting an ear at the White House. I mean, every meeting, every engagement, they turned their hearing aids off. So in late summer we began to test advertising that turned out to be Harry and Louise.

ARCHIVAL: But this was covered under our old plan. Oh, yeah, that was a good one, wasn't it?

NARRATION: In the fall of 1993, around the time of Clinton's speech, American TV viewers got to know a generic couple sitting around their kitchen table, quote: "sometime in the future."

ARCHIVAL: I don't get it. Congress isn't passing the healthcare reform America wants. Problem is, they don't get it.

NARRATION: The couple didn't have names originally, so people called them by the actors' real names: Harry and Louise.

ARCHIVAL: Coverage we can afford. Now why won’t Congress write a law like that?

Chip Kahn: It may appear that our interest was to see health reform – Clinton care– fail. That was not our intent at all. You know, our intent simply was knocking on the door of the White House saying, let us in. We just wanna talk. I don't know if people believe me when I say it, but it really was, was true. Our guys wanted to see something happen and they just wanted to be part of it.

NARRATION: You can decide for yourself whether to believe Chip Kahn or not, but the ads did end with a simple plea, that he wrote himself.

ARCHIVAL: There's gotta be a better way.

Chip Kahn: There's gotta be a better way.

ARCHIVAL: There's got to be a better way.

There's gotta be a better way.

There is a better way to reform. Call this toll-free number for the facts. Call today.

Julie Rovner: One of the things that I already knew from covering healthcare is that people didn't like the healthcare system in general, but they mostly were okay with their own healthcare. And in 1993, unless you were a nerd like me and could see that the costs were going up and the number of people without insurance was going up, it wasn't necessarily top of mind. So when you get Harry and Louise, sitting at their kitchen table saying, this is gonna hurt you. That really was very effective. And that was sort of the way in for the opposition. It's like they're gonna mess up your healthcare.

Ian Coss: How did the administration respond?

Julie Rovner: They weren't thrilled.

MUSIC: Enter

Chip Kahn: And frankly, that's what made us.

ARCHIVAL: They are powerful special interests who profit from the status quo

NARRATION: So the Clintons decided to hit back. And Hillary Clinton, who took a big role in the healthcare effort, was especially forceful in calling out the industry, and the ads themselves.

Chip Kahn: And she just got angrier and angrier about the ads. She lambasted the industry.

NARRATION: And the Clinton response itself became front page news, which of course only put more attention on the ads.

Chip Kahn: We were the center of attention.

ARCHIVAL: Wait a minute, I thought healthcare reform was supposed to save us money.

Chip Kahn: Every time we ran a new ad, we would have a news conference. And I can remember ABC, NBC and CBS were there with us. I mean it became a story.

NARRATION: I don't want to overstate the impact of Harry & Louise all on their own. There were many other forces at work, but I would look at this ad campaign as emblematic of the larger challenge: a complicated problem, an organized opposition, and a constant struggle to define the narrative. The Clinton administration literally started negotiating with the insurance industry over the ads themselves. Like, what do we have to offer you to stop running these? Then when negotiations inevitably broke down, Harry and Louise came right back.

Chip Kahn: And when they lose control of the narrative, you know, they're in trouble.

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL: It is the end of June now and there is still no healthcare plan.

NARRATION: By the summer of 1994, the whole healthcare effort was in disarray.

ARCHIVAL: Advocates of every reform scheme intensify their lobbying efforts.

The American Health Security Act…

NARRATION: The original Clinton plan had been so thoroughly picked apart by critics and attack ads, that public support was collapsing, so there was no real policy to rally around, no consensus on what the Democrats were trying to do.

ARCHIVAL: Tonight we'll investigate the cost of this latest delay and what it means for the future.

NARRATION: And of course, as the Democrats became increasingly divided over the whole effort, for Republicans the political calculus became increasingly clear: Don't help. At all. Because for Republicans, this healthcare thing could be their chance to take back control of Congress itself, after almost half a century of consistent Democratic majorities. As legendary political strategist Grover Norquist put it, for Democrats, healthcare would be “their Stalingrad, their Gettysburg, their Waterloo.”

ARCHIVAL: I've worked on many issues in the Senate, but none is more important to me than the fight to reform healthcare.

NARRATION: And as I've said, in 1994 there was no US Senator more closely identified with the issue of healthcare than Ted Kennedy.

ARCHIVAL: And he's at the center of the battle for healthcare reform.

NARRATION: So if Republicans were laying a trap, Kennedy was marching into it, defiantly.

Julie Rovner: He was one of the holdouts. That was where the tension was that, you know, should we push ahead, um, or should we throw in the towel? And they did push ahead.

ARCHIVAL: Speaking first, Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts.

NARRATION: Even as June turned to July, July turned to August, Kennedy and the other holdouts kept looking for that opening, that magical alignment of all the factions through which a bill could pass.

ARCHIVAL: Does the senator know of any member of the Senate?

The Senator may not yield for a speech, regular order.

Can I ask you a question?

Julie Rovner: It was pretty cool to watch, I gotta say. I mean, he was just, always trying to find a path

ARCHIVAL: Restriction or limitation.

That is correct.

NARRATION: Yet, in 1994, the opening proved elusive.

ARCHIVAL: That is the way that we had proceeded.

Is there objection then to the unanimous consent request that there be cause…

MUSIC:  Enter

NARRATION: Meanwhile, back in Massachusetts, another problem was brewing for Kennedy: the campaign for Senate. Because while he was stuck in stuffy committee rooms and trying to chase down votes in DC, Mitt Romney was out on the campaign trail.

ARCHIVAL: Mitt Romney. Good to see you. A Notre Dame man. Huh?

No, BC man.

A BC man. I see the ND up there. I figured what the heck.

Steve Silveira: Early in the morning. I would drive to his house, leave my car, and get the campaign car, and go all over the place.

NARRATION: Steve Silveira was Romney's 'bodyman' in the '94 campaign.

Steve Silveira: A body man is the person who's with the candidate that just keeps him moving, which keeps the campaign moving.

ARCHIVAL: Now there, you gotta get a picture of that, you guys. Look at that GTO. That's a beauty.

NARRATION: Not that Romney needed help moving. Steve Silveira, who is about twenty years younger than Mitt, remembers getting winded just trying to keep up.

ARCHIVAL: Don't don't run away. I'll shake your hand anyways. You haven't…I know you haven't got your makeup on yet, right now. You do. You do.

Steve Silveira: Because I spent so much time with him, because I saw him in so many different environments, I have never understood why he's constantly tagged with this standoffish, uncomfortable guy 'cause that’s not the person I saw.

ARCHIVAL: Mitt Romney. Good to meet you.

Good to meet you. I'm Mitt Romney.

Steve Silveira: There was no group or place where he seemed uncomfortable or it was like, you know, get me outta here, you know what, you know, I don't know what I'm doing with these people.

ARCHIVAL: Oh my goodness. Can I shake some hands around here? Is that all right? My goodness.

Steve Silveira: I think some of this may go back to, you know, he's, he's a Mormon and he did his mission. And when you do your mission, you literally just go and knock on doors to proselytize, and so I think he was just very comfortable doing that.

ARCHIVAL: Thank you. I’ll need that vote.

NARRATION: Not only did Romney do his Mormon mission, he did his mission in a blue collar port city in Normandy that had no Mormon church at all and was known as a bastion of the French Communist Party. Young Mitt Romney would spend months knocking on doors without a single invitation to come in and talk. So yeah, once you've preached the book of Mormon to French Communists, you can handle most campaign stops.

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL: Well, if the community feels that the city is better as a result of Ted Kennedy's policies, that there's less crime, less drug problem, then they ought to vote for Ted Kennedy.

NARRATION: All through that summer, the poll numbers started to creep in Romney's direction. He was out campaigning, he was on the airwaves. And even into September of 1994, Ted Kennedy was nowhere to be found.

Vicki Kennedy: He was spending a lot of time in Washington, a lot of time in Washington.

NARRATION: His wife, Vicki Kennedy, would attempt to take his place at events, but it wasn't the same. She could tell.

Vicki Kennedy: I had people who wouldn't wanna shake my hand or didn't, or they couldn't meet my eye. And I remember one state rep saying to me, ‘People need to see his shoe leather on the pavement. He needs to be here. People need to see him, needed to touch him.’ And he needed to see them and needed to touch them.

NARRATION: Something had to give, and that month -- September of 1994 -- the whole situation would finally change. Because that month a few things happened all, at once.

ARCHIVAL: Let me say first that…

NARRATION: On September 27th, Republican congressional candidates gathered on the steps of the capital, under a cloudless autumn sky, to announce to the world just how serious they were about taking back Congress. 350 candidates from all over the country, lined up on bleachers – like they were the graduating class of 1994.

ARCHIVAL: We will have a series of eight reforms…

NARRATION:They were led by a man named Newt Gingrich, and bound together by a document called the "Contract with America."

ARCHIVAL: And I want to say to every American that we believe in this contract, and these reforms so deeply, that we not only put them in writing today…

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: The contract was a way to nationalize the election – to focus those hundreds of local Congressional races around a single message of discontent. And at its heart was  a ten point pledge of everything Republicans would deliver in their first 100 days of a Republican Congress: budget reform, welfare reform, Congressional reform.

ARCHIVAL: …Require all laws that apply to the rest of the country to also apply equally to the Congress.

NARRATION: Notably absent was any kind of healthcare reform.

Gingrich read the 10 promises aloud. Then following his lead, the rest of the candidates came up four at a time to sign their names to the 'Contract'.

Mitt Romney, by the way, was not there that day; he did not sign the contract. But he did share some of those same goals, and he was certainly drafting off the same frustration that Gingrich had managed to encapsulate so well. Democrats talked, Democrats dreamed, Democrats did not deliver.

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL: Senate will come to order. The prayer this morning will be, uh, led by the Reverend Richard C. Halverson.

NARRATION: And in a perfect illustration of that argument, like a scene from a political opera, on the same exact day Newt Gingrich read his contract on the steps of the Capitol, inside the Capitol the Democrats were in fact quietly admitting they had failed.

ARCHIVAL: Gracious Lord, deliver us from the futility of lost causes and bankrupt ideas.

NARRATION: Because on September 27th, following that strangely apt prayer on the Senate floor, the leader of the United States Senate officially pulled the Clinton healthcare bill . The debate was over, there wouldn't even be a vote.

Vicki Kennedy: And he was really disappointed not to have the up and down vote.

NARRATION: For Kennedy that was the final sting.

Vicki Kennedy: Because he thought going on the record would've been an important message. That it was always better to just take it to fruition, get the vote on the record.

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: The Boston Herald, uh, did a poll of 391 registered voters that shows Mitt Romney with a two point lead…

NARRATION: Back in Massachusetts polls now showed the race very close, with Romney possibly ahead.

Vicki Kennedy: It was pretty tough. It was neck and neck.

NARRATION: And all that same week Romney was out in the press -- almost taunting Kennedy, who had largely ignored the race -- to come into the ring and face him. Quote: "Give it your best, Ted."

So the old war horse could not wallow in defeat and lick his wounds. If he wanted another chance at healthcare reform, he first had to fight to survive. And he would have to play rough in order to make that happen.

Vicki Kennedy: If you have a competitor who doesn't have a voting record, you have to look at what the rest of their record is.

NARRATION: One important piece of context about Vicki Kennedy. She and Ted had just married a couple years earlier; in fact a lot of people credit her with helping the man get his life settled after all those personal scandals I mentioned. But Vicki was more than just a grounding influence. She had worked in corporate law, so probably better than anyone around Kennedy she understood the world Mitt Romney came from at his company Bain Capital -- it was the world of buying, running and selling companies.

Vicki Kennedy: There are different ways that you can do an acquisition. You can go in with different philosophy and we should take a look at that.

NARRATION: Up to this point, Romney's business record had been a big selling point. He could hold up his years of leadership experience, his knowledge of a whole range of industries, not to mention the thousands of jobs he had created, the billions of dollars he had managed. It was impressive. Vicki though was savvy enough to know that there had to be an ugly side to all that success, if they could just find it. If Kennedy would let them find it.

Vicki Kennedy: That's just what you have to do.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: Ted and Vicki Kennedy kept an apartment in downtown Boston on Marlborough Street. It's one of those streets that could trick you into thinking you're in Europe. There are brick sidewalks, old brownstones, iron gates, chimneys and gas street lamps -- a mansard roof here and there. This apartment was not their main home, but it was spacious enough and just a few blocks from the statehouse. So in September of 1994, within a week of that grim poll result I told you about, the Senator summoned all his top political advisors. It was time to get serious about this campaign; time to shake things up.

Tad Devine: We all believed that, okay, we have to go after Romney and we gotta go hard after Romney. And if we don't, we're gonna lose this election.

NARRATION: Tad Devine would be absolutely critical to this shake-up -- he was there that night.

Tad Devine: Okay. We could see the numbers. It wasn't just the horse race being behind, all the internals were moving to Romney. All of the issues and attributes were moving in his favor. So, we're going in there, now, amongst ourselves, we're concerned because Senator Kennedy had never run a negative ad.

NARRATION: A typical Ted Kennedy ad was more like this:

ARCHIVAL: He's been called one of the most productive and effective senators in history.

NARRATION: …a list of his very impressive legislative record.

ARCHIVAL: Author of Job Retraining,

Author of the Freedom of Choice Act.

Wrote the new student loan program,

The Meals on Wheels program

And the list goes on.

NARRATION: Tad Devine wanted Kennedy to do a very different kind of ad – an attack ad. But he didn’t think the Senator would go for it.

Tad Devine: So we talked with each other beforehand. We said, ‘Okay, listen, we can't have any daylight between us. We can't get soft on this. We gotta go real–we gotta be really tough. We gotta go in there and be tough.’

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: To really emphasize the gravity of the situation, the pollster on the team brought a slide projector and one of those pull-down screens so they could display all the latest data, in a way the Senator could not ignore. They got everything plugged in, settled into couches and chairs, and turned off the lights.

Vicki Kennedy: The tone was business.

Tad Devine: He went through his presentation and then, you know, we turned off the projector and we went into the discussion.

Vicki Kennedy: What do people think?

MUSIC: Out

Tad Devine: So he's like, you know, he's taking it all in. We’re expecting the fight's about to begin.

NARRATION: Then, Ted surprised everyone.

Tad Devine: So he is like, ‘Alright, well, you know, let's start with he took away healthcare from his employees and then we'll go to he laid ‘em off!’ You know, he's like—and so we're looking at each other like, okay, we think we're going to have to just go to the wall to try–and he's like one step ahead of us.

NARRATION: So the team quickly got some ads up and running on the air.

ARCHIVAL: Romney, in business he made $11 million in two years while his largest company denied health insurance to most workers.

NARRATION: But the challenge for this attack campaign was that Romney's job was kind of abstract. Like what do venture capital and management consulting and private equity really mean? What did this man do? You needed a human story to make that concrete.

Tad Devine: And sometimes these things just happen in campaigns. You know, get a break.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: The break came from a small city called Marion, Indiana. Now this is a little convoluted, but Romney's company, Bain Capital, had a controlling interest in another company called Ampad, in Texas. They made things like note pads and office supplies. And Ampad had recently taken over a paper plant in the small city of Marion, Indiana. That plant was now on strike, over their working conditions and benefits. But those striking workers in Marion somehow pieced together this chain of connections and reached out to the Kennedy campaign.

Tad Devine: And the person who answered that call at the front desk got them to the right person to talk to who was somebody doing the issues and research and stuff. And we decided, okay, maybe I'll, you know, I'll go to Marion, Indiana and meet these people. So, you know, we go out there.

NARRATION: Tad Devine landed in Indiana with a script in hand, ready to film his attack ad. And when he got to the union hall, the film crew was already there, all set up and ready to go.

Tad Devine: Camera. Audio, teleprompter operator and our producer who went a day before to set it up. And so we, we go in there and I sit with the people who were striking and there were like 10 of them. I was gonna talk to and as I talked to them, I realized that the script paled in comparison to what these people had to say about their lives and how it was affecting them.

NARRATION: So Devine told the teleprompter guy, ‘Go home.’ Instead, he just gave the workers a simple instruction: use Mitt Romney's name. Don't talk about “the company”, or use vague pronouns. If you have something to say to him, say his name. Then, the cameras rolled.

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL: I would like to say to Mitt Romney, if you think you'd make such a good senator, come out here to Marion, Indiana and see what your company has done to these people.

Tad Devine: These people began to just throw their hearts out. They wanted to tell their story.

ARCHIVAL: On Sunday we were watching the television and saw a commercial with Mitt Romney in it saying he was in all for healthcare benefits and helping the middle class people get jobs…

Tad Devine: It was so different.

ARCHIVAL: I was just stunned because here we are, we have no healthcare benefits, and this Mitt Romney is trying to tell people…

Tad Devine: The real, the emotional stuff that these people delivered about their own lives and their own narratives.

ARCHIVAL: They had to, uh, ask the foreman to use the restroom.

Tad Devine: You know, I didn't know anything about the men's room, raising your hand and go to the men's room. You know, I mean, that's really humiliating,

ARCHIVAL: We had no rights anymore.

Took all of our security away.

Taking away their dignity.

Basically cut our throats.

Tad Devine: That wasn't the stuff in our script. Okay. But that became the stuff that went into the ads.

ARCHIVAL: I'd like to say to the people of Massachusetts, if you think it can't happen to you, think again. 'Cause we thought it wouldn't happen here either.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: Tad Devine came back from Marion and immediately holed up in an edit room for two days, cranking out a half dozen different ads -- all pulled from those interviews.

Tad Devine: We bring 'em back. And we decide, you know what, we're just gonna put 'em all on TV.

NARRATION: On September 29th -- barely a week after that strategy meeting at Kennedy’s apartment -- the Ampad ads started to run. Here was that vivid illustration the Kennedy team had been looking for.

Frank Phillips: This is what venture capitalism is. This is how he made his millions taking companies, stripping them down and laying people off. And this was the perfect example that the Kennedy campaign needed.

ARCHIVAL: But not many who were pregnant or older, and canceled their health insurance with four days notice. The truth hurts. Maybe that's why Mitt Romney isn't telling it.

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: Did it upset him to see his business record attacked like that?

Steve Silveira: Definitely. That definitely upset him.

NARRATION: Steve Silveira, again, was Mitt Romney's bodyman all through that campaign.

Steve Silveira: Because it was, of course, a very one-sided telling of the story. Um, this was an instance where, my recollection is if somebody didn't step in, everybody there was gonna lose their jobs because the place was gonna go under. And so there was an investment in it to try to keep the business going and to save as many jobs as possible. But it wasn't as if it was realistic that Mitt could come and save them, or quite frankly, I think anybody could come and save them. And I recall feeling at the time just how unfair it was that these people were being used, um, because it wasn't as if the Kennedy people were gonna go and save these people's jobs any more than anybody else.

Ian Coss: How did Mitt Romney wanna respond publicly once the ad started running?

Steve Silveira: Knowing Mitt, he would've wanted to respond in, you know, 55 point detail to, to get into the specifics of, you know, each and every thing that was going onto it. And I think, you know, maybe this is why people see Mitt as standoffish is he's not a soundbite guy, um, because most things are too complicated for soundbites. Which is why it was so effective. They had put Mitt in an unwinnable position.

NARRATION: Really it was the same position that Kennedy and the Clintons had found themselves in with the health bill. A sprawling, interconnected topic -- way too complicated to argue all the details before the public -- but compelling if you can boil it down. In that case, Kennedy had felt the brutal power of a good soundbite: "There's got to be a better way." Now, Romney was feeling it.

Steve Silveira: He's the guy who you know is firing these people from their jobs.

Frank Phillips: It played into the character that the Kennedy campaign wanted. And it worked beautifully.

Tad Devine: That's when everything turned, you know? But then we had the debate.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: All that year, both campaigns had been assuming that the debates would be bad for Kennedy.  It would be the ultimate reminder of the whole  uncomfortable dynamic: an old worn out Kennedy, facing a young handsome challenger. It was all wrong. Kennedy's staff was so anxious that in negotiating for the debates, they insisted on using the widest possible podiums in order to hide Kennedy's girth. They also wanted to crank the A/C so that Kennedy wouldn't visibly sweat. Romney agreed to all of it, as long as he got his debate. And he got it – on the biggest stage possible:

A place where Boston’s patriots came to debate the American Revolution itself. A place where every Boston tourist following a guide book now makes a compulsory stop. A place known as Faneuil Hall.

MUSIC: Enter

Vicki Kennedy: I can remember brushing our teeth the night before and he turned to me and said, ‘I’m ready, you know?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know.’

MUSIC: Post

NARRATION: On October 25th, 1994, two weeks before election day, Steve Silveira drove Mitt Romney to the debate.

Steve Silveira: What I recall is leaving Mitt’s house, driving into Boston. We stopped on State Street to go in the back way to Faneuil Hall where we were met by police motorcycles 'cause they were gonna escort us in.

NARRATION: Vicki Kennedy was riding with Ted.

Vicki Kennedy: As we approached Faneuil Hall, there were just teams of people.

Steve Silveira: People as far as the eye could see and the Kennedy people in particular.

Vicki Kennedy: I mean teems and teams of people just shouting, ‘Teddy. Teddy, Teddy.’

Steve Silveira: So I was afraid, you know, the gate holding back the supporters, like, that's gonna fall down. People are gonna spill in front of us and I'm gonna end up like running somebody over. So it was a tense moment for me. But what I clearly remember is when I pulled the car up before I could even get out of the car, Mitt had jumped out of the car to go shake hands with his supporters.

Vicki Kennedy: Teddy was like in a balloon. His mood was so elevated.

Steve Silveira: Mitt was not stressed. He was excited to be able to go and do this.

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL: Now to Boston as we show you live coverage of a debate between Democratic incumbent Edward Kennedy and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney. This is the first of two live debates…

NARRATION: The two candidates faced each other across the grand stage of Faneuil Hall, framed by a massive oil painting, and of course their notably large podiums. But the visual contrast between the two men was just unmissable. Romney was tall and lean, with that impossibly chiseled chin of his, and at that time just the faintest hints of grey at the temples. Kennedy's hair of course was white all over; he had webs of wrinkles around his eyes, heavy make-up on his forehead, and his own chiseled chin had become somewhat muted by the roundness of his cheeks. Three million people, half the state's population, were watching.

The first question was to Kennedy.

ARCHIVAL: Senator, you're the fourth most senior member of the United States Senate. Your opponent is a novice who's never held or even run for office. Why is this race even close?

NARRATION: It was followed by a pause.

Vicki Kennedy: And, and of course, Teddy said, his thought in his mind was, that's a really good question. Why is this race even close? And then he said, I better start talking.

ARCHIVAL: In Massachusetts, as throughout New England, we're facing uncertain times primarily on the economy…

NARRATION: Kennedy turned it around just fine, but the tone was set right there: it was Kennedy, the incumbent, who really had something to prove on that stage.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: As the debate unfolded, Romney tried to press his advantage, by bringing the very issue that had come to dominate the campaign so far: his business record.

MUSIC: Out

ARCHIVAL: Senator, Senator Kennedy, my impression has been that you have followed a campaign as soon as the primary is over of trying to divert the voter's attention from the issues at hand, and instead making personal attacks on me, which are unfounded...

NARRATION: This was his chance to confront it head-on, in detail -- to clear his name.

ARCHIVAL: You say I’m not in favor of the minimum wage. I am in favor of the minimum wage, and you have yet to produce any document which says that I do not support the minimum wage. When will this end?

Now let me stop. Lemme stop this right now.

NARRATION: The moderator is clearly not prepared for how quickly things turn ugly – he looks like the ref caught in the middle of a boxing match.

ARCHIVAL:To take your first minute

NARRATION: But Kennedy is ready, he’s got his fists up..

ARCHIVAL: Mr. Romney, let's put the ads aside and talk about healthcare. Let's talk about education. Let's talk about training. Let's talk about new jobs. Let's talk about infrastructure. Let's talk about our different vision for Massachusetts. That's what the people of Massachusetts want to talk about, and that's what I think they ought to hear about.

Mr. Romney.

Then I wanna know why you spent millions of dollars showing advertisements of strikers in a company I had nothing to do with. And talked about them not having healthcare benefits when your companies don't have healthcare.

NARRATION: Romney then attempts a new line of attack. Some reporting had come out about a company that the Kennedys were invested in that did not provide healthcare to their part-time workers. It had some makings of a gotcha moment, but once again Kennedy was clearly ready for it.

ARCHIVAL: Mr. Romney, the Kennedys are not in public service to make money. We have paid too high a price in our commitment to the public service.

Tad Devine: “We paid too high a price.” You know, and it was, it was like boom, everything sort of stopped, you know?

NARRATION: If team Romney thought they were getting a tired out war horse, they were wrong. This Kennedy still had some fight in him.

ARCHIVAL: Alright, ladies and gentlemen. Senator Kennedy. Senator Kennedy, a question for Mr. Romney.

NARRATION: And with that now established, Kennedy got his chance to frame the conversation. He chose, what else, but healthcare.

ARCHIVAL: When Mr. Romney, are you going to tell the people of Massachusetts which healthcare program you favor?

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: And now I hope you can hear just the beginnings of a smile in Kennedy's voice. This was his chance to turn the tables. After spending his whole summer tied up in the arcane details of health policy, overwhelmed by simplistic attack ads and cheap soundbites, outmaneuvered by opponents who were content to simply criticize. He now got to throw the question back: so what's your big plan?

ARCHIVAL: And if you're not prepared to tell us tonight, maybe you tell us where we're up in Holyoke in two days from now.

Mr. Romney?

Well, I'm happy to tell you which one I come closest to. There's no one that is, uh,

Which one do you support?

I'll, I'll tell you which one I come closest to supporting, and that's the one of Senator Lloyd Bentsen, which was introduced in 1991.

That's not health insurance reform.

Which, which was a start.

That's insurance reform.

NARRATION: Immediately the dynamic between them changes. Kennedy is the elder statesman, in command of the issue. Romney is like an eager student trying to pass the test.

ARCHIVAL: I have a plan, I have a position paper on healthcare. I'm happy to show it to you, Senator, anytime you'd like.

NARRATION: Everyone I talked to who was there that night, remembers this next moment.

ARCHIVAL: Mr. Romney, it isn't a question of showing me your paper. It's a question of showing all of the people in here that are watching this program the paper.

well, they can get…

They ought to have an opportunity to know. What is the cost of your program?

Vicki Kennedy: And Teddy started asking him specifics

ARCHIVAL: Uh, I don't have a cost of my program.

You don't have a cost.

I don’t have a cost, Senator Kennedy.

No, I'm sorry. I don't have, I don't have the congressional.

That's interesting.

I don't have the Congressional Budget Office.

Do you have any other estimates?

Frank Phillips: How much does it cost? and Romney just stumbled. He stumbled through it

ARCHIVAL: I'm not in favor of a program that will add to our taxes or add to our deficit.

Well, what is the cost? What, what is…

Tad Devine: He starts lecturing Romney, he's just killing him.

ARCHIVAL: Ladies, ladies and gentlemen, please

What is the cost of the tax incentives on the deficit?

I'm sorry.

What will be the cost in terms of…

Vicki Kennedy: And it was just like the old experienced guy. It was a big contrast.

ARCHIVAL: Well, the impact, I do not know the specific number.

So you don’t know the cost.

On the budget. On the budget, Senator Kennedy. And I think it's a wonderful idea to take it through piece by piece. And, uh, and…

That's what you have to do as a legislator. I understand, Senator.

That's exactly what you have to do as a legislator.

Tad Devine: ‘And this is the work that senators do, Mr. Romney!’ You know, and I think that’s when he finished him off.

Frank Phillips: That was Teddy at his best.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: The next morning the cover of The Boston Herald -- generally the more conservative of the town's two newspapers -- featured a series of opinion columns with the following headlines:

"Wisdom born of experience bests youth and good looks"

"Battle-scarred old warhorse takes young upstart to school"

"Confident Ted K silences critics"

Not surprisingly, that exchange about the cost of Romney's healthcare plan comes up in all three of those columns. It was a devastating moment.

Steve Silveira: That's a very bad soundbite. And since campaigns eventually come down to soundbites, it was pretty clear at that point that this is highly, highly unlikely to go his way.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: The interesting thing about 1994 was that nationally, it was a wave election with very few comparisons in American history. That year, Democrats lost 54 seats in the house -- including the one held by the Speaker of the House himself -- plus 8 seats in the senate. It was enough to flip both chambers red. But it went so much deeper than that. Democrats lost every contested governor's race in the country -- 11 total. Democrats lost control of 18 state legislatures. And here I think is the most stunning fact. If you look across every single house, senate and governors race, not a single Republican incumbent lost. Not one.

Julie Rovner: What I remember was the next day was just, was literally driving around town feeling very off balance. It's like, what just happened?

NARRATION: Julie Rovner, the reporter, had grown up in Washington. Her parents had both worked in politics going back to the sixties. And in all that time Democrats always controlled the People's House.

Julie Rovner: All of what I considered the modern history, I mean, really, you know, since the New Deal, the house had not changed hands.

NARRATION: All the usual metaphors were thrown around: earthquake, tsunami, blowout, but the one that stuck was "revolution." The Republican Revolution. It was truly the overthrow of everything Ted Kennedy stood for.

ARCHIVAL: This is truly a wildly historic night…

Julie Rovner: Even the night that Trump was elected the first time was not as shocking to me as the aftermath of the election night of 1994. I was just not prepared.

NARRATION: A poll conducted by Harvard University found that the number one issue affecting voters nationwide that year was not taxes or crime. It was healthcare. For the Democrats, it was their Stalingrad, their Gettysburg, their Waterloo.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: Except, not in Massachusetts.

Ultimately Kennedy's own election was not close. He won 58 percent to 41. He trounced Romney.

But that night of the election, Steve Silveira -- Romney's bodyman -- remembers that as the inevitable became clear, the crowd at their watch party did not despair or disperse. Instead they started chanting: "run Mitt run, run Mitt run."

Vicki Kennedy: I think it was clear that a star was born.

NARRATION: Again, Vicki Kennedy.

Vicki Kennedy: And I hope he feels this way, that it was ultimately a really good thing because I think it was, it was the launch of him.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: Mitt Romney was of course not done with politics.

And just to give a little peek at where all this is going...a decade later, Mitt Romney and Ted Kennedy would reunite on that same stage where they held their first debate -- Faneuil Hall…

ARCHIVAL: This is a politician's dream. You gotta admit, standing at the top of this, this pedestal here.

NARRATION: Romney joked to Kennedy that day -- it was a bit like the Titanic returning to visit the iceberg. Here he was again at the site and source of his greatest defeat in life. But this time in a moment of triumph, signing a bill that would change both their lives and transform the politics of American healthcare. The bill known as ‘Romneycare.’

So what is it that forced these two adversaries into a new alliance?

ARCHIVAL: It's now my pleasure to introduce my collaborator and friend, Senator Edward Kennedy. Senator.

NARRATION: That is the story we tell in Part Three.

The Big Dig is produced by Isabel Hibbard and myself, Ian Coss. It’s edited by Lacy Roberts. The editorial supervisor is Azita Ghahramani with support from Ryan Alderman. And the Executive Producer is Devin Maverick Robins. 

I just want to note that I did reach out to Mitt Romney through several contacts to ask for an interview, and as of publishing this I have not gotten a direct response. Mitt, if you’re listening, the offer stands.

I wanna thank  Chris Jennings, who was very generous in sharing his inside perspective on the Clinton healthcare battle, but whose voice you don’t hear. I also want to give a special shout out to the book The System by Haynes Johnson and David Broder, as well as the fantastic two-part biography of Ted Kennedy: Catching The Wind and Against the Wind by Neil Gabler which I’ll be relying on throughout the series. 

Archival sound for this episode came from C-SPAN, FRONTLINE (The Long March of Newt Gingrich & The Health Care Gamble), The Clinton Presidential Library, Boston City TV, and Tad Devine himself. 

The artwork is by Bill Miller. Our closing song is “Things Will Be Different,” by The Shods. 

The Big Dig is a production of GBH News and distributed by PRX.