Go Big or Go Home: Lee Atwater Was the 'Boogie Man'

WE DON'T OFTEN get to watch as Faust sells his soul to the devil, but when the George Herbert Walker Bush presidential campaign went over to the dark side, America got to see it on TV, twice a night — five times if you were watching the news.

The infamous "Willie Horton" ad accomplished a number of feats: It wiped then-president Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal, in which the president traded arms to Iranian terrorists in exchange for American hostages, out of voters' minds; it destroyed Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis' presidential bid; and it changed forever the way the Republican party did campaign business.

Behind what documentarian Stefan Forbes calls the "single most racist campaign in American history" was Lee Atwater.

The Mississippi-born political strategist and fiery blues guitarist went from riling up college-age Republicans to changing the terms of the American political campaign to schooling future generations of advisors and back-room boys — the most prominent of which is Karl Rove — on the niceties of his merciless playbook.

Forbes, fascinated by Atwater's short, sharp arc — he was felled by a brain tumor at barely 40 — explores his life in the film "Boogie Man."

This 89-minute look at the country's most powerful setter of political terms is incisive and even-handed — let's just say Forbes is a lot fairer to Atwater than Atwater would have been to him — giving weight to the respect and admiration Atwater engendered among bluesmen for his commitment to blues guitar and his James Brown-like onstage ferocity and letting laugh-out-loud lines such as Mary Matalin's claim that Atwater was "a great intellectual" pass without comment. (He was a genius but no intellectual.)

When he set out to film "Boogie Man," Forbes, an Emmy-nominated director, knew this was the film he had to make — little could he have known how much the country needed to see it.

» EXPRESS: What brought you to make this movie?
» FORBES: I just always been fascinated by Lee. It's the legendary American story — a guy who went from humble roots to the height of political power. We wouldn't have had Reagan or Bush senior as president, and he taught Karl Rove and [George] W how to win. Here's this guy who hangs out with James Brown and BB King, and yet runs the most racist campaign in history. To me, the shocking questions it why no one else has made it.

» EXPRESS:And his influence is still felt.
» FORBES: I think we live in a world that Atwater created — this sense that a presidential election could be decided on something having nothing to do with the issues. Atwater took it to a whole new level and he left the playbook for Karl Rove. Rove took that into the White House and it became a philosophy of governing.

Tucker Eskew studied under Atwater, and went on to take over Atwater's old office and ran Bush's war room in 2000. He was one of the guys who destroyed McCain in 2000. ... Now he's a senior advisor to John. Atwater may be dead but he's still alive in American politics.

» EXPRESS: And as Eskew points out, the Democrats still don't get it.
» FORBES: It's frankly something most of the Democrats have missed. They only see the dirty side of Lee's playbook, but they don't see the incredible power of these deep culture-war tactics and emotional appeals to things like patriotism and religion.

» EXPRESS: It's amazing to see R. Crumb's iconic hippie poster, Keep on Truckin', used to lure young Republicans.
» FORBES: [In the movie], Lee's asked why he went with the party of fuddy duddies and the country-club set, and he said, "That's where I can get ahead." The Democrats have all the rock stars, Hollywood, the actors, the entire cultural community of America; the GOP was overjoyed to get Lee Atwater.

» EXPRESS: Well, except Bush senior treated him like the pool boy.
» FORBES: It just shows how Lee deeply resented the Eastern elites with the true Southerner's resentment of Eastern elites; he joined the party of Nelson Rockefeller and turned it into the party of Tom Delay.

Look at John McCain, there's no way he could be running as the little-guy candidate without what Lee Atwater pulled off in 1988 — took George Herbert Walker Bush, a moneyed Yankee elitist, and turned him into a cowboy boot-wearing Texan.

» EXPRESS: You wisely avoid the easy psychology of positing the brain cancer that afflicted him so young as some sort of divine retribution for his sins.
» FORBES: Nobody should ever say something like that, and, actually one of Lee's friends told me that was the side of his head he used to constantly use one of those old, bulky cell phones. He was always on that thing.

» EXPRESS: The childhood-trauma explanation for a villain is usually pretty pat, but this seems convincing — he watched his little brother burn to death. Then never spoke of him again.
» FORBES: As a filmmaker — when you're unraveling this mystery or when you're fascinated by the mystery of what turns somebody into a self-styled political assassin — you have to be open to these things. But you also have to leave room for the mystery of human character. You can't try to explain everything away; we just don't know. But obviously, Lee was driven like very few people are, incredibly ambitious and incredibly relentless, and that kind of personality is often created by some kind of primal trauma. You see it in political figures a lot. They're often driven by not having a father, like Reagan or Clinton. It's fascinating that the people shaping our country and our world have some great trauma or primal wound to overcome.

» EXPRESS: For him, a lie was just as good as the truth, if people believe it. It's horrifying to watch that unfold.
» FORBES: And only somebody as brash as Atwater would style himself as a rebel while he was working for big power and big business. He's the patron saint of spinmeisters. And we're seeing it in America today, in our politic. In 1988, Willie Horton basically pushed Iran-Contra off the page. ... People laughed at [Atwater] when he first started talking about the Willie Horton ads.

» EXPRESS: Is it big-D Democratic of me to think, "Waah! That's not fair!"
» FORBES: Ultimately, the question comes down to, if politics is a game, there have to be rules, and if somebody is lying and cheating, somebody has to call the foul. So who is going to be the ref? And the rep strategists are talking about going to the refs. There has been so much pressure on national media to report both sides of the story. So if there's a smear, then there's a denial, they publish both given equal weight.

» EXPRESS: The dichotomies in his life are mind-boggling — particularly the racial ones.
» FORBES: The idea of 100 percent racist versus 100 percent non-racist is one of the most damaging fallacies in America. Republicans are very good at playing the race card and it's something we need to discuss as a country, desperately, but this idea that you're either a complete racist or you're a-OK, really holds back a serious discussion.

» EXPRESS: How did you get people to talk?
» FORBES: Lee's friend are so eager to talk about him; they see him as an incredible legend, a complete hero to the Republican party. They were dying to talk about him. They were a little leery at first, because he had been misrepresented in the media, the liberal media. I reminded them that newspapers are owned by these huge conglomerates and they were OK with it.

» EXPRESS: How did the Reagan depicted in the film end up the lionized master statesman of today?
» FORBES: Reagan's rehabilitation in the history books is a testament to the way that images and spin trump issues and facts. And the Republican party is light years ahead of the Democrats in creating powerful narratives and stories that are irresistible. They understand emotions, that stories are what move us, and the Democrats come out with 11-point plans. The crowning achievement was getting George Bush elected in 1988, when his partner in the White House, when Ronald Reagan had sold arms to terrorists, and Reagan had lied about it on national TV. If the democrats had done that, they wouldn't have seen the White House for another 100 years.

We're in the world of images and the media is not doing its job in fighting for the truth, which is the one thing that makes our country great and makes us a free country. And yet the media is under attack — you saw it at the Republican convention. Again, the Republicans have used these powerful emotional narratives to frame the media itself as un-American and liberal, which is not true and is an insult to the intelligence of all Americans.

» EXPRESS: What do you think his horrible illness and death teach us?
» FORBES: Atwater's story has incredible importance in the country right now because we're living in the age of spin, and its led the Republican party to so much power. But when Lee hit a crisis, spinning wasn't enough, this amoral cynic and this self-describe political assassin found himself desperately searching for the truth America's in crisis right now and I think there's a truth that's going to heal us. These are growing pains as a country, and we'll come out of it better and stronger. We need to search our souls as a country; I think it's really important.

Rather than blame all this on Lee Atwater, we need to examine our complicity and our responsibility to bringing the truth back in American politics. And that's why his story is so moving and profound — if an amoral cynic like himself can undergo a transformation like that, as incomplete as it may have been, it calls on all of us to do the same thing.

» Landmark E Street Cinema, 555 11th St. NW; opens Fri., Sept. 25, 202-452-7672. (Metro Center)