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Showing posts with label Michael Milken. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Milken. Show all posts

Friday, February 8, 2019

For me, he was simply THE master politician of my 15 years in Washington, D.C. Remembering John Dingell and what legislators used to do and be











WDIV-TV, Detroit BREAKING: Former Michigan Rep. John Dingell dies at age 92

John Dingell writes a note to his younger self
CBS This Morning
Published on Dec 10, 2013
Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., begins his 58th year as a member of the House of Representatives. At age 87, he is the longest serving member of Congress in history. In the "CBS This Morning" ongoing series, "Note to Self," Dingell write about his personal connection to Pearl Harbor.




















Make sure you read the pillow he's holding!
Longest-serving Rep. Dingell on how Washington has changed
Longest-serving Rep. Dingell on how Washington has changed
Video: CBS News, Published on June 9, 2013 

Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., the longest-serving congressman in American history, discusses how Washington has changed since he arrived on Capitol Hill more than 57 years ago, particularly the gradual loss of bipartisan cooperation.

Updated February 11, 2019

Upon my arrival in Washington, D.C. in February of 1988, the day after the Super Tuesday presidential primary election day in Florida, the Southeast U.S. and a few other states, I was more than elated to finally be in the city that I had always wanted to live and work in, and I made a promise to myself.
That vow was that I’d do everything in my power to expand my base of knowledge of policy and process on many different issues in a way that would also help me get a job in a very competitive environment. Growing up in North Miami Beach in the 1970's sans the Internet, I always believed that information was power and always strived to be a person “in the know” whom other smart and savvy people turned to for advice or counsel. And all throughout high school at NMB Senior High and college at Indiana University in Bloomington, and various national and state political campaigns I worked on at a pretty high level, that’s exactly who I was and the reputation I garnered.

 I have always had a crazy memory for trivia and context that always helped me recall details that others didn't know or recall. Yes, I was that guy who often won trivia contests at spring break events, at hotel bars or restaurants or get-together at parties in Dc and suburban Northern Virginia.
And thanks to a lot of hard work and diligent effort, I became a well-connected person that was in-the-know. Or so it seemed to me. But who can really know. right?
Growing up in South Florida, because of my personality and interests, I always knew LOTS of TV and print reporters and columnists and editors, when I was in high school at NMB -spent hundreds of hours at the late Miami News at both their Sports and Entertainment desks- and that was also true at IU where college newspaper, the IDS, was one of the best managed in the country, housed in a building named for a journalism icon, Ernie Pyle, an IU alum.

 I knew nearly everyone who was anyone at the ids and frequently attended get-to-gethers with many of them on Sunday nights in the Fall after the last NFL football broadcast. We'd meet around 7:30 pm in the school library cafeteria on the ground floor, and there, over burgers, fries, cokes and pizza, we'd discuss what was REALLY happening on campus.
The stories that few students on campus knew about but should be talking about, ones we often knew a bit too much about to keep quiet for very long.
By the end of my freshman year at IU I knew and was friends with lots of influential people at the I.U. Varsity Athletics Dept., and gave camous tours for them when VIPs were in town, often before a big game, and knew as well some of the more influential students on campus at the various student groups, including the three most important: student government, Student Athletic Board and Student Alumni Council, being especially devoted to the latter two when not in class, spending hundreds of hours a semester doing things to help them prosper and have fun at the same time.

 All in all, I'd done pretty well to create a well-oiled little network for myself in Blooomington, and I hoped to replicate someting similar in Washington, D.C., however difficult that would seem at the outset. Because of my insatiable curiosity, I was always digging to know a little bit MORE than most people about what was really going on below-the-radar and how the sausage was put together if you will.
That led to people noticing that I had a way of getting things done and get the results I wanted more often than not. Plus, in keeping with my outgoing ENFP personality, I was able to do that without grating on people, a not uninmportant ability that I knew would help me qa lot in Washington, based on conversations with friends who already worked there.
But I knew that there were LOTS and LOTS of people in Washington my age who knew a great deal more than me about specific subjects, and that while my general knowledge may've been better than most, I needed to figure out a way of getting MUCh BETTER informed on those subjects that I was clearly lacking in.
To help accomplish that, from 1988-2003, I took copious contemporaneous notes of what I observed first-hand at myriad events with policy makers, journalists and news makers at the Brookings Institution, CSIS, SAIS at Johns Hopkins, AEI, the Wilson Center, the Goethe Institute, the Center for Security Policy, the IMF and The World Bank -BEST wine!-the Economic Strategy Institute, et al. 
There I'd hear subjects and stories that, for whatever reason, rarely saw the light of day in the pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post. Not even mentioned by friends of mine who worked at those media groups. 
This, naturally, had the entirely predictable ripple effect of making me realize that this would only ensure that these stories and issues almost NEVER made the airwaves of the TV networks, cablenets or, even NPR, either.
So, combined with my own personality and interests, the nature of my jobs in DC and the kinds of friends I had, and all those days and nights I was going to forums and events ariound town, I wound up with a front-row seat and below-the-radar perspective on many of the most contentious and implacable issues in Washington, D.C.
That was especially true for the sorts of policy debates that would take place on Capitol Hill, and their resultant fallout at DC-area think tanks, industry groups and public policy groups.

Nothing thou proved more valuable to me in widening my horizons than actually attending Congressional hearings and becoming familiar with not only the well-known public issues at hand, but also issues below-the-radar, and comparing and contrasting how the individual Members, their staff and the news media in attendance, all performed and interacted -or didn't- to either help illuminate or obfuscate an issue, for better or worse.

I heard pinpoint criticism of policies by members of Congress that I never saw mentioned in the press, and heard analysis that I hadn't heretofore known existed, found out that ideas that I always thought were popular had actually evaded public scrutiny, transparency or accountability for years, and I heard lots of well-aimed personal brickbats. 
Every week, I was able to see examples of the proverbial case of the media watchdog that doesn't bark, or see examples of why the latest case of media conventional wisdom had -again- been proven wrong, and why.
So on Capitol Hill, especially before the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994 that saw so many of my Democratic friends on Congressional committees get the heave-hoo, I saw first-hand how some Members chose to be earnest and diligent work-horses.
People like Lee Hamilton or Dante Fascell, my own Members back in Bloomington and Miami.

Members who did their hardest work behind-the-scenes, which was apparent by their choice of questions and their ability to intelligently follow-up  and elicit interesting answers from the people testifying, to get to the larger truth of an issue.
Others, of course, the Congressional show-horses, the majority, were largely content to simply show up and read the questions their well-informed but partisan staff had written for them, missing obvious follow-up opportunities. I also saw something I never imagined -Members who seemed to be bored with such a great job. A job I and so many others in the crowd would kill to have.

 There were a few, though, who combined the work ethic of a work-horse and the showmanship of a show-horse, and one of them was John Dingell, the veteran Michigan Democrat who had held his Detroit-area seat since 1955, succeeding his father, who'd been swept into power during the first FDR presidential victory of 1932.
Dingell’s voluble style and legendary ability to generate both passion and news headlines were famous long before I arrived on the scene in Washington in 1988, of course, so I knew that whenever possible, I needed to attend one of his hearings so that I could see him operate in-person if I wanted to see how things could really work on the Hill, because those rare moments when he was properly engaged and enraged were truly magic.
I saw that Dingell magic for myself many times in the fifteen years I lived and worked in Washington, spending thousands and thousands of hours at/on/around Capitol Hill.

The hearings that made the most powerful impression on me came in April of 1988, just months after my arrival. I was fortunate enough to grab a seat at a Energy & Commerce committee hearing he chaired, after waiting in line for hours to get one of the coveted 30-plus seats inside, where Drexel’s Michael Milken was to testify before what seemed like most of the Beltway press corps.
A hearing where tension was already thick even before it started and then only seemed to grow once Milken publicly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination as camneras all over the room clicked, refusing to respond to the committee’s very pointed and explosive questions.
This, despite the fact that his attorney, the legendary Edward Bennett Williams -the Williams of the famous D.C. law firm, Williams & Connolly, as well as the cantankerous owner of the Washington Redskins football team and Baltimore Orioles baseball team- had already told the committee in advance that his client would not answer its questions because Milken was already under grand jury investigation. John Dingell, though, had bigger fish to fry that day, and was cagey enough to see Milken’s refusal to talk publicly for what it really was -for Dingell.
An opportunity for John Dingell to make a point much larger than the simple one being written about by the legion of journalistic lemmings in American newspapers and business magazines regarding whether Michael Milken and his business approach were a force of corporate good or evil. Dingell used his opening statement -which came before anyone else spoke- to outline what he perceived to be the “evils” of Drexels’s junk bonds, and their use in corporate takeovers that had led to the collapse of longstanding companies, thousands of productive jobs in towns large and small throughout America’s heartland.
People whose lives Dingell believed could never be made whole again. That was to be the drama.
April 27, 1988  Securities Markets and Federal Laws
The subcommittee held a hearing relating to the operations of the nation’s securities markets and the effectiveness of the federal securities laws. Following members' opening remarks, Mr. Milken invoked committee rules preventing television cameras from recording his testimony. After cameras left the room, he invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self incrimination. He was under investigation for racketeering and securities fraud.

The comedy was to come later, when Drexel’s CEO, Fred Joseph, came into the room and testified, apparently oblivious to everything everyone else in the room who counts had heard Dingell say from his seat in the middle of the dais during Milken’s portion of the hearing. In a shocking example of making a bad situation even worse, Joseph refused to address the legitimate points Dingell had raised, instead, claiming that financing takeovers was a small part of Drexel’s overall business.
(As opposed to, say, their percentage of company profits! If it really was so small, logically, you’d think that Joseph would try to address the thornier questions posed to Milken, without the embarrassment of taking the Fifth, but he didn’t.)
By the time Fred Joseph had concluded his testimony, the damage had largely been done. Dingell, ever the master pol, had simply let Milken and Joseph hang themselves on TV: Milken by his silence and Joseph by his inability to see the bigger picture that all of America would see that night on the network TV newscasts, via a narrative written and framed by Congressman John Dingell.
APRIL 28, 1988 Securities Markets & Federal Laws

The subcommittee met to investigate several areas of the securities market with the intent of improving the laws in this area. Subcommittee members were interested in regulating the market while also preserving the confidence of the public in the free market system.

John Dingell Visitation And Funeral Arrangements:



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