Card Talk
Massachusetts-born Andrew Card returns to the Kennedy School to discuss life in the Bush administration.
By Julia Hanna
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card is running early. In the space of two hours, the former state legislator from Holbrook, Massachusetts, is scheduled to give the Class Day address to a group of Kennedy School graduates and their families, attend the unveiling of a portrait of George W. Bush, mingle with students, and take questions from the Bulletin. It’s the minute-by-minute race against the clock that most politicians run with limited success. Card has it down to a science.
His mastery of time management, however, is only one of the many skills that make this self-described “swamp Yankee” something of a Washington anomaly. A veteran of the Reagan and “Bush 41” administrations, Card has earned a reputation on both sides of the aisle as a unifier and peacemaker who can maintain his affable, humble demeanor while navigating rough political waters. He’s witnessed the changing of the guard under seven former chiefs of staff, including James Baker, Don Regan, and John Sununu, but with characteristic diplomacy, Card avoids the invitation to compare and contrast his predecessors’ personal management styles. “I’ve tried not to model myself after any one of those experiences, but to take good aspects from each of them,” he says simply.
“My function, and, I think, the function of any chief of staff, is the same,” continues Card. “My first responsibility is the care and feeding of the president, which includes the greatest challenge — scheduling his time. I frequently have to say ‘no’ to people who work with him, never mind good friends and family members,” he remarks. “That doesn’t mean people aren’t invited to reach around the chain of command. The president shouldn’t be isolated from his staff or the real world. It’s a delicate balance.”
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Card’s introduction to politics began early. He was born in Brockton, Massachusetts (the hardscrabble hometown of boxing legends Rocky Marciano and Marvin Hagler), before his parents finished high school, and recalls spending a great deal of time at his grandmother’s house nearby. “She was very proud of a photograph that showed her marching down Commonwealth Avenue in a white dress, fighting for women to get the right to vote,” he says. “She was also involved in local politics and served on the school committee,” he adds, noting that her tenure was somewhat controversial due to the fact that she was pregnant at the time.
His grandmother’s dinnertime etiquette also left a lasting impression. Often, Card recalls, she would begin a meal by asking each person at the table to repeat something from the day’s newspaper. “When I was very young, I could remember comic strips and Red Sox scores. Eventually, it turned to politics,” says Card, who began attending town meetings when he was eight years old. “Our discussion of the newspaper always prompted a healthy debate — that was the norm. We were taught to pay attention. My grandmother left me the curse of participation.”
Card characterizes Holbrook, where the family later moved, as “a blue-collar, working-class community, kind of on the wrong side of the tracks.” Although his pedigree includes Mayflower blood, he jokes that his ancestors must have been stuck with worthless land, given his family’s lower-middle class standing (hence the tag “swamp Yankee”). Card attended the University of South Carolina on an ROTC scholarship, earned an engineering degree in 1971, and joined the Merchant Marine Academy before dropping out in 1979 to enroll at the Kennedy School. The lure of the campaign trail proved too strong a temptation, however, and he left after a year to work on George H. Bush’s first presidential campaign. (In the opening remarks of his Class Day address, Card quipped, “I’ve always wanted to come back here,” adding that he remembers enjoying the camaraderie of his fellow students more than the classroom.)
It didn’t take long for Card to hit the campaign trail on his own behalf. After one failed attempt, he won a seat in the Massachusetts legislature at the age of 26, and went on to serve four terms in the State House, working with the Democratic majority to take on bipartisan issues such as political corruption in state construction work. Philip Johnston, now the state Democratic chair, collaborated with Card to effect rules reform in the Massachusetts House. “I’m a very partisan, liberal Democrat, and we worked just beautifully together,” Johnston told the Washington Post last February, a sentiment that was echoed throughout the Capitol when it became clear in the final days of postelection turmoil that Card was Bush’s pick for chief of staff. If anyone could restore some vestige of unity and civility to the political climate and assemble a new White House staff in less than half the time normally allotted for such a task, most agreed, it was Card.
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After all, it wasn’t the first time Card had stepped into the breach. As secretary of transportation in the last year of Bush, Sr.’s term, he was sent to Florida in the wake of Hurricane Andrew to take charge of relief efforts and repair the political damage caused by what some perceived as a leisurely government response to the $25 billion disaster. Earlier, as Bush’s deputy chief of staff, he was put in the prickly position of firing his own boss, John Sununu, after the infamously outspoken chief of staff overstepped his bailiwick one time too many. (It wasn’t the first time Card had to give someone the boot. As a college student, he worked as an assistant manager at McDonald’s. When an employee who was pilfering cash refused to confess the crime, Card fired the entire staff.) “Andy is not going to freelance,” Sununu told the Houston Chronicle last November. “He is a loyalist who understands his role is to step in front of the spears aimed at the president.”
Card’s commitment to the Bush family dates back to 1979, when he was the Massachusetts campaign chair for George H. Bush’s first run for the presidency. Although Bush lost the nomination to Ronald Reagan, he won the Massachusetts primary, and Card was there eight years later to manage Bush’s New Hampshire campaign for the Republican nomination against Senator Bob Dole. In 1982, he launched a failed bid for Massachusetts governor, then settled into the office for intergovernmental affairs under Reagan. After coordinating Bush’s transition out of the Oval Office in 1992, Card considered running for Senate. “I was anxious to have Ted Kennedy compete against me for the job, rather than the other way around,” he laughs. His parents’ failing health, however, quickly changed his mind. “Serving in a political office is selfless, but running is selfish,” he explains.
For now, Card seems content to work behind the scenes, deflecting questions about future ambitions and emphasizing his here-and-now role as a staffer. “I need to have the president’s complete confidence. He doesn’t have to enjoy all of my confidence. If there’s ever a point when I don’t have his trust, I hope he’ll have the courage to tell me so,” he says. “Will he be a successful president? It’s a function of making good public policy decisions and marketing them well so that people move forward on them. The chief of staff helps direct that process, but the president is ultimately held accountable for my actions. So it’s a great burden.”
That burden translates into days that begin at 6:15 a.m. and end somewhere between 8:30 and 10:30 at night. “I try to get to bed just as the 11 o’clock news is starting, then I’m up at 5:15 a.m. like clockwork.” His wife of 34 years, Kathleene, gets up with him, he adds; she’s a Methodist minister at Trinity Church in McLean, Virginia, who was raised a Roman Catholic; Card, who was brought up as a Congregationalist, is one of her parishioners. The father of three, Card says, “I get as much joy out of one hour with my grandchildren as I do out of a whole weekend off.”
Card’s earliest efforts as chief of staff focused on thinning out an alphabet soup of government offices and trimming White House staff and salaries. “From a management perspective, I want to leave some room to grow during the administration,” he explains. A leaner, more efficient government is clearly one of Card’s ongoing concerns. In his address, he called for a decrease in the number of government workers who require Senate confirmation. President Bush, he noted, won’t have all of his political appointees in place until he’s been in office nearly a year; in contrast, John F. Kennedy’s picks were confirmed within nine weeks. “There was a transformation of the government’s personality when JFK was president,” he said. “I didn’t support him, but I was excited by his election.” Today, he continued, voters who hope for the same sense of immediate change are bound to be disappointed.
When asked about the general skepticism with which the public views government today — an attitude that many trace to the Reagan and Bush administrations’ emphasis on ferreting out bureaucratic waste — Card is quick to make the following distinction: “You can run on an antigovernment platform to change the system, but you shouldn’t run on a platform that says there’s no need for government. If you want a limited role for government, that’s a philosophical statement, and an appropriate topic for debate.
“There’s no greater title you can have in a democracy than politician,” Card adds, a sentiment he echoes later in his Class Day address. “Working for a campaign is very seductive. Get turned on,” he advised the group gathered in the school’s Forum. “The one thing I’d ask you not to be is agnostic. Disagree with me, disrespect me, or run against me — but get involved.”
Julia Hanna is a freelance writer living in Cambridge.
