It’s not every day that a veteran Washington insider — one who, at the zenith of his career, was the city’s highest-paid lobbyist — writes a 300-page account of his political triumphs, serial lawbreaking and unethical conduct, all of which ended in his imprisonment for fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy. Abramoff’s status as perhaps the premier modern symbol of Washington’s corruption by monied interests makes his reflections on the events surrounding his disgrace especially tantalizing.
The book’s aim, according to its dust jacket, is to pull “back the curtain on K Street,” show “the dirty underbelly of America’s government” and prescribe reforms meant to undercut the political influence of private, monied interests. It achieves these goals in part, confirming in a highly personal narrative what some reporters on his trail (myself included) unearthed in the mid-2000s, while adding some fresh accounts of how he manipulated the legislative process.
But the curtain is pulled back only partially. When it comes to his own role, Abramoff leaves out some embarrassing details, making a reader suspect that there is still more to tell. And his sensible yet improbable prescriptions — which Abramoff says occurred to him while he was doing time at a minimum-security federal prison in Cumberland — are undercut by the pride with which he recounts his lobbying victories. We are left with an odd mixture of candid revelation, defiant celebration and score-settling, all stuck to a postscript of avowed remorse.
A child of Beverly Hills and an aggressive high school football player, Abramoff cut his political teeth in the college Republican movement in the late 1970s alongside well-known movement conservatives such as Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist. We were “immature well beyond our years,” Abramoff writes. To win election as chairman of the College Republican National Committee, for example, he had Reed distribute “scurrilous pamphlets” about his opponent. “I didn’t pause to consider niceties,” he writes. He helped President Ronald Reagan sell higher military spending to Congress, then became a filmmaker before joining the powerful lobbying firm Preston Gates in 1994.
There, Abramoff says, “our idea of a successful day was obliterating our clients’ enemies.” He was not an advocate for his clients, but a warrior. His ethos was “fight-to-the-death,” and the Capitol Hill veterans who worked alongside him on what became known around town as “Team Abramoff” were “the roughest, toughest street smart killers.”
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