‘Truly a great honor’
By contrast, Rollins’s ascent to the lectern was preceded by a cue to dim the lights. Ken Burns-style piano music filled the room and two large screens lit up to show a video. Yellowed stills depicted Rollins as the young boxer who won more than 160 amateur fights. Shots of him older and stockier followed. He was shown conferring with candidates, hoisting arms in victory, holding forth on Sunday morning talk shows. There were testimonials from Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R). “The first rule was: Don’t get me, don’t get Rollins in any trouble, because I survived five years with [Lee] Atwater,” Barbour said. “Did I ever get him into any trouble? Yeah, but Ed didn’t need any help.” The elected officials and colleagues joked about his advanced age — Barbour quipped that “I thought this was AARP” — but mostly the Rollins intimates called him the best political consultant and friend they ever had.
The lights came up and so did Rollins.
“This is truly, truly a great honor,” he said. “And Senator McGovern, if I had known you wanted to come to the White House, I would have invited you over. I had the old Nixon hideaway office. We could have drank a little booze and listened to the tapes.”
Rollins hailed his friend, the conservative direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie, whom he ribbed about stuffing mailboxes. And he offered a teasing admission: While the Democratic inductees may have wanted to change the world, “I just wanted to be powerful and rich.”
Then the aging pugilist, too, turned earnest, and emoted about how all political consultants respect one another deep down, because unlike the candidates they elect, they live “in the trenches.”
“At the end of the day,” he said, “we make the country better. I have watched the great freedoms that we have and the great freedoms other countries want to have like us. So much of it comes because of this profession.”
“I’m very flattered by this award,” concluded Rollins, who said that he would put the glass trophy in his living room, next to his bust of Ronald Reagan. “It means so much to me.”
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