The details have faded from memory, but Cathleen Steffen and Craig Shirley, a boss at NCPAC who has just published a book about Reagan, recall that Steffen weighed in on a hot topic, and Terry Dolan, the late, legendary NCPAC chairman, saw the letters and invited Steffen to apply for a job. After the interview, Dolan hired Steffen on the spot.
Suddenly at 23, he was NCPAC's press secretary, a well-placed soldier in the New Right revolution.
Joe Steffen, right, with Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich, before Steffen got fired because of his postings on the Free Republic Web site.
(WMAR-TV2 via AP)
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"It was like a dream come true," Cathleen Steffen says.
"He was a good political operative, a good communications guy, he had a good sense of message, how you use the press," says Michael Murphy, the GOP strategist who also worked for NCPAC at the time, but who hasn't seen Steffen in years. "I liked him. He was a rough-and-tumble Maryland political guy, and a smart one, but not deliberately malicious or a cheap-shot artist."
NCPAC laid off Steffen in 1984 for budget reasons, according to Shirley. Steffen moved to southwestern Virginia and worked on campaigns including direct-mail whiz Viguerie's run for lieutenant governor. The family moved back to Maryland, where Steffen worked on Linda Chavez's senate run against Barbara Mikulski. It was a nomadic existence, campaign to campaign, but Steffen was driven, says his former wife. Between political jobs, he had to scrounge, she says. He delivered pizzas and sold cemetery plots.
They divorced in 1989. Cathleen says his devotion to politics, which she did not share, was part of the reason. They speak infrequently but are not on bad terms, she says.
Steffen remarried in 1990 and divorced in 2003. His second wife did not respond to requests for an interview.
"He's a very caring person, a very generous person," Cathleen Steffen says. "He likes to put on the image of the tough guy. . . . He's not a villain. He just likes to be flamboyant."
She describes him in Dungeons & Dragons terms as "chaotic good." Such characters, according to a D&D Web site, "are guided by their own moral compass, which although good, may not always be in agreement with the rest of society."
Some New Tricks?
It was in the mid-'90s that allegations of dirty campaign tactics became connected to Steffen -- around the time he earned his nickname from Ehrlich, whom he had known for years through Maryland politics.
Steffen went to work in the freshman congressman's district office in Lutherville. His responsibility was helping constituents who were tangling with the IRS. But Ehrlich's political foes suspected him of doing other work as well.
"Joe Steffen is Bob Ehrlich's dirty-tricks operative," says Gerry Brewster, a Baltimore County lawyer whom Ehrlich defeated for the open seat in 1994. During the campaign, Brewster says, "Joe was always with Bobby. They were practically attached at the hip."
Ehrlich calls Brewster's speculations "pathetic" and "bitter."
"Joe Steffen handed out literature, put out signs, went door to door, stood at polls," says Greg Massoni, Ehrlich's spokesman. "The last I heard, that was perfectly acceptable behavior."
Despite an absence of evidence, vivid suspicions had a way of following Steffen like vapor, feeding the myth. If you look hard into some of the stories -- rumors -- they fall apart. Look hard into others and you find an actual dirty trick -- but you can't tell who did it.
In 1996, former state Del. Connie DeJuliis challenged Ehrlich for his congressional seat. Someone distributed a flier accusing her of being a "home-wrecker." DeJuliis says she confronted Ehrlich at a joint campaign appearance and, according to her, he said, "The home-wrecker piece? Yeah, Joe does good work."
She says she didn't know who Joe was, but one of her volunteers suggested it was Steffen, whom she began to notice in Ehrlich's company.
Ehrlich bristles at the allegation that his campaign was responsible for the flier and denies the conversation took place. "That is absolutely the goofiest thing I've ever heard of," he says.
During that same campaign, someone spliced the letterhead of the local steelworkers union and the signature of the president, Joe Butler, onto a letter that Butler didn't write. The letter was a masterpiece of reverse psychology. It said Ehrlich was a "racist" for not supporting a federal program to move poor inner-city families into suburban neighborhoods that opposed the program -- and the letter was distributed in those neighborhoods.
"That was a bogus letter," says Butler, now retired. "It was a trick." He never found out who wrote it.
