The Power Player

Gatsby sought riches to reclaim a lost love who had rejected him when he was young and poor; Cassidy, too, sought riches as armor against poverty and rejection. Both were dreamers who would be forced by circumstances to become realists.

For Cassidy, the urge to accumulate money drove him to succeed. "I'm a big fan of financial security," he said in one of numerous extended interviews. "I didn't have a lot of it as a kid, so I wanted to be successful and financially secure." He never pretended not to be interested in money nor tried to deny who he was or how he made his cash. He proudly, though quietly, made large donations to numerous charities.

His candor about his business and his pursuit of wealth set him apart from the most successful lobbyists of earlier generations, who often were reticent about their trade. Washington powerbroker Clark Clifford was a good example; he never registered as a lobbyist and would deny heatedly that he was one, even as he helped his law firm's corporate clients solve problems in Washington for handsome fees. Clifford wanted to be known as an elder statesman.

Cassidy made no bones about his work. He liked to talk about his ability to get things done: winning hundreds of millions in federal dollars for his university clients, getting Ocean Spray Cranberry juice into school lunches, helping General Dynamics save the billion-dollar Seawolf submarine, smoothing the way for the president of Taiwan to make a speech at Cornell despite a U.S. ban on such visits.

Cassidy's career has spanned an astounding boom in the lobbying business. When Cassidy became a lobbyist in 1975, the total revenue of Washington lobbyists was less than $100 million a year. In 2006 the fees paid to registered lobbyists surpassed $2.5 billion; the Cassidy firm's 51 lobbyists earned about $29 million. In 1975 the rare hiring of a former member of Congress as a lobbyist made eyebrows rise. Today 200 former members of the House and Senate are registered lobbyists. Two of them, tall, gregarious men named Marty Russo and Jack Quinn, work for Cassidy, and at the 30th birthday party they worked the crowd with relish.

The business involves giving as well as receiving. As lobbying became more and more lucrative, Cassidy realized that members of Congress who helped his clients could be thanked with campaign contributions. "You can't be in this business and not give," he once explained.

Starting with McGovern

The party crowd looked like a typical A-List Washington gathering, sprinkled with past and present senators, House members and Washington hangers-on of many varieties. But there was a story up on the roof that evening that wasn't obvious to most of the guests -- the story of Gerry Cassidy's remarkable career.

The crowd included figures from every stage of Cassidy's life in Washington, beginning with George McGovern.

The long-retired Senator and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee had flown in from South Dakota to toast Cassidy, whom he had first met 36 years earlier in Immokalee, Fla., when McGovern chaired the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs.

In 1969, Cassidy, then a young legal aid lawyer for migrant workers, helped McGovern's staff organize hearings in Immokalee on hunger among those workers. Cassidy then escorted the senator around one of the most impoverished areas in the United States. The hearings drew extensive television and newspaper coverage, one of McGovern's first moments in a national spotlight. Just two months later, Cassidy made his way to Washington and knocked on the nutrition committee's door. Could he have a job? In April 1969, Gerry Cassidy arrived in the nation's capital to join the staff of McGovern's committee. He has been here ever since.

When Cassidy moved up from Florida, he and Loretta rented a small apartment in Arlington. Today, they own grand houses in McLean and on the Eastern Shore and a condo on Key West.

Cassidy and McGovern have maintained friendly if not close relations over the years -- a typical pattern for Cassidy, who has many acquaintances but few real friends. McGovern expresses personal amazement at Cassidy's financial success, and also gratitude for it. The lobbyist has contributed $100,000 to the George and Eleanor McGovern Library, which was dedicated in October at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, S.D.