Head of 'The House'
In Fred Thompson's Dining Room, Ken Rietz Helped Build a Campaign. Then the Chaos Began.

By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Back in March, when Fred D. Thompson's presidential candidacy was just a possibility, but one with seemingly unlimited potential, a small group of veteran Republican insiders began meeting regularly in the dining room of Thompson's McLean home to plot his coming-out.

"Picture your kitchen table with four or five laptops, a printer from Home Depot, and somebody going out every day to get food from Boston Market, Balducci's or turkey sandwiches from home," said one regular participant.

The architect of the group was Ken Rietz, a longtime Thompson pal and former operative for Richard M. Nixon who has spent two decades as a prominent Washington image-maker. Working with Thompson's wife, Jeri, he recruited GOP strategist Mary Matalin; Ed McFadden, a speechwriter for John D. Ashcroft when Ashcroft was attorney general; Mark Corallo, a well-known Washington press specialist; pollsters John and Jim McLaughlin; and Tom Collamore, a former Altria executive whom Rietz put in charge of operations. Nelson Warfield, Robert J. Dole's former spokesman and Rietz's neighbor, was there, too.

For weeks that stretched into months, they argued about how to turn a Hollywood actor and onetime senator into a presidential candidate, and how to get a campaign off the ground. "From the beginning, we've wanted to find a way to help people who want to support Fred -- this massive group of volunteers out there -- how to connect them with the campaign in a nontraditional way," Rietz recalled.

Eight months later, the team that Rietz helped assemble is largely gone. Thompson has had to reinvent his campaign repeatedly, and even his allies have questioned the way it has been run. But before the series of high-level staff departures helped undermine Thompson's entry into the 2008 race and raised questions about how serious a candidate he would be, the Rietz effort appeared promising.

As Rietz planned it, Thompson's campaign would be run by people wise in the ways of Washington but able to think beyond the Beltway. It was a campaign that would be radically different, unencumbered by the typical pressures of a big-budget organization. With technology, the team members believed, there would be less need for Thompson to attend every rubber-chicken campaign dinner.

On May 15, they showed what they meant. On the Drudge Report, Corallo and McFadden saw a story about filmmaker Michael Moore's trip to Cuba and his challenge to Thompson to debate him. Within an hour, the pair filmed a cigar-chomping Thompson in a biting, 38-second response: "A mental institution, Michael. Might be something you ought to think about."

They posted the video to a news Web site called Breitbart TV, and it became an instant hit. It was the epitome of the rapid-response, new-media ideas that Rietz and the others thought could shake up the 2008 White House race.

"Those were heady days for the campaign," said one staffer who later quit. " 'This is all working. We got a trillion hits on the Michael Moore video. We don't need to do the traditional things that a campaign does.' "

It was also the last time that the Thompson campaign did anything remotely like it.

For months, the group debated how to announce a formal candidacy. Positive press soon turned negative as advisers mishandled questions about Thompson's lobbying efforts for an abortion rights group. Evangelical leaders started to question Thompson's commitment to their issues, while donors wondered whether to put money on a candidate who wasn't even in the race yet.

At the heart of the problems, though, was the team that Rietz had taken a lead role in assembling. Amid bickering and infighting over operations and strategy, many of the people whom Rietz persuaded Thompson to hire were soon fired or left in frustration during a disastrous summer of conflict and chaos inside the nascent campaign.

The first campaign manager Rietz had recruited left the job in July after clashing with Thompson's wife. He was followed quickly by the campaign's research director and his deputy. Two aides, including one of President Bush's nephews, quit.

The campaign's communications director -- who publicly declared the staffing mess much ado about nothing -- was soon out herself, and a week later the press secretary was gone, along with two top press aides. A longtime Thompson friend who had been there from the beginning left without fanfare. So did the man tasked with outreach to the religious community.

"You had a lot of bright, well-meaning people. But there was kind of a disconnect between ideas and operationalizing ideas," said Bill Lacy, the man Thompson brought in to clean up the staffing mess. "There's a major step from saying 'This is an idea' to actually making it reality."

Rietz, who is nearly blind from a degenerative eye disease, has no official title and is not getting paid by the campaign. But aides say his close relationship to Thompson still gives him unique access to the candidate. Thompson, his wife and their young children celebrated the senator's 65th birthday at Rietz's Delaplane, Va., estate over the summer, borrowing a neighbor's pony to give rides to 3-year-old Hayden.

Lacy calls Rietz the "godfather" of the campaign. But what began as a lean, bold, insurgent-style political effort -- conceived by Rietz and the handful of people in what the campaign calls "The House" -- has morphed into a traditional, big-budget campaign that has so far failed to live up to the hype Rietz helped create last spring.

"There was an irrational exuberance for Internet campaigning," one former staffer said. "When this exaggerated faith in the Net collided with reality, the impact was pretty severe. Once the real campaign began, an organization that placed no premium on having a real campaign was ill prepared to deal with it."

Disagreements From the Start

By the end of May, the campaign had opened a large office about a mile from The House. Big and beige, reminding some of an insurance agency, it had a fancy corner office with "FT" on the door and an equally nice office for his wife, with a sign that read "JKT."

But even as a campaign structure was taking shape, Thompson's small cadre of advisers was locked in endless debate about how and when to announce the senator's intentions. What began as an effective "will he or won't he?" tease stretched out for months.

When the campaign raised the idea of an announcement in Thompson's hometown of Lawrenceburg, Tenn., the candidate balked. Later, aides booked the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the former home of the Grand Ole Opry, as the venue for a big-budget announcement in early September. "I thought we had that sucker planned at least twice," said one former staffer.

The plan -- backed by Rietz -- was later ditched in favor of making announcements in September on the Internet and "The Tonight Show."

"In the early stage, I was an advocate of doing it in Nashville. In the later stages, I was an advocate for doing it the way we did it," Rietz said. "We talked about the announcement for 30, 40 days. . . . I think in the end we did it exactly the right way."

The team that Rietz built started falling apart by the end of June, as the Thompson brain trust continued to haggle.

On the Friday evening before July 4, Jeri Thompson walked into the new campaign office to find the place almost deserted. She erupted, according to several staffers who witnessed it, directing most of her anger at Collamore and instructing him to start calling people back into the office.

The moment culminated weeks of clashes between the ex-senator's wife and Collamore, according to current and former staffers.

The pair argued about Thompson's schedule as they traveled together in an SUV on the way to events. They quarreled over staffing decisions, the wording of e-mails, the location of offices, the look of the Web site and the timing of the campaign's rollout.

Collamore and others got frequent e-mails from Jeri Thompson's BlackBerry on every aspect of the campaign: "Are we all set with contract for hats?" one read. Another asked: "Are we sending these great clips out? What kind of distribution lists? Donors?"

On July 24, five minutes after word leaked out to CNN, Collamore sent an e-mail calling his staff to a meeting, where he announced his resignation. As Rietz had requested, a statement issued to the news media that night indicated that Collamore would stay on as a "senior adviser," but in reality, he was gone.

The next morning, research director J.T. Mastranadi left a one-page resignation letter on his chair. But despite wondering why he wasn't on the day's 7:30 a.m. conference call, no one noticed the letter for hours, according to two sources. A day later, Sam LeBlond, a nephew of President Bush's, quit the campaign, along with Tom Frechette, a former aide to the president's father, George H.W. Bush. Both had been loyal to Collamore.

That night, Jeri Thompson arrived at headquarters with pizzas for the remaining staff members.

There had been "no mass exodus" of staffers, the campaign's newly hired communications director, Linda Rozett, insisted publicly at the time, adding that "there were plenty of people here to eat up the pizza before I got any."

Within weeks, she was gone, too.

Lacy took over the campaign and replaced Rozett, a former executive at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who had been recruited heavily by Rietz, with veteran press aide Todd Harris. Jim Mills, a former Fox News producer who started as the campaign's spokesman on Aug. 20, was out by Sept. 5. Burson Snyder and Robert Traynham, two veteran press aides from Capitol Hill, left in frustration, as did Corallo.

"I'm surprised at the seeming chaos in the campaign," said one longtime friend of Rietz's who has watched Thompson's slow rollout with interest from afar. "That's not something that he would normally be part of."

A Political Life Resumed

In 1972, Rietz, then a 30-year-old political operative, flew down to Key Biscayne to meet with President Richard M. Nixon and John Mitchell, the director of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, armed with an audacious proposal.

Never mind the anti-Vietnam War protests on college campuses across the country, the dashing Rietz told them. Spend a few million dollars, and we can win the youth vote. The skeptical president and former attorney general signed off on the plan, and within weeks, the new head of Young Voters for the President had set up a storefront office at 17th and Pennsylvania, staffed with a dozen eager young activists.

By year's end, Rietz's army of under-30 volunteers (which included a college-age Karl Rove and a cadre of women called Nixonettes) had swelled to the thousands and helped deliver Nixon the election. Rietz was named the deputy chairman at the Republican National Committee, until he became entangled in Watergate.

Interviewed by the FBI, he admitted hiring a student to infiltrate a peace group, but he denied leading a "kiddie spy corps," as news reports had alleged. He was never charged with anything, but he resigned his RNC position and went into political hibernation in California, emerging occasionally to run campaigns over the next 30 years.

"I basically put that all behind me and went out to California and went into the record business, thinking I would never be involved in politics again," Rietz said.

Eventually he returned to Washington. He rose to become a senior executive at Burson-Marsteller, one of the city's biggest public relations firms, despite retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that claims eyesight from the outside in, leaving a shrinking tunnel of vision that eventually closes.

Rietz had largely retired to his home in Virginia when Thompson offered him the chance to work his trade in a national campaign again. "What Ken has is this wealth of experience. He has seen how the game is played," said Tom Nides, a Democrat who was chief executive at Burson-Marsteller and is now a senior executive at Morgan Stanley.

But critics said the campaign's current struggles reflect the presence of too many Rietz friends from political eras long gone by. Most of the people he lured to Thompson's side either had no experience on a presidential campaign or were years out of date.

And their departures continue. Atlanta developer Tom Bell, who first met Rietz while running the campaign that ousted Sen. Al Gore Sr. (D-Tenn.) in 1970, resigned as one of Thompson's finance chiefs in late October.

But Rietz's supporters, including Lacy, say he gives relevant advice drawn on four decades of experience. "He's just extraordinarily well connected," Lacy said. "He knows most of the others who you would lump into a guru category."

Each morning and evening, Rietz's fourth wife, Ursula, reads him the e-mails he gets from campaign staffers, donors and political consultants. He dials a toll-free number every day to listen to coverage of the campaign on free audio versions of The Washington Post and the New York Times.

It is Jeri Thompson, Lacy and other friends from Tennessee who have the influence in the campaign now, according to current and former Thompson aides. Lacy helped rescue Thompson's first Senate campaign. Bob Davis, a former Senate aide, is never far from his side now. Mark Esper, his policy expert, was an adviser for former senator Bill Frist (R-Tenn.).

That leaves Rietz somewhat isolated. But his admirers say the campaign still relies on him.

"I don't think Fred Thompson could have a better person in the background than Ken," said Bell, who worked alongside Rietz in 1970 as he managed Republican Bill Brock's Senate campaign in Tennessee. "He's in the background. That's where he wants to be."

Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.