My Days at the Heritage Foundation
From an Unpublished Memoir
When I got back to Washington [in 1985], I started doing more free-lance writing for the Heritage Foundation. I had known the president, Ed Feulner, vice president Phil Truluck, and domestic policy director Stuart Butler since the 1970s. In the early 1980s, I also got to know Burt Pines, a former editor at Time magazine who was head of the entire Heritage research department. Eventually, my relationship evolved into a full-time position at Heritage
In September 1985, I became the John M. Olin fellow. The Olin Foundation supported a number of conservative academics in the 1970s and 1980s before spending itself out of business, per the wishes of its founder.[i] For a while it was controlled by [former Treasury secretary] Bill Simon. Not being attached to a particular department at Heritage, I was pretty much free to write about what I wanted. I wrote a lot of tax stuff but also stayed involved in international economic development issues.[ii]
A New Type of Think Tank
One of the interesting things about the Heritage Foundation is that it was light years beyond all other think tanks in terms of distribution. Generally, think tanks would print their studies as books or pamphlets that took weeks or even months to produce and distribute. But Heritage had the biggest Xerox machine I’ve ever seen in its basement to make copies of its studies.
I once asked the manager of the printing operation why Heritage used such a high-cost method. He said that offset printing would have been much cheaper, but also much slower. If a thousand copies of a document were needed, a thousand copies of page one would have to be printed, then a thousand copies of page two and so on. Then, when all the pages were printed, they would have to be collated before they could be distributed. But with a Xerox machine, complete copies of the entire document were available from the first copy.
There were many occasions when a Heritage analyst would write a short two-page paper on some hot topic in the morning and it would be on the desks of members of Congress by the afternoon. Staffers would grab copies as they came out of the machine and literally run over to Capitol Hill to hand them out. This sort of speed is taken for granted today when email has replaced sprinting interns, but in the 1970s and 1980s this was an enormous improvement in communications.
One of my best days at Heritage was when the House of Representatives was considering an early version of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 that I felt had some serious flaws. I wrote a quick paper with the best title I’ve ever used: “The Rosty Horror Tax Bill Show.”[iii] Rosty was, of course, Rep. Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. The paper was out the same day. Newt Gingrich cited it in floor debate two days later as a reason to vote against the legislation and a procedural vote on the legislation failed on December 11 as only 14 Republicans supported it.[iv] He later told Ed Feulner that my paper was instrumental in giving Republicans cover in opposing an initiative strongly supported by the Reagan administration.[v]
Another important benefit of the Heritage style was that journalists found its work as timely and useful as members of Congress. Our mantra was what Ed called the “briefcase test” – were our papers the ones that congressmen put into their briefcases to read on the plane back to the district? The idea was not only to be short, but provocative and readable, like a good magazine article. Burt edited every Heritage paper very heavily for style and clarity, something that it was pretty obvious that no other think tank did in those days; dense academese was the standard style.
Heritage also understood that time-pressed reporters were already adopting the horrid he-said/she-said style that plagues journalism today. If we got wind that some world-class Brookings scholar was due to release a book on, say, national health insurance that made an original contribution to knowledge in the field, someone at Heritage would quickly draft a short paper rehashing the same old talking points attacking national health insurance that had been around forever and release it the same day as the Brookings study. More often than not, we would get a story in the Washington Post the next day saying little more than this: “Today the Brookings Institution published a book, 3 tears in the making, advocating national health insurance, and the Heritage Foundation released a report on the same subject saying it would bankrupt the nation and lead to a deterioration in health quality.” Reporters never distinguished between the quality of one study and the shallowness of the other; they both got conflated and prevented the other side from getting traction on an issue.[vi] This method still works today.
Heritage’s relationship with the Reagan administration was a two-way street. While we were expected to be supportive of its initiatives, we were also interested in pushing the administration in a more rightward direction. Often, we would get ideas for studies based on a tip from a conservative Reagan appointee frustrated that her department’s leadership was backsliding on some issue. We also thought that if we continually criticized the Reagan administration for being insufficiently conservative, its policies would appear more moderate and therefore more palatable in Congress.
However, Heritage’s primary relationship was always with Congress. It is no coincidence that its building is just a block away from the Hart Senate Office Building. We wanted congressional staffers to have easy access to our auditorium for programs. I think Heritage was also one of the first think tanks to have full-time congressional relations specialists, who fed its work to friendly congressmen and senators and fed intelligence on upcoming hearings and floor debates to the analysts for studies.
Liberals were not unaware that Heritage had changed the rules of the game. A perceptive report on the Heritage style appeared in The New Republic that captured its essence. In reference to Ed Feulner, it said:
His foundation operates on a far shrewder understanding of the new power of the media and bureaucracy than traditional think tanks such as the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute. Heritage’s innovation is to combine the structures of a research group, a public relations firm, a special interest lobby, and an employment agency into one organization. If Heritage isn’t as powerful or as influential as it claims, it is certainly better at what it does than anyone else.[vii]
This is right. I know in my work I was always expected not only to research and write a study, but do spin-offs such as op-ed articles based on it. The press operation did a good job of getting such stuff out across the country and also getting numerous radio interviews for every paper. In those days, talk radio was just getting off the ground and there were many more talk shows in local markets with an insatiable demand for Washington-types to talk to.
For example, in 1985 I wrote a Heritage paper advocating elimination of the deduction for state and local taxes, which the Reagan administration had proposed as part of tax reform. I argued that it encouraged the states to have higher tax rates than they otherwise would have without deductibility.[viii] This study was reprinted in the National Taxpayers Union’s widely distributed newsletter, as well as the scholarly journal Tax Notes.[ix] I testified on the subject before a congressional committee and it was cited by Senator Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire in a floor speech.[x]
In 1986, I published a Heritage study arguing that that President Reagan should not grant Social Security recipients a bonus cost-of-living adjustment – that year inflation was too low for the law indexing benefits to trigger an automatic increase, but many of the elderly nevertheless expected their annual COLA anyway.[xi] On July 24, I published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal summarizing my study.[xii] And in October, my study was cited in floor debate in the House of Representatives.[xiii]
This was typical of the Heritage way of doing things; always getting multiple hits from every product. Again, this sort of thing is commonplace today. But in the 1980s, no other think tank was doing it.
Heritage was a good place to work and I enjoyed it. But some of the staff were a little strange. The strangest was a woman named Eileen Gardner, who handled education policy. She belonged to some rather strange religion and thought just about everyone else on the staff were agents of the devil, something we did nothing to discourage her from thinking. She would come in at night and try to purify our offices by sprinkling them with some sort of pixie dust. In 1985, Education Secretary Bill Bennett offered her a high level job in the department. But it went down the drain when the Washington Post did an expose of her peculiar views about many things including the handicapped, who she said were “summoned” to their afflictions by God.[xiv]
[i] John J. Miller, A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America (NY: Encounter Books, 2006).
[ii] Hobart Rowen, “Baker Plan Needs New World Bank Chief,” Washington Post (March 9, 1986), K1; Hobart Rowen, “Conable’s Personal Style Symbolic of Quiet Changes to Come at World Bank,” Washington Post (June 22, 1986), F6; Joanne Omang, “Foreign Aid Advocates Urged to Mount Grass-Roots Effort,” Washington Post (Sept. 12, 1986); Eduardo Lachica, “Conable Launches Plan to Streamline Global Lender and Ease U.S. Criticism,” Wall Street Journal (Dec. 16, 1986), 66.
[iii] Bruce Bartlett, “The Rosty Horror Tax Bill Show,” Heritage Foundation Executive Memorandum No. 100 (Dec. 2, 1985).
[iv] Congressional Record (Dec. 4, 1985), 34246; Pamela Fessler, “GOP Defeats Attempt to Consider Tax Bill,” Congressional Quarterly (Dec. 14, 1985), 2613.
[v] The legislation was quickly revised and brought up for another vote, which was successful. Pamela Fessler, “House Reverses Self, Passes Major Tax Overhaul,” Congressional Quarterly (Dec. 21, 1985), 2705.
[vi] Andrew Rich and R. Kent Weaver, “Think Tanks in the U.S. Media,” International Journal of Press/Politics (Sept. 2000), 81-103.
[vii] James Rosenthal, “Heritage Hype,” New Republic (Sept. 2, 1985), 15. See also Morton Kondracke, “The Heritage Model,” New Republic (Dec. 20, 1980), 10-14; Phil McCombs, “Building a Heritage in the War of Ideas,” Washington Post (Oct. 3, 1983), B1; Gregg Easterbrook, “Ideas Move Nations,” The Atlantic (Jan. 1986), 66-80.
[viii] Bruce Bartlett, “Reagan’s Tax Revolution: Ending the Free Ride for State & Local Taxes,” Heritage Foundation Issue Bulletin No. 114 (June 14, 1985).
[ix] Bruce Bartlett, “Why Local/State Deduction Should Go,” Dollars & Sense (July/Aug. 1985), 6-7; “The Case for Eliminating Deductibility of State and Local Taxes,” Tax Notes (Sept. 2, 1985), 1121-25.
[x] Congressional Record (April 21, 1986), S4619-20.
[xi] Bruce Bartlett, “The Social Security COLA: The Elderly Should Play by the Rules,” Heritage Foundation Executive Memorandum No. 115 (April 16, 1986).
[xii] Bruce Bartlett, “Buying Retiree Votes the Old-Fashioned Way,” Wall Street Journal (July 24, 1986), 22.
[xiii] Committee on the District of Columbia, Subcommittee on Fiscal Affairs and Health, Impact of the Elimination of State and Local Tax Deduction (Washington: USGPO, 1986), 29-33; Congressional Record (Oct. 10, 1986), H9893-94.
[xiv] Phil McCombs, “Eileen Gardner’s Agenda for the Soul,” Washington Post (May 17, 1985), B1.