20 Questions: John Le Boutillier

Like many graduates of Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Business, John LeBoutillier is on the fast track. His field happens to be national politics. A top Republican fund raiser in his college-sophomore year, author of a book taking his alma mater to task for its liberal leanings, he got himself elected to the House of Representatives at the age of 27. One can't help thinking that he, like any other ambitious M.B.A., has his sights set on the executive suite--in his business, that's called the Oval Office. Warren Kalbacker met with the Congressman on Capitol Hill and later in his New York office. "Some people may accuse conservatives of living in the 19th Century," Kalbacker told us, "but LeBoutillier thrives in our media age. At one of our meetings, he pulled out a tape recorder and made his own copy of our conversation. Then he gave me the cassette. He wasn't taking any chances that his words might not be coming through loud and clear."

1.

[Q] Playboy: You were elected to the House of Representatives at 27. How does it feel to earn the title Honorable at such a tender age?

[A] Le Boutillier: It's kind of a joke. Actually, they don't ever call you the Honorable. They call you sir. I find men old enough to be my grandfather calling me sir. It makes me feel ill at ease and I always ask them to stop.

2.

[Q] Playboy: How about telling us the real story behind "Mr. LeBoutillier Goes to Washington"?

[A] Le Boutillier: I went into my local Republican Party office on my hands and knees and asked if I could run. Politics is a young man's game. You can't wait for the call. Being drafted to run is the biggest bunch of malarky in the world. Parties don't draft anybody. Politics is like medical school or law school. If you don't know when you're about 18 that you want to be a doctor, you'll never be one. You've got to be excessively competitive from an early age, because the competition is so much stronger. It's the same with politics.

3.

[Q] Playboy: You've received a tremendous amount of press coverage due to your remarks about members of the House and the Senate. You've called Charles Percy a wimp and Daniel Patrick Moynihan a drunk. Are you worried about your reputation or are you only concerned that reporters spell your name correctly?

[A] Le Boutillier: I enjoy the attention. But the press has tried to portray me as something I'm not: a vicious and angry young man who's upset with everything. I'm upset with lots of things; but I'm not angry. I apologized to Senator Moynihan only because the statement I made should not have been recorded. It was off the record.

4.

[Q] Playboy: This is a Washington office, after all. Just how many records are being made of this conversation?

[A] Le Boutillier: Only two that I know of. By the way, this office belonged to Bruce Caputo when he was a member of Congress. He was the Republican pushing the big Koreagate investigation. He said that he had found bugs in the closet and that either the CIA or the Korean CIA had been bugging his office.

5.

[Q] Playboy: Public officials are sometimes del at evading unpleasant questions. Is that a skill taught in Washington?

[A] Le Boutillier: I learned it at Harvard. A professor asks an essay question and, of course, you don't know the answer. He probably doesn't expect you to know the answer. So you run off and write about something else, whatever you want. Professors don't grade you on what you don't know about the question. They grade you on what you wrote in the essay. It's the same in politics. You get asked your position on tax cuts. You don't want to answer that, so you talk about something else that has to do with the economy. People remember only your answer--not that you didn't answer the question. Reagan's very good at not answering questions. Either he says "I'm not going to answer," or he runs off and tells some funny story that gets the press mad but makes the public laugh and pay attention.

6.

[Q] Playboy: You readily agreed to talk with us. Do you feel that politicians can use the press to their advantage?

[A] Le Boutillier: Even a very clever politician, such as New York mayor Ed Koch, who's adept at saying things to use the media, can't manipulate them just the way he wants. The last laugh is always the media's. They control the amount of space or of air time the politicians get.

But if I couldn't use the press, why would I ever want to do an interview? When you get down to it, the only reason a politician wants press is that it leads to power. The more press you get, the more publicity, the more people who know you--and, you hope, like you--the more powerful you become politically. You want the power to do the things that you want to have done. Doing an interview with Playboy will probably lose me my next election. I do not have lust in my heart.

7.

[Q] Playboy: Does the Congressional life offer you any favorite perks? Isn't the Capitol renowned for its bean soup and cheap haircuts?

[A] Le Boutillier: I don't like bean soup and I wouldn't go into the Congressional barbershop. That place is a butchery. I pay for my own haircuts in New York.

8.

[Q] Playboy: Is it possible to maintain sexual relationships and function as a member of Congress? Or do you constantly face that teenage problem "How far can I go?"

[A] Le Boutillier: It's possible. But the threshold is a lot lower for members of Congress than for freshmen in high school. You had better judge very carefully whom you talk with, whom you go out with, where you go. If I'm photographed talking with someone at a party, that photograph can ruin me. I toe a very safe line. A woman can come into this office, see me alone, walk out and say that I made a move on her. Even if it's not true, (continued on page 194)John Le Boutillier(continued from page 133) I'm guilty once I'm charged.

There are evil people here and they're out to get you. I've been invited to a couple of parties and turned them down because I didn't know the people who had invited me. I could go to the party and get taken into a room with a video recorder going. You just have to be careful. So I go right home to my apartment, which is across the street, and I lock and bolt the door and stay in there alone. I'm always afraid that my apartment is wired.

9.

[Q] Playboy: Would a bug in your apartment expose something sordid?

[A] Le Boutillier: I swear a lot, which to me is no vice but which I know gets some people upset. And I bet on sports. I love fights. I bet on all the fights I can.

10.

[Q] Playboy: What's your major political concern?

[A] Le Boutillier: I have one thing I care about more than anything else. I'm absolutely convinced--I know for a fact--that there are living American prisoners of war in Southeast Asia. Some of those guys have been sitting there for 14 or 15 years, abandoned by their Government. I'd give up anything in my life to be able to get those guys out.

11.

[Q] Playboy: Some members of Congress are considered experts in such fields as taxation, defense and foreign relations. Do you claim an area of special competence?

[A] Le Boutillier: I'm probably not very competent in anything. All of us are ignorant about many things. You may be speaking about Poland one minute and about taxes or health care the next, and I promise you that you can't know much about any of that stuff. I don't think there's anybody in Congress who's in-competent, because people had to get elected to get here--so the public has judged them to be competent. Whether or not I would judge them to be competent--now, that's a different story.

12.

[Q] Playboy: How does the White House get the Republican troops in Congress to fall into line on Administration proposals?

[A] Le Boutillier: I wasn't going to vote for an agricultural bill, and a couple of days before the vote, I told a guy in my office to let the White House know. So a couple of White House guys started calling me. I got a little bit of heat on that one. The night before the grain-embargo vote, a guy called me and said, "The President is very concerned about your vote." I told him, "Bullshit! If he's so concerned, why hasn't he ever talked to me about it? Why don't you get him to call me?"

13.

[Q] Playboy: The press has made you out to be a favorite of the White House. Do you often dine off Nancy's china?

[A] Le Boutillier: I just had my first meal there. It was a luncheon for the National Hockey League All-Star Game, and they served this ice-cream cake for dessert in the shape of a hockey puck with large hockey sticks that you could eat on the top. It was the best thing I've ever eaten in my life.

They had three people in the receiving line at the White House: Reagan, George Bush and Bob Hope. How do you figure that one? My guess is that Bob Hope lives in the White House. He sure looked like he knew his way around.

14.

[Q] Playboy: You're related to socially prominent families--Vanderbilts and Whitneys. You come from an affluent district on Long Island. Politicians seem to vie with one another to claim humble origins. Would you like to give it a try?

[A] Le Boutillier: My immediate family didn't have in any way the type of life that most rich people have. My father was a test pilot, and my family still lives in the same house he was born in. It's on four acres. We can't sell the place; no one wants to buy it. I went to good schools where a lot of the kids were real rich, and at Harvard, certainly, you saw the difference between the middle- and lower-class kids and the upper-class ones. The upper-class ones were far out and left wing, mostly out of guilt over what they had.

15.

[Q] Playboy: White House advisors, Cabinet Secretaries, Gloria Vanderbilt and a slew of her fashion models appeared at a recent fund raiser on your behalf. Why would they court favor with a freshman Congressman?

[A] Le Boutillier: I just asked them if they'd help me, and they probably don't get asked very often, so they said yes. The one who's helped me most as far as money goes is Justin Dart. He's a great friend of the Reagans' and of mine. He's the kind of man every American should idolize, because he started out with very little and built a couple of businesses--Rexall Drugs and West Bend and Tupperware. He and Holmes Tuttle held a fund-raising party for me two years ago. They were the guys who helped start Reagan in 1965. On the day Reagan was inaugurated, Dart slapped me on the back and said, "John, you're going to be the best goddamned fucking freshman there ever was."

16.

[Q] Playboy: Members of Congress don't always deal with the major issues of the day. Aren't you duty bound to provide American flags that have flown over the Capitol to favorite constituents?

[A] Le Boutillier: I must have given away dozens. But I've got a new proposal to cut down on Government expenditures. There are four or five guys on the Capitol roof who put the flags on a little machine. They run the flags up for a second and then take them down, just so you can say that this flag flew over the Capitol. I propose that we take all the flags right from the factory, put them in a 747 and fly them right over the Capitol. Or we could use an AWACS plane.

17.

[Q] Playboy: Are you serving your constituents by talking with Playboy?

[A] Le Boutillier: Absolutely. One of the things you have to figure out is how to communicate with the people in the district. So you try to be in the magazines and the newspapers that they read. I bet Playboy does really well in this district, because a lot of white-collar men and women read it. But I don't buy it just for the articles. I look at everything in Playboy. I wouldn't talk with Penthouse.

18.

[Q] Playboy: You've visited with Richard Nixon. Does he ever doff his jacket and tie?

[A] Le Boutillier: He's a lot like you've heard. Jacket and tie all the time. But he's soft-spoken, much more so than people realize. He is a real creature of politics. Nixon, of all the Presidents in this century, was intellectually the best prepared, the man with the most self-discipline, the guy who worked toward a goal more than anybody else.

To this day, after eight years out of office, he still has probably a better command of all the issues than anybody in public life. People should never confuse their moral outrage about his behavior with their judgment of his abilities, because as awful as some people think he is, they should recognize a real brilliance in Nixon.

I've had lengthy conversations with him on three or four occasions, all of which have been nothing but a pleasure. He's very interested in everything that goes on in the House of Representatives and in the Republican Party. And he loves to give advice to people. He's told people I know that he thinks I'm a bomb thrower. He thinks I'm a little outspoken. Maybe he doesn't really like that.

19.

[Q] Playboy: As an elected official, do you feel obliged to bad-mouth the Federal bureaucracy?

[A] Le Boutillier: The encounters I've had with career bureaucrats make me mad. I hate them so much I can't put it into words. They are the outgrowth of bad government. They run the Government despite what those of us who are elected to run it say, and we're the ones who get the blame for bad government. Even if Reagan issues a direct order, he'll just be laughed at, because bureaucrats know the President has no power over them.

I'd prefer to go back to the spoils system. We win an election; we run the Government. If we don't run it well, we all get thrown out.

20.

[Q] Playboy: You're a big fan of the Eagles'. Will you consider a career as a rock-music impresario if the voters don't return you to Congress in November?

[A] Le Boutillier: I don't know the Eagles, but I hope I get to meet them. I think they're great, though I hear they're now doing individual albums, which is sort of distressing.

I was going to ask George Steinbrenner if he'd let me pitch in the minor leagues. But I don't know. I just don't treat people the way he treats them. There are some dictatorial things in Yankee Stadium that don't quite smack of the old Yankee tradition.

But if something happened so that I couldn't stay in politics, I could do something else for a while. I have all the good things going for me. I have the best educational credentials you can get. I'm just beginning. I'm not burned out. I haven't shot my wad.

"My guess is that Bob Hope lives in the White House. He sure looked like he knew his way around."