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pokerticians
The game is the same, it's just up on another level. —bob dylan, "po' boy"
Poker skill didn't vault Barack Obama into the presidency. No cool-eyed read of a Hillary Clinton tell made it obvious he should reraise her claims to be an agent of change. Nor did he shrewdly calculate the pot odds necessary to call John McCain on his commitment to the Bush economic policies or extending the war in Iraq. At least not literally, he didn't. But when Senator Obama was asked by the Associated Press in 2007 to list a hidden talent, he said, "I'm a pretty good poker player." He seemed to be talking about the tabletop card game, but the evidence also suggests he was right in the much larger sense. As a writer, law professor, and community organizer, Obama was greeted coolly by some of his fellow legislators when, in 1998, he arrived in Spring.eld to take a seat in the Illinois Senate. Spring.eld had long been the province of cynical, corrupt backroom operators, hide bound Republicans and Democrats addicted to partisan gridlock. So how was this ink-stained, highly educated greenhorn supposed to get along with Chicago ward heelers and conservative downstate farmers? By playing poker with them, of course.
"When it turned out that I could sit down at [a bar] and have a beer and watch a game or go out for a round of golf or get a poker game going," Obama recalled, "I probably confounded some of their expectations." He was referring to the regular Wednesday night game that he and his fellow freshman senator, Terry Link, a Democrat from suburban Lake County, got going in the basement of Link's Spring.eld house. Called the Committee Meeting, its initial core was four players, but it quickly grew to eight regulars, including Republicans and lobbyists, and developed a waiting list. But whatever your af.liation, Link says, "You hung up your guns at the door. Nobody talked about their jobs or politics, and certainly no ‘in.uence' was bartered or even discussed. It was boys' night out—a release from our legislative responsibilities." The banking lobbyist David Manning recalls, "We all became buddies in the card games, but there never were any favors granted." Another regular was a lobbyist for the Illinois Manufacturers' Association, and the game eventually moved to the association's of.ce—which didn't keep Senator Obama from voting to raise taxes and fees for manufacturers. He says the games were simply "a fun way for people to relax and share stories and give each other a hard time over friendly competition," adding that they provided "an easy way to get to know other senators—including Republicans."
Most Committee Meetings began at seven o'clock and ran until two in the morning, with the players sustained by pizza, chips, beer, cigars, and good fellowship. Obama wore workout clothes and a baseball cap, but his approach to the cards wasn't casual. He wanted to win. His analytical background—president of the Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago law professor—helped him hold his own at stud and hold'em, though it did him less good in the sillier, luck-based variants other players chose, such as baseball and 7-33.
Link, who probably played more hands with Obama than anyone else in Spring.eld, observed that his lanky table-mate played "calculated" poker, avoiding long-shot draws in favor of patiently waiting for strong starting hands. "Barack wasn't one of those foolish gamblers who just thought all of a sudden that card in the middle [of the deck] was going to show up mysteriously." He relied on his brain, in other words, instead of his gut or the seat of his pants. "When Barack stayed in, you pretty much .gured he's got a good hand," recalls Larry Walsh, a conservative corn farmer representing Joliet, who neglected to note that such a rock-solid image made it easier for Obama to bluff. "He had the stone face," Link recalled.
Yet even as one of the boys—bluf.ng, drinking, bumming smokes, laughing at off-color yarns—there were lines he wouldn't cross. When a married lobbyist arrived at a Spring.eld of.ce game with someone described as "an inebriated woman companion who did not acquit herself in a particularly wholesome fashion," Obama made it clear he wasn't pleased, though he managed to do it without offending his poker buddies. Link says they all were displeased, and that the lobbyist and his girlfriend were "quickly whisked out of the place."
Obama also made sure he never played for stakes he couldn't easily afford. Only on a very bad night could one drop a hundred bucks in these games, typical wins and losses being closer to twenty-.ve. Among the regulars, the consensus was that "Obama usually left a winner." The bottom line politically was that poker helped Obama break the ice with people he needed to work with in the legislature.
"Barry," as he was called before college, had learned the game from his maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, a World War II army veteran whose black friends played poker as well. Barry also played with classmates at Punahou High School in Honolulu. His best game, however, was basketball. He wore a Dr. J 'fro, and his teammates respectfully called him "Barry O'Bomber." They won the state championship in 1979, and Obama later told HBO's Bryant Gumbel that, despite the O'Bomber nickname, "My actual talent was in my .rst step. I could get to the rim on anybody." His problem as an in-shape, thirty-six-year-old legislator was that very few pols who'd been around long enough to run things in Spring.eld could still make it up and down a hard court. His solution was the game in Link's basement. To connect with those who didn't play basketball or poker, he also took up golf, a game at which Link says "he wasn't a natural." But he counted every stroke. "When he'd shoot an 11on a hole, I'd say, ‘Boss, what did you shoot?' and he'd say, ‘I had an 11.' And that's what he'd write on his scorecard. I always respected that." Determined to write down fewer 11s, Obama took enough lessons to be able to shoot in the low nineties, and he eventually beat Link a few times.
But the freshman legislator seems to have understood that, as a networking tool, poker is the most ef.cient pastime of all. Its tables often serve as less genteel clubs for students, workers, businessmen, and politicians of every rank and persuasion. Instead of walking down fairways forty yards apart from each other, throwing elbows in the paint, or quietly hunting pheasant or muskie, poker buddies are elbow to elbow all night, competing and drinking and talking. The experience can tell them a lot about the other fellows' ability to make sound decisions, whether electoral or parliamentary, tactical or strategic. As Abner Mikva, one of the deans of Chicago's legal and political worlds and a longtime Obama adviser, put it simply, "He understands how you network." The networking paid off when, against all expectations, Obama hammered out a compromise bill called "the .rst signi.cant campaign reform law in Illinois in 25 years" and other bills mandating tax credits for the working poor, the videotaping of police interrogations, and reform of the state's antiquated campaign-.nance system.
After being "spanked"—his word for losing by 31 percent to the incumbent, Bobby Rush, in a run for Illinois's .rst congressional district in 2000—Obama returned to Spring.eld and set to work even harder. He also began speaking publicly about national issues. After September 11, 2001, he said, "Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy," and called for a better understanding of "the sources of such madness." After President Bush called for the invasion of Iraq, Obama chose an antiwar rally to say, "I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances." He cited his grandfather's service and praised the sacri.ces made during the Civil War and World War II, before saying, "I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the .ames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars."
After his keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in July 2004 made him an even brighter political star, Obama easily won election to the United States Senate in November. John Kerry's loss at the top of the ticket, however, prompted David Mamet to write an unconventional postmortem for the Los Angeles Times. "The Republicans, like the perpetual raiser at the poker table, became increasingly bold as the Democrats signaled their absolute reluctance to seize the initiative," he said, arguing that Kerry had lost in part because of his timid response to the distortion of his service in Vietnam. "A decorated war hero muddled himself in merely ‘calling' the attacks of a man with, curiously, a vanishing record of military attendance." Mamet went on to say, "Control of the initiative is control of the battle. In the alley, at the poker table or in politics, one must raise. . . . How, the undecided electorate rightly wondered, could one believe that Kerry would stand up for America when he could not stand up to Bush?" Mamet made his poker parallel even more speci.c by suggesting that a better "response to the Swift boat veterans would have been, ‘I served. He didn't. I didn't bring up the subject, but, if all George Bush has to show for his time in the Guard is a scrap of paper with some doodling on it, I say the man was a deserter.' This would have been a raise. Here the initiative has been seized, and the opponent must now fume and bluster and scream unfair. In combat, in politics, in poker, there is no certainty; there is only likelihood, and the likelihood is that aggression will prevail." Anticipating future elections, Mamet chided the Democrats for "anteing away their time at the table. They may be bold and risk defeat, or be passive and ensure it."
The playwright's point was uncannily in sync with advice Admiral John S. McCain Jr. once gave his children. "Life is run by poker players, not the systems analysts," he told them, referring to poker players' cunning and toughness, and their tendency to have a bold strategic vision, not fussy myopia. His son John III, while certainly cunning and tough, turned out to prefer craps, a loud, mindless game in which the player never has a strategic advantage and must make impulsive decisions and then rely on blind luck. His selection of Sarah Palin for the vice presidential slot and his unsteady response to the economic crisis were two of the better examples of a dice-rolling mind-set.
By contrast, the Obama campaign's preparation of a separate website featuring a .fteen-minute documentary video about McCain's role in the savings-and-loan scandal of 1989was but one piece of evidence that the candidate understood Mamet's point about raising. "We don't throw the .rst punch," he said, "but we'll throw the last." In other words, if the McCain campaign or its surrogates wanted to raise the specter of Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright, Obama was going to reraise. As he'd told his .edgling staff back in January 2007, "Let's put our chips in the middle of the table and see how we do."
Mamet's and Obama's analogies appear more traditional when we learn that as early as 1875, a New York Times editorial declared that "the national game is not base-ball, but poker," noting that the newspapers of the day were already in the "daily" habit of using "the technical terms of poker to illustrate the manner in which political questions strike the Thoughtful Patriot." This book will offer cases in point from nearly every decade since.
Where Mamet made clear why a politician must raise, especially with a stronger hand, Andy Bloch, a poker pro with degrees from Harvard and MIT, explained how bluffs might be read in military and diplomatic arenas. "In poker you have to put yourself in the shoes of your opponents, get inside their heads and .gure out what they're thinking, what their actions mean, what they would think your actions mean." Contrasting Obama with his predecessor, Bloch said, "One thing that got us into the Iraq War was that George Bush didn't realize that Saddam Hussein was basically bluf.ng, trying to look like a big man, when he really had no weapons of mass destruction."
Back in 2002, Obama read that bluff correctly. He also understood that the most pressing threats to American security were the bin Laden strongholds in Afghanistan and Pakistan. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, John McCain, and seventy-six other senators misread (or allowed themselves to be misled about) Saddam's bluff. The Bush administration then proceeded to squander tall stacks of military and diplomatic chips it should have deployed against Al Qaeda.
In April 2003, the Iraqi Most Wanted poker deck, with Saddam as the ace of spades and .fty-one other Baathists beneath him in the hierarchy, was of.cially designated the "personality identi.cation playing cards" by Brigadier General Vincent Brooks of the U.S. Central Command. The pattern on their backs was the desert camou.age worn by our troops. Cards with a similar purpose had been deployed by both sides during the Civil War and in every important American military campaign since. So it seemed rather telling that no deck depicting members of Al Qaeda was requisitioned by President Bush.
Although he was more likely to be seen on the campaign trail playing Uno with his daughters, or a pickup game of basketball, than poker, Obama has already extended the long tradition of presidents who have used the card game to relax with friends, extend their network of colleagues, or even deploy its tactics and psychology in their role as commander in chief. His tendency to .nish poker sessions in the black puts him in the company of Chester Arthur, Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon. But by limiting his play to small, friendly games, Obama is more like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. He has also played the national card game, as Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson did, at least in part because of the entrée it gave him to political circles he would not have had otherwise.
George Washington (1732–1799) and Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) both loved to play cards and gamble, and would no doubt have taken up poker had the game been around in their heydays. As a young of.cer, Washington received a rebuke "for wasting so much of his time at the gaming table," and Jackson was one of the most notorious gamblers of the early nineteenth century. But it wasn't until Jackson's old age that the French game of poque evolved in New Orleans—the city he'd saved from the British in 1815—and began moving north on Mississippi steamboats as poker. By the 1850s, however, it was the card game of choice among savvy risk takers in nearly every state and territory, and most politicians were playing it.
In November 1861, with Union armies generally stymied and the capital threatened by rebel armies under Beauregard and Johnston, Abraham Lincoln used a poker analogy to explain a dif.cult wartime decision to an anxious Northern public. The British mail steamer Trent, bearing two Confederate envoys to London, was intercepted by the Yankee captain Charles Wilkes. When Wilkes decided to take the envoys prisoner, he created an incident that threatened to bring Britain into the war on the side of the South. The British delivered a stern ultimatum: release the ambassadors and apologize, or else. "One war at a time" was Lincoln's rationale as he "cheerfully" freed them. Yet reporters and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic wanted to know whether the president would also apologize, as the British had insisted. Said Lincoln to one of them: "Your question reminds me of an incident which occurred out west. Two roughs were playing cards for high stakes, when one of them, suspecting his adversary of foul play, straightway drew his bowie-knife from his belt and pinned the hand of the other player upon the table, exclaiming: ‘If you haven't got the ace of spades under your palm, I'll apologize.'" As the great Civil War historian Shelby Foote would write of the Trent Affair: "Poker was not the national game for nothing; the people understood that their leaders had bowed, not to the British, but to expediency."
Theodore Roosevelt gained access to the middle echelons of New York's Republican Party in the early 1880s by showing up at their informal gatherings in a smoky room above a saloon on East Fifty-ninth Street. To overcome the mostly Irish bosses' impression that he was a "mornin' glory," a well-to-do poseur who "looked lovely in the mornin' and withered up" quickly, he insisted on taking part in every profanitylaced "bull session," in spite of his loathing for vulgarity and tobacco. "Some of them sneered at my black coat and tall hat. But I made them understand I should come dressed as I chose," he recalled. "Then after the discussions I used to play poker and smoke with them." His intention, writes David McCullough, was "to get inside the machine."
And it worked. These and other masculine gambits helped the formerly frail young man shimmy up the political totem pole with astonishing speed: assistant secretary of the navy by thirty-eight, governor of New York by forty, president of the United States by forty-two. What our youngest chief executive called the Square Deal was inspired by a set of silver scales presented to him by the black citizens of Butte, Montana, in 1903. Roosevelt used the term to promote a sweeping series of policies designed to ensure that all Americans could earn a living wage and that the scales of justice would be put into balance for black and white, rich and poor citizens. "When I say I believe in a square deal," he explained, "I do not mean to give every man the best hand. If the cards do not come to any man, or if they do come, and he has not got the power to play them, that is his affair. All I mean is that there shall not be any crookedness in the dealing."
When the dark-horse candidate Warren Harding was asked by reporters how he'd managed to win the Republican Party's nomination in 1920, he said, "We drew to a pair of deuces, and .lled." (That is, he made a full house.) After soundly defeating James M. Cox in the .rst national election in which women could vote, he continued playing poker at least once a week. Harding's games while in of.ce were for fun and relaxation, not pro.t or political advantage, and the rumor that he lost the White House china in one of them is merely a bit of embroidery. The more signi.cant charges are that Harding took poker, alcohol, and his affairs with at least two women more seriously than his responsibilities as president, and that he fostered a spirit of corruption. One of the regulars in his game, Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall, went to prison in the Teapot Dome scandal for accepting bribes for leasing oil-rich .elds in Wyoming without competitive bids. Other regulars included Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth and his wife, Alice, a daughter of Teddy Roosevelt, along with other members of Harding's administration, who came to be known as the Poker Cabinet. "Forget that I'm President of the United States. I'm Warren Harding, playing poker with friends," he would say, "and I'm going to beat hell out of them." Alice Longworth described the Prohibition-era gatherings this way: "No rumor could have exceeded the reality; the study was .lled with cronies . . . the air heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey stood about, cards and poker chips ready at hand—a general atmosphere of waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on desk, and spittoons alongside."
It was to promote policies designed to lift the United States out of the Depression in 1933 that Franklin D. Roosevelt, following the example of his .fth cousin, Theodore, chose a term from the game he knew millions of ordinary Americans loved: the New Deal. Throughout his three terms (and the few weeks he served of his fourth), FDR played relatively sober nickel-ante stud games in the White House to unwind after his grueling days managing the Depression and then the Second World War. Beginning only eight days after his .rst inauguration, he steadied and soothed anxious Americans with a series of popular evening radio broadcasts from his second-.oor study, where the poker games also took place. "Good evening, friends," he'd begin. As he delivered at least one of these Fireside Chats, he kept hold of some of his chips, .ngering them the way others might use worry beads or a rosary. His friends gathered around their boxy wooden radios could hear them clicking together in his hand.
FDR's .nal vice president, Harry Truman, had played poker as a doughboy in France and kept up with war buddies at small, friendly games in Missouri. In Truman, David McCullough teased out poker's role in our most mainstream president's careers as an artillery of.cer, haberdasher, judge, and politician. "He never learned to play golf or tennis, never belonged to a country club. Poker was his game, not bridge or mah-jongg." Truman's Monday-night sessions with old army buddies "had a 10-cent limit. A little beer or bourbon was consumed, Prohibition notwithstanding, and the conversation usually turned to politics. Such was the social life of Judge Harry Truman in the early 1930s, the worst of the Depression." During his years in the White House, he played with chips embossed with the presidential seal, though only once did he allow himself to be photographed doing so.
Eisenhower and Nixon, both of whom came from working-class backgrounds, played for signi.cant stakes during their military service. At West Point in 1915, Ike attended cadet dances "only now and then, preferring to devote my time to poker." During the First World War he paid for his dress uniform and courted the wealthy Mamie Doud with his winnings. As supreme allied commander in 1944, he outfoxed the Germans on D-day with a series of bluf.ng maneuvers before taking Normandy Beach.
As a navy lieutenant in the Paci.c theater, Nixon won enough in .ve-card draw and stud games to .nance his .rst congressional campaign in 1946. That same year, an up-and-coming Texas congressman named Lyndon Johnson tried to get himself invited to President Truman's poker sessions aboard the yacht Williamsburg—not to win money, of course, but because a seat in that game would have been a precious political asset. When those efforts failed, Johnson started his own game with more junior politicians, though he did play with Truman a couple of times at the home of Treasury Secretary Fred Vinson. And while John Kennedy didn't play much poker with cards and chips, his ability to call Khrushchev's bluff without triggering a nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 may be the best example we have of how the tactic at the heart of our national card game helped alter the course of our history. Even so, Aaron Brown, the hedge fund manager who wrote The Poker Face of Wall Street, credits Khrushchev as "the one who made a wise fold. He had a strong hand but not an unbeatable one, and he sensed the other guy was going to call everything to the river. Good laydown."
As we'll see in Chapter 29, bluffs, counterbluffs, and strong lay-downs throughout the cold war, from Khrushchev's threats to nuke Britain during the Suez crisis to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars initiative, gradually made it more apparent how important poker's most basic maneuver was to modern military and diplomatic strategy. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the survival of Western civilization depended on bluf.ng effectively. One of the most inventive scientists of the nuclear age, John von Neumann, began his monumental Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, cowritten with the economist Oskar Morgenstern, as a mathematical expression of bluf.ng. "As in poker," wrote Morgenstern after serving as an adviser to Eisenhower, "both we and the Russians must realize the importance of making threats commensurate with the value of the position to be defended, and not bluff so grossly that the raise is sure to be called."
Chapter 34 tells the story of the Massachusetts congressman Tip O'Neill's tide-turning change of heart about Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam strategy. During a poker game at the Army and Navy Club, General David Shoup told the hawkish O'Neill that the con.ict was a civil war between Vietnamese factions and wasn't winnable by U.S. forces, at least not the way LBJ was fighting it.

Excerpted from Cowboys Full by James McManus.
Copyright © 2009 by James McManus.
Published in 2009 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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