Amherst Reads Interview Transcript

Warren Olney (WO): I’m Warren Olney, class of 1959 at Amherst College and I’m sitting in a studio in Santa Monica, California with Chris Lehane, who is class of 1990 and is much more involved with the college than I am. He is a four-year member of the board of trustees, and he has written a book which I have on the desk in front of me, called “Masters of Disaster: The Ten Commandments of Damage Control.” He has co-authors of Mark Fabiani and Bill Guttentag. We know that Chris must have written most of this book, because a lot of the stories are familiar to me from stories that I know about. Chris, how did you get into being a “Master” of disaster, first of all, before we even get to what that means?

Chris Lehane (CL): When I was graduating from Amherst, it certainly was not at the forefront of my mind, of my career projector or my path would take me such a direction. Life creates interesting opportunities and moments. After I left Amherst, I had worked in political campaigns in Maine, which is where I had grown up, and that was in law school. I had signed up originally…

WO: Harvard, of course.

CL: I was blessed to have been at Harvard. Going into the 1992 presidential campaign, so this would have been the fall of 91, I had originally signed up to work for Governor Mario Cuomo, who many people thought was going to run for the presidency. I know this takes people back some years. You had this moment, on the last day you could go to New Hampshire and register to be a candidate on the New Hampshire primary ballot, and Governor Cuomo doesn’t show up. There’s this famous story with a plane on the runway in Albany that never leaves. So he’s not a candidate. That night in my dorm room, I get a call from the Clinton campaign. I had met the then Governor Bill Clinton the previous summer. He had shown up at a summer picnic hosted by the Democratic Party up in Maine. It was a typical Clinton event; he showed up and hour late, stayed and hour longer than he was supposed to, knew everyone’s name, knew their spouse’s name, knew their dog.

WO: He hasn’t forgotten them yet?

CL: He still reminds me of them when I see him! At the end of the picnic he puts everyone in bear hugs and puts his arms around folks, grabs them by their wrist or their elbow. When I’m leaving, I’m around 21 or 22, he says “are you with me?” And again I was 21, 22. No one  had ever asked me if I was with him. Certainly not someone running for their presidency. But I have having difficult time getting dates at that point in time. I sort of stammered and said “I’m signed up f-f-f-for Governor Cuomo’s campaign, but if-f-f not, sure!” I had sort of forgotten about it. Flash forward to this night in the fall at my dorm in Harvard. I get this call from this campaign saying “In Little Rock on such and such a date, you told Governor Clinton that if for some reason Mario Cuomo didn’t run, you’d be with him.” I had no idea how they found my number and tracked me down and so my immediate thought was, “either they have no one on this campaign, in which case I was going to get great titles, this was fantastic,” or “they’re so well organized, this is one of the greatest political talents we have ever seen. It ends up being the later and not the former. My first job on the campaign that I found out was that teaching folks from south of the Mason-Dixon Line how to lawn signs in the ground of New Hampshire after the fresh frost. They figured I was from Maine, I had to know how to do that.

WO: How do you do that? Do you take a hammer and bang it?

CL: Use a crowbar! Use a crowbar and a big sledgehammer to create a hole. From there, I ended up working on the campaign. It was a great roller coaster, a great experience. Still the greatest campaign I’ve ever been involved with. I ended up getting a job at the White House, where I ended up being part of a small group of folks in the White House Counsel’s office that was formed after the 1994 midterms when the Republicans took over the Congress, and embarked on a series of investigations into the Clinton Administration; originally called “White Water” eventually morphed into second term into what people know as the Monica Lewinsky hearings and the impeachment process and all of that. So I ended up being in a small part of a small group of folks at the White House who were ultimately responsible for being in the front lines and dealing with it. I got my on the job training in terms of how to deal with crises through that experience.

WO: That was a disaster in many ways. But was Clinton a “Master” of disaster? He came out of the White House as one of the most popular presidents in history.

CL: Clinton, at the end of the day, understood something; we get at this in our book. A crisis, ultimately, is a challenge to whether people trust you or don’t trust you. What Bill Clinton had, in some part because he’d been president for 4 plus years and was presiding over what is perhaps the greatest economic time period in our nation’s history, time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, he had established a public trust with the electorate. They had a pretty good sense of who he was as a person. They may not have had great trust in him at a very personal level, but they had tremendous trust in him as a public official. Because he maintained that public trust, he was ultimately able to deal with and whether the particular issues he was facing, that’s something I think he is a preternaturally talented communicator, politician. I’m a huge fan, it was an enormous privilege to have been small part of his White House and what he did for the country in my view was tremendous. But I think enough of that went through the public that they were willing to trust him through the process. And it didn’t hurt. We get into this a little bit in the book, but the folks on the other side, were not necessarily presiders having the cleanest hands themselves in the whole process. There was a growing narrative that developed and was certainly part of our strategy at the White House, which was to raise the question “are people trying to use the investigative process, the oversight process, are they trying to use it for partisan gain?” Again I don’t think anyone, and no one has, excused the conduct that took place, but a significant distinction between private conduct and what you’re doing as a public official in terms of moving the country forward.

WO: So which of the Ten Commandments that you outline in the “Masters of Disaster” would best apply in that situation?

CL: Our first commandment is called “Full Disclosure.” The premise here is that most people, given the world that we live in today, it’s not a question of if they’re going to face a crisis, it’s only when they face the crisis. And at some level, you’re going to survive by whether people think you handle it in a trustworthy way going forward. Now, Bill Clinton did not necessarily handle it in those immediate days and months when the story first broke in a way that’s consistent with what we are recommending in the book. I always point out that to me he’s a little like Hank Aaron of the sports world. Hank Aaron was the homerun champion for years. He actually hit the ball with his hands crossed the wrong way, because he was such a huge talent. Bill Clinton was a huge talent; he could do certain things that typical people cannot do or be able to survive. And he also had this basis of trust because he had been in public office for five years in a big time way. So people knew who he was, had developed a relationship. Clinton ends up being in a little bit different category than the typical person, company, politician, who ends up in a crisis. The commandments that I would point to are Commandments 9 and 10 in the book. Those deal with the fact that if you have someone one the other side, it’s incumbent on you to make sure that their agenda is made public, that you make clear that there are folks who are actually behind this who have their own motives, and to make sure that the people are taking shots at you, that they are not doing it without having to pay some type of price, at least in terms of exposing to the public who’s doing it, why they’re doing it, and how they seek to benefit from it.

WO: You fight back and you make it hurt.

CL: That’s right. That’s exactly right. We’re sitting here in Santa Monica near Los Angeles where Pat Riley, who used to be the coach of the show time Lakers back in the 80s, talked about “no free lay ups.” Don’t let someone take up a free lay up on you; make sure they take pay a price. In a crisis, typically is the case; there’s a competitor, there’s an opposition political party, there is someone who has a specific agenda in mind, and are involved in planning out the information. If that’s the case, you need to point that out and make sure that there’s no free lay ups for them. I would underscore that your ability to do that, and go on the offensive in that type of situation or counteroffensive, is much stronger if you’ve gotten out there on the front end and disclosed and begun to show people that you’re credible and that you’re telling the truth because that gives you more of a foundation to push back on.

WO: Speaking of the front end, let’s go back to your statement that it’s not a question of “if” but “when” the crisis will occur. Is that true of everybody? Is it true of all companies, all institutions? Is it true of Amherst College? Are we going to have a crisis one of these days and have to deal with it?

CL: I think it is for the following reasons. Ronald Regan had the famous line in that when your neighbor loses a job it’s a recession, when you lose a job it’s a depression. It’s a crisis when your neighbor has a problem; it’s a crisis when you have a problem for people to trust in you. It’s a scandal. We live in a day in age where trust is at historic lows. That’s across all sectors; business, religion, media, education institutions. Almost every single entity, in terms of how people measure the levels of public trust, they’re at historic lows. Also because of the way information travels, trust is always under assault. The old line in The Paperchase, which is also based on One L by Scott Turow, an Amherst grad, when John Houseman the professor comes down and says “Look to your left, look to your right. Either one of you will not be here by the end of the year.”

WO: That’s what they said to me my first year at Amherst College!

CL: I think they said it to both of us! I got the same talking point. But you all live in a type of ecology, from a communications perspective where you look to your left, look to your right, look in the mirror, all three entities are going to face a crisis. It could be a big public trade company, a BP that has a major crisis in terms of what’s going in the Gulf, it could be a high profile sports figure who’s dealing with steroid issue, it could be a politician caught with an affair, it could be a principal of a high school who has a cheating scandal that they’re dealing with, it could be a neighborhood restaurant with a bad series of yelp reviews, and it could be, the situation that so many of us have been in and break out into cold sweats, you hit “reply all” on the email, that was just supposed to be “reply,” where you’re talking and saying things that you probably shouldn’t be saying.  Crisis really depends on how you define it, but it really is at almost every level, and that’s part of the premise of this book is “how do you tell the truth the right way when you face what is going to be an inevitable crisis at some point in your career or your life.”

WO: You mention “Full Disclosure.” Do you really mean that? When I was drafted into the army and sent to the information school because I was an English major at Amherst College, they told us that the army policy was “full disclosure with minimum delay.” What we all know is that the army doesn’t do anything resembling full disclosure, much less with minimum delay. And what you learn about when you go into the army is how to hide things not how to show them. Isn’t that really what you need to do?

CL: We distinguish between full disclosure and being a confessional. Full disclosure basically means that you look at a situation, and I get asked this, this is a question we get asked all the time. When do we know we should get disclosed? I teach a class at the Stanford business school and they’re business folks and they tend to think in a very linear, very business-like way. “Tell me when I’m supposed to disclose.” It’s a bit of a soft science, at some level. But the simplest way to describe it is, as you consider the situation that’s in front of you, is are you going to be better off in the long run if you disclose under your own terms, through your own program, or is the situation so troubling that it’s worth it to take the risk that it doesn’t come out and not disclose it. That’s really the balance you have to put on the table, and it’s really a cost-benefit risk. In our practice, generally speaking, it tends to make a lot more sense because the information is going to come out, it almost always comes out. There are rare instances where it doesn’t. And so assuming that it is going to come out, you’re almost always better to put it out under your own terms, at your own timing, you get the benefit of the doubt, people perceive you as trying to be credible. It’s important that you hold yourself accountable, you take responsibility, you tell people how you’re going to correct what has happened. You don’t create expectations you can’t meet. But ultimately by going out there and doing that, you’re beginning to reestablish credibility.

WO: You use Tiger Woods as a great example of having failed to live up to that standard.

CL: Yes. Tiger Woods, the days prior, the weeks prior to when the information broke about the late night “car accident,” I say that in quotes, had been a transcendent figure in society. I’ve worked for a corporate client that does polling on the annual basis that looks at some of the most favorable people and least liked people in entities in the world. Tiger Woods historically was always in the top four or five. I mean in enormous brand, a brand of enormous value and equity. He wasn’t in the obligation to come out in the first two hours. Everyone understood that when something happens at 3:30am or whatever the exact time that occurred, it’s likely not a good situation, that something clearly had happened. His initial comments, and I’m translating and summarizing, that this was “effectively no-one else’s business”, for a public figure whose brand equity was predicated on being a public figure was just not a tenable position to take. He simply could have said, “I will discuss the situation, give me a couple of days.” You know, in his own terms, go out there, and acknowledge that there were issues, he was dealing with issues, marriage issues, that he needed to take responsibility. And that story ends up being a damning story no matter what. But it does not end up a story where he’s on the wood. The front page of the New York Post, almost every day for a month, more time on the front page of the New York Post than the days following 9/11, that 9/11 was on the front page of the New York Post. At the end of the day, he did enormous damage to his brand and makes his comeback that much harder.

WO: Did he make it even worse, because ultimately, the things that were revealed about him were very intimate and very widespread longstanding, and horrendously embarrassing. Would the media be less likely to pursue him and to find that stuff out if he had become clean, “yes, I’m having an affair and my wife is mad at me” and had gotten rid of that at the onset?

CL: That’s his pivot moment on this. You come out, you take responsibility, you hold yourself accountable, you make clear that you’ve had issues in your marriage that you’re accountable for. Everyone understands what you’re saying, everyone understands what that means. You, Tiger Woods in this case, is taking responsibility and going to try to address his marriage right. You’ve put the information out there – that then makes it a lot more difficult for all the stuff that began to come over the transom, to then become part of the public discussion and public affair. Because you’ve acknowledged it, you’ve taken responsibility, you’ve drawn a line in the sand. I think in that situation it would have been much much less likely that all types of information ended up being reported out there would have gotten out. Remember at the end of the Tiger situation he actually had to deal with, was it a press conference? At least he stood publicly and talked about it, he didn’t take any questions, where he effectively acknowledged that he was having to check himself into a clinic that dealt with addiction issues. A lot of that stuff could have been avoided had he been out there initially. You compare it, again here in Los Angeles, with a Kobe Bryant  who faced a much more serious situation. He faced criminal exposure, accused of certain types of acts.

WO: He was accused of raping a girl in Denver, Colorado.

CL: That’s right. And he came out, not immediately, but he came out a couple days later. He stood up on a stage, a pretty stark stage, with his wife, took full responsibility for having misconduct within their marriage, but then drew a line between infidelity and illegal conduct. And by doing that, by acknowledging that, he gave himself the credibility to really distinguish between those two acts. That allowed him to pivot, and ultimately him and his team raised some serious questions about the nature of the allegations. 

WO: One of the things that I find very interesting about the book is your emphasis about the core audience. It makes me think that when you’re engaged in full disclosure or disclosure of any kind, you really want to think about who you’re disclosing to and who you matters and who doesn’t.

CL: That’s exactly right. We always tell people to create your target. Who are the people or entities that you need to talk to, who will make or break whether you succeed, your organization succeeds, your business is viable.

WO: So it’s not always the media.

CL: No it’s not always the media. Doesn’t have to be on the electronic media, doesn’t have to be on the front pages of New York Times. Sometimes it can be a very discreet focused communication. Sometimes it can be in person. We use an example in the book with a matter we’re involved with; publically trading company that own television affiliates all over the country but when 2008 and the economic meltdown took place they had to go through a bankruptcy proceeding. They have a relatively limited number of people who own stock in the company, some institutional investors. And they were concerned that if the information on the bankruptcy was translated through the analyst who typically covered these, their shareholders would not get the full story.

WO: There goes the money.

CL: That’s right. And there goes reduced litigation, you want shareholders to approve the bankruptcy proceeding. So what they did is they went out first of all and met in an appropriate way with their core shareholders and explained to them what was going on. But then they also created a twitter feed, where all the fire lines and all the information became immediately available to sophisticated shareholders, so that they could analyze it themselves, having to have the information initially coming through analysts, who all had their own biases good or bad, and that was just a really good example to figure out who you really needed to talk to.

WO: But didn’t they take a hit in the short-term?

CL: They absolutely took a hit in the short-term. They certainly took a hit in terms of how people valued their stock. But long-term the company came back, ended up being very profitable, and sold, and the folks who stayed with it and were part of it ended up doing really well.

WO: Commandment number 3 is “Don’t feed the fire” and the example that you use has to at great length, it has to do with one of the biggest corporations in the world, Toyota.

CL: A big chunk of that took place in Los Angeles. Part of the story, which is 3 or 4 years ago, Toyota was going through the situation with a terrible situation involving apparent brake failures with their vehicles and all sorts of accidents taking place. Toyota went through this process where there was denials, then there was information that was put out that didn’t prove to be accurate, then they refused to release some information, and ultimately at the end of the day, over about a year process, Toyota went from being the number one car maker in the world to losing that status in large part because they did an enormous damage to their brand. To the automobile industry, credibility is incredibly important because it’s about getting someone to buy your car initially and stay with that company as it goes forward. So it’s trust…

WO: And then it went from number one, and then it dropped, within a year or so.

CL: And the number one status reflected a 40 year plan. All predicated building trust in this company because they saw that as a competitive advantage versus a lot of American auto manufacturers. The head of the Toyota company, at the end of the process, effectively came out and said “we were hurt by this because of our failure to effectively communicate.”  If they had gotten ahead of the story, taken responsibility, put information out there, even if they couldn’t answer questions at that time, at least look like they were trying to cooperate with the government or show some genuine interest to get to the solution as opposed trying to pretend there wasn’t an issue, they would have been in a much stronger place.

WO: How could a company of that size do something so wrong? I mean that seemed, at the time, so transparently stupid.

CL: At some level these are folks who help keep people like me in business. Part of it, and we explore this in the book a little bit, which is there’s basic human reactions to events. And for whatever reason there’s an instinctive reaction by some humans not to want to confront issues or put issues out there. There also is, and I suspect this was the case with Toyota, I wasn’t involved but from conversations and what I surmised, just the functionality of decision making, particularly a company facing a US issue but run out of Japan, translation, communication, cultural issues all come into play at some level. But I do think that one of the dynamics that we see all the time is that companies sometimes hire us to go in and put together these great plans, you know game out types of scenarios that they will face, develop their war room, we do all of these things. Sometimes when you’re dealing with a company and they’re only focusing their mid-level people on it and not necessarily their decision makers, they spend an awful amount of money game-playing things out creating all this, they go on the shelf, it’s a great plan. But when something happens, the people who are actually in the room who making the decisions haven’t been part of that process. Or, there is not a disciplined, coherent decision making process in place. We refer to as the fog of a crisis, it’s a playoff of the fog of war – people start to lose sight of where they need to go and the decisions that they need to make, and people aren’t disciplined. Systems break down and decisions are made or lack of decisions are made, bad information is put out, and suddenly you find yourself in a deeper hole than you began with.

WO: Amherst grads of a certain age and those who were students of politics will remember Gary Hart, who came very close to being a candidate at least for president of the United States. And when you’re talking about feeding the fire and not feeding the fire, you’re talking about the “Gary Hart Trap.” Tell us about the “Gary Hart Trap.”

CL: “Gary Hart Trap” is, if you’re potentially engaged in conduct, you certainly ought not to challenge people, to go out there and try to discern whether you are engaged in the conduct. Gary Hart had this famous incident where there had been rumors about whether he was someone who was having affairs outside of his marriage, relationship outside of his marriage. He vehemently said that it was untrue and challenged the press to prove it, the case.

WO: He said “Follow me around. I lead a very boring life. It’s not interesting.”

CL: That’s exactly right. Some intrepid reporters from The Miami Herald decided to take him up on his very kind offer. They literally followed him around, almost as  PI’s, and were able to find out. You can’t make this stuff up. Some people remember this but to remind people, he ends up being on a yacht with a former model by the name of Donna Rice, and the name of the yacht, which is cruising around the Bahamas, is called Monkey Business. You cannot make this stuff up, right? It ends up being one of those classic examples of what not to do.

WO: So it’s easy to find examples of things not to do, you need to give us a couple ideas of what to do. But one of the things that interested me, and interested a lot of people I think, or will interest a lot of people, and you mentioned it earlier, is bad reviews for restaurants on yelp. What is a restaurant going to do about bad reviews of their food and their service and their prices on yelp?

CL: It’s a really interesting dynamic. One of the reasons we identify why trust is under assault in this day in age is because you now have outlets like yelp which are effectively user controlled and user created. So anyone now can effectively be a reporter, not necessarily trained in the skills as people like yourself, but effectively playing a role where they’re communicating and generating original content. You got platforms like yelp and others that people go to and trade information on and make decisions on. So you often will see a series of bad reviews on yelp. But then the restaurant, the barber shop, the doctor, whomever it may be, sometimes responds exactly the wrong way, which is to attack the entity that questions them on yelp which then just creates conflict. In the book we talk about an instance I think involved a doctor in New York or Chicago I forget exactly where, who attacked the person who raised questions about their experience being treated by this person, and suddenly it was a local television story. So the limited number of eyeballs who had looked at it on the yelp reviews suddenly became a lot larger.

WO: The doctor sued!

CL: The doctor sued and created all sorts of coverage on it and it became a long, big story. At the end of the day, a lot more people knew that this was a place they probably should not go to than beforehand. And you compare that, we used the example in the book of a barber shop in Los Angeles, which actually took great pride in taking poor reviews, putting them on their wall in their barber shop, below it, explaining to folks what they were doing to correct the issue, going on to the yelp page and actually thanking the people for their comments and talking about how they were going to address the issues that were raised, and that’s a practice that you’re seeing really smart entities do. There’s actually a hotel chain now that follow the stuff on social media and have a whole practice. There’s an example that I think we derived from a Wall Street Journal story of someone who was complaining about the fact that the radiator was rattling out in their hotel and they tweeted it out and the hotel chain was monitoring tweets. And they saw that, and within a couple of minutes there was someone up in their room with a six pack of beer and fixing the radiator. And that story completely flipped and the guy ended up tweeting what a great place this was. There’s ways you can use the social media to be helpful to you but the way not to be helpful is to be engaging on stuff in a critical way.

WO: You can manipulate them as well I suppose by getting people to send in their own yelp reviews. You can write them out and dictate them.

CL: That is right although that’s a practice that the algorithms at the yelps of the world are pretty good at catching. The downside of gaming it is if it becomes public that you’re gaming it, it’s very problematic. In fact the level of sophistication of just everyday people who are using yelp are so high, that people are actually pretty good at being able to discern “that looks like it’s a prepaid message” versus “this one looks like a genuine message.” So if in some ways if it’s prepaid and it comes off that way it actually works against you because people sniff it out and figure it out. Again, people are generally distrusting, so they’re almost wired to be suspect of what they see out there.

WO: So, not only do you have, then, a communications environment where almost anybody can say anything about anybody whether it’s true or not and certain number of people are going to believe it and come out against you, but you also have people who are getting to be savvy about the way in which that information is being constructed in the first place and being distributed.

CL: That’s exactly right. We talk about any number of elements that go into the ecology, first of all you just have the number of outlets out there, 500 plus outlets, everything from mainstream media to micro blogs to tweets. You have the speed at which information moves. Remember when I first started doing politics, we talked about 3 news cycles a day. Now there’s news cycles within news cycles. You have the fact that people can leverage the information, you have the consumer generated information, and on top of all that, you’ll just have these huge levels of distrust which almost creates this huge negative feedback loop that generates this great sort of distrust that exists out there and why you’re almost always under assault on an almost constant basis.

WO: So you, who are masters of disasters, are part now of what is becoming a growing industry.

CL: It is a growth industry. I think that does reflect the fact that we live in a time period where it’s not a question of if but only a question of when, and all of those elements that we talked about are only increasing on a daily basis, on a new technology that’s out there. The continuing rise of social media, particularly with moving to mobile as aggressively as it is. The flip of it is that you also live in a society where people have very short time memories, and these are all tools that you can actually use to fight back and engage and try to restore your reputation if you use them in the right way. But it is a very toxic environment out there in terms of having to protect your trust and whether you’re deemed as a credible entity.

WO: Is there anything in particular that the core audience that might be listening to this interview needs to know?

CL: We talk about three basic principles of survival. First is “do no harm.” It’s the hypocratic oath of this particular field, when you find yourself in the hole, drop the shovel, stop digging, don’t bring in the back hoe. So many times it is the proverbial “not the crime but the cover up” that ultimately really get folks in trouble. So if you find yourself in a difficult situation, don’t do anything that would make the situation worse, being sensitive to the fact that people are looking at you closely. Second of all, we touched on this earlier, you have to be disciplined. You have to make sure that you recognize that this is going to be a long-term process.  It is not like flipping a switch and that you’re going to restore your reputation over night or instantaneously. You need a long-term plan. Third of all your North Star to all of this has to be credibility. Everything you do, everything you say, every action you engage in has to be with a focus. “Does this enhance or hurt my credibility? Because ultimately, credibility is my path back to earing that trust of that core audience that I care about.”

WO:  Have you ever come up with a disaster you couldn’t master?

CL: We do have a phrase that we had borrowed from Maureen Dowd when she had written on the column when I was at the White House. I think she had described a particular situation where we’re facing in this age a “deep, dark, unspinable place.” Occasionally you will come up to a situation that would qualify as a “deep, dark, unspinable place,” where the facts were just so problematic or challenging. But even then, Americans love comeback stories. Particularly if you’re a high profile or celebrity, you are going to get a second bite at a comeback at some point. It’s important to keep that in mind, but every once in a while you will come across a situation where there’s very little you can do and you just have to take your hit and think really long term about how your comeback is going to be. John Edwards falls into that category, he may even be immune from the comeback strategy. Some of the conducts he engaged in were just so bad that it may be very difficult even ever have a hope of comeback.

WO: I don’t want to take over the interview, but you remind me of a segment on a program I did today about the former governor of South Carolina who said he was going on a hike in the Appalachian mountains and he was going to see his mistress  in Buenos Aires, he’s running for his old congressional seat.

CL: Yes yes, don’t cry for me Argentina apparently!

WO: And he asked his divorced wife to run his campaign!

CL: Again the stuff that you see, particularly in politics, you cannot, if you put this in a movie script, you know we get thrown out because people will say it’s not real. But that’s a great example. Here’s a guy who had an affair, lied about it, basically lost his seat as a result of it.

WO: He never could

CL: Right, he just didn’t run for reelection for governor

WO: Served out his term

CL: But from a very conservative state, particularly a religious conservative state, South Carolina, and who now ends up being in the run-off for a congressional seat, which does go to the point that you do have the ability to come back particularly in the society that we live in. That was not a situation he handled it correctly in any way. We have a little fun with this in the book; although he did do his tour in South Carolina where he did a series of town halls to discuss his “Appalachian trail hike” so to speak. Maybe in retrospect it began that long term path to being perceived as someone being straight and honest about his particular situation after having lied about it in the initial phases.

WO: I don’t want to date this interview I hope it will last forever, but in two weeks we’ll know whether he wins the primary to run against the sister of Stephen Colbert!

CL: You cannot make this stuff up!

WO: You can’t make this stuff up.

CL: Like I said, if I was telling this to someone this they’d just laugh right out of the room, if you wrote the book they’d laugh right out of the room.

WO: Well, this book is “Masters of Disaster: The Ten Commandments of Damage Control,” one of the co-authors is Christopher Lehane. He is Amherst 1990 and a four-year member of the board of trustees, it’s been a lot of fun.

CL: Thanks. First of all, thank you so much for doing this. It’s great to have a voice of Amherst who is the distinguished and a gust voice of Los Angeles and Southern California, so a real honor for doing this.

WO: I hope that isn’t damning with faint praise

CL: (laughter)

WO: Given what people think about Los Angeles, but especially when they’re at Amherst College.

CL: I hope as many Amherst people as possible see this and recognize that going forward, the voice of Warren Olney is a voice of Amherst out there.

WO: Onwards and upwards. It’s you and me guy.

CL: There you go.

WO: Alright.

CL: Thank you.