The Fall of the House of Zeus (7 page)

Lott also had an uncle, Arnie Watson, who served the same area in the legislature. At public events, Watson preferred to recite a pledge of allegiance to the old Confederacy rather than to a government based in Washington.

But Lott’s most important entrée to politics turned out to be the Gulf Coast’s veteran congressman William Colmer, another nominal Democrat affiliated with the political network overseen by Eastland. Lott took a job out of law school as Colmer’s administrative assistant. When the old man decided to retire before the 1972 election, he gave Lott his blessing to succeed him. But Lott surprised his benefactor, and many of his friends, by running as a Republican. It was an easy decision for him; it came at the height of President Richard Nixon’s efforts to lure erstwhile Southern Democrats, upset over the Democratic Party’s commitment to civil rights, to an increasingly conservative GOP. Lott felt at home with Nixon’s policies. Besides, it was good politics in Mississippi, tying himself to a Republican standardbearer who won his
greatest majority, 87 percent, in the congressional district that would elect Lott as its representative to the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time.

    By the time Scruggs moved back to Pascagoula, Trent Lott had become the darling of the archconservatives in the state. With the retirement of Senator Eastland in 1978, a power shift took place. Members of the Eastland network, layered into the political infrastructure of every county, needed a new leader who could bring patronage and appropriations from Washington, and most of them felt more comfortable with Lott than Eastland’s replacement, the freshman senator
Thad Cochran.

No matter that Lott, as well as Cochran, had abandoned the Democratic Party for the Republican. Those belonging to Eastland’s camp were Democrats in name only. Like Eastland, they called themselves Democrats for old times’ sake—and to maintain party affiliations that preserved Eastland’s seniority and ensured largesse from Washington. But the Mississippi conservatives had effectively broken with the national party long ago. For some, the rupture occurred in 1948, when the Mississippi delegation walked out of the national Democratic convention rather than accept a plank in the party platform that deplored segregation. Mississippi supported a Dixiecrat ticket that year that included the state’s governor, Fielding Wright, as a running mate for the renegade presidential candidate Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. For younger members of the Eastland apparatus, the final schism came in 1964, when a Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, engineered passage of the Civil Rights Act, while a Republican, Barry Goldwater, who opposed the legislation, carried the GOP banner that fall. Goldwater was buried under LBJ’s national landslide, but he won more than 80 percent of Mississippi’s votes.

Thad Cochran actually voted for Johnson in 1964. But as the Democratic president pushed the federal government toward his “Great Society” and encouraged a quicker fall for segregation, Cochran felt the thrust went too far and too fast for Mississippi. He drifted toward the Republicans. In 1968, he served as state co-chairman of Citizens for Nixon with Raymond Brown, the Pascagoula lawyer. Four years later Cochran ran as a Republican and won an open U.S. House seat—the same year Lott claimed Colmer’s office.

The two new GOP congressmen never bonded, in spite of some shared background. Four years older and a member of a different
fraternity, Pi Kappa Alpha, Cochran had been a cheerleader at Ole Miss and active in campus politics. The pair overlapped in Oxford; Cochran obtained his law degree while Lott was an undergraduate. But they were two different personalities.

From the beginning of his career on Capitol Hill, Cochran appeared easygoing, and courted friendships on both sides of the aisle. Lott was stridently partisan, and no issue better demonstrated this approach than his fight-to-the-last-ditch defense of President Nixon during Watergate, when Lott served as a junior member of the House Judiciary Committee.

Their attitudes were reflected back home, too. Cochran built a following among the wealthier, business-oriented voters flocking to the GOP. Lott attracted a coarser element, the hard-core segregationists and hardshell Protestant true believers. Cochran personified the Chamber of Commerce; Lott epitomized the all-white Citizens’ Council, a Mississippi organization dedicated to the fight against
Brown v. Board of Education
, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

When Eastland retired, Cochran moved quickly to declare interest in the Senate seat and locked up support before Lott could act. Just as he nursed old grudges from his losing campaign for student body president, Lott never forgot that he had been preempted by Cochran. His rival might take over Eastland’s office, but Lott began to assume control of Eastland’s organization.

There was no formal passing of the torch. The Eastland apparatus existed outside of party lines and had no structure. It was composed of a motley assortment of interests, its most influential members local lawyers and judges who gave the organization a patina of legality. In Mississippi, all judges were elected, and they were as attuned to politics as the lowliest constable.

The Eastland organization may have lost its long battle against racial integration, but it survived to represent the interests of conservative white Mississippians. It was capable of finding jobs for the faithful, of making such irritants as minor criminal charges and traffic tickets disappear from court dockets, of promoting sympathetic candidates for public office, and of throwing up roadblocks to progressive ideas or any piece of legislation deemed too liberal.

For the Eastland crowd, it was a fairly smooth transition to Lott. He had proper manners. Despite his carefully groomed appearance—he had creases pressed into the blue jeans he wore when he went native,
and he kept his hair styled—Lott seemed at home with the best of the good ole boys. He talked their talk, and he voted their way in Washington.

After he entered politics, Lott tended to surround himself with fellow Sigma Nus who could be trusted. He made it a rule to restrict his Capitol Hill internships to boys from his fraternity at Ole Miss, and at the top of his staff he preferred Sigma Nu alums to help watch over his interests. When he first took office, Lott appointed Tom Anderson, class of ’68 at Ole Miss and a Sigma Nu, as his administrative assistant in Washington. Anderson had been a banker in Gulfport, and he possessed the loyalty and discretion that made him an ideal associate for Lott.

Anderson took charge of the new congressman’s Capitol Hill office, imposing a strict dress code and issuing orders to other staff members with the discipline of a martinet. He was not the most popular figure in the office, but he became known as Lott’s alter ego, and constituents soon learned that if they were unable to reach Trent, it was just as good if they could talk to Tommy.

Anderson proved vital to Lott, helping him bridge the distance between the nation’s capital and Mississippi. He performed duties privately that the congressman avoided publicly, cutting deals, extending favors, and exerting pressure. It didn’t take long for Lott and Anderson to fall into the folkways of the political apparatus back home, and when it came time to inherit the Eastland organization, they were ready. Under Lott and Anderson, the Sigma Nus formed a new subdivision of the old network that would grow through the years. At the same time, they knew to stay in touch with the veteran insiders, and one of the valuable contacts they inherited was Eastland’s quiet operative, a former Mississippi State football player and Delta farmer named P. L. Blake.

    
Blake once described himself as a “plunger and promoter,” but basically he claimed to be a planter. “I’ve been involved with farming during my childhood from sharecropping,” he said in a 1985 deposition, “and had the desire of probably a lot of young people that was raised in the rural areas of someday owning a farm.”

Court documents indicate that some of the earliest loans to finance his land purchases came from the Hancock Bank in Gulfport. Tom Anderson worked for the bank at the time, before joining Trent Lott’s staff. The president of Hancock’s mortgage operation was Kent Lovelace, a
former running back at Ole Miss who had played against Blake in college and become his friend. Lovelace formed Dewitt Corporation, the real estate investment company that Blake took over in the mid-1970s as he began acquiring more than five thousand acres of farmland.

Blake held no political portfolio, but his association with Senator Eastland enabled him to obtain government loans easily as he built an agricultural empire. Some of his transactions proved to be as puzzling as the mystery about him.

Though Blake invested heavily in agriculture, buying farmland in North Mississippi, he dabbled in other ventures. In 1970, he served as a front man for the purchase of an American Basketball Association franchise that had been operating in New Orleans.
Though he posed as the team’s owner, Blake said later, “I don’t think I put any money in it.”
The Louisiana Buccaneers were moved to Memphis, where the club became known as the Pros. Their coach was Babe McCarthy, who had guided Mississippi State to a couple of Southeastern Conference basketball championships in the years Blake played football there. But after signing Ole Miss ace Johnny Neumann to a deferred $2 million contract, the Pros faltered. Nearly five thousand Tennesseans invested in five-dollar shares in an attempt to save the franchise, but the league had to take over operations of the club within a year. The team was sold in 1972 to Charles O. Finley, the iconoclastic owner of the Oakland A’s.

In another sporting gesture, Blake bought the Fighting Bayou Hunting Club in the little Delta hamlet of Schlater, a well-known venue for duck hunters. During shooting season, the club attracted a number of prominent Mississippians to its grounds, and Blake nurtured his connections there.

But Blake’s primary investments were in agriculture. It was no coincidence that the Farmers Home Administration loan program looked favorably on Blake while Eastland was in office. Eastland owned an extensive cotton plantation in the Delta, and over the years he had been instrumental in preserving a system of federal subsidies to cotton farmers while helping to dictate farm policies in Congress.

By the time Eastland left office, Blake’s political bona fides were so secure that he held on to his Farmers Home Adminstration connections. In fact, they may have been strengthened by Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, for Lott became the Reagan administration’s favorite son in Mississippi. Even though Cochran, a Republican senator, outranked Lott, the congressman scrapped and clawed to claim credit for
every pork barrel project in the state, for the right to dispense patronage and to name federal judges. He came into conflict with Cochran on some issues, and often Lott prevailed with the Reagan White House.

The Reaganites remembered that Lott had been with them in their near-miss run for the GOP nomination against President Gerald Ford in 1976, while Cochran had not. Four years later, with Reagan closing in on the White House, Lott tried to wrest control of the state Republican Party from Clarke Reed, the state GOP chairman who helped deny Reagan the 1976 nomination by delivering the Mississippi delegation to Ford. The Mississippi votes proved decisive, and like elephants, Lott and the Reaganites never forgot. Once in power, they took care of their friends.

In 1982, Jim Lake, a lobbyist who had worked as Reagan’s campaign press secretary, helped Blake win a government contract to store grain in elevators Blake had acquired in Texas. Tom Anderson also offered assistance. “He found out the routes that we had to go through, the procedures that we had to go through” to obtain a license to store grain, Blake said after questions were raised about the contracts.
In 1984, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found Blake’s firm, PLB Grain Storage Corp., in default on a contract after PLB could not account for one million bushels of government-owned corn that had disappeared.

Blake also ran into trouble when audits prepared by the inspector general of the Department of Agriculture determined that the Farmers Home Administration had failed to uphold agency regulations by making loans, intended for struggling farmers, to wealthy planters. The Gannett News Service followed up with a series of articles, and one of them featured P. L. Blake.
The news report found that Blake, the sole stockholder of Dewitt Corporation, ostensibly a modest farming operation in Mississippi, owned several subsidiaries, including the Texas-based PLB Grain Storage Corporation, a catfish farm in Mississippi called Quiver River Plantation, a catfish processing plant known as Cupid Corporation, and a rice-growing operation in the name of Delta Rice Farms.

According to court papers, Dewitt’s 1977 tax returns had listed assets of just over $3 million. But by 1983, its assets had grown to more than $42 million. Blake’s grain enterprise in Texas appeared especially profitable. Since 1980, the federal Commodity Credit Corporation had paid Blake’s company more than $17 million to keep surplus government-owned corn.
The grain was stored in elevators once owned by a famous Texas con artist named Billie Sol Estes, who
swindled investors and the government out of millions of dollars in the early 1960s by using nonexistent stores of cotton and anhydrous ammonia fertilizer as collateral for loans. Estes became so notorious that he appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine in 1962.

Blake, in applying for his own farm loans in Mississippi, made no mention of his investment in Texas. The Gannett article reported that Farmers Home had first heard from Blake in 1975 and “found him so persuasive it has loaned him money ‘to make ends meet’ every year since then—$11 million in all.” Although the federal loan program requires borrowers to disclose all assets and income, Blake never listed the PLB operation in Texas. As a result, he qualified for loans designed for farmers in financial stress and unable to get conventional credit.

After reporters began to ask questions in Washington, Tom Anderson called Blake to warn him of the news service’s probe. In a rare interview at his Greenwood home, Blake insisted to the Gannett reporters that his business was “still struggling our asses off and trying to make ends meet.” He said he had intended to notify Farmers Home of his Texas holdings in the coming year. “I feel like I’ve done to the best of my ability of being honest. I never stole a soybean. I never stole a bushel of rice. Everything I’ve done has been reported and aboveboard.”