Chapter 101: Getting Ugly

I had predicted that the race would get ugly, and it did, in a hurry. Andy Stewart had a tough fight with Bill Worley, and he spent far more money than he planned to. In April he eked out a narrow 52-48 percent win, and then immediately turned his sights on me. He had neither the record to run on nor the inclination to do so. He went negative immediately.

Every political campaign has both positive and negative aspects to it. Every candidate promises to run only a positive campaign, a campaign that focuses on his or her accomplishments, and the wonders they will perform. Only their opponent will run a negative campaign, because, of course, that’s just the type of person they are! Right off the bat you are going negative! Negative campaigns focus on your opponent’s faults, either real, perceived, or made up. The theory is that if you can’t make the public love you, then you can at least get them to hate the other guy!

I tried to stay positive, but McRiley immediately began preparing ads to go after Stewart. In this we were helped by the nasty campaign between Worley and Stewart. We saw what had worked for both men and what hadn’t and could move on from that.

Andy started low key but slimy. For Memorial Day, Andy claimed I wasn’t patriotic enough! He was one of those guys who always wore a flag lapel pin, and I wasn’t. We both went to various Memorial Day parades in the area, and we heard from some people that Andy was loudly claiming that I was disrespecting our nation by not wearing a flag pin. Brewster immediately came to me and handed me a bag of flag pins, large ones, and told me to always have one on me.

“You don’t think this is going to look like we’re reacting to him? I put one of these things on, and the next thing you’re going to hear is that I’m only doing it because I’m scared of him,” I told him.

“In this case we are scared of him.” He pushed the bag towards me.

I pushed it back. “No, we’re not.” What I couldn’t figure out was why Stewart was attempting this. He must have known I was a decorated veteran by now.

“Carl, you are speaking to the American Legion in Parkton this Friday night. You don’t wear one of the flag pins, you might as well write off their votes.”

I put the bag in my pocket, just to humor Brewster. “You worry too much, Brew. Come with me to the Post Friday night. It will be fine.”

We got a babysitter for the kids that night, and Marilyn and I both went to the Legion Post in Parkton, where Brewster was to meet us. I had on a nice blue blazer and white shirt, with pressed khakis, and the only thing patriotic was a red, white, and blue striped tie. Marilyn was wearing a very pretty knee length dress, also in red, white, and blue, though it was a flowered print. I didn’t have a flag pin.

Brewster took one look at me and immediately pulled a pin from his pocket. I noticed he already had one in his own lapel. “Did you forget, or were you just planning to piss these guys off?”

I stopped him. “Behave Brewster. I know what I’m doing. Now, knock it off and watch.”

Before I was called up to speak, I met with several people, many of whom were wearing a flag pin on their lapels. By now I knew Andy’s whispering campaign was in full stride, since everyone was glancing at my bare lapel. That was fine by me. When I was introduced, I had already decided to grab the bull by the horns.

I picked up the microphone and spoke into it. “Thank you all for inviting me here to the Post. It’s a pleasure to meet you all, and I can say that I already know a few of you. Right there in the second row is my neighbor, John Caples, who owns the farm across the road from me. My wife Marilyn and I have bought a lot of sweet corn from him over the years. I also saw Bill Elliott and Barry Henderson; didn’t know you guys were in the Legion. Thanks for inviting me.” It was a typical American Legion crowd, with some old timers going back to World War II and Korea, and others from Viet Nam and more recent conflicts.

“Anyway, before I get too much further along, let’s get something taken care of. I would bet that everyone here has now heard the complaints that I don’t wear an American flag pin in my lapel. Is that true? Have you all heard that?” I asked. I looked around and smiled. “Go ahead! Raise your hands!”

There was a fair bit of surprise at my bringing this up, and several voices spoke up in agreement. Slowly a few hands were raised, and then eventually most of the room raised their hands. In the back I saw a couple of reporters jotting in notepads. I wondered whether they had been invited by Brewster, or more likely, by Andy Stewart.

“I’ve certainly heard the stories. Where better to address the issue than here at the American Legion. My answer is this. I think we’ve all been taught that actions speak louder than words, right?” I looked out over the room and smiled at the number of people murmuring to each other and nodding their heads. “Okay, then. I’m just not the kind of guy who really wears much in the way of jewelry or pins. I don’t wear much more than my wedding band, my college ring, or my watch.” In each case I held up the appropriate hand. “Well, there is something else I wear.” I moved my spare hand under my tie and unbuttoned my shirt. I reached inside and pulled out my dog tags. “I still wear my old dog tags.” I tucked them away, and then reached in my left pants pocket. “And here’s one last piece of jewelry I could wear if I wanted.”

This was the reason I wasn’t worried about the lapel pin. Let them all stare at my lapel. It was obvious to me by now that Andy still didn’t really know who the hell I was. He must not have researched me much beyond the fact that I was a billionaire murderer. I pulled out the oblong metal case that military decorations are presented in and set it on the podium. There was a loud murmur as people saw me lift the top. I hadn’t opened this since I had gotten it years ago, except for earlier in the day, when I dug it out of my desk drawer. I pulled out my Bronze Star and held it up for the audience. “I’m not one to wave around my medals, but I think you all know what a Bronze Star is.” I pinned it to my lapel.

“Now, in case anybody here thinks I went down to Sunny’s Surplus this morning and picked this up, here’s something to read. Marilyn?” I gestured to my wife, and she stood up and came over, and opened this gigantic purse she had. “Folks, this is my wife, Marilyn. Now, to be honest, she earned this even more than I did, because while I was deployed overseas, she was back home in Fayetteville having our son. Anyway, she had this plaque made up for me. We’ll pass it around for you to look at. The photo is from my retirement parade. You’ve seen my cane; it was from my last jump when I earned that. Back then I was known as Captain Buckman, Bravo Battery, 1 ^st Battalion, 319^th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment, 82^nd Airborne Division.” I motioned Marilyn to hand the plaque to somebody in the audience.

“Now, when Andy Stewart was twenty-four, he was going to law school. When I was twenty-four, I was commanding some of our nation’s finest troops! When he was studying how to sue people, I was studying how to defend them! When he was firing lawsuits at people, I was teaching my lieutenants to fire 105s at them! If Andy Stewart wants to thump his chest and wave his flag pin, great! I’m not going to thump my chest and bray like an ass. I used to defend the real flag! Now, ask yourself, who do you think is more qualified to figure out the real issues with our nation’s defense, Andy Stewart or Carl Buckman?”

The room was stunned, but then erupted in applause. I kept going. “Now, I’m not going to sit here and brand myself a hero. Andy Stewart picked this fight, not me - but I will finish this fight! I will bet long odds that some of you out there earned medals. You know why I don’t wear this routinely, because you don’t wear it for yourself, you wear it for those who can’t. I look around this room and I see men who served just like me. Some of you were drafted. Some of you volunteered.” I gave a big grin, and continued, “And some of you volunteered one step ahead of the draft board or a judge. Yeah, I know how it works.” That got some chuckles around the room.

“Why are you going to vote for me? Because I’m the guy who knows what it takes to keep your sons and grandsons prepared as best they can be. Not safe but prepared and trained and supported. I won’t promise to keep them safe, because you and I both know it can be a dirty and dangerous business. However, if they get hurt, I’m the guy who spent time at Walter Reed, and knows what it takes to make sure their medical treatment is the best it can be. Then, when they are out of the service, I’ll be the guy who can make sure that they are treated properly as veterans, just like you would want! And guess what? It might not be your sons or grandsons! More girls are enlisting every day. It might be your daughters and granddaughters!”

“Now, who do you want making sure your concerns are being addressed? Andy Stewart can wrap himself in the flag and sing himself to sleep with the National Anthem, but do you really think he’s the guy to help you, to help your children and grandchildren? Or do you think a guy who served like you is the one to help? I can help because I understand. Can Andy Stewart say that?”

I pushed it a little bit longer and ended up with a standing ovation. I was asked to speak to the post in Westminster, which I accepted. Brewster was astonished, both by my speech and by the level of donations I received. I just laughed at him. “Brewster, I told you not to worry. Just watch. Andy Stewart is going to learn about this and shut down this attack real damn fast!”

John Caples came up to me at the end of the evening. He was a quiet and weathered man about ten years older than me. “Carl, I had no idea you were in the service.”

“Same here. Viet Nam?” I asked him.

He nodded. “Da Nang, ‘68 to ‘69.” He picked up the plaque from where it was laying. “That’s a pretty vague citation.”

Another man with us laughed. “That’s the kind of citation you get for when you’re somewhere you’re not supposed to be and doing something you’re not supposed to be doing, and nobody is allowed to know about it.”

I smiled. That was about as perfect a description for that Nicaraguan hike as I could imagine. “Close enough!”

Afterwards, Brewster excitedly told me we needed to push the Bronze Star and heroism as campaign hot buttons. I shut him down in no uncertain terms! “Brew, this is not a winner for us,” I told him.

“The Republican Party always looks good on defense and national security. This plays to that,” he replied.

We were outside in the parking lot at that point, so I just leaned up against the car. I shook my head. “Listen, I don’t know why Andy decided to pick the fight, but he screwed up. He should have gone after me on the Bronze Star itself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Brew, I’m not saying I didn’t earn the damn thing, but it’s not like on television. Things got very messy on that mission. I’m kind of surprised he didn’t have that already.”

McRiley shrugged. “He’s tied in tight to the various banking regulators, but he doesn’t know shit about the military. Maybe he simply saw the medal and decided not to push on a hero, but then why push the flag pin routine? Maybe he just doesn’t know what any of it means.”

“I don’t know either, buddy, but in my opinion, let sleeping dogs lie.”

Andy Stewart shut down the flag pin campaign quick enough, but immediately began pushing elsewhere. The obvious one was that I was trying to buy an election. No matter what I did, I was too rich. If I gave money to a local charity, I was trying to buy their support. Then, no matter what I gave, it wasn’t enough, and with my massive funds, I was being cheap. He loudly called on both the IRS and the SEC to investigate how I had come about by my ill-gotten gains (he actually used that phrase) and when both agencies ignored him, he called on the Attorney General and the Justice Department to investigate how I had bribed the investigating agencies.

There was a small grain of truth to some of what Stewart was claiming. For years I had been donating to any number of local civic and service groups. Five or ten thousand dollars is a lot of money for a volunteer fire department or health clinic, and I routinely gave a couple hundred thousand every year to groups all over the area. Most were in the district, simply because I lived close to the center of the Ninth. Brewster simply made my routine donations into photo opportunities. We never gave any campaign speeches at these events, but if asked, I was always able to say some kind words for the people involved and the fine and necessary work they were doing.

To be fair about it, Stewart was doing many wonderful things by giving away money, also. At least once a week he would have a press conference or a photo opportunity and be shown talking about a new government grant, or tax benefit, or road improvement. Of course, the money he was giving away didn’t cost him anything, whereas mine did.

We pushed back on two fronts. One was the Horatio Alger story about how I had built my business from nothing, even to making a drive-by movie of my parent’s house. They no longer lived there, having sold it as part of the divorce. Still, it showed I hadn’t grown up in a mansion. The other front was the negative one. I had made my money in the stock market. How did Andy Stewart, who had been working in the public sector non-stop since he got out of law school, build a net worth of over $20 million? When reporters started questioning our information, we released some carefully sanitized versions of the info our investigators had uncovered. No account numbers were given, but banks were named. The result was a predictable level of chaos, with Stewart fulminating about the release of the information and dancing around whether it was true or not.

A big part of Andy Stewart’s money was due to his position as the fourth highest ranking member of the House Committee on Financial Services, also known as the House Banking Committee. As such, he had taken over a half million dollars in the last ten years from various banks and Wall Street finance companies as campaign donations. Even better, leaving aside whether Andy had ever dipped his fingers in the till inappropriately, was the way members of Congress got to legally benefit from insider trading.

Very specifically, if a Congressman learned something because of his routine Congressional duties there was no prohibition against playing the stock market to profit from this knowledge. As a private citizen, I could go to jail for buying or selling stocks based on information I learned in a board meeting. Like in any number of other matters, the federal laws on insider trading did not apply to members of Congress or the Senate. If Stewart learned something from a banker or lobbyist, it was perfectly legal for him to call up his broker and act on it. Stewart was heavily invested in the banking business.

It might have been legal, but it was tacky, and I enjoyed watching him squirm under repeated questioning from the Baltimore Sun and the local television stations. I didn’t enjoy the second half of the ‘Billionaire Murderer’ label I predicted would be tossed around. There was no way in the world I could label Andy Stewart a killer. He was proudly declaring his push for strong gun control laws and tying this to me as well. Not only was I a murderer of my baby brother, my ownership and use of a gun validated the need for control of guns.

For starters he dug up all the mud that had been tossed back in 1983, especially the various allegations originally tossed around by the State Police in their pissing match with the Baltimore County Police. Some of those allegations, reported by that jackass WJZ reporter, were that I had used my wealth to buy my way out of jail. (If only! If I could have done that, I would have used it to bury the whole damn mess!) Then he started going after the rest of my family. My father, quite predictably, punched out a reporter outside of the condo in Perry Hall he had bought with his half of the house proceeds. Equally predictably, Mom was waylaid by a camera crew at the door to her apartment, made an incoherent statement, and then ended up hospitalized at Sheppard Pratt for ‘exhaustion.’

I heard from John Rottingen early on that reporters from Baltimore were calling. They hadn’t shown up on his doorstep yet, but at least one managed to find his unlisted phone number and bug them at home. They were taking it well so far. So far, I couldn’t see any of the local television stations or the Sun coughing up the cash to send somebody out to Rochester to bug them in person. I asked him to keep me informed, and then let Marilyn know the latest news from Rochester.

Brewster had the media people working overtime on this, because it was as awful as we had thought it would get. We ended up with a television ad that seemed to go over well.

(Extreme close-up of a giant Bowie knife, slowly pulling back until you saw a hand holding it angrily. Overlaid was a slow, deep voice.)

“Carl Buckman’s family was being terrorized by a psychotic madman. A stalker came after his wife. Her car was vandalized and firebombed. Their house was firebombed. On September 3^rd, 1983, he broke into their home with a fourteen-inch-long knife and announced his intention to butcher his wife and infant son, and then attacked Carl Buckman. Carl Buckman killed his attacker. His attacker was a known paranoid schizophrenic with a history of violence.”

(Pause.)

“He was Carl Buckman’s brother.”

(Longer pause.)

“Was the last sentence really that important?”

(Different baritone voice.)

“There’s a reason for the Second Amendment!”

We did that in print as well as radio, deflecting the murder into a defense of the Constitution. I wasn’t so sure how well that was going over. Polling just didn’t say.

The strangest part was when Andy Stewart tried to turn my family’s abandonment of me when I was young back against me, as if it was my fault. If they had thrown me out and disowned me, then it must have been my fault. I must have been evil to deserve the treatment I received.

By August it was getting surreal. The national news had begun following the story of the billionaire running for Congress, and Stewart’s narrative of my murder of my brother and my denouncement by my mother, who finally calmed down enough to give a statement damning me. It culminated with a dual interview on Meet the Press. Andy refused to meet with me, since that would be a debate. He went to the NBC studios in Washington, while Brew and I drove down to the WMAR-TV studios on York Road in Towson. I would broadcast from there.

The regular moderator, Garrick Utley, was out sick and the duties of host were being performed by Tim Russert. I had met Russert before, during an appearance on the show the previous year, and two dinners since then. We were friendly, but I wasn’t ready to call him a friend, and I didn’t think he was going to be favorable to me.

The interview started out normal. We were introduced with a quick head shot and a hello from each of us, and then Russert turned to the camera and announced that we were the contenders in “ ... one of the nastiest campaigns in recent American history. On the one side we have the Republican contender, Carl Buckman, billionaire investor and one of the leaders of the ‘Young Republicans’ vying for public office. His opponent is eight term Democratic Congressman Andy Stewart, a member of the House Banking Committee, now fighting for his political life.”

Tim turned to Andy, and asked, “Is that a fair assessment, Congressman? Is this a fight for your political life?”

Andy snorted derisively. “Hardly! Carl Buckman’s candidacy is a symbol of the Republican Party’s contempt for the struggles the average American is having in today’s difficult economy. They are running a billionaire with a bottomless wallet who plans to buy a Congressional seat. I have called on both the Federal Election Commission and the Department of the Treasury to investigate this flagrant violation of the election laws in the State of Maryland.”

“Mister Buckman, are you trying to buy the election? Have you heard from the FEC or Treasury Department yet?” asked Tim, turning to the camera he was using to talk to me.

I smiled and shook my head. “The Federal Election Commission and the Treasury Department? Those are new ones. The Congressman has been complaining about me to the Maryland Board of Elections, the IRS, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and they’ve all told him to go jump in a lake. I can’t imagine who’s next. The real issue is that somebody dared to run against the Congressman, and who has a program aimed at solving the very problems he admits his constituents are having a problem with under his representation.”

Russert turned back to Stewart. “Congressman, Mister Buckman is not the first wealthy man to run for office, and more than a few of them have been Democrats. Jack Kennedy comes to mind, and it wasn’t even his money. It was his father’s.”

“That may be true, but Jack Kennedy was representing the people. Carl Buckman is only representing himself. He has a history of eliminating his problems, problems like his brother, a problem he eliminated by murder!”

Tim knew of the current allegations thrown around by my opponent but hearing me being called a murderer was still unusual. Most politicians would weasel around it, calling me a killer, or saying ‘alleged’ or ‘presumed.’ He had a shocked look on his face as he turned to face me. “Those are astonishing allegations, Mister Buckman. What do you say to them?”

“It’s simple, Tim. Congressman Stewart is a liar. There are no allegations of a crime. Does the law allow a sitting Congressman to lie and slander anybody he wants? He is lying to you, just like he has been lying to the voters in the Maryland Ninth. What else has he been lying about?”

Stewart didn’t even wait for Russert to ask him anything. He immediately protested. “I did nothing of the sort. Carl Buckman killed his brother and then used his fortune to cover it up! His own family knows the truth about him. They threw him out of the family when he was sixteen, and then had him disinherited and disowned a few years later. Who would know him better than his own parents?”

Off camera I could see Brewster wincing. We knew it was coming, but it still sounded terrible. Nothing to do but brazen it out. “Yes, I killed my brother, a paranoid schizophrenic with a long and documented history of aggression towards me and my family. I covered up nothing and was investigated by both the police and the district attorney.” Then I reached into my inside jacket pocket and pulled out a sheathed Bowie knife. I unsheathed it on camera and held it up. “This is the knife that my brother came after my family with. I got it from the Baltimore County Police Department after the investigation was over. He brought this into my home and told me he planned to butcher my wife and baby son, and then he attacked me, and I killed him. As for my mother, she has a history of instability, and she is the one who purchased this weapon and provided it to my brother, along with the vehicle he used to carry out his attacks on us. I’m not sure how seriously you should be taking her statements.”