The passing of political luminary Frank Mankiewicz last week at age 90 spawned tributes from all quarters of the Washington scene. The legendary operative had a long and storied career, as press secretary to Robert Kennedy (he had the unfortunate duty of announcing the Senator's death to the world following his shooting on the night of the 1968 California primary), as campaign manager for George McGovern during the 1972 campaign, as head of NPR during the Carter administration, and as a well-respected PR and media consultant for more than 30 years.
It was in that capacity that he played a relatively obscure, but critically important role on behalf of credit unions during the historic Campaign for Consumer Choice, better known as H.R. 1151. For his contributions to that effort, for the essential things that he taught me during that time, and for the words of wisdom that he imparted, I will always remember Frank.
To refresh the memory, in a show of industry unity CUNA and NAFCU joined together in 1997 to form the Campaign for Consumer Choice, the effort to overturn federal court restrictions on credit union field of membership rules. A major part of that effort was hiring Hill and Knowlton, the well-known PR and lobbying firm, to give the effort form as well as substance.
Mankiewicz and I were, in some ways, unlikely allies. His background was as a strong Democratic partisan and an unapologetic liberal. I came from the Republican side, a child of the Reagan Revolution in the early 1980s and as conservative as Frank was liberal.
Yet we found much common ground in our love for the process, our zest for ideas and spirited debate, and our belief that politics, done right, was an ennobling business. He was fond of saying that he most enjoyed the public side of'public affairs, and it showed.
Frank Mankiewicz was a contributor to our communication strategy, early and often. I recall a meeting in the beginning stages of the campaign that featured much anguish about percentages of ad money for print vesus TV versus radio. Mankiewicz settled the discussion by simply stating that “credit unions connect with people, plain and simple. You're likable. Don't get hung up on the how's as much as the why's.”
Useful and absolutely on point.
That kind of pedestrian yet profound ability to observe and diagnose was Mankiewicz's gift, which he gave freely at several key junctures. Once Frank was in the middle of relating one of his many campaign war-stories to me and Larry Blanchard (the campaign's director and a credit union PR legend in his own right) when a call came in from a House staffer alerting us to a potentially serious problem with H.R. 1151. In the midst of the hastily-convened discussion of various doomsday scenarios that followed, Mankiewicz counseled that, above all else, we should keep moving forward.
“During the '68 Kennedy campaign,” he noted, “we always operated under the belief good plan executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”
The advice and counsel he dispensed was borne from an experience of the type to which constant attention should be paid. There wasn't much that he hadn't seen, weren't many significant players with whom he hadn't interacted, weren't many problems that he hadn't fixed. His obituary noted that “every conversation with Frank Mankiewicz was like a history lesson,” and that's true, as far as it goes. But his was the kind of history that was alive and well, the kind that lived every day in the constantly churning world of Washington in which everything old is new again.
And that's how I'll remember Frank Mankiewicz, as someone who reminded me that good ideas, and good people, are timeless, and are always going to win out. Something that the credit union movement benefited from more than 15 years ago, during one of our finest political hours, and will do so again in the future.
John J. McKechnie, III
Partner
Total Spectrum
Washington, D.C.
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