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 versus 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 hows as much as the whys.” 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 middle 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 McKechnie

Partner

Total Spectrum

Washington, D.C.