January 29 - February 5, 1998
![[Don't Quote Me]](/standard/image/headers/dont_quote_me_header.gif)
Another day, another story about how much Attorney General Scott Harshbarger's fellow Democrats hate his guts. Monday's entry is by Jill Zuckman, fresh up from the Boston Globe's Washington bureau for an election-year stint at the State House. In a Metro-front piece on Harshbarger's gubernatorial campaign, Zuckman repeats the by-now-conventional wisdom that the AG's pursuit of corruption cases against Democratic stalwarts such as Biff MacLean and the late Eddie McCormack has made him a pariah within his own party. Mr. Personality
Ed Cafasso, the attorney general's press secretary, is passionate, aggressive, and confrontational. Does that help or hurt Scott Harshbarger?
Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy
Of course, to the reformist Democrats and suburban independents who've always made up Harshbarger's base, his willingness to go after old-time Democratic pols is just one more reason to vote for him. But the constant drip-drip-drip of negative press has created a perception that Harshbarger can't get his campaign out of the starting blocks. And that, in turn, has Democrats who've been out of action for years (step right this way, Patricia McGovern, Ray Flynn, and Brian Donnelly) plotting challenges to Harshbarger rather than helping him solidify his support.
Which is why some media and political insiders are criticizing the Harshbarger camp for its inability to put a more favorable spin on its man's outsider status. And increasingly, some are pointing the finger at Harshbarger's spinner-in-chief, $80,000-a-year press secretary Ed Cafasso, an intense, chain-smoking, occasionally foul-mouthed former Boston Herald reporter known for his confrontational style.
As Cafasso sees it, there's only so much he can do -- and to his mind, all those stories about party insiders whacking Harshbarger probably do more good than harm. "A story about how Scott is not beloved among the Democratic Party establishment does not necessarily hurt him among the voters of this state," says Cafasso, a 36-year-old with unruly curly hair, piercing brown eyes, and a perpetual five-o'clock shadow. "It's hard to see that as a liability."
Cafasso may be right. But the media have accorded Harshbarger a surprisingly small margin for error, given his status as a popular two-term attorney general known for his pro-consumer, pro-environment agenda. From his heavily criticized utility-deregulation initiative to his widely mocked $1.5 billion tax-cut proposal, Harshbarger has been treated like a not-ready-for-prime-time player rather than a respected party elder. Hell, he didn't even get a bounce from being the only Democrat with the guts to challenge US Representative Joe Kennedy back when Kennedy looked like a shoo-in.
No reporter, of course, will admit to screwing Harshbarger in order to get even with Cafasso. But human nature is human nature. And if a reporter and/or her editor has felt the sting of Cafasso's temper over some perceived slight, well, eventually that's bound to take a toll on the politician Cafasso works for.
"Ed's biggest problem is he tends to shoot from the hip and he tends to overreact," says a Herald reporter who -- like many people interviewed for this article -- asked not to be identified. "I don't think that's good for any politician. That just raises hostility among the press. It doesn't mean that any reporter's going to go out of their way to hurt anybody, but it just makes it more complicated to deal with Harshbarger. It definitely gets talked about. It definitely is an issue."
"He's not very helpful. He's real abrasive," says another political reporter. "He doesn't like to spin, he doesn't like to schmooze. He's just kind of a dark presence who slips in, hands you his press release, and slips out."
Adds a party insider: "Cafasso hurts Scott tremendously. There are no deposits in the public-relations bank of Harshbarger, even though he's done some really good things. Yeah, he's done some screwups, but who hasn't? The ledger should be weighted greatly to his positives, and that doesn't seem to be the case."
That's not to say Cafasso has gotten under everyone's skin. Globe State House bureau chief Frank Phillips and political reporter Scot Lehigh, who share a byline on many of the Globe's most significant political pieces, both offer more praise than criticism. "He can whine and he can scream and he can yell, but I can laugh at him and enjoy him," says Phillips, who worked with Cafasso at the Herald during the 1980s. "He's a pain in the ass on behalf of his client, and I think he's therefore very effective." Adds Lehigh: "Ed's high-strung and can be passionate about things, but this can be a rough business. He's also very politically knowledgeable, and I've never seen him do anything that I consider unreasonable or beyond the pale."
But Cafasso has also managed to piss off more than his share of journalists. And unfortunately for him and his boss, he appears to have a penchant for pissing off the ones who've gone multimedia, and who thus can do the most damage.
Consider, for example, the case of Jon Keller, reporter and talk-show host for WLVI-TV (Channel 56), columnist for the Globe and Boston magazine, and commentator for WBZ Radio (AM 1030). Just before Labor Day in 1995, a state judge released Violet Amirault and her daughter, Cheryl Amirault LeFave, defendants in the notorious Fells Acres child-molestation case. Keller wanted to do a brief interview with Harshbarger, who, as Middlesex County district attorney, had successfully prosecuted the Amiraults a decade earlier.
"My phone call to Cafasso touched off a three-day runaround," Keller recalls. Finally, on the Friday morning before Labor Day weekend, Keller learned from one of Cafasso's assistants that Harshbarger was at home in Cambridge, packing for a holiday trip. Keller and a cameraman drove to Harshbarger's house, where, according to Keller, the AG "readily agreed" to go on camera after Keller explained that he'd been unable to schedule anything through Cafasso.
"It was not contentious in any way," Keller says. "He mounted a convincing defense of his position in the Amirault case, the story ran that night, and that was that -- except for the obscenity-laced tirade I received from Cafasso on my voice mail later that day, cursing me out for betraying an alleged friendship he and I had for putting him in deep doo-doo: `You fucked me with my boss.' `I would have set you up with him, but then you had to turn around and fuck me.' Every fourth word was the F-word. I've been yelled at, shouted at, reprimanded by the best in my time. But I've never received a phone message as abusive and unprofessional as Cafasso's message. So I took the liberty of letting Harshbarger know about it. He wrote me an apology note saying it wouldn't happen again, and it has not. I have since dealt with Ed without incident."
Or consider what happened to Paul Sullivan, who covers politics for the Lowell Sun, hosts a talk show on Lowell's WLLH Radio (he also fills in on WBZ), and is a regular on Five on Five, on WCVB-TV (Channel 5). Sullivan was hanging out with (coincidentally) Keller at the 1996 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, when Keller did a stand-up with US Representative Marty Meehan (D-Lowell). Meehan was effusive in his praise of Joe Kennedy, then the front-runner in the governor's race. Sullivan wrote a column in which he reported Meehan's remarks -- and soon received a call from Cafasso.
Apparently Cafasso had seen Keller's interview with Meehan on television, and was upset that Sullivan attributed gushy pro-Joe quotes to Meehan that hadn't appeared on Channel 56. "It was an attack on Marty Meehan, first," Sullivan says. "His theory was that Meehan had relayed the story to us inaccurately." When Cafasso insisted that Sullivan view a tape of the interview, Sullivan replied that he'd watched it in person.
"He was as mad as a hatter," Sullivan recalls. "He wasn't yelling -- he was just terse. I had never even met Cafasso. That was my entrée for being schmoozed by the Harshbarger campaign. They schmooze with hatchets. This is a uniformly unpleasant guy. I think, frankly, the press is resisting taking it out on Harshbarger. They don't want to do that. But every time you sit around with a group of reporters, Cafasso's name comes up."
As Keller's and Sullivan's stories suggest, when Cafasso gets angry he tends to overreact to minor provocations, and he tends to suspect bad motives where none may exist. Recently, for instance, Cafasso lit into Phoenix reporter Michael Crowley after Crowley wrote a piece that was critical of Harshbarger's views on utility deregulation ("Talking Politics," News, November 21, 1997). Cafasso insisted that Crowley should have contacted Harshbarger's office for comment; Crowley argued that Harshbarger's views had been stated on the record on a number of previous occasions. A fair-minded observer might conclude that each side had a legitimate point. (According to Phoenix policy, says editor Peter Kadzis, Crowley should have attempted to contact the attorney general, since his story was primarily about a policy Harshbarger had promulgated.)
But when Cafasso got wind that this piece was in the works, he left a voice mail in which he made it clear he believed it was in retaliation for his verbal fisticuffs with Crowley. "I thought perhaps you might want to give me the courtesy of a phone call," Cafasso said, "before you whack me for yelling at Mike Crowley for failing to basically fulfill his most basic journalistic responsibility, by actually sort of calling to hear what the attorney general's views are on deregulation before he concluded they were full of shit."
After leaving that message, though, Cafasso was pleasant and cooperative, agreeing to an interview that lasted nearly an hour. Which underscores another side of Cafasso that Keller alluded to: his ability to put aside his differences with people. In fact, the negative aspects of Cafasso's style notwithstanding, people who know him best say his abrasiveness shouldn't be taken all that seriously, and that reporters who are willing to overlook it can develop a reasonably good rapport with him. "You have to understand Ed and his temperament," says a friend. "On the one hand he could be yelling at you, but on the other hand he could be calling five minutes later and acting like a sheepish little puppy dog."
Tom Vannah, of the Valley Advocate, in Western Massachusetts, faults Cafasso for not being particularly prompt in returning calls, but he says he enjoys -- and benefits from -- bantering with Cafasso on his own terms.
"Because he gets back to you 10 days later, you've sort of got him over a barrel," Vannah says. "He knows he hasn't been conscientious, so when you begin to talk to him, he's a little looser in an off-the-record way than many of the public-relations specialists are. Of course, you know damn well he's only letting you know what makes his boss look good." Vannah adds that, so far, he's managed to avoid getting into any screaming matches with Cafasso; instead, he says, their conversations usually begin with Cafasso sarcastically asking, "What the fuck do you want?" or some such pleasantry. "This is reporter to reporter, `my dick's bigger than your dick.' Which I find kind of endearing, ultimately," Vannah says.
Cafasso, who grew up in a suburb of New Haven, got his bachelor's degree in journalism from Boston University. But he earned his PhD in aggression at the Herald, which he joined in 1986 after a stint at the Waltham News-Tribune. Even more than today, the Herald in the late 1980s and early '90s -- when it was under the ownership of the international press baron Rupert Murdoch -- was known for its no-holds-barred competitive drive. Its young staff had a reputation for working hard and partying hard (a veteran of that era refers to the Herald gestalt as a "testosterone maelstrom"), and few worked or partied harder than Cafasso, whether it was in the paper's cavernous, decrepit newsroom or over after-hours beers at J.J. Foley's.
"It was sort of funny, a real loose, underdog type of environment where people could get away with all kinds of weird activity," says another ex-Herald hand. "Ed had a sign over his desk that said THE HUMAN TIME BOMB, or something like that. It was one of those half-jokes. Part of the thing about Ed was that he was abrasive, but you could ridicule him. You didn't go in there with a thin skin. Everybody gave and got, and he was certainly in that mix." (Cafasso, now married with two young daughters he reportedly dotes on, says: "The Herald was a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away in terms of who I am as a person. I think a lot of people would say the same thing about themselves.")
Not everyone appreciated Cafasso's act, but no one ever said he wasn't a good reporter. Indeed, he emerged as one of the Herald's stars, covering not just City Hall and the State House but the San Francisco earthquake of 1988, the Persian Gulf crisis in the months leading up to the Gulf War, Gennifer Flowers's tales of sex with Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot's 1992 presidential campaign. He also served a stint as city editor, and even covered Washington for the New York Post during the early days of the Clinton administration, when Murdoch had to assemble a temporary staff after rescuing his former flagship from near-death. "He's a heck of a reporter, and I was sorry to see him leave the business," says Bob Sales, who was the Herald's sports editor during those years and is now assistant director of the MIT news office.
Cafasso also covered Scott Harshbarger's insurgent campaign for attorney general in 1990, which led to his current job -- and to an embarrassing ethical lapse that caught the attention of the Washington Post. In July 1994, Harshbarger interviewed Cafasso to be his press secretary; following the interview, Cafasso whipped out his notebook and interviewed Harshbarger for a story. The Globe, still smarting from a similar incident involving an education reporter who'd been hired by the Boston School Committee, took a poke at Cafasso in its Sunday "Political Capital" column, and Post media critic Howard Kurtz made Cafasso's transgression the lead item in a subsequent column. ("I had the opportunity to make some news for my newspaper, and I took it. But in retrospect I probably could have found a better way," Cafasso says now.)
There is, to be sure, something oddly dissonant about the notion that being nice to reporters should be part of Cafasso's job description. No doubt on at least a few occasions, the recipients of Cafasso's anger have richly deserved it. Nor is Cafasso alone in occasionally lashing out at the media. A political insider says she's found the press secretaries for several of the current and former gubernatorial candidates notably prickly -- not just Cafasso but also Rob Gray, who fronts for Acting Governor Paul Cellucci, and Brian O'Connor, who works for Joe Kennedy. Even state treasurer Joe Malone's press secretary, Eric Fehrnstrom (Cafasso's BU roommate and former Herald colleague), widely regarded as a smooth operator, has reportedly had some angry exchanges with reporters recently. "It's hard to start carpet-bombing in January," this observer says. "What do you do in July?"
But virtually every journalist and politico interviewed for this article agreed that Cafasso stands out for his combativeness. "He strikes me as an excitable guy, and having been on the other side of the fence, as he has, I'm surprised sometimes that he takes the tone that he does," says Globe political editor Doug Bailey. Mark Leccese, editor of the state-government newspaper Beacon Hill, who says he enjoys a decent working relationship with Cafasso, explains it this way: "I just don't think he likes reporters."
In the perpetually overheated media and political culture of Massachusetts, it's easy to forget that (1) it's early in the campaign and (2) perceptions aside, Harshbarger is the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination. One of Harshbarger's key political advisers, Don Davenport, says Cafasso deserves a good share of the credit for that, calling him "an enthusiastic, articulate, and energetic advocate for the attorney general."
Ultimately, of course, Cafasso has to please just one person, and there's no sign that grumbling from the press corps has affected his relationship with Harshbarger.
It's early on a recent morning, in Harshbarger's 20th-floor suite in the McCormack Building, and the AG is bantering easily about the upcoming campaign. "Don't go too hard on Ed, okay?" he says amiably before heading out.
In his surprisingly cramped office, with a spectacular view of the Charles River behind him, Cafasso defends his performance. "I have nothing but respect for the journalists in this state," he says, "but my job is to work with them, not for them. We try to be accessible, which I am, and my staff is on a 24-hour basis. We try to be credible. We try to anticipate their needs, and get them the information they need as quickly as possible."
On his run-in with Jon Keller: "I would hope reporters who have a problem with me would come to me first. I try not to give anybody the runaround. We try to make Scott as accessible as we can. It's not easy."
On his phone call to Paul Sullivan: "It's not productive to go over each one of these things. All I can say is that I had a transcript of what was said in front of me. And it did not match what was published."
On Tom Vannah's contention that he doesn't return calls: "Tom has called this office a lot about a matter that is subject to a grand jury investigation. It would be illegal or unethical for me to help him in any substantive way."
What appears to sting more than anything, though, is the quip about his not liking reporters. Cafasso is, above all else, passionate about what he does -- too passionate at times, too eager to go on the offensive against those he thinks have wronged him or his boss. But not like reporters?
"Oh, that's not true at all. That's where I come from. That's what I dreamed of doing from the time I was in grade school," he says, describing an adolescence in which he devoured Hunter S. Thompson's books. In some ways, those dreams were fulfilled at the Herald, and he says he still looks at those years as among the best of his life. "Everyone was friends," he recalls. "We broke a lot of stories, we kicked a lot of butt, and we had a lot of fun. It was a harmonic convergence."
In moments like these, Cafasso comes off not so much as the Last Angry Man, but rather as someone who is genuinely puzzled by the suggestion that others don't always see him the way he sees himself. Sure he screams and yells at reporters sometimes, but so what? Can't they see that it's just business?
For the time being, Cafasso will remain in the AG's office. When the gubernatorial race heats up and the action moves over to the campaign, he expects to move with it. The early forecast: a long, loud summer.
"If there's any reporter who's not covering Scott Harshbarger or this office -- or who's cheap-shotting Scott Harshbarger or this office -- because of me, then they need to take a hard look in the mirror," Cafasso says.
"Once in a blue moon I will play bad cop. And it is once in a blue moon. Sparks fly, but it doesn't start a fire. The next day is a new day, and we go from there."
Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www1.shore.net/~dkennedy/
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com
Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here
