Joseph Miller's "The Wicked Wine of Democracy" is a memoir of politics in the 1950s and 1960s, an era in Northwest and national politics where the lines between lobbyist, journalist and advocate were very blurry indeed.

By Bob Simmons 
Special to The Seattle Times

Joseph S. Miller is a survivor of Northwest newspapering, political campaign managing and Washington, D.C., lobbying. At the age of 86, he's also a fine storyteller. The narrative of his memoir, "The Wicked Wine of Democracy" (University of Washington Press, 268 pp., $27.95) hums along like a Shiraz-warmed conversation at the dinner table.

A political operative with extraordinary skills for getting congressional candidates elected and for passing or killing national legislation, Miller seems both proud and chagrined in reflecting on his career and relishes insider stories of political heroes and crooks. He defends the craft of lobbying as "a natural byproduct of democracy," while educating the reader on the gritty details of Capitol corruption. At the end, he reflects ruefully on the need to change the money-mad system he played adroitly for half a century.

Along the way there are intriguing glimpses of political history: the vulnerability of Seattle's unsaintly hero, Sen. Warren Magnuson; the fussy unpleasantness of OregonSen. Wayne Morse; the insecurity of Morse's brilliant colleague and fellow senator from Oregon, Richard Neuberger.
Miller helped elect all three during his years as a campaign operative, as well as a dozen other major and minor stars of the U.S. Senate. He was involved in John F. Kennedy's winning of the Democratic presidential nomination, and helped lead Scoop Jackson's losing effort to become Kennedy's vice president.
For a longer and much more lucrative period he lobbied Congress on behalf of organized labor, railroads and small sawmill operators of the Northwest. As a lobbyist he was, in his words, no "vestal virgin dragged unwillingly into a cathouse of whores trying to seduce congress" but insists he lobbied only for causes he truly believed in.

Among the revelations Miller presents rather casually are blatant conflicts of interest news reporters were allowed to maintain in the 1950s and 1960s. He was labor reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at the same time as he was being paid as business agent of the Seattle nurses' union. He was a part-time political correspondent for Time magazine while being paid by the United Steelworkers of America to help run selected congressional campaigns. During the past 30 years, this kind of multi-tasking could get a reporter fired. In Miller's heyday it was commonplace.

During his years as a congressional campaign whiz — "the Democrats' answer to Madison Avenue," The Washington Post called him — Miller points out that his being on the United Steelworkers' payroll was a violation of the Taft-Hartley Act, a law aimed at stifling the power of labor unions and grandly ignored at several levels of government. He also acknowledges laundering illegal campaign money and witnessing cash transactions that could be called nothing other than bribery.

One such episode — the bribing of a Nevada member of Congress to keep him out of a Senate race — is related twice in nearly identical passages near the front and near the end of the book. Miller says it was his own doing, not that of the editors at University of Washington Press. "It's such a good story," he said in an interview, "maybe it needed to be told twice."

Summing up his career in the final chapter, Miller finds it unlikely that government regulation will ever control the "wicked wine" of the democratic system. The best we can hope for, he believes, is that the news media will come to focus attention on lobbying with the intensity they now bring to election campaigns: "The voters get a far more accurate picture now," he says, "than they did when campaign coverage was merely glorified sports writing."

Originally published at the seattletimes.com. Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company