The Secret History of the 116 Club, the Inner Sanctum of the US Political Aristocracy

Part III: Political scandals, corruption, moral failures and other quotidian affairs during the 116’s early years.

For Part I of this series, click here. For Part II, click here.

116 Club VIP Senator Harrison Williams, seen here during happier times prior to his 1982 conviction for bribery in the Abscam scandal, with his dear friend Yassir Habib, an Arab sheikh. Unfortunately for Harrison, the sheikh was actually Richard Farhardt, an FBI agent who he accepted bribes from. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Towards the close of the second installment of this series, the Quorum Club, the 116’s predecessor, shut down in 1965 due to bad press and its founder, President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s close aide Bobby Baker, and a number of prominent members were heading to prison or soon would be on corruption charges. In September of that same year, a group of Baker’s closest associates opened the 116 and a large share of the Quorum Club’s members joined the new establishment.

The leaders and members of the 116 were determined to amend their ways. By that, I don’t mean to say they decided to stop being corrupt, but rather they resolved to keep a lower profile at the 116 than they had at the Quorum Club. To wit, the 116’s founders tried to obscure the new establishment’s direct ties to the Quorum Club by rechristening it after its new address at 116 Schott’s Alley,

Beyond that and other perception management steps, the 116 was essentially a carbon copy of the Quorum Club. To take one example, which entirely gives the game away about the general modus operandi of both, the 116 continued its predecessor’s practice of making it a lot cheaper for members of congress, Hill staffers and administration officials to join the club than for the lobbyists, political operatives and corporate executives who ran it for the specific purpose of gaining access to and currying favor with the former group in hopes of winning support for legislation and laws favorable to their clients and companies.

In an interview many years after it was inaugurated, the late Joseph Kimmitt, a former top Hill staffer, close friend of Quorum Club founder Baker, and 116 member, said the venue continued to be “run by a lot of old curmudgeons who remember the ‘good old days’,” and remained “very hard to get into, almost impossible.” 

Hence, as it could not have been otherwise given the DNA of the 116 and its members, it wasn’t long before its premises were filled with a shadow copy version of the rogues and scoundrels that populated the Quorum Club. Among the regulars were ethically-challenged senators such as Robert Byrd, whose ex-staffer Joe Stewart was a 116 founder, Strom Thurmond, Ted Stevens and Harrison Williams, who, as noted in the previous installment, was sentenced to prison in 1982 for taking bribes from FBI agents posing as Arab sheiks in the Abscam scandal.

A 1948 photograph of Strom Thurmond, a future senator who at the time was the governor of South Carolina. If you don’t recognize him, it’s probably because the photo was taken at a rare moment when Thurmond wasn’t wearing a white robe and standing next to a burning cross he’d set ablaze in front of the home of a Black resident of his home state. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Stewart McClure, who worked for Williams, described the 116 as a place where lobbyists “played poker and what-not, waiting for something to happen.” In 1970, five years after it was inaugurated and 12 years before his boss’s bribery conviction, he accompanied him to a lunch meeting at the 116 with Andy Biemiller, a former congressman who worked for a union group that was one of Williams’s major donors. “Biemiller had a list and he just handed it to Senator Williams and said, ‘Now this is what we want this year’,” McClure recalled in a subsequent interview conducted by the Senate Historical Office. “The senator said, ‘Stewart, you've got your marching orders.’ That was the end of it, just like that.”

Players linked to virtually every major political scandal during the past six decades joined the 116 – I’ll be publishing a lengthy list of current and historic members next week – including Powell Moore, a Justice Department spokesman during the Nixon administration and deputy director of public information for the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP). “There is absolutely no truth to the charges in the Post story,” Moore said in 1972 of an entirely true story by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward that revealed Attorney General John Mitchell was in charge of a slush fund for a dirty tricks program created to surreptitiously gather information that could be used against Democrats.

Another member of the 116 was Henry Giugni, a longtime aide and close friend of Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii who after retiring from public service became a vice president of Cassidy & Associates, one of the bottommost bottom feeders in the lobbying world, and often hosted lunches there. “The lure he offered was his intimacy with Inouye,” Washington Post reporter Robert Kaiser wrote. “Year after year, Cassidy clients won earmarks from Congress in the annual defense appropriations bills.”

In 1990, then-Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole accepted an invitation to address an assemblage of 21 tax lobbyists at a gathering held at the 116. The group’s members included Robert Lighthizer, who’d been Dole’s staff director at the Senate Finance Committee and continued to be one of his closest advisors and top fundraisers after he became a lobbyist.

Prior to the event, an aide to the senator sent him a briefing memo, which can be found at the Robert and Elizabeth Dole archives in Lawrence, Kansas, that said the tax lobbyists wanted him to share congress’s upcoming plans on fiscal policy, which one can imagine they’d be very interested in hearing about as it would clearly be of great value to their clients. Dole, who would retire a few years later and become a lobbyist himself, was more than happy to accommodate the group, which included a number of his major campaign donors. He and his senate colleagues were already hard at work putting together a deal to cut the tax rate on capital gains, Dole passed along at the gathering, and were additionally looking to make budget cuts of $50 billion.

The 116 played a role in seedier stories as well. In March 1994, ex-Congressman Tony Coelho – who had resigned five years earlier after he was reported to have profited handsomely on a junk bond investment made with money borrowed from a banker and Democratic donor – hosted a dinner at the 116 Club for about dozen agribusiness lobbyists. James Lake, a lobbyist for Tyson Foods and former aide to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and Richard Douglas, an executive with Sun-Diamond Growers, helped organize the dinner as well and were at the affair.

The purpose of the gathering was to raise money to pay off a $150,000 campaign debt of Clarksdale, Mississippi Mayor Henry Espy, who had recently lost his race for a House seat, and attended the meeting too. However, the lobbyists were more concerned about the mayor’s brother, Mike Espy, who was President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Agriculture and had been a great friend to their industry, especially Tyson Foods, the Arkansas poultry giant that Clinton and his wife Hillary has long and intimate ties with. 

Unfortunately, Mike Espy would be on the hook for part of the $150,000 debt if Henry didn’t come up with the money to pay it off. Fearful that financial stress would distract Secretary Espy from his duty of larding favors on the firms they represented, the lobbyists agreed to donate to the cause and ask family, friends and colleagues to as well. 

After details about the meeting at the 116 Club were reported in late-1994, Espy resigned from the Clinton administration. He was later acquitted on bribery charges, but 15 individuals and companies plead guilty or were fined for making illegal contributions or offering gratuities to Espy, including Douglas, Lake, Sun-Growers, and Tyson Foods.

In 1996, longtime Democratic House Speaker and former Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, who’d resigned two years earlier, visited the 116 shortly before he reported to prison to  serve a sentence for mail fraud. “In what may be one of his last good meals before starting his 17-month stay in the slammer for mail fraud, Rostenkowski lunched at the private 116 Club on Capitol Hill,” said a brief item in the Washington Post. 

“That's the discreet town house behind the Senate where lawmakers and lobbyists can do a little bidness out of the public eye,” the item added. “Several well-wishers stopped by Rosty's table to say hello and goodbye.

Official Portrait of Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, one of many illustrious 116 members and future jailbirds. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The 116’s cloistered atmosphere makes it one of the rare places in Washington where lawmakers and political operatives can discuss highly sensitive matters over drinks without fear of being spotted by problematic individuals, especially journalists, who might disclose seeing them there. A tiny number of reporters have periodically been admitted on the 116’s premises, but only compliant toadies like Jeffrey Birnbaum, who was allowed to conduct interviews at the Club some 30 years ago when he covered lobbying and PR for the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Upon retiring as a journalist, Birnbaum went to work for BGR Public Relations, another notorious industry bottomfeeder, where he’s now a senior executive.

In a sense, the press is indirectly complicit in the 116’s sleazy operations. The Club is private so reporters can’t get in, other than for sycophants like Birnbaum, but it’s hiding in plain sight yet is almost never written on. Fifty years ago, the New York Times called the 116 “a headquarters of subterranean power [where] legislation affecting billions and billions of dollars is discreetly discussed and drafted.” It hasn’t published a single story on the Club since.

Coming next week in Part IV, The Present-Day 116: The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same.