It Was All a Lie

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Race, The Original Republican Sin
 
You start out in 1954 by saying, Nigger, nigger, nigger. By 1968 you can t say nigger that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states rights and all that stuff.
Lee Atwater, 1981
 
I played the race card in my very first race.

It was 1978 and my first client was running for Congress in Mississippi. His name was Jon Hinson. He had been chief of staff to a Mississippi congressman named Thad Cochran, who was now running for the Senate. (Actually, back then they called the head staffers administrative assistants, or AAs, but as government became more about positioning for that next job and less about service, that sounded too much like secretaries, so the more elevated chief of staff became common. What lobbying shop wants to pay $500,000 for a former AA?) In high school I had been a page when Hinson ran the congressional office, and I d kept in touch when visiting the office on trips to D.C.
 
Hinson was running against the son of Senator John Stennis, a Mississippi icon of the Democratic Party. The son, John Hampton Stennis, was a state representative, and it was assumed he would win easily. I was in film school then at UCLA, and Hinson called and asked if I could make television commercials for his campaign. I told him I didn t know how to make commercials, that I just made silly little films and wrote scripts I couldn t sell. That doesn t matter, he said. You have to do it. I can t afford to pay anyone who does this for real. In retrospect, this might not have been the most compelling pitch. But like anyone who has gone to film school, I was eager to get out and actually do something even vaguely related to film, so I said yes.
 
I d been one of those kids who loved politics and campaigns and had walked precincts since the 1967 William Winter for Governor campaign in Mississippi. Winter ran against the last avowed segregationist to be elected governor, John Bell

STUART STEVENS is the author of seven previous books, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, and Outside, among other publications. He has written extensively for television shows, including Northern Exposure, Commander in Chief, and K Street. For twenty-five years, he was the lead strategist and media consultant for some of the nation's toughest political campaigns. He attended Colorado College; Pembroke College, Oxford; Middlebury College; and UCLA film school. He is a former fellow of the American Film Institute.

"Stevens stands out among Trump s conservative critics because of his candor about the deeper rot at the core of the GOP... He offers a grand mea culpa for his own role in paving the way for Trumpism." 
Sean Illing, Vox

"It Was All a Lie is unlike anything published in the Trump era: a photo negative of the genre of self-justifying apparatchiks... He s written a history of the modern GOP from an insider s perspective, as well as something deeply personal."
Benjamin Wofford, Washingtonian

"A stunning indictment."
David Corn, Mother Jones

A blistering tell-all history. In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses [that] the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies."
The New York Times

"This book is going to become an important reference volume for future historians trying to explain what happened to the Republican Party in the second half of the 20th century and the Trump era. It takes someone with Stuart Stevens' insights as a writer to be able to see this story and deliver it to us the way he has."
Lawrence O'Donnell

A sustained attack Refreshingly frank.
John S. Gardner, The Guardian

"Washington in 2020 often beggars belief: an American President answering a deadly pandemic with ignorance, inflaming racial unrest with racism, stoking violent confrontations while his fearful party stands mute... What if the accounting comes from one of the Republican Party's most accomplished political strategists, an insider provoked by Trump to reconsider his life's work? In fact, it has. Stevens dissects several categories of deception. Though he could not have anticipated it -- the book, completed last September, does not include the words "coronavirus" or "George Floyd" -- events of recent days keep offering improbably-vivid evidence for his assessments.
CNN
 
"A blistering attack on the modern Republican Party and its wholesale surrender to Donald