In the wake of yet another hard-fought and bitter presidential campaign, FRONTLINE presents a spirited and revealing biography of Lee Atwater, the charming, Machiavellian godfather of modern take-no-prisoners Republican political campaigns. Through eye-opening interviews with Atwater’s closest friends and adversaries, the film explores the life of the controversial political operative who mentored Karl Rove and George W. Bush, led the GOP to historic victories, and wrote the party’s winning playbook.
Stefan Forbes, the film’s director, in an On The Media interview:
I didn’t set out to make a movie to hold Atwater accountable and let the rest of us off the hook. I mean, the fact that a guy who pals around with James Brown and B.B. King runs the most racist presidential campaign in 150 years, that reflects America’s hypocrisy about race.
Atwater does all these things and then gets down on his knees and somehow seeks redemption at the end of his life. That’s our country all over again. We like to sin on Saturday night and get down on our knees Sunday morning.
Atwater died at 40 from an unusually aggressive brain tumor. Was he repentant?
Friends of Atwater told me he never even repented for negative campaigning. The fact is, though, as Tucker Eskew, senior advisor to the McCain/Palin campaign says, the fear tactics that he had used on America came back on him. He would lie awake at night desperately afraid that he was going to hell. He apologized to a couple of people. They say he actually sent a telegram to Willie Horton apologizing for what he’d done, but he didn’t send anything to Mike Dukakis, as was reported in Life Magazine.
He still doesn’t apologize for making the Republican Party a Southern party, for putting the right wing evangelicals, whom he privately mocked as freaks, as guys with hands growing out of their heads, for putting them in firm control of Republican politics. He didn’t repent for any of that.