Not even his own family would readily recognize him. Less than a year ago Lee Atwater sat atop the Republican National Committee and lived in a state of deep personal satisfaction with his precocious success in national politics. Today he lies dying of brain cancer, his face badly swollen and his body drawn down from radiation therapy and medication drugs. Reading the few thousand words he shares about his ordeal in the current issue of Life, one finds a Lee Atwater reaching out for strength, because he knows this last campaign is one he cannot win by exposing the opponent’s weaknesses. “Now I realize,” he says, “that cancer is no Democrat.”
He was speaking last March at a fund-raiser for Texas Senator Phil Gramm. Weeks earlier the candidate whose campaign he had managed was inaugurated president, and he was telling a favorite joke about how Michael Dukakis had looked like Rocky the Squirrel when he took a ride in that tank. First his foot and then the entire left side of his body began to shake, and he fell. He would later learn that he had an inoperable tumor the size of an egg lodged on his brain.
At first he tried to rely on his old gifts, organizing friends to research the cancer and develop a plan of attack. “Everybody got assignments, ” he writes. “I had followed the ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu’s advice—’Know your enemy’— in every political campaign.” Desperate at times, he took the advice of various healers, such as shedding his black T-shirts and wearing red underwear. But a brain tumor (now he has another) doesn’t need any votes and it doesn’t take note of the color of your shorts. It just takes everything, and in this case there has been nothing to stop it. Now Lee Atwater is looking to God for help, a source he says never meant much to him before. “So now I have a fourth favorite book,” he writes, giving his Bible a place alongside Sun Tzu, Machiavelli and Plato.
