The Playbook

He was born Harvey LeRoy Atwater on February 27, 1951, in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of an insurance adjuster, and grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. At twenty-five he was Strom Thurmond's college campaign-volunteer coordinator. At twenty-seven he managed Carroll Campbell's congressional campaign. At thirty-three he was Ronald Reagan's deputy political director. At thirty-seven he ran George H. W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign — the Willie Horton ad, the Boston Harbor ad, the long demolition of Michael Dukakis — and became, in February 1989, chairman of the Republican National Committee. He was diagnosed with grade-IV astrocytoma on March 5, 1990, at thirty-nine. He died on March 29, 1991, at forty.

Theodore Pemberton's biography opens earlier — in the South Carolina childhood and the Newberry College years, the Wofford fraternity-house years that produced the campaign-network DNA — and follows the arc through the Strom Thurmond apprenticeship, the long Republican-consultancy career at Black, Manafort & Stone, the 1988 Bush campaign and the Willie Horton television ad, the RNC chairmanship, the diagnosis, the deathbed conversion to Catholicism, and the apology to Dukakis that Life magazine published in February 1991.

What emerges is a portrait of the political consultant whose 1988 campaign rewrote the rulebook for what an American general election could look like — and whose deathbed apology the rulebook he helped write has carried with it ever since.