Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 17, 1994 TAG: 9404180166
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Sherrie Rollins has never been starstruck by herself or the people she knows, but when she found herself with the world's most powerful leader on the world's most famous airplane jetting above her humble hometown, she just couldn't resist.
She picked up the telephone, the phone reserved for her exclusive use.
And from Air Force One, she called home.
She said: ``Don't look up, but ...''
Below, in the brick ranch house where she was reared, her parents were profoundly proud.
The year was 1992, and their daughter was a senior assistant to the President of the United States, one of only seven women ever to hold such a distinction - and the only native Roanoker.
She was 33 years old.
"I just thought it would be a thrill for them," she said.
For the steadfastly modest Rollins, it was a rare moment of self-importance and look-at-me-now wonderment. But it was her mom and dad, so it was OK. For them, this was the crowning moment of their daughter's remarkable rise from small-town obscurity to having her very own office in the White House.
And a private line on Air Force One.
Trappings she would later give up amid a hailstorm of controversy that would test her affable sense of humor, and leave her with an insider's view into the strange world of national politics. Whether it is rummaging through Jimmy Carter's trash, making Ronald Reagan cry, or taking George Bush through riot-ravaged Los Angeles, Sherrie Rollins has been there.
Even in her marriage, Rollins has been on the inside track. Her husband is Ed Rollins, the campaign manager who prompted her White House resignation, and the man who landed them back in the headlines again last fall with statements he made about improperly suppressing the black vote in the New Jersey governor's election.
Roanoke roots
She was born Sherrie Sandy in 1958, the first-born child of William and Charlotte Sandy. Her father was a vice president at Carter Machinery Co. in Salem. Her mother was a homemaker. They lived adjacent to a working orchard, an apple's throw away from Mud Lick Road in what was then Roanoke County.
Far from Pennsylvania Avenue.
She lived the ideal "Ozzie and Harriet" childhood. Her house was the neighborhood playground, her mother the type who would have cookies and punch ready for her friends, then join them in climbing the apple trees that shaded their yard.
From an early age, she was a busy child, industrious beyond her years.
She wanted to be a teacher. For several summers during grade school, she organized "creative class" in her basement for some of the younger children in the neighborhood. She started her own newspaper, The Neighborhood Gazette, which her father mimeographed at his office, and she delivered door-to-door.
She went to public schools: Oak Grove Elementary, Hidden Valley Junior High and Andrew Lewis High School, where she graduated in 1976. She had two younger brothers. She was a cheerleader and a good student, but not exceptional or particularly driven.
"Just as normal as blueberry pie," is how her mother described her.
Rollins credits her parents for their combination of love and discipline. Under their roof, there were certain rules that she was expected to follow - without exception and without excuse.
Once, when she had plans to sleep at a friend's house, she forgot to call home when she got there, breaking one of the family ground rules. Her father waited an hour, then called her and told her to come home. She pleaded and cried, but her father stayed firm.
It was the last time she forgot to call home.
Her father also once flew home - at a cost of several hundred dollars - in the middle of a business trip when she was picked for the homecoming court, and it was expected that he attend.
"We weren't spoiled," she says, "but we were definitely a priority."
No clear plan
In the fall of 1976, she enrolled at the University of Virginia and had her first encounter with politics. She voted for Gerald Ford for president, where her interest in politics stopped.
By this time, she had decided against teaching and harbored a vague notion about public relations, an area of study that UVa didn't specifically offer. She designed her own program by combining classes from the business school and communications and selling the idea to the deans of both departments.
Her senior year, she arranged for an internship at a Charlottesville public-relations firm. She figured she would get a job in public relations or advertising after college, but, like many college students, didn't give the future much thought.
"I just didn't have a real clear plan," she says.
By chance, her internship led to a job after she graduated in 1980. The job was in Washington, where the firm was opening a satellite office, and one of her first assignments was to help with a picture book about the city that the company had been hired to put together.
The assignment took her to the White House for a photo session. Her job was to help move equipment and props at the photographer's direction. It was election eve, Jimmy Carter was out campaigning, and they were photographing the Oval Office.
At one point, the photographer asked her to move the president's trash can. "I was really curious what was in there," she says. So, she peeked, and she found, balled up, a negative article about Carter's beer-drinking, politically troublesome brother, Billy.
She remembers thinking then how fun it would be to work in the White House, but it wasn't something she set as a goal, or even a possibility. "It didn't even seem like a logical path," she says. "Who would have thought that later there would be a picture of me sitting in the Oval Office advising the president?"
A wonderful break
In Washington, another of her first assignments was to work with the Business and Professional Association of Georgetown, a small group of about 50 business owners that was looking to hire someone to run the association full time.
The group approached Rollins.
"It was a wonderful break," she says.
She was 22. "I wore my hair in a bun every single day in an attempt to look older." She had an office with a secretary. She answered to a board of directors, and her task was much like running a chamber of commerce.
She increased membership from 50 businesses to 400, and she organized a slew of special events to promote Georgetown that caught the attention of the Washington media - and the Reagan White House.
In 1983, the White House travel office contacted her about helping to organize some of Reagan's trips outside Washington. Her job would be to travel to a city ahead of the president and arrange many of the details for his visit.
Before she went on her first trip, her name was funneled to the Reagan-Bush re-election campaign. Rollins voted for Reagan, but she had not been politically active. Still, she recognized the opportunity.
"By this time, my interest was piqued," she says.
The campaign signed her up. She quit her Georgetown job, and by the thick of the 1984 campaign she was responsible for Reagan's state press coordination in all 50 states.
Her big accomplishment, however, was the 1984 Republican National Convention, in which she coordinated media access to key Republican leaders, from the vice-president on down, much like a booking operation.
Jim Lake, her boss on the campaign, says her work has since become the model.
"It had been done before maybe 25 percent of what she did."
Ed Rollins
She first saw him in Time magazine and commented to her roommate at the time: "Doesn't he look like the kind of guy you'd like to go out and have a beer with?" It turned out he was the kind of guy you'd like to go out and have a beer with.
They met on the campaign. Ed Rollins was Reagan's campaign manager.
She liked him. "It's hard not to like Ed," she says. She liked the stories he told about his dogs. He seemed principled and unusually candid, particularly for someone in politics. "He doesn't care if he's in or out, up or down."
About her, he would openly tell a roomful of people that she was the type of woman he could easily fall for.
Her parents were skeptical. He was 40, and when she brought him home to meet them for the first time, they were prepared not to like him. "Dad never approved of anybody I dated anyway," she says.
Ed won them over, although he wasn't the image of the man they expected for their daughter. Later, when she called to say they were engaged, her mother said: "It's not like we don't like Ed, it's just you've always dated such tall, handsome men."
Her mother didn't know Ed was listening quietly on the other end.
Ed and Sherrie married at South Roanoke United Methodist Church in 1987. They moved into a house in Alexandria that overlooks the Potomac River, along with their two dogs, Duke and Dutch, named by Ed after two of his heroes, John Wayne and Ronald Reagan.
However, more came with Ed Rollins than two dogs.
After Reagan's landslide re-election, he became White House political director, and Sherrie was offered a high-profile job as a White House deputy press secretary. She badly wanted the job, but sensitive to cries of favoritism, she turned it down.
"I didn't want there to be a question," she says.
Reagan in tears
Instead, she answered a want ad in the Washington Post for a public-relations job at one of Washington's largest commercial real-estate companies, The Oliver Carr Co., where she worked for three years and had two memorable encounters with Ronald Reagan.
The first came after she sent Reagan a St. Patrick's Day card that thanked him for a get-well call he had made to Ed, who had recently undergone surgery. The card said something about how God invented whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world.
"I didn't even think he'd ever get it," she says.
Apparently, he did.
She was at her desk at Oliver Carr when her secretary buzzed her to say the White House operator was on the line. Rollins didn't believe it. She thought it was an office prank. She picked up her phone and a voice said: "This is Operator One, please wait for the president."
Then Reagan came on. "Hello, Sherrie?"
Still suspicious, she didn't respond. "I didn't even say a word."
He went on to thank her for the card, and commented about how much he laughed at the Irish joke, and she quickly realized that this was no prank. She recovered as best she could, but she still gets red-faced when she tells the story.
Her second encounter with Reagan was less embarrassing.
In Washington, Oliver Carr was renovating the historic Willard Hotel, and it was her job to organize various publicity events surrounding its reopening. One of these events was a VIP dinner that she wanted Reagan to attend.
But the White House wasn't interested.
So, she turned it into a fund-raising dinner for the president's alma mater, Eureka College, which he couldn't refuse. At the dinner he was presented with a Eureka class ring, something he never had before. Moved by the gesture, Reagan got all misty-eyed.
"You know," Rollins says, downplaying the moment, "he was always so emotional."
HUD and Jack Kemp
Oliver Carr proved the perfect training for what followed: Jack Kemp and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. At Oliver Carr, she learned the housing and real estate game to complement her new-found political savvy.
It was 1989, Rollins was 30, and George Bush had just been elected president.
As Bush's choice for HUD secretary, Kemp subsequently tapped Rollins as his public-affairs chief, a job that requires Senate confirmation. She had a staff of 50, and the ear of a Cabinet member.
Plus, a national scandal to contend with, as Kemp exposed a system of mismanagement that reigned at HUD under the Reagan administration. Rollins was left to help the media sort through the wreckage.
"We had our own press corps," she says.
Typically, quiet agencies like HUD don't have such things.
Kemp valued Rollins. She became one of his closest advisers, and she learned first-hand the power of politics. She says that because she was in Kemp's inner circle, her effectiveness in the mass bureaucracy of the federal government was enhanced.
"Your power is directly influenced by how close you are to the secretary."
Rollins, in turn, was impressed with Kemp, a longtime champion of urban renewal. With him, she saw a side of the country she had never seen before - at least not up-close. "I think I've been to every barrio and ghetto in the country."
Although she knew Kemp through her husband, who ran Kemp's short-lived campaign for president in 1988, it was Kemp's dedication, she says, that moved her to join HUD. "When someone cares passionately about something, it's very contagious."
Lunch with Barbara Walters
Rollins stayed at HUD only a year - swayed away by an even better opportunity at ABC News.
ABC, attracted by her political contacts and growing reputation as a player in Washington, wanted her as its director of news information, heading up all public relations for the network's news operation. It was a job that would put her in almost daily contact with the some of the news media's biggest names, among them Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer and Ted Koppel.
"At that level, the thought of really understanding the media from the inside was very appealing," she says.
Kemp was supportive. She told him over coffee at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington after a breakfast speech he had given. "I really dreaded telling him," she says. But he acknowledged that the opportunity was too good to pass up.
Rollins spent two years with ABC.
It wasn't always an easy two years. Soon after arriving, she learned that Peter Jennings had objected to her being hired, primarily because of her husband's high profile within the Republican party.
Eventually, she confronted him on the issue, railing him for being sexist. She argued that if someone questioned his integrity or his objectivity because of his spouse's occupation, he would be angry - and rightfully so.
"He just said `touche.'"
Rollins got a warmer reception from Barbara Walters.
She was like a nurturing mother. They would sometimes have lunch together, and Rollins was always struck by the genuine interest Walters seemed to show in her life. "You'd feel like you'd just been interviewed and she had tried to make you cry," she says.
"It was not just `how are you?' but `how ARE you?'"
The White House
If Jack Kemp was supportive of her career, so was Roone Arledge, her boss at ABC, when Rollins was offered the chance to join the Bush White House as a senior assistant to the president. He said simply: "You just can't not do that, Sherrie."
Her job title was Assistant to the President for Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs. That meant she handled all of the president's dealings with outside interest groups, from unions to corporations to sports teams, youth groups and lobbyists. Everything except foreign affairs.
And it was a post she didn't earn through her husband.
By 1992, Bush and Ed Rollins were not on good terms, partly because Rollins had backed Kemp four years before, partly because of his public criticism of Bush over raising taxes. The White House call came more as a culmination, a progression of luck and timing and talent. It was nothing ever planned. "Each opportunity has led me to another."
She arrived during a time of turmoil at the White House. Bush was in trouble, down in the polls and making changes to his staff that he hoped would help. It was not a fun time, she says.
"But there wasn't a day you didn't pull in the gates and weren't awed."
Probably the most important accomplishment was her role in helping thwart a potentially disastrous public-relations blunder by the White House in the wake of the Los Angeles riots, and then arranging for Bush's visits to the city afterward.
The morning after the riots broke out, Bush was scheduled to join Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Great American Workout, an event that Bush looked forward to every year. There was a debate over what to do, and she argued: "You cannot have the president doing jumping jacks on television while L.A. is burning."
Barbara Bush took his place instead.
Rollins coordinated Bush's visit to the riot area, which she says had a profound effect on him, but at the same time highlighted perhaps his greatest weakness. Bush was often criticized for being out of touch with the real problems of the country. In L.A., Rollins says that she saw him become more and more engaged and empathetic to the situation. He promised action.
But he never followed up.
Her theory is that Bush was the victim of his own deadlock, caught between his policy makers and his campaign advisers. One side shared his desire to do something, while the other cautioned against anything too bold during an election year.
"It's a real shame. In my view, that's when you have to show leadership."
From one nightmare ...
Rollins left the White House, just six months after arriving.
The reason: Ed had decided to run the Ross Perot campaign.
It was against her advice. She warned her husband that he was getting caught up in a movement, without assessing Perot the man, not to mention that it put her in an impossible situation, working for Bush and married to the competition.
Ed offered not to take the job, for her sake. But she decided not to stand in his way. Then he tried to persuade her to remain in the White House, but she decided it would be too distracting to Bush.
She became convinced of this during one of his L.A. visits when speculation about her husband joining the Perot campaign was the big news of the day. It was a nightmare, she says. "The press wanted to talk to me, about Ed, rather than the president."
She remembers a chilly discussion she had with Bush before she resigned. It was in his private office, off the Oval Office, and she tried to explain why Ed and others had lost confidence in him and why they were looking to someone like Perot. "I felt like I needed to explain."
Bush clearly was hurt, she says. To him, it was a matter of loyalty, not politics, and he didn't buy into all the lost-confidence rhetoric. "The president didn't want to hear that. ... I guess I don't blame him."
He was genial in her resignation, though, which wasn't easy because of the attention the story had received in the media. Her leaving only added to the feeding frenzy. "You couldn't just quietly go away," she says.
. . . into another
"Perot was tough," she says now, in hindsight. "But it was only a warm-up for New Jersey."
Again, it was Ed at the center of the storm. Last fall, he ran Christine Whitman's upset victory over incumbent Jim Florio in the New Jersey's governor's race. At a Washington breakfast afterward, he shared some explosive remarks with reporters about how black clergy had been paid to keep minorities away from the polls, thus helping Republican Whitman get elected.
The incident spurred a federal investigation, and has cost him $100,000 in legal fees.
He almost immediately retracted his statements and apologized to Whitman and the black community, saying he had been trying only to antagonize James Carville, Florio's campaign manager who had put Bill Clinton in office a year earlier.
Investigators eventually cleared Rollins, but it left his reputation tarnished. Sherrie Rollins says that has been especially difficult for him. "The questioning of his integrity and honesty."
It caused him to evaluate his life more, she says.
"And it takes a lot to make a 50-year-old man reflect." He has since returned to the Catholic Church, and he is writing a book while beginning to consult on campaigns again, in Colorado and Texas.
It has helped them, she says, sort out what's important. Through the ordeal, one of the most appalling things they encountered was speculation that the New Jersey controversy would wreck their marriage, that she would leave Ed now that he had been involved in some scandal.
"At first I thought, what do people think of me?"
Then she says she realized that said more about who people are, than who she is. It helped her gain perspective. She and Ed might be, as Vanity Fair called them, the "PR expert married to a PR nightmare," but they are still happily married. They would like to have children.
"Maybe it's a great ability to rationalize, but maybe it happened for the best," she says.
They handled the affair with typical self-deprecating humor - in the form of their annual holiday greeting card. In Washington circles, Rollins is famous for her holiday cards, which poke fun usually at Ed. She sends out more than 700.
Last year, in the wake of New Jersey, she borrowed an editorial cartoon depicting Ed teetering on the ledge of a tall building, ready to jump, when he notices another man on the same ledge also poised to jump.
"Joey?" Ed says. "Joey Buttafuoco?"
"Ed?" the man replies. "Ed Rollins?"
Inside, the greeting reads: ``We could really use a new year. How 'bout you?''
The future
Sherrie Rollins is 35 now. After leaving the White House, she joined U.S. News & World Report as senior vice president of communications. Last fall, she started producing a series of national debates on issues of the day sponsored by the magazine that air on CNBC.
She says she is happy at the magazine but doesn't rule out a better opportunity. Maybe at the White House again? If Jack Kemp runs for president again, and wins, Rollins says it isn't outside the realm of possibility.
"There's a lot of ifs there."
Who knows?
"As usual," she says, "I don't have a long-term plan."
by CNB