Grover Norquist, Emperor of No: How Anti-Tax Crusader Norquist Rose From Weston to Washington
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THE TRAINING BEGAN when the boy was just 9. His father, a Polaroid executive who prized precision, would tell the boy: Go to the encyclopedia, choose a topic, and then give me a one-minute speech about it. The boy would do as he was told. When he was ready, he would stand in the living room, planting himself between the fireplace and his father’s wing chair, and deliver his speech for an audience of one. When the boy was finished, his father’s response would always be the same. Do it again.
So young Grover Norquist would do as he was told. Again. Again. Again.
Fifteen times the boy would repeat this exercise, honing his message a bit more and referring to his index card of notes a bit less with each run-through. Only after the 15th attempt would the father begin to offer his firstborn son detailed critiques.
As the night wore on, the boy’s mother would charge into the living room, complaining: “Enough! This is child abuse! It’s time for him to go to bed.”
Her husband would wave her off, and she wouldn’t protest too much. Although she wanted Grover to get his sleep, like her husband she tended to view her children as budding adults who should be challenged, not delicate creatures who should be coddled.
With that, the training regimen would resume. Again. And this time make eye contact. And use your hands to emphasize the point.
In time, the boy could claim a supreme confidence in public speaking that matched the confidence he felt in his own intellect and his emerging view of the world. Compared with his grade school classmates, who sweated and stammered and fumbled through their class presentations, young Grover was an outlier of Gladwellian proportions. After he delivered one flawless talk, his teacher approached him to inspect the index card he was clutching, perhaps expecting to find the full text of the speech somehow crammed onto the card. She was stunned to find it was blank. He had held it just for show. After all that practice in front of his father, notes were no longer necessary.
Still, elementary school offers only so many opportunities for public speaking. So Grover remained on the hunt for others.
He loved nothing better than to leave his home in the affluent west-of-Boston community of Weston and start walking, along the hilly block of handsome houses, through the woods dense with vines and thick with pines, and finally up a rocky ledge. There, the precocious boy who had so much to say would find a receptive audience, and one that couldn’t fit into a single wing chair. The ledge led to a cliff overlooking a pig farm, which sat just over the town line in Waltham. Grover learned that simply by standing on the cliff and speaking clearly and confidently, he would attract the notice of the pigs that were fenced in on a muddy, rooted-up plateau 30 feet below him. So he would give speeches of all types. As the words left his lips, 40 or so of the swine would give him their rapt attention. “They’d come listen to you,” he recalls. “I liked that.”
This desire to be listened to would remain undiminished as that boy grew into a Harvard student and then into a sharp-elbowed Washington activist and lobbyist. Over the years, he has refined his speeches and toughened his attacks, but the substance of his message has not changed across more than three decades. It’s the same message that first gestated in his mind when his parents would take him and his younger siblings for ice cream after church on Sundays and his dad would confiscate large bites out of each of their cones, explaining, “This is income tax” or “This is property tax.” And it’s the same message that came into clearer focus when Grover was at Weston High School in the early 1970s and read with admiration about a colorful New Hampshire politician named Meldrim Thomson, who rode an “Ax the Tax” campaign of bumper sticker simplicity straight into the governor’s office