CRESCENT People: Tucker Eskew (Part 2)

THE CAMPBELL YEARS

My longest term boss in South Carolina, a great leader in Carroll Campbell, could certainly be measured in intensity. He was an intense campaigner and an intense govern-er – believing in the power of governing conservatism. He was a partisan, and I learned so much from him. I was thinking about Hurricane Hugo which was remembered not too long ago with its anniversary. He had the recruitment of BMW, and Carroll Campbell never took any of that for granted. Not the getting of them. Not the value of them. Not the impact.

It was an incredible thing to watch. Someone at the top of his game who was comfortable talking about business and driven to create opportunity for the people of South Carolina. That was an amazing experience in an era when newspapers were large, well-staffed, and aggressive.

The BMW story started to leak out, and I of course, stood atop the world and said, “Stop!” Well, it did no good whatsoever. The story continued to seep out. We did a good job, I think, of keeping details quiet, but when you started interviewing people who could potentially sell their land to make a BMW happen alongside Greenville-Spartanburg Airport, which was not a foregone conclusion – thank you, Verne Smith — to watch that happen was to see leaks start to get out.

I think I found 150 different ways then to say, “No comment.” The CEO of BMW, whom I’d never met, stepped off an airplane at Greenville-Spartanburg Jetport the night before we were to make this announcement, was introduced to me and said, “You’re the man who says nothing!” What an amazing event by a man driven to make an impact.

I think there was a first draft of history written that day. I jumped out of my skin at that first story. It underplayed the size of the event. It was a very literal story about what had been technically announced as opposed to what the potential was. I looked at that story like, “Gosh! These people don’t understand it’s so much bigger!” It was. It is, and we all know it now, but as a spokesman, as a communicator, my job is to stay on top of the story. What can I say? The AP story was kinda wrong, and I was kinda right to complain about it, and that’s the lives that communicators lead.

After about eight years of Carroll Campbell, I spent time in Columbia with this startup company and was overwhelmed by this force that was rising around us called the Internet. We were a company focused on telephone-based technology, so we were probably doomed pretty early on, but it was a great and amazing learning experience as we learned about the power of the web, sort of hands-on with its rise in business.

THE FIRST ELECTION OF GEORGE W. BUSH

Then I felt like there was one more ride left in me, so I got involved with this fella from Texas and watched history get made here in South Carolina. We took on John McCain and a large field of candidates. After that campaign, columnist Robert Novak, who passed not that long ago, said that was one of the top two or three most intense campaigns he’d ever seen.

We were incredibly successful. It’s a campaign I’m proud of. We won. We won a tough, hard-fought campaign – a fair campaign – and my family picked up stakes and moved my 7 1/2 month pregnant wife to Austin, Texas. Her doctor that we chose on a preliminary trip to Austin had to leave the practice of medicine between choosing her and our arrival, so we had no doctor, but we found one.

So we went through that amazing campaign, and I was the first communicator dispatched out to Florida for the recount. Governor Bush and Karen Hughes said, “Put a team together. We’ll get a plane, and you can drop ‘em wherever you think we need ‘em.” I was thinking, “I wonder what I ought to pack.” The advice was that I’d only need something for two or three days, and of course after about a week my wife packed up a full suitcase and FedEx-ed it out to Palm Beach which was Ground Zero of the early days of that fight. It’s where the “butterfly ballot” happened. It’s where the “bulging chad” and the “pregnant chad” and the “hanging chad” and the “dripping chad” and all that craziness…

I’d just come off the birth of a son who was born that August. This was now November. So standing outside the West Palm Beach County Building and looking in to these big plate glass windows, there they were. Workers, ballot workers, and election workers carefully cradling these little bundles and alongside me were photographers and people staring in. Some were smiling. Some were concerned. It suddenly hit me. I felt like I was looking in on the nursery and thought to myself, “Man. That is one ugly baby.” Democracy was being decided by little chips of paper hanging off the side. I gave so many interviews about “the law” as we were advancing it and as our lawyers were fighting it in court, hundreds of people thought I was a lawyer. Believe me. I’m not, but I’m standing there talking to the world press and suddenly confetti would come drifting through the air and a guy in blue and red tights and a cape and a cap and a big “C” on his shirt would jump off a retaining wall in the middle of the picture as “Chad Man.”

There were a lot of moments of great privilege working at the White House. I mean you’re walking along paths that people like Franklin Delano Roosevelt had trod, and yet overseeing the talk radio office my moment of pride was appearing on The (John Boy and Billy) Big Show. All joking aside the office dealing with all of the domestic press had a lot to do, so on the day they mentioned it to me, I volunteered to the president and Karen and the chief of staff to go to one of the offices we’d set up globally.

Stay Tuned for Part 3 of the Feature Next Week. Read Part 1 HERE.