Callaway: In retrospect, it probably would have been, but a lot of those people who were not giving to a lot of other things, just plain did not want their name in the paper for privacy. I am thinking of one very good friend of mine -- I'd get him to give $10,000 but he would say, 'My name's not going to be in the paper, is it?' And that's legitimate. I think I'm correct in saying there's never been any law requiring GOPAC to release its names. And there are people like GOPAC under the same kind of thing and use Common Cause and don't release names. With Newt's prominence, I understand why they released the names and I support the release. I've always been a very open kind of person and think they should release the names.

There's still some problems. As you know, if you're one of the regulars, if you have a campaign and release the names, if the federal election committee commission gets the names, then you're prohibited by law to use them to solicit. If we release names, nobody's prohibited by law and they can just take those names and solicit every conservative cause that anybody thinks of and so I think we have some obligation to give some protection. But my understanding is that they're all released, but some complain, 'Why don't you give us copies instead of letting us go look at 'em?'

Q: With regard to the GOPAC donors themselves, what are their views concerning business and government?

Callaway: I would bet if you took a vote of the charter members today on the issue of the so-called business perks, I bet you'd get 90 percent of them saying 'take them all away.' What they want for business is to have the government leave you alone and stop the onerous regulations. They're not for dirty water, they're not for having people hurt on the job, they're not for that, but those of us who are in small businesses know how much time you spend on regulations. Well, the GOPAC people would say, 'Have the government allow the businesses freedom to flourish.' But they would not say give perks to business.

Q: What was the main thing the money got spent on in GOPAC?

Callaway: Well, we continued to do what Pete DuPont did and that was to continue to give money to the farm team. But knowing Newt, you've got to do something beyond what your predecessor did. You know, you have to do something new. And he got involved in how the language of a candidate gets him elected --what you say to get elected. The feeling, which I don't think Newt's paranoid about, is that a large part of the press would be more Democratic than Republican and that it's hard in a lot of places to get the Republican message across. So, how do you get that message across? How do you work with the press to get your message across? And what kind of message do you want to give if you believe the kinds of things the people of GOPAC believe, which is, relatively conservative in the sense of free enterprise (as opposed to a government regulation kind of a business).

So, he got the idea of doing some training. And he'd go out and train himself. He was very good at that. People would just say, 'Oh wow, I can take this and I can get elected with it' and it was very successful. But, even before he was whip, one congressman doesn't have time to go all over the country and do everything he wants to do. So we started a videotape program. We videotaped Newt in front of a regular audience doing the same kind of training he does. Through the use of anecdotes, he effectively communicated to candidates what kind of language to use to help your campaign. Then our director of training, Tom Morgan, would take that videotape to a number of states around the country and the local party, or someone local would sponsor it, so we'd bring in whoever the local candidates are and then he would show the tape. He'd show maybe five or ten minutes of the tape and he'd stop and he'd say, 'Ok, now let's discuss that. What did Newt say here? How does this affect your campaign? What do you do in Mississippi that fits this?' And then he'd say, 'Alright, we've discussed that, let's do another five or ten minutes of the tape. And it really was extremely effective. And then Tom would train others. And he would get other people going around. So those tapes went all over the country in, I would say, virtually every state and some trainers were present and it was enormously effective. It elected a lot of people.

Then Newt would say, 'Yeah, but that's not enough, we need to get to more people.' And so, we should have known it instinctively, but every candidate spends a lot of time in his car. Virtually everyone of them owns a tape deck. So we got the audio tapes. Now, the videotapes you send to somebody. I don't know how many you get, I get 20 a month and I don't look at many of them. But, audio tapes, I'll generally stick one in the car because I'm in the car a lot. And I'll generally do that, listen to it, and if I like it, I'll listen to all of it. So we began doing these audio tapes. We began giving them to candidates and it started out with just Newt, but it ended up with a lot of other people. I mean, Jack Kemp and people of that kind would be on there. And the candidates really enjoyed listening to 'em. And they got to be so powerful that I remember one time, George Bush had a State of the Union in maybe '91 and Newt thought it was a particularly good one. Newt said, 'That's good, do you suppose we could get permission from the White House to put this on the GOPAC tape?' So I called over there and they were ecstatic. We were promoting George Bush, the president of the United States on our tapes and they were ecstatic. And of course we have an introduction by Newt. He said: 'Now this is a great speech by President Bush. I want you to listen to these points.' At the end of it, he said, 'Did you listen to those points George Bush made?' And they were totally ecstatic about it.

At the time, Newt was actually elected as the candidate for the Republican conference to be speaker, which was in the fall of '94. When he was elected, he asked, 'How many of you have listened to the GOPAC tapes?' And it was just virtually unanimous. Almost all of them. And, you just stick 'em in your car. They almost caused divorces because this candidate calls in and says, 'My wife wants this tape and I've got it' and we said, 'Well, if you notice, you can copy it. We don't mind that.' And so they would ask for extra copies for their wives and they'd wear them out. They'd wear them out so much that they'd say, 'I'd give it to my campaign manager, then I'd give it to my brother-in-law, then I'd give it to this one.' And they'd listen over and over and then they would want to get the language just right. They would say, 'That's just the way I want to say it.' And it really was an effective thing.

Q: This was a Republican revolution by audio tape?

Callaway: Yes. I think that if I had to pick the one thing that GOPAC did the most effectively, I'd say it was the audio tapes.