How Washington insiders ambushed Mickey Mouse.

• Author: Bailey, Charles W.
• Position: Fight against the building of theme park in Virginia by Walt Disney Co.

When America's best-loved entertainment company tried to build a history theme park, LBJ's White House counsel, a Reagan imagemaker, and a top Mondale hand took on Disney--and won

Once upon a time, there was a business called the Walt Disney Company. It did lots of nice, friendly things: It made movies and built amusement parks; it invented a mouse named Mickey, and a duck named Donald, and seven dwarfs. Everyone liked the Disney Company, and it grew and grew.

One day, the company said it was going to build another park, this one near the nation's capital And all at once a lot of people decided they didn't like Disney any more; and a few of them--Washington insiders all--decided to try and stop it from building its park.

The story begins with Richard Moe and Nick Kotz having breakfast together at the Mayflower Hotel on a Friday morning in February 1994. Moe, once a top aide to Vice President Mondale, is president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Kotz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. Both men had written newspaper articles opposing a Disney proposal, announced in November 1993, to build a $650 million theme park called "Disney's America" on a 3,000-acre tract in a tiny northern Virginia town called Haymarket. So Kotz had called Moe to suggest they get together and talk about it. The result is an object lesson on how people who know the power players in the capital--and how to orchestrate public opinion--can defeat even the largest of corporations.

There was plenty for Kotz and Moe to talk about. The park itself, with American history as its theme, would occupy only about 400 acres. Disney's plan encompassed more than 2,200 housing units, almost 2 million square feet of commercial space, 1,300 hotel rooms, two golf courses, a 280-acre campground and a 37-acre water park. And that did not include the additional development by others that would surely be stimulated by Disney's project. Moe feared the development would despoil the battlefield of Manassas, only four miles from the Disney tract, and overwhelm other historic sites nearby. Kotz had similar concerns--intensified by the fact that he owned a home in Haymarket.

Enter the third man: Julian Scheer, once chief of PR for the U.S. space program, now in business for himself, a native Virginian and also a resident of the region where the Disney development would be built. Scheer first heard of the project from another PR man, Jody Powell, once President Jimmy Carter's press secretary. Powell had been hired by Disney to promote the theme park, and he invited Scheer to work on the Disney project, but he declined. Instead, because Scheer "did not like the proposition," he began to think about ways to defeat it. He was a friend of both Kotz and Moe, so it was logical for him to join them.

But the next recruit was a surprise. At the end of February, Kotz was seated at a large dinner party next to Peter Hannaford, a (you guessed it) public relations consultant, but best known as the man who, with...