Bob Beckel recounts an early lesson from life spent in politics

Bob Beckel has some advice for anyone working in Washington: When someone asks for a favor, totally milk it.

The longtime political operative, who worked in former President Jimmy Carter’s administration, writes in his new book, “I Should be Dead: My Life Surviving Politics, TV, and Addiction,” that he learned that crucial lesson during his first visit to the Oval Office.

{mosads}While working at the State Department in 1977 on the ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty, Beckel got a call that he needed to report to the White House to brief Carter on a vote count.

After what was slated as a 15-minute meeting stretched to more than an hour, Carter asked Beckel if he’d like to work at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. According to the author, Carter called up then-Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, whom Beckel had never met.

“The jig was up,” Beckel writes, “Secretary Vance must know I was a phony (since he’d never heard of me), and now the president of the United States would know I was a phony.”

But when Carter hung up the phone, he turned to Beckel and said, “He hated to lose you, Bob, but he’ll reluctantly do so. Welcome aboard!” Beckel was named the deputy assistant to the president for defense, intelligence and foreign policy.

Beckel, 67, a CNN political commentator who has been open about his long struggle with addiction, says he “learned a political lesson that day” from Vance, who died in 2002: “When anyone in Washington asks for a favor, no matter how little the favor means to you, act pained and get as much as you can in exchange — even if the person asking is the president of the United States.”