Burning Down the House

by Julian E. Zelizer

  In this campaign, Gingrich embraced the bare-knuckle approach that would become a model for his future electoral runs and his congressional conduct. Speaking to a group of College Republicans at the Atlanta Airport Holiday Inn, Gingrich said that the next generation of Republicans couldn’t speak like Boy Scouts, the way that the elders in the GOP liked to do: “neat, obedient, and loyal and faithful” were “lousy” attributes in politics. He told his enthralled young audience that when they saw someone doing “something dumb,” they should “say it, say it in the press, say it loud, fight, scrap, issue a press release, go make a speech.” Republicans, Gingrich concluded, do “not need another generation of cautious, prudent, careful, bland, irrelevant, quasi-leaders who are willing as people to drift into positions because nobody else is available.” They needed energetic candidates ready for a “slug fest.”59

  Some of Gingrich’s supporters heeded his words immediately, surreptitiously distributing a racially tinged flyer that featured a photograph of Shapard standing next to Julian Bond, the black civil rights leader and state senator, with text that read, “If you like welfare cheaters, you’ll love Virginia Shapard.” Gingrich denied having anything to do with this incident, though some Democrats didn’t believe him.

  By the final days of the campaign, Shapard’s staff was so angry about their opponent’s underhanded tactics that they took to calling Gingrich “s.o.b.,” refusing to even utter his name.60 Shapard charged that Gingrich’s misleading ads were tantamount to “political pornography.”61 With a few days to go, Shapard was taken aback once again when Gingrich unleashed a torrent of unfounded accusations that she had violated campaign-finance laws.62 This time, The Atlanta Constitution, which had twice endorsed Gingrich, backed Shapard, concluding that the Republican had plainly lied and engaged in dirty politics. But he didn’t need these endorsements anymore.

  At 11:30 on a rainy election night, Carlyle Gregory called Gingrich to let him know that he had won. Running as a rock-ribbed Republican, Gingrich defeated Shapard by eight points, with a 54.4 percent majority. Before a cheering crowd at the election-night celebration at the Atlanta Airport Holiday Inn, he declared victory ten minutes after receiving the news. Gingrich instructed the crowd, “I want you to force us to be accountable. Stay alive. Call and raise Cain. We need you to be an angry customer just like you would in any business.”63 As one long-term supporter watched her new congressman stand victoriously on the podium alongside his daughters, Jackie Sue (eleven) and Kathy (fifteen), as well as his beaming wife, Jackie, she broke down into uncontrollable tears and shouted at the top of her lungs, “It sho’ is nice after so many times!”64

  Gingrich’s campaign team clapped and hollered for the victor, but Gingrich remained strikingly calm. He spent the winning hours working the room, shaking hands and schmoozing with people about the next steps in his political career. On Wednesday morning, he met with airport workers and then crews at a Ford Motor plant to let them know how much he appreciated their support. “I am fairly unique. I am a strange guy named Newt Gingrich who was born in Pennsylvania and grew up everywhere,” he said, adding that he was “a college teacher who is a Republican who was willing to run three times, and I think that makes me weird.”65

  Republicans throughout the country were feeling good, even though Democrats retained control of Congress. In the Senate, Republicans had defeated five Democrats in high-profile races, including Iowa’s Dick Clark and New Hampshire’s Thomas McIntyre. In the House, Gingrich was just one member in a rambunctious new class of Republicans who leaned to the right. The GOP picked up fifteen House seats, with an especially strong showing in the Sunbelt and the Midwest.66 “You’re going to have a skittish Congress,” one adviser warned President Carter.67

  The election celebration had barely died down when Gingrich flew to Washington to meet Guy Vander Jagt, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Gingrich told Vander Jagt, a Michigan representative, that their party needed a bold plan to win a majority in the House of Representatives. Three hours later, when the meeting finally ended, an admiring Vander Jagt decided to appoint Gingrich to head a task force for the GOP to map out a strategy. He recalled, “I skipped him over about 155 sitting Republicans to do it, and from that moment on he has been planning for a Republican majority.”68

  Gingrich was suddenly a player on the national stage. When thirty-five new Republicans gathered for a celebratory weekend freshman orientation at a Virginia hotel in early December, Saul Friedman of The Charlotte Observer ran into Gingrich, who was bouncing around the hallway like the big man on campus. The thirty-five-year-old politician jumped at the opportunity to speak to a reporter from outside Georgia. With a wide smile, Gingrich proudly whipped out his new congressional identification card and told Friedman, “Here’s how it starts.” The reporter glanced at the card, which read, HONORABLE NEWT GINGRICH. Taking a look for himself, as if still almost in disbelief about his victory, Gingrich said, “Until November 8 (the day after the election), I had never been honorable in my life. It’s the office that’s honorable, not the man. But when they hang such titles on you and a staff trails you everywhere, it’s so easy to . . . take yourself seriously.”69

  The humility was feigned. Gingrich’s ambitions were almost visibly bursting at the seams, his inner grandiosity latched to a sense of purpose now unleashed. He arrived in Washington with three goals in mind: to “defeat the Soviet empire, replace the welfare state, and replace the Democrats as the majority party in the House. . . . I spent my days on those three goals.”70

  This new congressman was on his way to something big.

  His first target would be an African American congressman named Charles Diggs.

  Two

  A POLITICAL WRECKING BALL

  The new congressman sprang into action. Gingrich stormed Capitol Hill with a plan to clean house, calling out corruption wherever he saw it. This would be the best way to take on the Democrats and catapult himself into the press—and into the growing ranks of young Republicans who shared his desire to challenge Democratic rule. Having run as an outsider, the junior congressman now embraced the message of good-government reform to pursue his bolder partisan objectives. He hit Congress like a human wrecking ball, shattering norms and customs that senior legislators thought were bedrocks to good governance. Nothing was inviolate, including decorum and civility; these, Gingrich insisted, were merely tools that Democrats used to preserve their power.

  Gingrich ignored the traditional paths to congressional power: doing committee work while moving up the ladder of seniority or taking a high-profile role on legislation. He was not going to “carve out a subcommittee to dominate,” he told The Atlanta Constitution.1 Instead, he would prove himself to his colleagues through high-profile attacks on the majority Democrats that he knew would rile Washington. Gingrich would be the Republican attack dog with the mind of a policy intellectual, constantly testing the limits of what was possible.

  * * *

  —

  Gingrich spotted an enticing target before he and his family had even settled in Washington. Congressman Charles Diggs, a Democrat from Detroit first elected in 1954, was a prominent civil rights leader and a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus. In March 1978, a grand jury indicted the fifty-five-year-old Diggs on several charges, including accepting $60,000 in kickbacks from his staff. A jury convicted him approximately six months later on eleven counts of mail fraud and for having filed false payroll forms. His constituents were more forgiving. While he awaited sentencing and planned his appeal, Diggs’s district reelected him in November with 79 percent of the vote. Given the legal jeopardy he faced, Diggs agreed to voluntarily relinquish the chairmanship of the House District of Columbia Committee, though he insisted on keeping hold of the chairmanship of the International Relations Subcommittee on Africa so that he could continue working on vital issues such as the fight against apartheid in South Africa.

>   Gingrich, who had been in Washington for only a few weeks and was not yet formally seated, immediately called on Diggs to step down. He smelled blood when he read in the newspapers that the Democrats, sensing that Diggs could be a liability, had approved rules in early December mandating that the caucus would vote on the subcommittee chairmanship of any member who had been convicted of a felony that included a sentence of at least two years. Emboldened by the fact that Democrats were uneasy about their situation, Gingrich kept up the drumbeat when he organized fourteen House Republicans to demand that the House Ethics Committee investigate.

  The young congressman caught the attention of Minority Leader John Rhodes. In 1976, the Arizona Republican had published a book titled The Futile System, in which he argued that the Democratic majority would never be willing to reform itself. Rhodes was one of those Republicans whom Gingrich kept writing about in his strategic memos to colleagues, a representative who had served all but two years of his frustrating term on the losing side of the aisle. Rhodes planned to retire after November 1980 unless the nation voted in a Republican majority that could elect him Speaker of the House. Rhodes worried that Gingrich was being too aggressive with Diggs and should let the Democrats clean up their own mess, as was traditional.2

  Notwithstanding his concerns, Rhodes announced on January 9 that a group of Republicans would move to expel Diggs when the session started. Under Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, by a two-thirds vote the House had the right to expel a member from his or her seat. This was a serious and seldom-used punishment against a colleague; only three members had been expelled in the history of the House, all of them after being accused of treason during the Civil War.

  On January 11, Gingrich wrote to the Illinois congressman John Anderson, a reform-minded Republican, that he was “morally repulsed” to be serving in a government body whose member had “committed a series of crimes against” that very body. If Diggs voted on any substantive matter before the Ethics Committee had completed its investigation, Gingrich warned, he would be “compelled” to take the steps needed to have him expelled from the House.3 “While I’m pleased the Republican leadership is going to file a complaint with the Ethics Committee on this matter,” Gingrich said a few days later to the press, “I’d request that you go one step further. We should insure that Mr. Diggs doesn’t vote until the report from the Ethics Committee is acted upon by the House.”4 While the House rule recommended that convicted members not vote (unless they were elected after conviction), Democrats were not prepared to enforce that prohibition. As Republicans ramped up their efforts, House Democrats were able to pressure Diggs into stepping down from his subcommittee chairmanship on January 23 to avoid a direct confrontation with the party.

  Fourteen junior House Republicans, with Gingrich as the main signatory, followed through on their promise. On February 2, they sent a letter to the House Ethics Committee requesting that an investigation into Diggs start “as expeditiously as possible.” In a strategic move, Gingrich dropped the demand for the specific punishment of expulsion so that he could win the support of the Missouri Democrat Richard Gephardt, a second termer who hoped to burnish his credentials as a reform-oriented leader and position himself as a key member of the new generation of “Atari Democrats.” After the letter was submitted, Indiana’s Philip Sharp, one of the Democrats from the class of ’74, announced his support, bringing the total number of Democrats to two.

  Five days later, the House Ethics Committee launched its preliminary investigation. Putting aside Gephardt’s and Sharp’s bipartisan support, Gingrich decried the “double standard of justice” that he said existed among the twenty-seven Democrats who in 1976 had voted to investigate Florida’s Bob Sikes, a southern conservative accused of financial misconduct, but now sat in total silence. “In essence,” Gingrich wrote in Human Events, “we should have one standard of justice for all Americans—and for all Congressmen—for white conservative Southerners and for black Northern liberals.”5

  The Illinois Republican Robert Michel, a believer in civility, was expected to replace John Rhodes as minority leader if the Arizonan retired. Michel privately told Gingrich that he supported his effort but worried that going after a prominent black congressman would reinforce the image that the GOP was hostile to minority groups, if not outright racist.6 Michel was old enough to remember the backlash that took place over the Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell. The first African American from New York to be elected to the House, Powell had been an ardent champion of civil rights. But his work on civil rights was often overshadowed by countless stories about egregious financial and personal misconduct, such as tax evasion and using public funds to pay for junkets with his girlfriends. While there were liberals who supported an investigation, Powell argued that the Dixiecrats—many of whom were guilty of much worse—were targeting him because of his work on racial justice. In January 1967, the House voted to prevent Powell from being seated while a bipartisan special committee investigated his case. When the committee recommended that punishment was warranted, his opponents secured a 307–116 vote to “exclude” him on March 1, which meant keeping him out of his seat for technical violations of the requirements needed to serve in the House. The punishment, which required only a majority vote (in contrast with the two-thirds requirement needed for expulsion), enraged his constituents. The NAACP warned that the punishment could be “interpreted as tailor made to apply to him and to no other member of Congress [and] will be fuel for appeals based on prejudice rather than reason.”7 Powell’s district overwhelmingly voted for him in a special election held a few weeks later. Because of the standoff, the seat remained empty until June 1969, when the Supreme Court ruled that the House did not have the constitutional right to exclude Powell because he met every technical requirement in the Constitution. While Gingrich distinguished the two cases by saying that Diggs had been convicted of a crime against the House and the Supreme Court had specifically ruled against excluding Powell (saying that expulsion would have been legitimate),8 senior legislators in both parties saw the racially tinged Diggs case through the same political prism. As a result, most Democrats believed that voters should have the ultimate say to decide on his fate. “I don’t think he should be expelled from the House,” argued Majority Leader Jim Wright from Texas. “Membership in the House is not ours to bestow. We can’t give that to anybody. The constituents are entitled to have the representatives of their own choice.”9

  There was another, more recent scandal that also inhibited Democrats from joining Gingrich’s crusade. Koreagate, a scandal that unfolded between 1976 and 1978, involved a South Korean lobbyist named Tongsun Park who made more than $800,000 in donations to Democrats and held lavish dinner parties in his Georgetown town house attended by such powerhouses as Speaker Tip O’Neill. Although a number of major legislators were caught up in the story, in the end the only punishment taken by the House was to reprimand the California representatives Edward Roybal, John McFall, and Charlie Wilson, a mild punishment considered even less severe than censure (the toughest punishment came through the courts; the former California congressman Richard Hanna went to jail). The New Jersey congressman Andrew Maguire’s staffer privately confided to Gingrich’s assistants that with regards to Diggs they were “very concerned about racism—Koreagate people get their hands slapped and now a black gets more than that.”10

  Gingrich was not concerned about the racial overtones with Diggs. His supporters had dabbled with the politics of race during his 1978 congressional campaign, but in his view he was no old-school southern racist. Gingrich bragged that he was one of a handful of Republicans in favor of creating a national holiday and monument in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. He also liked to say that he was going after corrupt white legislators, such as Pennsylvania’s Daniel Flood, a Democrat under investigation for misusing federal money.11

  The stage was set for a showdown. Gingrich sent a letter directly to Diggs explaining that h
e would call for expulsion should the congressman take any votes before the investigation ended. On February 28, when Diggs exercised his right to vote on a routine measure, Gingrich followed through on his threat by walking to the well of the House chamber and proposing a resolution—his first official act as a congressman—to expel his Democratic colleague to protect the “honor and dignity of the House.” Fellow representatives were taken aback by the severity of the proposal and the fact that a Republican was leading the charge.

  Opposing Gingrich was Wright, whose job it was as majority leader to quash the motion and put the GOP upstart in his place. Wright reminded the young firebrand that historically it was up to each caucus to discipline its own members. The Democrats would do with Diggs as they saw fit, Wright said; that’s the way it was, and even after Watergate that’s the way it remained. Wright walked to the lectern on his side of the aisle and offered a counter-motion that referred Gingrich’s proposal to the Ethics Committee, which everyone on the floor understood would bury it.12

  Most members of the House thought that Gingrich was going too far. Wright’s proposal passed by a vote of 322 to 77. Wright dismissed Gingrich’s motion as a stunt by someone new to Washington who did not understand how politics worked. “Surely the membership is not prepared to take action expelling a member of the House pending the exercise of his legal and constitutional rights under the law,” Wright said in his slow Texas drawl.13

  The defeat didn’t bother Gingrich a bit. After all, as he boasted to his staff in a memo revealing his true strategy, “I was in the Washington news media enough to be a very well-known Freshman. The country is now much more aware that a convicted felon is voting in Congress.”14