Burning Down the House

by Julian E. Zelizer

  Gingrich felt vindicated on April 4, when the members of the Ethics Committee charged they had “reason to believe” that Diggs was guilty of eighteen violations of House rules. The committee would soon begin the second stage of its investigatory process to see whether the evidence met the highest standards and, if it did, how it should punish Diggs. After a few months of a humiliating investigation scrutinized by the media, Diggs’s lawyers reached a deal with the committee. In exchange for dropping the rest of the investigation and settling on censure—the mildest form of punishment—Diggs agreed to pay the government $40,031 that he had obtained from kickbacks and padding the payroll. “I sincerely regret the errors in judgment which led to this proceeding,” he wrote.

  On July 31, a somber-looking Diggs, wearing a patterned tie and light blue jacket, was the first to enter the chamber. He walked to the front row and sat down by himself, awaiting his punishment. Once the other representatives filled up the room, many stood up to offer their thoughts on what the House should do about Diggs’s wrongdoing. The congressman dutifully listened to half an hour of floor speeches in which no one came to his defense. The Wyoming Republican Richard “Dick” Cheney said that Diggs should have resigned “long ago,” given the “dishonor” he had brought on the House.

  Once the speeches were done, Speaker O’Neill called on Diggs to approach the front of the chamber and remain at the rostrum as he read out loud the language of the censure. Although they stood just inches apart, Diggs looked down and showed barely any emotion as the Speaker mechanically and uncomfortably recited the words off a two-page resolution. O’Neill banged his gavel, proclaiming “the matter” closed. Members crowded around the humiliated Diggs, patting him on the back and whispering words of support before he bolted to the sanctuary of his office. The House proceeded to vote almost unanimously in favor of the committee’s recommendation to censure Diggs.

  A jubilant Gingrich told the horde of reporters who met him near his office that he accepted the verdict as “realistically the strongest thing we can hope for.”15 Gingrich realized that expulsion would have been a step too far for most members. And he was savvy enough to understand that he needed to at least act in a statesmanlike fashion as he spoke to the journalists, making it seem as if he were primarily concerned about the fate of his colleague and the health of the institution. Diggs’s downfall was Gingrich’s first major political victory as a House member. This was Gingrich’s first at bat in his effort to paint the entire Democratic Party as fundamentally corrupt, and he had hit a home run. Diggs would resign from the House on June 3, 1980, after the Supreme Court rejected his criminal appeal; he would serve seven months of a three-year prison sentence.

  The disgraced Detroit legislator was small potatoes in the larger scope of party politics, but his defeat felt like a big event to Washington insiders. Several news organizations, including The New York Times, featured Gingrich in stories about the fresh voices of the GOP. Major print editors, such as Meg Greenfield of The Washington Post, who had previously rejected Gingrich’s pitches, now solicited his writing. The editor of the Conservative Digest, John Lofton, called Gingrich’s office to say that he wanted to “give Newt more ink.” Human Events, the conservative magazine that had ignored Gingrich’s congressional campaigns, expanded its coverage of the congressman as a result of his role in the Diggs case. “Newt is now on very good terms with Bob Novak and David Broder,” the staffer Frank Gregorsky, on loan from the National Republican Congressional Committee, observed in his private notes, “he is becoming friends with George Will and Morton Kondracke. An A.P. reporter who covered Newt and another freshman in 1979 told him last week that there are about six Representatives whose phone numbers reporters know by heart, and Newt’s was now one of them—because they thought Newt understood what was happening and would play it straight with the press.”16

  Gingrich’s focus on congressional corruption turned out to be well timed. As the Diggs saga unfolded, another major scandal rocked Capitol Hill that seemed to confirm Gingrich’s basic point about Democratic Washington. On February 20, 1980, NBC reported the shocking news that the FBI had been conducting a sting operation on several members of Congress who had allegedly accepted bribes from undercover agents dressed as Arab sheikhs in exchange for influence. The first story about the Abscam scandal to hit the airwaves featured grainy, night-vision videos, filmed by network cameramen, of legislators entering and exiting the town house that the FBI used for its operation. The theme of congressional corruption took on new valence. Just a few weeks after NBC broadcast its report on the scandal, Gingrich convened a news conference at the Atlanta Air Center, where he unveiled a seven-point plan to clean up Congress. His proposal included suspending legislators from committee service if they had admitted to taking money from FBI agents, pushing the House to use more subpoenas to investigate corruption, and having the media establish an ethics watch monitor to cover this beat. “Many people in this country are now saying that all this is just politics, and politics is dirty,” Gingrich pontificated to the journalists who had gathered to hear him. “I disagree. Politics doesn’t have to be corrupt. In fact, in a free society, it can’t be allowed to be corrupt. I think the House can and must do a great deal to clean up government and restore people’s faith in Congress.”17

  In September 1980, not even two years since his election to Congress, the Georgian felt as if he had already arrived in Washington as he stood beside the Republican presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, at a photo session that Gingrich largely organized, joining 150 Senate and House challengers and 23 Senate and 115 House incumbents on the steps of the Capitol to pledge their support for spending cuts, tax cuts, and a hard-line foreign policy. The point of the photo op was to show that electing Reagan would be part of a larger political revolution. Reagan was not a one-man show; he was part of a team. “Yes it’s a media event,” Gingrich admitted, but it would signal to voters that the party could be held accountable should they be successful in November.18 The picture was meant to show that the decision on Election Day would be about the direction of the entire Republican Party. Project Majority, a report that Gingrich had completed for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which was circulating around Capitol Hill, had recommended that the party act in more “synergistic fashion.”19 This event with Reagan fulfilled that exact objective. Reagan and Republicans like Gingrich were part of a movement seeking to transform American politics. They sought to bring down the entire establishment along the way.

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  Gingrich’s elation about his success with Diggs was nothing compared with the thrill he felt on election night, November 4, 1980. At 8:15 P.M. eastern standard time, NBC News flashed the words across the screen that Republicans had been waiting for: “Reagan Wins!” Just four years earlier, Ronald Reagan had been dismissed by most pundits as an extremist. Now, on CBS, the network displayed a national map of the United States that showed the dramatic sweep of his victory, taking all but six states and the District of Columbia. “Reagan Democrats” had not only helped Republicans carry the day but signaled the possibility of a genuine partisan realignment. Reagan won nearly nine million more votes than Carter and took 489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49. And for the first time since 1954, Republicans secured control of the Senate, with a majority of fifty-three to forty-six (Virginia’s Harry Byrd Jr. was an independent but caucused with Democrats)—not sufficient to kill a sixty-vote filibuster but enough to set the agenda.

  Back in Georgia, Gingrich slowly absorbed the enormity of the result as he and his advisers celebrated his own reelection, taking 59 percent of the vote in a district that had once been solidly Democratic. As a student of history, Gingrich understood the larger implications of the national results. He found Reagan inspirational and had praised his 1976 primary challenge to President Gerald Ford. Although Gingrich’s own positions were more nuanced and eclectic than the president-elect’s, drawing as much
from futurists like Alvin Toffler as from conservative ideologues such as Friedrich Hayek, Gingrich understood Reagan to be the type of transformative figure needed to make conservatism into a governing doctrine.

  Having spent decades marginalized in Washington, forced to live in the shadows of American liberalism, conservatives could barely contain their joy that a champion of their cause would soon assume the highest office in the land. Gingrich was twenty-one years old when Senator Goldwater failed spectacularly in 1964. It had taken a generation for right-wing conservatism to triumph as Dixiecrats and Rust Belt Democrats—weary of the lagging economy under President Carter and the ongoing American hostage crisis in Iran—broke for the former actor turned California governor. Reagan’s election had only been possible after fifteen years of a brewing political backlash toward the Democratic embrace of civil rights in 1964 and 1965—as President Johnson had famously predicted—finally allowed the GOP to start dominating the South.

  Republicans were feeling triumphant on Inauguration Day, January 20, 1981. Breaking precedent, Reagan was sworn in as the nation’s fortieth president from the west side of the Capitol, a choice that he said reflected his sense of American’s manifest destiny and endless possibility. All morning, the skies had been overcast. As if on cue, the sun came out when Reagan walked up to deliver his speech to the nation.

  Gingrich, standing alongside his Republican colleagues and watching his first inauguration in person, saw the clearing skies as a sign of things to come. In his stirring inaugural address, Reagan uttered the words that would become Gingrich’s political fuel: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Standing fifteen feet away from the crooner Frank Sinatra and directly behind the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Omar Bradley, the starstruck Gingrich felt that Reagan’s oration “was a pretty darn good speech.”20 Making the moment even sweeter was the surprise release of the fifty-two American hostages after 444 days in Iranian captivity; conservatives crowed that Reagan had achieved what President Carter could not. (In fact, Carter had negotiated the release, but the Iranians spitefully held on to the hostages until he left office.) The television networks covering the postinaugural procession switched back and forth between the celebration in Washington and the news out of Iran.

  Gingrich’s celebratory mood was tempered by the fact that almost nothing had changed in the House of Representatives. Democrats remained in full control, just as they had for the previous twenty-six years. A few days after the election, when David Broder of The Washington Post contacted the congressman to ask him what he thought about the Republican triumph, Gingrich replied bluntly, “We are not in power. If the Reagan people let that idea get abroad, we are in real trouble. We do not control the senior bureaucracy as yet and we do not control the House of Representatives.”21 Republicans had picked up thirty-five House seats and expanded the size of the conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans, but Democrats retained a formidable 243–192 majority, enough to sink Reagan’s legislative agenda and neutralize much of his victory. Many Republicans gloried in the fantasy of the ideological shift that Reagan’s victory portended, but Gingrich thought only of the continued control of the House Democrats. In the House, only a simple majority was needed to move or stifle a bill; the minority was virtually powerless.

  Speaker Tip O’Neill was not eager to play ball with the new administration. He believed that government was a good thing, and he would never abandon the fight to defend the legacies of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Nor did O’Neill share Reagan’s hawkish outlook on international relations. Facing one of Washington’s last “unreconstructed liberals,” Gingrich mounted a letter-writing campaign to his fellow Republicans arguing that they should replace O’Neill with a more conservative Democrat who would better reflect the tenor of the election. Democrats would retain control of the office, but a leader from the shrinking southern conservative wing of the party would be more prone toward compromise with the GOP. The Republicans would need to persuade twenty-six conservative Democrats to desert their party during the vote to select the next Speaker. “There is a media conspiracy to assign conservatives responsibility for the U.S. House of Representatives. Well, it’s not really a conspiracy. Just a case of the establishment echo chamber at work. . . . Conservatives cannot afford to believe they run the U.S. House,” Gingrich warned his colleagues. He also proposed that O’Neill voluntarily agree to make committee appointments that were equally divided between Republicans and conservative Democrats—a total nonstarter.22 He enlisted conservative activists like Terry Dolan and Richard Scaife to lobby members of Congress to support this cause. It didn’t work, although it did give O’Neill the message that liberals would be blamed if Reagan’s agenda was blocked. Gingrich was savvy enough to know that the campaign was unrealistic. But he believed that its mere undertaking would remind reporters that liberals controlled the House of Representatives. He wanted to generate enough “noise and energy,” one staffer admitted, to send a message to the public and lethargic members of his party that without full control of Congress, the Reagan Revolution was dead on arrival.23

  That message seemed much more urgent to Gingrich after House Republicans voted to replace John Rhodes with Robert Michel, as much of a middle-of-the-roader as one could find. To Gingrich, Michel’s selection as minority leader signaled that his party remained resigned to the life of a permanent minority.

  For his part, Michel disliked Gingrich’s attention-grabbing antics. Elected to the House in 1956 in a solidly Republican Illinois district, Michel opposed much of the Great Society and older liberal programs but concluded that the GOP would have to work with Democrats to keep a place at the table. Otherwise, he feared, the party would be rendered irrelevant.

  Gingrich did not accept this logic. With Michel lecturing his Republican family about the need to be practical and to accept the reality that Democrats still ran the show, Gingrich acted like a petulant child who refused to take no for an answer. Here was another authority figure who made him mad. Gingrich respected Michel’s career in Congress, but he didn’t like his strategy for the party.

  Instead, Gingrich wanted to create a new and lasting majority—one that replicated the New Deal coalition that dominated American politics for more than four decades, but this time from the right. Gingrich believed that the Republicans had honed in on a powerful set of issues—supply-side tax cuts, balanced budgets, higher military budgets, welfare, and fighting the ERA—that every faction of the conservative movement agreed on. While some of his own particular interests, like urban enterprise zones, did not yet command widespread support, there were enough points of commonality among all members of the party to keep the GOP on the same page. The main challenge thus revolved around winning greater control over the levers of power. No one else would have believed that a durable Republican majority was possible, but Gingrich had played and replayed the strategy in his mind for years, perfecting the campaign to tarnish the Democratic majority as corrupt and build a broad electoral coalition that would make Congress Republican.

  It all came down to this: for Republicans to dislodge House Democrats from power, they would have to be ruthless. Democrats didn’t play fair, Gingrich believed. He said that incumbents rigged elections through gerrymandering and campaign money; they relied on arcane procedures, such as imposing rules that prevented floor amendments to bills, that disempowered the minority party; and they solidified their public support through corrupt pork-barrel spending and favors for business leaders in their districts. “There’s a sense that this (the Capitol) is a neighborhood designed to secure congressmen’s feelings. That’s very, very dangerous,” according to the Georgian.24 If the GOP adhered to the old rules of politics by being civil and bipartisan, it would simply allow the Democrats to keep winning.

  As the Ninety-seventh Congress opened for business at noon on January 5, 1981, Gingrich set out
to pull the House Democrats from power. The opening day was always festive. Members brought friends and families to the chamber to watch the start of the new session. The House relaxed its rules requiring visitors in the galleries to be silent when members convened so that they could cheer and clap.

  The chamber was magnificent. First opened in 1857 as part of the expansion of the Capitol, the grand room had housed quintessentially historic moments: the passage of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Hundred Days program that began to claw the nation out of the Great Depression; the declaration of war against Japan after Pearl Harbor; President Harry Truman outlining the new policy of containment against Soviet communism in 1947.

  The chamber had been thoroughly renovated in the late 1940s. Congress abandoned the Victorian, marble-heavy style for decor from the Federalist era. An interior, soundproofed room, the chamber featured a ceiling replicating the stained glass of an earlier period, while the carpet had a design of golden wreaths on a field of royal blue. A huge American flag hung along the wall. Carved into the marble of the top tier of the rostrum were four laurel branches signifying longevity. On the bottom tier, members saw inscriptions that captured the goals of post–World War II America: “Union,” “Justice,” “Tolerance,” “Liberty,” and “Peace.” Below the rostrum were rows of dense books, such as Cannon’s Precedents and Deschler’s Precedents, explaining the rules of the chamber, esoteric technicalities to outsiders but the lifeblood of the institution to its initiates. Light beamed in from the artificial skylight, and relief sculptures of deceased lawmakers decorated the walls.25

  Gingrich could embrace the history of the moment. Despite the small children who scampered in the aisles, partisan tensions were running high. The House clerk called the roll alphabetically so that the vote on electing Tip O’Neill as Speaker for another term could begin. Majority Leader Jim Wright said, “Just as the American people chose a Republican to sit in the White House, so the American people chose a Democratic majority in the House.” Wright delivered these words as a warning to the GOP that the Democrats would not allow the president to do whatever he wanted. But Gingrich heard them as an opportunity. Voters’ anti-establishment memories of Vietnam and Watergate remained fresh, and their distrust of government institutions had not yet been cauterized. With the House Democrats clinging to the rules of old Washington, this attack dog was determined to expose them as the epitome of all that was broken in the nation’s capital.