Burning Down the House

by Julian E. Zelizer

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  Gingrich found his early years in Washington personally difficult. He worked brutal hours in his cluttered office in the Rayburn Building. He didn’t like to sit at a desk, preferring to pace while speaking to colleagues or to sit comfortably on his navy-blue couch while crafting pithy memos. He sometimes looked for solace at the single portrait in the room, of the former president and military hero Dwight Eisenhower. Ike too had come to power after years of Democratic dominance.

  Gingrich’s marriage to Jackie had fallen apart. Repeated attempts at marriage counseling had failed. Jackie had been diagnosed with uterine cancer and was hospitalized several times. This didn’t make Gingrich more sympathetic toward her. Instead, he started struggling with feelings of depression and anger. The two separated, sitting down with their girls, then sixteen and thirteen, in their home in Fairfax, Virginia, to explain their decision.

  Gingrich acquired a reputation for sleeping around. In January 1980, at a fund-raiser in Ohio, he met an attractive twenty-eight-year-old county planner named Marianne Ginther. The tall, blue-eyed brunette found Gingrich intellectually stimulating, and they spent the evening discussing his ideas for reviving the moribund midwestern economy. They continued speaking on the phone over the next few weeks in late-night calls, and then much more. Some of his closest advisers worried that reporters would overhear them chatting on a pay phone when Gingrich ducked away to speak in the middle of well-covered events. Gingrich loved the fact that Marianne believed everything he said, finding his promises to remake American politics persuasive and exciting. They began to seriously date within a few months. Reflecting his impatience and self-centeredness, Newt discussed divorce terms with the cancer-stricken Jackie during one of her hospital stays.

  The personal turbulence took a toll on the new congressman. He had gained considerable weight binge eating and began a diet, which made him, in his own words, “moody and grumpy.”26 He had surrounded himself with an office of sycophantic staffers who treated his theories and slogans, no matter how thin, with the seriousness of a Nobel Prize–winning professor’s pronouncements, but even they could grow tired of his tantrums. He frequently sent apologetic notes to his aides, only to lash out at them again.

  Gingrich would marry Marianne about a year and a half after they met, just six months after his divorce from Jackie. But this new marriage did not restore his tranquility. Newt was frenetic, moving from one idea to the next, unconcerned with pushing any notable legislation. He was in constant conversation with everyone but intimate with almost no one. He found it easier to speak in slogans than to relate to the person in front of him. He knew that he had an explosive temper and the only way he could contain it was to stay on script, perpetually acting as if he were before the cameras or addressing a large audience so that he wouldn’t let his temper flare.

  Aside from his personal struggles, Gingrich was happy that Reagan’s first year as president had produced some triumphant moments. When the air-traffic controllers’ union, which had endorsed him in the campaign, went on strike, Reagan summarily fired them. The president proposed a massive supply-side tax cut, an idea that Gingrich had been supporting since 1978, premised on the belief that the benefits to upper-income Americans would trickle down to the rest of the country. Following the horrific assassination attempt on Reagan’s life that March, the president saw his approval ratings soar when he returned to work. Congress passed the tax cut, and it was a big one. The administration used executive orders to deregulate energy markets and dramatically increase military spending. These were significant victories for conservatives eager to shift away from the New Deal order. “We have a chance to bring about a half-century of right-of-center government,” Gingrich predicted.27

  In other respects, however, Gingrich’s warnings about the House Democrats’ obduracy played out as he expected. Despite his frontal assault on federal spending, Reagan was unable to slash domestic programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the signature welfare program from the 1930s, and the president backpedaled when his plan to cut Social Security benefits stimulated fierce opposition. In 1982, Senate Republicans joined Democrats to enact tax increases to reduce ballooning federal deficits, a decision that was anathema to the tax-cutting Gingrich. Furious with Reagan and his congressional colleagues for abandoning their orthodoxy of lower federal income taxes, Gingrich criticized those who had capitulated in the “fight for the soul of the Republican Party.”28 The “political establishment in Washington,” he lamented, had defeated the ordinary citizens.29 And while House Democrats were willing to agree to spend more on the general defense budget, they wouldn’t go along with the president’s proposals to boost military and financial assistance for anticommunist forces in Central America. Meanwhile, social conservatives complained bitterly that the administration was giving up on their entire agenda.

  In March 1982, Gingrich wrote a letter to all of his fellow Republicans urging them to develop a better, more coordinated message to use in front of the media—a lecture much like the one he’d delivered to Paul Weyrich at their first meeting in Milwaukee in 1975. After reviewing twelve Sunday television interview shows, Gingrich came away impressed by how much attention congressional Democrats devoted to perfecting and repeating their message. Republicans were far less polished, Gingrich thought. “A political party which focuses on the management and allocation of campaign resources, and neglects political strategy, is a party that loses,” Gingrich warned. “Two minutes on the evening news is watched by more people, believed by more of them, and, politically has a greater multiplier effect than paid political advertising.” Gingrich implored House Republicans to pay more attention to their media appearances. “Republicans tend to have blurred and unfocused opening statements while Democrats tend to focus effectively and persuasively.”30

  Gingrich urged his party to embrace more radical tactics to achieve their goals. In an effort to win support for a constitutional balanced budget amendment, Gingrich proposed that Republicans ally with conservative Democrats to shut down the federal government for as long as necessary by refusing to pass appropriations bills. The congressman also floated the possibility of refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling, a decision that would send the entire government into financial default. “We want to force a crisis,” Gingrich admitted in full candor.31 Neither threat came to fruition, but like so much of what Gingrich did, he normalized conversations about radical procedural tactics that would have at one time been considered off-limits.

  Gingrich was catching fire. In May, the Conservative Digest featured him on its cover, an honor for anyone who identified with the Right. In “Rep. Newt Gingrich: A New Conservative Leader for the ’80s,” Steven Beckner explained to readers that the “word on Newt Gingrich was that he was a bright, energetic innovator on both the legislative and political fronts—in short, a man with a future.” The piece was sprinkled with glowing praise from prominent Republicans. “A key intellectual figure within the Republican Party,” said Jack Kemp. Robert Michel told Beckner, “If there was ever a champion of positive thought and positive action in the development and execution of Republican policy, Newt is the one.” After reviewing his rise to power and outlining his key policy positions, Beckner ended the article with Paul Weyrich’s predicting Gingrich would be a “very important conservative leader” for a “long time to come.”32

  Gingrich was also becoming a familiar voice inside the Washington Beltway through talk radio. Members, staffers, and reporters frequently heard him as a guest host on one of the most popular drive-time radio talk shows, Confrontation. The show, co-hosted by the liberal syndicated columnist Tom Braden and the conservative speechwriter and pundit Pat Buchanan, featured liberal-conservative debates on the issues of the day and live calls from listeners. When the producers were having some contract problems with Buchanan, they invited Gingrich to fill in as a voice of the Right (for free because he was a legislator).
The gig gave Gingrich a platform to reach some of the most powerful figures in the city as they became familiar with his name and point of view (CNN picked up the show and turned it into Crossfire in 1982).33

  In the fall of 1982, he and Marianne met with Richard Nixon at the Mayflower Hotel in New York. Gingrich had contacted Nixon for advice, and the former president proved happy to meet with an ambitious Republican seeking to create the kind of majority Nixon had envisioned back in 1972. Nixon, the most disgraced figure in American politics at the time, also felt flattered that a younger Republican looked up to him as a legitimate party elder. At one point during their three-hour dinner meeting, Nixon counseled, “If you really want to become the majority, you have to fill the place with ideas.” Gingrich left feeling flushed and emboldened—and blind to the irony that one of the most vocal “anticorruption” warriors in Washington was now taking lessons from the disgraced president at the center of the worst political scandal in American history. Gingrich was always comfortable with such contradictions.34

  Newt’s hopes for quickly turning his caucus into the majority grew dimmer in November 1982 when Republicans endured devastating midterm elections. He won reelection, but many of his GOP colleagues were not so lucky. A recession had begun in late 1981, hitting hardest in Rust Belt states where Reagan had sold blue-collar workers on his political vision, which left him particularly vulnerable to Democrats labeling the economic downturn the Reagan Recession. Democrats picked up twenty-six seats in the House, strengthening their position just two years into the Reagan Revolution.

  The midterms stirred within Gingrich an even greater sense of urgency about the need for Republicans to undertake dramatic actions to topple Democratic control of the House. Otherwise, as the disastrous midterms proved, conservatives would miss the chance to enact their agenda.

  By early 1983, Gingrich had crafted the message that would shape the rest of his career. He would brand the Democratic Party the symbol of Washington’s corruption in the post-Watergate era. The marching orders for his GOP allies were simple. Congressional Republicans would drive a wedge between the Democratic Party and the American people by taking on the political establishment—that is, the House Democratic Party. What made the strategy so compelling was the steady erosion of the trust of American voters in government institutions since Vietnam and Watergate. Poll after poll revealed that Americans had negative feelings about all parts of government, especially Congress. Gingrich was taking a match to a pile of dry wood. He was offering his colleagues a strategy for insurgency, suggesting that Republicans put aside their concern for governance until they regained power. Undermining the political standing of the Democratic majority needed to be the party’s top and singular priority for the time being.

  Congress’s good-government reforms in the 1970s had also left elected officials more vulnerable than ever. The reforms had primarily focused on weakening the authority of the existing leaders to create more room for rank-and-file members to influence debates. Committees were forced to hold public hearings, and the House began to televise its proceedings. The reforms the Democrats enacted had created more weapons for Gingrich to use to go after corruption.

  The Democratic Congress was susceptible to his offensive. Party leaders had responded to the post-Watergate fury, but within certain limits. Many of the practices that had angered voters remained unaddressed, leaving Democrats open to Republican attacks. Congress had failed to substantially reform its own campaign-finance system, and the stench of private money in the political system remained pungent. The complex nexus of lobbyists and legislators also remained as problematic as ever. And the pork-barrel spending that had repeatedly returned Gingrich’s former opponent John Flynt to Washington remained commonplace. While both parties engaged in questionable behavior, Democrats were the ones with the power, so voters would hold them more accountable than the invisible Republican minority.

  Gingrich understood the need for organization to take on the Democrats. He would also have to outflank the leadership of his own party, which had accommodated itself to life in opposition, with a determined circle of the like-minded. Gingrich formed a caucus of insurgents that would be modeled after the Democratic Study Group, a caucus of northern liberals formed in 1959 to challenge the senior southern Dixiecrats. Gingrich called his new base of operations the Conservative Opportunity Society, or COS. From within the House, the small caucus would start its own revolution, and—to borrow a phrase from the journalist Gail Sheehy after Gingrich was elected Speaker in 1994—he would be the “Che Guevara of conservatism.”35

  Gingrich chose the name “Conservative Opportunity Society” to signal an alternative to the “Liberal Welfare State.” Just as he had seen the world divided between black and white as a youth living in West Germany, he now drew American politics into Manichaean opposites of good and evil. Outlining the group’s principles for his staff, Gingrich wrote that the Conservative Opportunity Society represented “honest money without inflation” while the “Liberal Welfare State” stood for “a return to double-digit inflation.” The Conservative Opportunity Society stood for “no tax increases, and tax cuts whenever possible”; the “Liberal Welfare State” represented “higher taxes on almost everything.” Proponents of the Conservative Opportunity Society believed that “people are responsible for what they do whether it’s good or bad”; supporters of the “Liberal Welfare State” believed that “society is ultimately responsible for everything that happens.” The Conservative Opportunity Society was about “traditional family values,” while the “Liberal Welfare State” supported “radical lifestyles.” The Conservative Opportunity Society defended “equality of opportunity,” while the “Liberal Welfare State” endorsed “equality of result.”36

  In crafting this political manifesto, Gingrich had turned to books about futurism, organizational culture, and institutional transformation, subjects that appealed to his restless boundary pushing and spurred his optimism about political change. He urged his colleagues to read Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave, John Naisbitt’s Megatrends, Peter Drucker’s Effective Executive, and Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman’s In Search of Excellence37—bestsellers by futurists and management consultants who were in vogue as thought leaders. These books claimed that the pace of change was accelerating so rapidly that the older hierarchies of power from the industrial age were breaking down and giving way to new freedoms and choices. Gingrich saw in these books arguments that meshed with his personal mission and explained why the political institutions that had dominated government for so long were bound to end. Democrats were locked into using a government, he said, that would not be a central component of the next stage of society. It would take political visionaries to complete the transformation, leaders willing to break with long-standing conventions to move the nation into a new political era. “We need large-scale, radical change,” Gingrich wrote to fellow House Republicans.38

  The Democratic majority was Goliath; Gingrich was David. The changes he sought necessitated defying political conventions and ignoring norms of government. If there was one popular Washington truism that Gingrich couldn’t stand, it was the ongoing appeal to bipartisanship—a political trap, he thought, that only benefited the Democrats. Early in 1983, just as the new Congress convened, Gingrich warned that “liberal Democrats intend to act bipartisan before the news media while acting ruthlessly partisan in changing the rules of the House, stacking committees, apportioning staff and questioning the administration.” After doing all that, he added, they would “use a spirit of bipartisanship and harmony as a polite cover to attract sympathy if we disagree with their version of ‘reasonable, responsible compromises’—all of which happen to be liberal and increase spending, weaken defense, increase bureaucracy and raise taxes.” Democrats wouldn’t even consult Republicans about which issues should be addressed, and so, when the GOP said no to a deal, Speaker O’Neill could turn to the public and say that partisan Republicans were to bl
ame for the failures of Congress. Democrats would use “every possible institutional resource to dominate us and reach out to the country.”39

  Gingrich lobbied hard to win over Robert Michel, the new minority leader. Michel viewed Gingrich as a piece of forbidden fruit.40 Like almost every Republican, he was intrigued by Gingrich’s promise to make Republicans a majority again. Any Republican who had been in the House since the end of the Korean War had never experienced what it was like to be in the majority. Republicans had worse office space, they were ignored at, if not barred from, committee meetings, and they had almost no say in crafting legislation.

  Yet Michel saw Gingrich as quixotic. By seeking hard-to-imagine goals and using what he called “parliamentary pyrotechnics,”41 the party would lose whatever access it had been able to gain through negotiation. Worse, Michel thought Gingrich’s methods were dangerous to the health of the institution. Gingrich and COS, who met every Wednesday in an empty room in the House office buildings without staff, sounded like a group who would do anything necessary to win, even at the risk of tearing Congress apart.

  In an effort to show Michel that his plan was viable, Gingrich wrote him a letter outlining an alternative way to deal with his party, one that reflected the philosophy of COS rather than the Old Guard Republicans. Michel needed to encourage the “next generation” of Republican members to get into a tougher stance with the Democrats: “If you teach them how to be aggressive and confrontational, you will increase their abilities to fight Democrats on the floor. If you teach them to avoid argument and smother dissent, then they will be crippled on the floor.” Gingrich charged, “We have the habits and demeanor of a minority party.” And those habits, he argued, “help keep us in the minority.”42