Burning Down the House

by Julian E. Zelizer

  Gingrich’s strategic thoughts coalesced in an even more unorthodox think piece produced by one of his informal advisers, the Republican consultant Bill Lee. The memo, written six days after Reagan’s 1984 State of the Union address, likened COS to the crafty and impossible-to-defeat Vietcong, while comparing the Democrats to the bloated, slow-witted, U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government. COS, Lee argued, had to think harder about what it was and how it would act. “We exist with some support from North Vietnam (the formal Republican Party, the Senate, and the Presidency) on the basis of larger shared goals, but we live under the domination and corruption of the Republic of South Vietnam (the Democrats in the House, and in the majority of the 50 state legislatures, local officials and Governors).” Moving forward with the increasingly contorted historical comparison, Lee concluded, “One of these enemies, the South Vietnamese government, we must destroy. The other, the North Vietnamese government, we must take advantage of, lie to, sidetrack, confound, and possess by recruitment and propaganda until the two are one.”43

  Lee reminded Gingrich that “radical political factions” in the United States were “ultimately diluted and absorbed by larger factions or parties, and thus disappear, along with their ideals and ideas.” The premise of COS was that the group “can and must be a revolutionary guerilla movement.” To this end, Lee argued, COS must find “confrontational means to assure the publicity which indicates our viewpoint that the Democratic Party is the oppressor.” “Confrontation and conflict,” Lee added, “are the means to the end—the creation of a new definition of a Republican Party that shares the specific goals of the populace.” Lee warned Gingrich that it was essential that COS remained autonomous and did not turn into a “tool” of the Republican leadership or they could become “pawns” in destructive bipartisan compromise.44

  Gingrich loved Lee’s memorandum, which became his road map for how he would direct COS. Gingrich would bring his battle to the floor of the House of Representatives—and before the television cameras that post-Watergate reforms had introduced in 1977 to film daily proceedings. The effort to reform government had resulted in the creation in 1979 of a new cable network called C-SPAN, founded by the former Nixon official Brian Lamb. Gingrich was thrilled that any member could deliver speeches to his or her constituents as part of a live feed at the start and end of each day. On C-SPAN, legislators could speak without the filter of network news reporters, who in Gingrich’s mind were all too liberal. The cable network offered an electronic “town hall meeting.”45 Now, he enthused, “on the floor, we have the chance to present our views not only to our colleagues, but to the nation.” He continued, “C-SPAN permits us to communicate those views without having them digested or reinterpreted by unfriendlies within the media. And C-SPAN’s audience would swell if confrontation rather than capitulation characterized the GOP stance in all House debate.”46

  Gingrich liked to say, “You don’t get on TV with cars that get home safely,” which meant that you needed to give the press more “Indiana Jones than the Philharmonic.” Politicians had to feed the appetites of audiences seeking to be “voyeurs” watching “reality happen.” Though C-SPAN’s audience share paled in comparison to the major networks’, Gingrich reminded his colleagues that the station still offered members “200,000 potential viewers” at any given moment.47 “Most members will travel pretty far,” he said, “to talk to 200 people. When I stand up on the floor, the audience might be 1,000 times that.”48 Gingrich, who would later call himself the “first leader of the C-SPAN generation,”49 realized that provocative statements made on the floor would be picked up by a national press that thrived on controversy. This new cable television medium, a press without sentries, created opportunities to communicate with mass audiences that older Republicans didn’t understand and senior Democrats couldn’t handle. Through cable television, Gingrich would be able to carry out the guerrilla tactics his adviser Bill Lee had proposed.

  When COS met for a special Saturday session to make plans before the Christmas break, everyone in the room seemed to be on the same page as to what needed to happen in the coming year. COS would have to undertake a “radical strategy,” according to the minutes, because Democrats would be doing everything possible to boost their party’s standing in a “political year.” Even when White House and Republican leaders started feeling pressure to compromise, which they would, COS agreed that there could be no common ground with Democrats. COS would devote every day to driving a “wedge between the Democratic Party and the American people.”50

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  With the 1984 election season under way, “the young red hot,” as Wright began to call him, smelled opportunity. The national media would be looking for stories of partisan warfare, and Gingrich planned to deliver.

  So did his COS colleagues, twelve partisans who shared his goals. The Minnesota Republican Vin Weber, elected in 1982 and always by Gingrich’s side, was a hard-line conservative who championed term limits and deep spending cuts. Robert Dornan, a fire-breathing right-winger from California, was enthralled by Gingrich’s in-your-face approach. Connie Mack from Florida, Indiana’s Dan Coats, and California’s Duncan Hunter were ready to follow Gingrich’s commands whenever he said that it was time to attack. The lanky Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, elected in 1976, was a former political-science teacher who had spent much of his career scouring arcane House rules to master the art of procedural warfare. The spotlight-seeking Walker, one of the most disliked members of the House, clad in unflattering and cheap three-piece suits, reveled in the fact that he was developing a following among C-SPAN aficionados. Nobody had ever predicted that he would be a television star of any sort.

  COS counted on Trent Lott, a five-term Republican from Mississippi, who remained on the “fringes” of the conservative caucus and served as a bridge to the party leadership.51 Lott, who always managed to keep his blow-dried bowl haircut meticulously in place, had started his political career as the administrative assistant for William Colmer, an ardent Democratic racist and the chief ally of Howard “Judge” Smith, the conservative chairman of the House Rules Committee, who spent most of his career blocking liberal legislation. He had become the minority whip in 1981. Filled with ambition to become a party leader, Lott offered Republicans the rare breed of legislator who could forge pragmatic, bipartisan compromises while maintaining the image of an unfaltering, ideological conservative.52 While working for Colmer, Lott learned that the House rules could be a brutal cudgel against almost any proposal. Along with Congressman Kemp, Lott helped Gingrich’s renegades gain some kind of sway within the party caucus.53

  The House minority leader, Michel, talked often about civility but did little to stop COS, hoping to incorporate their energy and ideas into the party without allowing Gingrich to take it over. In a Faustian bargain, trading away the norms of good governance for a more potent form of partisan warfare, Michel reached out to all Republicans, urging them to use floor speeches, op-eds, and national press appearances to issue Gingrich-like warnings about how Democrats were manipulating their authority. His staff met regularly with COS to work on strategy.54

  Gingrich and COS took aim at the hot-button policy issue of the moment: the fight against communism in Central America. The Reagan administration wanted to expand support for rebels in Nicaragua who were battling the socialist Sandinista government that had taken power in 1979, in addition to funding the autocratic government of El Salvador that was fighting against an insurgency. Under Reagan, the CIA was providing financial and military support to a counterrevolutionary group called the contras, a ragtag collection of guerrillas who lived in the jungles while trying to bring down the Sandinista regime. But House Democrats feared that Nicaragua would turn into another Vietnam. To check the president, Democrats had passed a series of amendments starting in 1982 to limit support to the contras.

  Congressional Republicans were eager to focus on foreign policy as the presid
ential election season started. Even though polls showed that a majority of the public did not support U.S. military intervention in Central America, Republicans believed that national security remained a winning issue. Since World War II, Republicans had used the argument that Democrats were “weak on defense” to great political effect. In 1952, the GOP campaigned on this theme to regain control of the White House and Congress for the first time since FDR was elected president. In 1972, President Nixon pilloried Senator George McGovern, a decorated World War II veteran and liberal internationalist, for allegedly ushering the Democrats down the path of isolationism in response to Vietnam. Most recently, Republicans had seen how Reagan used national security to batter President Carter in the 1980 election when his administration was struggling with the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.55

  In 1984, Reagan was determined to shift the terms of the public debate and move Central America toward the front lines of the nation’s cold war strategy. In February, he proposed an $8 billion, five-year program to fight communism in Central America, including in El Salvador, where the administration wanted to help the U.S.-friendly government beat back left-wing rebels. Although the president excluded Nicaragua from the package in order to avoid an unnecessary controversy, he did seek a $21 million increase in aid for the Nicaraguan contras as an amendment to a separate Senate bill. When pushing for both of these measures, Reagan faced an uphill battle because polls still showed consistently low approval ratings for U.S. efforts in the region.

  The Conservative Opportunity Society took up the cause. Gingrich didn’t agree with everything that President Reagan had to say, but when it came to cutting taxes and fighting communism, he was all in. The importance of ramping up the war against communism in Central America made sense to Gingrich, who still vividly remembered seeing remnants of the aftermath from the world wars in Europe. “The Soviets are essentially the Nazis of the left,” he said.56 In Gingrich’s mind, the basic problem was that too many Americans didn’t understand the urgency of the dangers outside Eastern Europe. They had bought into the Democratic arguments that American support in Central America would turn into another quagmire like Southeast Asia and that the region was not essential to national interests. Gingrich compared Reagan’s situation in Nicaragua—as well as in El Salvador—to President Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam. This junior member of the House had no problem pontificating to President Reagan about his history lessons. In one of his many letters to the president, Gingrich told Reagan that in 1965 and 1966 Johnson had failed to “rally the American people, to educate them, and to insure there was strong popular support for the war.” Johnson had left a “vacuum of leadership into which the Jane Fondas and George McGoverns poured,”57 and the same thing was happening now to Reagan.

  When it came to Central America, Republican policy preferences neatly aligned with their political strategy. As the House considered the administration’s Central America package and the Senate legislation that included money for the contras, Gingrich also saw the fight as a chance to wound Jim Wright as he campaigned for federal funds that were urgently needed. The majority leader was an inviting target. The Texan was hawkish on most foreign policy questions—including U.S. support to the right-wing El Salvador government—and had been participating in diplomatic overtures to end the civil war in Nicaragua, hoping that Washington could pressure the Sandinistas into adopting democratic reforms without using military force. Reagan officials, who had often worked cordially with Wright on foreign policy, warned that he was being pushed to the left on this issue by his caucus.

  Gingrich began his ambush by talking informally to reporters about a letter that the majority leader and nine other Democrats had sent to the Nicaraguan president, Daniel Ortega, to pressure him to hold free elections. The letter started by addressing Ortega as “Dear Comandante,” proof, Gingrich claimed, that congressional Democrats were cozily willing to appease the Marxists and give them legitimacy. With the reporters leaning in, Gingrich denounced Wright and condemned the decision to contact Ortega as a violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers. He repeated these charges on the House floor. “It’s at best unwise, and at worst illegal,” he said, pausing before unleashing his final piece of mischief. Congress, Gingrich said, ought to consider whether the Logan Act, which forbade U.S. citizens to negotiate with foreign governments that were in conflict with the United States, should now apply to Wright and the other Democrats.

  Wright, who was serving as Speaker while O’Neill was out of the country, was furious. “Newt Gingrich, the gadfly Georgia Republican, is pursuing a vendetta aimed at discrediting me and nine other Democrats” by insisting that “we were interfering with and undermining official U.S. foreign policy by corresponding directly with an ‘enemy’ of the U.S.,” he wrote in his diary on April 24. “It is sheer McCarthyism of the very rankest order.” Wright was shocked that Gingrich had portrayed this letter as an act of support for the Sandinista government rather than an effort to pressure it to institute democratic reforms. “Gingrich knows all of this,” Wright wrote, “but he is trying to qualify as a junior grade Joe McCarthy. Ever since his coming to Congress, he has sought opportunities to build himself by attacking others. The little rascal feels no compunction about deliberately distorting this so as to make it appear that Democrats are un-American types who delight in undermining U.S. policy.”58

  Democrats could complain all they wanted to, but Gingrich’s plan worked. “Conflict equals exposure equals power,” Gingrich liked to say.59 He was right. The media soaked up the story. The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Atlanta Constitution all covered Gingrich’s speech. The ferociously anticommunist editorial page of The Wall Street Journal speculated that the “Comandante must find this amusing, since the Sandinistas have repeatedly disavowed any intention of holding to a ‘bourgeois’ conception of elections or democracy.”60 As with Gingrich’s attacks on Congressman Diggs, the media liked covering the feisty Georgia congressman and provided oxygen for his provocative assertions.

  Wright understood that Gingrich wanted to goad the Democrats into responding. “The silly little devil is like a small swarm of gnats. He hasn’t the capacity to inflict injury on anyone unless he makes you lose control of the steering wheel while swatting the gnats. He is a self-appointed pest,” Wright lamented.61 Wright kept downplaying the impact that the televised tirades on C-SPAN would have. “If a fellow wants to waste the time of the television audience with bombast, the rules permit it,” he said in dismissive fashion. “But I suggest that the public knows it’s phony as a $3 bill.”62 But with a national audience watching, Gingrich was difficult to ignore.

  Gingrich and his allies were just getting started. Now Republicans had a taste of the kind of chaos that Bill Lee’s guerrilla politics could create and the bonanza of media coverage it could yield. They had no intention of slowing down. COS intended to re-create the kind of constant mayhem that was common in the nineteenth-century House, not necessarily the fisticuffs, but rather the intense partisan conflict that guided all business on the chamber floor. The main goal was to persuade Republican legislators to see every decision through the lens of raw partisan interest. According to what Gingrich called the “floor strategy,” COS would move the deliberations out of the committee rooms and into the public eye. The caucus would employ uncomfortable, confrontational tactics with the sole purpose of exposing how Democrats stifled the minority. COS would coerce Democrats into responding to them in aggressive fashion, and Republicans would then use the Speaker’s retaliation as a dramatic talking point in their campaign against the “abuse of power.”63 As Bill Lee had written to Gingrich, “Any guerilla worth his powder understands that one of his guiding principles is to drive authority (read democrats) to excess that will anger the people and spark a popular uprising.”64 The setting for this plan would be the most seemingly innocuous routine of the congressional day.

  The House’s “Sp
ecial Order” speeches always started at 5:00 P.M., when most members were no longer in the chamber or their offices. Traditionally, they were a time for legislators to read from newspaper articles or deliver local-interest speeches as a favor for constituents. Gingrich would weaponize the speeches.

  As Democrats and Republicans left their “office work” to attend fund-raisers, join ceremonies, or gather in Capitol Hill bars to talk strategy over aged bourbon and steak, COS would go to work. During the previous few months, the subjects of their speeches had been picked haphazardly—sometimes in the office of Congressman Walker, more often than not while members of COS, still numbering only about a dozen (though they claimed the “hard” support of forty members), were milling around in the back of the chamber. In May 1984, knowing they would have the C-SPAN cameras largely to themselves, the process was different. This time, they had a coordinated game plan.65

  On May 8, at 7:30 P.M., one day before President Reagan was scheduled to address Congress to urge it to pass an $8 billion military and financial assistance package to support anticommunist forces in Central America, Walker and Gingrich approached the front row of their party’s side of the aisle and sat down, armed with a bulky report.

  When the young Republicans were recognized by the chair, the New York representative Ted Weiss, Walker walked up to the lectern with fire in his eye. He started to enthusiastically read a document written by Frank Gregorsky titled What’s the Matter with Democratic Foreign Policy? The report blamed a number of prominent Democrats, including Congressman Edward Boland of Massachusetts, the well-liked Washington roommate of Speaker O’Neill, for his role in authoring the amendments that had until now thwarted President Reagan’s heroic efforts to defeat communism in Central America.