Walker warned that the “radical wing” of the Democratic Party had taken over its foreign policy, abandoning Harry Truman’s muscular liberal internationalism for the anti-interventionist ideas of Senator George McGovern. And Jim Wright, Walker said, had allowed this to happen. The majority leader, who had once been among the party’s hawks, had joined the radicals, flipping on issues like funding for the MX missile and military assistance to anticommunist forces in Central America. Names were named: Democrats including Thomas Downey of New York, Stephen Solarz of New York, Barbara Boxer of California, and Robert Torricelli of New Jersey were all accused of playing footsie with communist-allied forces.
This was only the beginning. When Walker’s time ran out, Gingrich kept on hammering. The Democratic worldview, Gingrich read, was “rigid, unyielding and skewed.” Firing off facts and figures, Gingrich told C-SPAN viewers that Democrats were afraid to stand up to communism. Gingrich closed his binder and sauntered back to his seat, deeply pleased with his performance.
Members of COS had been making these speeches since January, but Speaker O’Neill had not been paying close attention and had allowed them to continue. Chris Matthews, one of the Speaker’s top spokesmen and a future cable television news host, said that “Gingrich’s Guerrillas” (as some colleagues called them) were an “embarrassment to their own leadership.” As he put it, “They’re making fools of themselves. The more exposure they get, the better it is for the Democrats, that’s how the speaker feels.”66 Agreeing with Matthews in a different interview, O’Neill told a reporter that the “Special Order” speeches “showed a meanness, because they showed an unfairness. . . . Our polls show they helped us.”67
That changed on May 8, with its climactic flurry of visceral, coordinated speeches. No viewer watching C-SPAN would have known that Walker and Gingrich were speaking to an essentially empty chamber. All that a viewer could see was the upper half of the body of the person speaking, thanks to the House rules adopted in 1977, which stipulated that the in-house cameras for C-SPAN broadcasts could film only the person standing at the rostrum. The rationale had been to avoid embarrassing members who might not realize that they were on camera as they schmoozed with friends or quietly dozed. But Walker and Gingrich had realized that as they accused specific Democrats of failing to support their country, C-SPAN viewers would be left to think that the Democrats had no response.
Congressman David Obey of Wisconsin heard about what was happening from a staffer watching the floor feed from an office television. Stunned and angered, Obey rushed to the chamber to defend his colleagues and himself. Seizing the rostrum, he attempted to explain to “those who might be watching” that “from time to time” in the House, members “more interested in making a political point than seeking truth” decide to “follow an approach which brings into question not only members’ judgment but patriotism.” Fidgeting with the pen in his shirt pocket and twisting his wedding ring to contain his outrage, Obey condemned Gingrich and his crew as “descendants of Joe McCarthy.” They “may be a bit prettier and a bit more skilled in the use of television, but they are certainly no less comfortable in the use of innuendo.”
The evening ended in a tense standoff. A handful of other Democrats ran into the chamber to support Obey, and they marched out steaming about what had gone down. Meanwhile, Gingrich sauntered toward the Rayburn Building feeling confident about the response he had triggered. The Hill’s watering holes were packed late into the night with legislators and staffers talking animatedly about what had happened.
On May 9, with this turbulence in the House behind the scenes, Reagan delivered a nationally televised address from the Oval Office urging Congress to pass his bill. “Central America is a region of great importance to the United States,” Reagan said. “And it is so close: San Salvador is closer to Houston, Texas, than Houston is to Washington, D.C.” Even without explicit coordination, the president and the Republican renegades were heading in the same direction.
The next night, an emboldened COS returned to the floor to resume their attacks on the Democrats, and on Congressman Boland in particular. The self-effacing representative who had authored the amendments prohibiting military or economic assistance to the Nicaraguan contras was reviled in Republican circles for concluding that Reagan’s wars in Central America were counterproductive and damaging.
This time, Tip O’Neill was in the chamber, having heard what had happened two nights earlier. He took the bait. Unable to contain himself as he listened to the Republicans pillory his friend, the Speaker extemporaneously instructed the technician controlling the camera to pan across the empty chamber, revealing to C-SPAN viewers the dirty trick that Gingrich’s forces were playing.
All hell broke loose. Democrats scrambled back into the chamber to take their seats, some with their jackets hastily tossed on, eager to challenge Gingrich, who insisted in his speech that he had given them fair warning that he was going to read from this study and had invited them to respond. One Watergate Baby, Tom Downey of New York, said that he had never received any such letter. Charles Rangel of New York stood up to denounce Gingrich. Jim Wright warned, “When we begin impugning one another’s patriotism, then we cross a bar that should not be crossed!” Republicans booed and hissed as the Democrats spoke, then hollered for Speaker O’Neill to restore order on the floor. The following morning, Michel wrote O’Neill to complain: “This was an act of dictatorial retribution against a Member of the United States Congress. It was deplorable.”68
The televised fighting continued over the next few evenings. The more the media covered the controversy, the more Gingrich got what he wanted: a televised platform to underline his claims about Democratic weakness on foreign policy.
Finally, on May 15, regular order totally broke down. While Gingrich was reading from a text claiming that Democrats were always ready to tarnish the United States but not the communists, Wright leaped up from his seat to ask, “Would the gentleman yield for a question?” Gingrich refused.
Sick of his Republican colleagues, O’Neill dropped his gavel and turned the Speaker’s chair over to Representative Joe Moakley of Massachusetts. O’Neill had already been nearing a tipping point as he and other Democrats saw Republicans abuse good-government reforms they had helped pass in the 1970s, and they started to clamp down.69 Now members of both parties sat on edge as O’Neill stormed down from the podium to the floor so that he could deliver a speech as a regular member.
“Will the gentleman yield?” O’Neill now bellowed. Gingrich yielded. In his thick New England accent, his face bright red, O’Neill removed his glasses and chastised the Republicans for misrepresenting the facts and making false allegations. O’Neill wagged his finger at Gingrich, who was sitting just a few feet away, and raised his voice: “You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House and challenged these people and challenged their Americanism, and it is the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my thirty-two years in Congress.”
There was stunned silence, like the moment after a parent loses his temper with poorly behaved kids. The rebels had been waiting for just this sort of dressing-down and turned the Speaker’s attack against him. Here was the essence of the Gingrich playbook: everything could be turned to his advantage. Flout institutional norms and then, when criticized for doing so, cry foul.
A Republican staffer informed Trent Lott that Speaker O’Neill’s comments violated the rules prohibiting personal attacks against fellow members. Lott asked that O’Neill’s comments be immediately “taken down,” or struck from the record.70 This was a daring move for a Republican in the era of Democratic dominance. As everyone anxiously waited to see what would happen next, like kids glancing after the first blow had been struck in a schoolyard fight, Weber quietly walked up to Gingrich and whispered in his ear to stay calm in front of the television cameras because “we’re winning.”71 Gingrich thought of the advice his wife had offered earlier that week—to employ
the principles of judo by provoking a stronger opponent and putting them off-balance, remaining calm the madder they got—and contained his anger.72 After what one journalist called a “painful silence,” the House parliamentarian, William Brown, meekly leaned over to inform Moakley that Lott was correct. Moakley had to strike the Speaker’s comments from the Congressional Record and then formally rebuke him for being out of order. O’Neill lost the privilege of speaking in the chamber for twenty-four hours. The two-hour fight aired on live television, and a humiliated O’Neill entered the history books as the first Speaker of the House to be officially punished for his own words.73 Gingrich, who complained to the cameras that it was his patriotism being “impugned” by a “McCarthyism of the left,” beamed. Some of his colleagues patted him on the back; others burst out in applause.74
The House Republicans kept attacking, using the O’Neill rebuke to exemplify the Democratic majority’s flagrant violation of the rules to hold on to power. Congressman Dick Cheney, a Wyoming conservative and former chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, charged that the Speaker had not been playing fair when he flipped around the camera. Cheney was taken more seriously than Gingrich. Unlike his renegade colleague, Cheney was a cerebral levelheaded conservative with an impressive résumé, and he was not known for hyperbole. With his wife, Lynne, who had a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century British literature from the University of Wisconsin, he had coauthored a history of how Speakers had attempted to dominate the House through personal and procedural force with mixed success.75 House Republicans were grooming Cheney, who was described by one reporter as having an “unsettling calm,”76 to be the Speaker of the House one day. Although not a member of Gingrich’s coterie or an admirer of his fire-breathing methods, Cheney now joined Gingrich in declaring that O’Neill’s “repeated attacks” were “damaging the House as an institution.”
Cheney tossed the ball downfield to Jack Kemp, the charismatic former football player who championed supply-side economics. The New York congressman claimed that the Speaker had “altered procedure and tried to use the televising of the House to embarrass the Republicans.” O’Neill, chimed in Vin Weber, “is one of the cheapest, meanest politicians to occupy that office in this century.” Even the docile Michel piled on: “I’ll have to agree with you. To have this man act the way this one has is unheard of.”77 Republicans painted O’Neill as nothing more than an old-school corrupt Boston-style Tammany Hall politician who abused his power. “Thanks to C-SPAN,” Gingrich said, “we can appeal to the country so people can see how phony the arguments are. We want to convict the Democrats in the court of opinion.”78
“Camscam,” as The Washington Post’s T. R. Reid called it, became national news, just as Gingrich hoped.79 “I’m famous,” Gingrich boasted to one reporter.80 The networks were playing footage of Republicans on the evening news, a rare occurrence in those days. Billy Pitts, Michel’s top staffer, believed that O’Neill made “Gingrich a household name” through his response.81 “The number-one fact about the news media is they love fights,” Gingrich would say later. “The minute Tip O’Neill attacked me, he and I got 90 seconds at the close of all three network news shows.” You have to give the media packaged confrontations, he added: “When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention you can educate.”82 Brian Lamb, the founder and president of C-SPAN, admitted, “We’ve never had any more visibility than this. Forget about whether the argument is right or wrong. It’s been on the front pages of every newspaper in the country.”83 Surveying the damage, Congressman Daniel Lungren of California praised COS for having “captured the attention of many Washington reporters, political analysts and the general public.”84
The way that Gingrich used the medium of television against the Democrats was as important as the specific debate over funding the contras and anticommunism. O’Neill, Wright, and the rest of the Democratic leadership were caught flat-footed. “This is the beginning of the post-Rayburn House,” Gingrich observed. “It’s like the transition from vaudeville to television, like going from being a Broadway actor to being a television star. O’Neill and others are pre-TV, pre-confrontational.”85
Wright, who felt that the House had become so tense that it was wound tighter than a “cotton clothesline after a rain,” could not have known that Gingrich would soon be coming for him. For now, the majority leader thought that O’Neill had done the right thing by taking on Gingrich, though he realized the Democrats were paying a steep political price. “Yesterday’s contretemps between silly little Newt Gingrich and the Speaker should not have happened,” Wright wrote in his diary. Gingrich “really is a shrill and shameless little demagogue.”86
The final results were mixed for Reagan and Gingrich. Majority Leader Wright and fifty-five other Democrats supported the administration’s Central America package, allowing it to move through the House successfully. This constituted a notable victory, even though the Senate ended up voting for only a limited package of $1.4 billion for one year. But the proposed assistance for the contras went down in defeat as the House instead imposed tighter restrictions on what kind of money could be given to the rebels, although Congress agreed to resume some kinds of funding in 1985.
But in certain respects, the legislation was beside the point. Republicans were playing the long game. Gingrich, who believed that it was necessary to change the terms of the debate if Republicans ever wanted to be in the majority and actually have the opportunity to enact transformative legislation, had capitalized on this dramatic floor debate to describe the opposition as weak on defense, to make a strong case before the media about why fighting communism in Central America mattered, and to continue painting Democrats as a corrupt party that relied on brute procedural force.
Gingrich’s rising stature was on full display at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas. Gingrich had secured a role on the platform committee because he had served on an informal advisory panel with Reagan’s deputy campaign director, Lee Atwater, campaign director, Ed Rollins, and political adviser Lyn Nofziger. This kitchen cabinet had been responsible, Rollins said, for “planning themes, tactics, messages, just the overall campaign strategy.”87 From their post on the platform committee, Gingrich and Weber pressured the GOP into adopting right-wing positions such as school prayer, requiring judicial nominees to oppose abortion, and a flat ban against tax increases. Gingrich’s “firebrands,” according to Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, “took over the platform committee, ramming through a document so close to the fringe that many Republicans—including Senator Dole—felt obliged to condemn it.”88 “We got everything we wanted,” Gingrich crowed.89 With the congressman conducting dozens of interviews in the convention hall, and with his photograph showcased on campaign buttons and in local newspaper ads, one reporter observed, “Newt Gingrich is a hot item here, and he loves it.”90
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As Gingrich kept gaining prominence, reporters started to take a closer look at the aggressive young Georgian. On November 1, 1984, the left-wing magazine Mother Jones published a blistering exposé of his personal life by David Osborne, a liberal freelance journalist who had become intrigued with Gingrich, the “intellectual phenomenon.” Osborne’s editor at Mother Jones, David Talbot, agreed that a profile of Gingrich might help explain the freshly assertive Republican Party.
When Osborne interviewed Gingrich in D.C., Gingrich struck Osborne as being skilled, articulate, and willing to “lie all the time.” Osborne had to bite his tongue when Gingrich told him things about the budget that he knew to be untrue—such as the effects that cuts would have on domestic programs. It was apparent to Osborne that Gingrich had the power to persuade but lacked a moral core. The reporter flew down to Carrollton to interview voters and staffers in the confident Georgian’s district. To his surprise, people started talking to him about Gingrich’s womanizing, mistreatment of colleagues, nasty temper, and more. Some of his disillusioned former staf
fers couldn’t help themselves. Lee Howell, who had been Gingrich’s press secretary in 1974, arrived at his interview with cuts on his face after surviving a serious car accident that very morning and was still eager to talk. When Osborne called Gingrich to ask him for a comment, the congressman initially did not answer, then finally called and offered a vague statement about not being a perfect man.91
The Mother Jones article appeared in November 1984, shortly before that year’s election. It was shocking. “One former aide,” Osborne wrote, “describes approaching a car with Gingrich’s daughter in hand, only to find the candidate with a woman, her head buried in his lap.” The story included tales about Gingrich’s infidelity, his unbearable arrogance, and the coolness with which his close associates viewed him. The hubris and personal distance did not come as news to most, but the infidelity surprised those outside his inner circle who thought of him as one of the moral warriors of the Right. Osborne wrote about Gingrich negotiating divorce terms with his first wife in her hospital room as she recovered from surgery for cancer, exposing a level of selfish callousness not readily apparent in his public persona. Osborne quoted L. H. Carter, a former friend and adviser until 1979: “The important thing you have to understand about Newt Gingrich is that he is amoral. There isn’t any kind of right or wrong, there isn’t any conservative or liberal. There’s only what will work best for Newt Gingrich.”92
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