Burning Down the House

by Julian E. Zelizer

  The personal attack stung. The California Democrat Tony Coelho, the influential head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, sent out copies to 252 members of the House, both as a warning and as a gesture of satisfaction. The article gained more attention when the Doonesbury cartoonist, Garry Trudeau, published a strip about the coldhearted encounter in the hospital room. Gingrich would only admit that he had difficult moments in his personal life and that those trying to capitalize on the Mother Jones piece didn’t like him anyway.

  Gingrich was far happier to focus on the 1984 election. President Reagan’s resounding victory over the former vice president Walter Mondale offered vindication to his admirers (Mondale’s only victories came in D.C. and his home state of Minnesota) and made continued Democratic control of the House even more infuriating to Republicans. Although his staff had worried about the fallout from the Mother Jones article, the story had little immediate effect in the Sixth District.93 Gingrich, who was now being called in the press the “darling of the New Right,”94 warned that Democratic leaders were planning to marginalize House Republicans to stifle Reagan’s voice in the lower chamber despite his historic reelection victory. He wrote to his colleagues to sound his familiar warning, namely that “we have a newly-reelected President, fresh from a campaign for tax reform and economic growth, facing a House skewed to the left by a series of corrupt bargains—corrupt bargains between national Democrats and their liberal welfare state allies who don’t particularly understand popular mandates and don’t particularly want to.”95

  The predictions seemed to be coming true when a debate immediately unfolded over Indiana’s Eighth Congressional District, where Frank McCloskey, a forty-five-year-old first-term Democrat and former Bloomington mayor, was in a too-close-to-call election against the Republican Richard McIntyre, a twenty-eight-year-old conservative state legislator. The “Bloody Eighth” of Indiana, as it was known, was a notoriously competitive swing district in which politics often turned ugly. Indiana Republicans challenged the results, and the recount, conducted by Republican officials, gave the win to McIntyre by 418 votes. Indiana’s Republican secretary of state certified McIntyre as the victor by 34 out of the 234,000 votes cast, based on a recount in just one district in one county, over protests from angry Democrats demanding broader recounts.

  When McIntyre arrived on Capitol Hill on January 3, 1985, Democrats refused to seat him. They argued that reports of widespread Election Day irregularities were concerning and that state Republicans were trying to take this election without an honest recount. Reports coming out of Indiana claimed that Republicans had unfairly disqualified a sizable number of African American voters in the urban parts of the district. “I’m not going to sit back and let one Republican secretary of state from Indiana dictate to the House who will or will not be seated,” said Tony Coelho, who controlled the purse strings for all Democratic candidates.96 Wright agreed, as did Speaker O’Neill, who administered a collective oath to every member other than McIntyre. The House voted 238 to 177, along strict party lines, to keep the seat vacant pending an investigation. In turn, the Republicans cried that the majority was trying to steal the election. Even the Minnesota Republican Bill Frenzel, a Gingrich ally who was nonetheless known as moderate in his disposition and politics, called the process a “rape” of the voters and the “ultimate abuse” of government.97

  Such comments convinced Gingrich that his party could make the Indiana brawl look like a full-blown constitutional crisis and compelling evidence of Democratic corruption. On a chilly late January day, with freezing rain pouring down on the capital, Gingrich tried to convince legislators and reporters that this was a scandal of epic proportions.98

  After the weekly Wednesday morning COS meeting, Gingrich walked back to his office alongside one of his newest recruits, the thirty-five-year-old Joe Barton, a conservative firebrand who had just been elected from Texas. As the two commiserated over the situation in Indiana, the admiring Barton jotted down notes so that he wouldn’t forget a thing. “Look up the Wilkes case in the 1770s,” Gingrich instructed, referring to a member of Parliament who had been expelled after having been reelected despite a conviction of seditious libel. “This is a constitutional issue! We have to make the press understand that. Now, when you deal with these people, you have to remember two things: absolute certainty and knowledge of detail. That’s what these reporters and editors want.”99

  Gingrich was feeling good about himself these days. When he returned to his office after lunch, as he was coming to expect, he was greeted by a crew from NBC Nightly News who had come this time to interview him about the story of the day: Reagan’s hard-line UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, had announced that she was returning to Georgetown University. “It’s a decisive defeat for the conservative movement in trying to effect a more realistic foreign policy and a more realistic approach to the Soviet Union,” trilled Gingrich. “There’s in effect been a bureaucratic coup d’état in foreign policy.” When the interviewer, pleased with the sound bite, asked Gingrich if he wanted to add anything else, Gingrich returned to the Indiana showdown. “The thing that’s gonna blow this House open,” he said, “is the McIntyre thing in Indiana. We have no record of a certified congressman not being seated.” When one member of the camera crew asked Gingrich to sit quietly for a second so that they could record a response shot of him nodding, Gingrich gladly obliged (for television, Gingrich would even tolerate being told to stop talking). When the cameraman signaled to Gingrich that he could start speaking again, the congressman jumped right back into his soliloquy. He warned, “We will make it impossible for this House to function. You’ll see literal war in the House. This is a constitutional issue, not a political issue. This is not a game. This is like Watergate in the House.”100

  Gingrich had come to believe that the best way to attract attention for an issue was to keep speaking about it over and over again. “We are engaged in reshaping a whole nation through the news media,” he crowed.101 He called the executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Joe Gaylord, and vented about how, the previous day, Coelho had distributed a chart to reporters showing that the Republicans had stolen the seat from McCloskey. “We should take Coelho’s chart,” Gingrich explained, “and redo it as our own chart showing what really happened. I think the press is beginning to pick up the scent that this is a constitutional issue, not a political issue. But we’ve got to really break Coelho’s believability with the national press and many Democrats.”102

  His next call was to Gaylord’s boss, Guy Vander Jagt, the prolific Republican fund-raiser, to whom he delivered a similarly stern message about Coelho’s chart and suggested that Cheney, whom many reporters saw as a nonpartisan figure, brief the press about the severity of what the Democrats were threatening to do. Vander Jagt, in his deep, calming voice, lectured Gingrich about how the party leaders preferred to work cautiously on such issues behind the scenes. Gingrich rolled his eyes at this.103

  Later that day, Gingrich called Minority Whip Trent Lott to let his best contact to the Republican leadership know what he was thinking. Lott was skeptical, telling his colleague that it was not clear whether McIntyre actually won. “Yeah, I understand what you’re saying,” Gingrich replied, sensing he needed to at least sound reasonable. “You’re right. Yes sir. If we’re not on full ground, we won’t ask Michel to seat him. I’ll check it out. I’ll accept it if McIntyre lost, but if he won it’s a constitutional issue.”104

  The Republican leadership didn’t have to be dragged into Gingrich’s world kicking and screaming. Notwithstanding all the televised reverence for congressional civility, many Republicans found Gingrich’s partisan approach highly seductive. Over the next month, they joined him in denouncing the contested election as a full-blown constitutional crisis. Wright noted that even his Republican counterpart, Robert Michel, had “succumbed to the coterie of noisy young red hots in his party. It is a ploy wholly unch
aracteristic of Bob.” It was an ominous sign, Wright noted in his diary. Michel had put “us on notice . . . that we no longer can rely upon the gentlemen’s rules which have prevailed for all of my 30 years in Congress.”105

  Although Wright was a firsthand witness as the Republican renegades dictated the party strategy during the battle over the Bloody Eighth, he and other Democrats were not motivated to mobilize a full-throated response. The party was not even remotely scared about losing its power to the GOP. Controlling the House for more than three decades had left the Democratic majority overly confident that Republicans would never be anything but a permanent minority. The working assumption for Wright was that at some point the GOP leaders would contain their red hots and that Republicans would return to a strategy of compromise and civility. House Democrats possessed so many tools, from campaign money to procedural rules, that Wright reasonably imagined that after the smoke settled from Indiana, his party would be able to stamp out the Gingrich problem, with the assistance of senior Republicans like Michel, when the time came to return to “regular” business.

  But in the short term there were no signs of calm on Capitol Hill. The distance between the Republican leaders and the Republican insurgents kept diminishing because of the Bloody Eighth. At a press conference on April 16, Guy Vander Jagt complained that Coelho was the “architect of the Democratic Majority’s blatant travesty against the people of the Eighth District of Indiana; a travesty against the State of Indiana, its laws, and its elected officials; and even more important, their travesty against the Constitution, and two hundred years of precedents and traditions in the U.S. House of Representatives.” He warned reporters that House Democrats had “run roughshod over the facts, the truth, the law, and the precedents in this case by innuendo, by misrepresentation, by distortion. . . .”106

  Partisan tensions boiled over when a special election-review task force, set up by the House Administration Committee, determined in late April that the seat should go to the Democrat, McCloskey. When Republicans protested, the task-force chairman, Leon Panetta, snapped, “No matter how you break this, your candidate didn’t win.”107 By a vote of two to one, the committee decided that McCloskey had won by four votes, 116,645 to 116,641. “The level of rage is so deep,” Gingrich told the press, “I think it is conceivable that almost anything could happen. If getting arrested for South Africa is noble, then getting arrested for Indiana is more noble.”108

  Seeking retribution, Republicans kept their colleagues in session all night and prevented the House from conducting any business for three days. Republicans started a talkathon, carried live on C-SPAN to an empty chamber, delivering one tirade after another, about how Democrats were stealing an election. Lott capped off the event by warning, “I don’t see much hope for a budget. I’m not sure a budget can get through the House.”

  Gingrich was like a shark circling its prey. The outcome of the Indiana election was less important than the perception of how Democrats handled the situation. Gingrich called the decision a product of the “Democratic Dictatorship of the House.”109

  “You will see a greatly tougher and more combative Republican Party coming out of this,” Gingrich told reporters.110 As he walked through the Rayburn Building, he smiled as he passed the offices of House Republicans who displayed posters of an empty chair on their doors that read, SEAT MCINTYRE. HE WON! Calling Democratic dominance “thug rule,” Gingrich explained to the press that before his arrival “the Democrats and Republicans played golf, and the Democrats came off the course and beat [their] brains out. Now Republicans feel it is legitimate for them to do the same.”111

  Even Michel jumped into the fray. Sounding uncannily like Gingrich, the minority leader, along with Trent Lott, Jack Kemp, Guy Vander Jagt, Dick Cheney, and a few other members of his party, wrote to members that the Republican House leadership “has decided on a series of tactics to be implemented during the next three days to dramatize our case on the issue of the seating of a Member from the 8th Congressional District of Indiana.”112 When Cheney took to the floor, he urged Wright to think about whether he, in line to be the next Speaker of the House, really believed that “the interest of the House and your party” was best served by accepting the “questionable” judgment of Panetta’s committee.113

  On April 31, by a vote of 229 to 200, the House then rejected a Republican proposal to hold a new special election to settle the matter. With dramatic flair, Republicans stormed out of the chamber two days later, refusing to be present when O’Neill officially seated the Democrat. Gingrich went so far as to write a newspaper column connecting the Democratic actions over the Indiana seat, the communist threat in Central America, and the Holocaust. “In a sense, there’s a real threat to freedom in the possibility of this becoming precedent.”114 The next day, May 1, the House voted 236 to 190 to seat McCloskey along party lines, with a surprising ten Democrats joining the unanimous Republican opposition.

  Democrats clapped and cheered as members of the Indiana delegation presented McCloskey to the House and Speaker O’Neill administered the oath of office. Michel returned to the chamber and shook McCloskey’s hand and was “shocked” to hear fellow Republicans criticize the handshake: “When acrimony becomes that bad among members, that really bothers me.”115

  As O’Neill swore in McCloskey, the Republicans stood side by side on the steps leading out of the House chamber to speak with reporters. “This has united the Republican Party as nothing else,” McIntyre told the press. “This will live on after Rick McIntyre goes back home to his family this evening. The American people are not going to forget.”116 Abandoning congressional decorum, the Republicans used explosive terms to describe the Democrats like “slime” and “corrupt.”117 Republicans produced a seventeen-minute film about how Democrats had handled the Indiana election that they distributed for members to show in their districts.118 There were a few Republicans, according to Gingrich, who went so far as to consider chaining themselves to Speaker O’Neill’s chair in the House chamber to express their outrage at the situation.119

  In his diary, Wright noted, “Now there is a deep schism within the GOP ranks. I surely don’t envy Bob Michel. His problems are far more severe than mine. Neither he nor Trent Lott can make a commitment with any faith in its fulfillment. The Young Turks, [with] a thirst for revenge and retribution, have the Republican leaders at their mercy. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. One mature Republican said to me, ‘We might as well install a sandbox for them to play in.’”120

  By the end of the conflict over the Bloody Eighth, Gingrich was reviled by many of his colleagues on the Hill, but he was also someone to be feared. He could not be swatted away like a gnat, as Wright once suggested. He was keen to make attacking what he saw as the corrupt Democratic establishment the GOP’s defining theme, and he had revealed the multiple opportunities the post-Watergate political system offered for a backbencher to inflict serious damage.

  In the summer of 1986, Gingrich took over a political action committee called GOPAC, a relatively unknown outfit that Governor Pierre “Pete” DuPont IV of Delaware and twelve fellow Republican governors had established in 1978 to train promising state and local Republican candidates. Gingrich, who was always on the lookout for unorthodox ways to obtain power, jumped at the chance to manage the moribund PAC and immediately saw how it could expand his influence. GOPAC gave him a tool to start influencing Republican candidates. He used the millions that GOPAC collected to finance audiocassettes of himself speaking about strategy like a general in the middle of a war, tapes that were distributed to thousands of candidates and proved an effective promotional tool for Gingrich. In seminars that he arranged for candidates and donors, Gingrich stressed that the path to political victory in the House rested on the ability to shape public perceptions and influence the language that politicians and reporters used.

  Still, many Republican leaders continued to keep Gingrich at a distance. They admired
his ambition, and they thirsted for the majority that he promised. But even as they dabbled in some of his techniques, Gingrich’s tactics felt too dangerous to be used on a full-time basis. His unconventional ways made some older Republicans feel uncomfortable. His willingness to ignore convention was unsettling in an era when most members still prided themselves on being loyal to the institution above all else. Gingrich needed to prove his value to the party elders if he wanted to obtain a formal position of leadership from which he could have much greater influence on the decisions of the caucus. One path to power was to take down a major Democratic target, someone with more stature than a Charlie Diggs and someone whose downfall would shock Washington and place the Democrats at risk.

  His moment arrived a few months later, in December 1986, when the Democrats voted for a new Speaker of the House and gave Gingrich just the target he had been seeking.

  Three

  THE PERFECT FOIL

  On December 8, 1986, Jim Wright was elated. The Democratic majority leader was proudly walking around the House chamber, shaking hands and slapping backs. Democrats had unanimously voted for him to replace the retiring Speaker, Tip O’Neill, who had announced in March 1984 that he would step down when the Congress ended.

  Even if he had not been the center of attention on this mild winter morning, Wright would have been easy to spot. He was a burly five feet eleven inches and looked like a cartoon character with his slicked-back reddish-brown hair parted down the center and bushy owl eyebrows that moved up and down depending on his mood.

  On this day, his eyebrows were pointed straight toward the ceiling in the shape of the letter V. Becoming Speaker of the House was a lifetime achievement for the sixty-four-year-old Texan. Although earlier in his career, he had flirted with the dream of being elected president or senator, the House was now his permanent home. Newt Gingrich had arrived in Washington determined to tear down the entire congressional order, but Wright loved the Hill just the way it was. For him, the House of Representatives was an inspiring institution that fulfilled the democratic dreams of the founders. If anything, he thought that the House should be using its power more forcefully to counteract Reagan’s imperial presidency.