Burning Down the House

by Julian E. Zelizer

  As the forty-eighth Speaker, Wright would be third in line to the presidency. He would also be the de facto spokesman for the entire Democratic Party. When the president wanted to launch a new domestic initiative or send troops into combat, Wright would be guaranteed a seat at the table.

  Few legislators felt much personal kinship with Wright; he was widely seen as a cold, tightly wound, short-tempered person, with a demeanor reminiscent of a slick used-car salesman. But they respected the way he had performed as majority leader between 1977 and 1986. Wright worked to represent the increasingly liberal post-Watergate direction of the party’s congressional wing and to ensure that moderates or mavericks didn’t defect on critical votes. He was also a workhorse. The folksy O’Neill might have known the names of everyone in the House cloakroom, but the frosty Wright had demonstrated a driving commitment to legislating and leadership that suited his fellow Democrats’ mood.

  Wright’s elevation did not come as much of a surprise: the majority leader was traditionally next in line when a Speaker retired or resigned. Just to be safe, Wright had been rounding up commitments for more than a year to make certain that nobody challenged him when the time came. Cagey and knowing, Wright wanted to preempt any effort by the savvy younger Democrats to make a surprise push for someone from their generation who was more attuned to the winds of reform or more liberal on foreign policy. He also kept an eye on his colleague and friend Dan Rostenkowski, who had coveted the speakership as well. By February 1985, Wright announced to a press conference that the votes were “in my pocket.”

  “The Reagan era is ending,” Democrat Dick Gephardt predicted as he saw Wright take the helm.1 As the president’s second term rounded its final lap, success in public policy and in the midterm elections mattered more than anything else to congressional Democrats, even more than good-government reform.

  When Wright walked out of the chamber victorious, he half joked to reporters that he was happy to have Washington State’s low-key, reliably calm Tom Foley as the new majority leader. “Sometimes, I’m too prone to shoot from the hip,” Wright admitted. House Democrats in the corridor chuckled; most of his colleagues had experienced his explosive temper.2

  Now Wright was up against another temperamental, ambitious man. An unrepentant New Dealer and Great Society Democrat, Wright was on track for a massive clash with Newt Gingrich that would reshape American politics. Gingrich saw himself as a guerrilla willing to fight dirty for the Reagan Revolution; Wright saw himself as a seasoned defender of the social safety net and a centrist on foreign policy who would not be easy to dismiss as “soft on defense.”

  Remembering his mentors, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, Wright believed that success required cunning, arm-twisting, and hardball politics in pursuit of worthy objectives. He was precisely the kind of Democrat that Gingrich was always complaining about. Because Wright assumed that the Democrats’ hold on power would not weaken anytime soon, he was prepared to act aggressively, even if his actions triggered a backlash. With Reagan in the White House and the GOP holding the Senate, Wright felt that his job required him to be tough with the opposition, keep Republicans in line, and prevent anyone within his own party from causing trouble.

  Gingrich did not scare the Speaker-elect. It was not that Wright didn’t understand how destructive Gingrich could be. Wright had confidence that, as so often occurred in the history of this venerable institution, a troublemaking, headline-grabbing provocateur such as Gingrich would eventually be brought down by the chamber’s better angels. After all, this was what happened to the red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, the year Wright first won election to Congress.

  As Speaker, Wright planned to be even tougher with Gingrich than O’Neill had been. He would not give Gingrich or his allies an inch. He would render the red hots powerless by excluding them from legislative debates, committee deliberations, and serious negotiations. He remained optimistic that he could persuade the House minority leader, Robert Michel, whom he respected as a civil colleague, to keep working with the Democrats rather than falling for Gingrich’s seductive promises of achieving a Republican majority by blowing up the House. As a Democratic Speaker facing a Republican president, Wright was determined to keep the chamber focused on meaningful policy debates. Congress, he believed, would ultimately cleanse itself of destructive forces that could rip the institution apart.

  Gingrich could sense what Wright had in store for him. He would be an incredibly tough partisan adversary for the Republicans. Gingrich told C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb that the Speaker-elect was a “more active adversary” than O’Neill, and he was going to be “tough for the Republicans to cope with for a while, to figure out.” Wright was like a “first class NFL quarterback who knows his game and is at the peak of his form,” Gingrich predicted. Wright would have “all the weapons: he could run, he could pass, he could kick.”3

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  Wright and Gingrich both came from hardscrabble beginnings.

  Wright was born on December 22, 1922. His parents—James, a working-class traveling salesman and former boxer, and Marie Lyster, a debutante drama teacher—raised him in Weatherford, Texas, forty miles west of the mobbed-up gambling city of Fort Worth. Ever since the railroad came to town in 1880, Weatherford had been a vibrant town with a bustling outdoor market, an ornate courthouse, and a handsome opera house.4 Wright, along with his two sisters, spent his childhood moving from town to town as his father searched for work.

  Wright was first exposed to politics by his father, a World War I veteran with a populist streak. James Wright signed letters condemning the Ku Klux Klan in the local newspaper, spoke out against powerful economic elites, and became an early advocate for women’s rights.5 Jim’s parents nurtured his self-confidence; his mother loved to bring him into rooms of adults during social events to boast about how many grades he had skipped.6

  Like millions of Americans, the Wright family suffered during the Great Depression. James had quit his sales job to launch a new advertising business right before the economy collapsed. Without a regular income to count on, the family burned through what money Marie had inherited. As their circumstances worsened, James started drinking heavily. Marie, humbled from her affluent beginnings, now sold eggs at the local market to cover the utility bills. The family pawned most of their treasured belongings to cover the rest. Wright remembered 1931 as the year they “ate the piano.”7 The Wrights were forced to sell Marie’s treasured piano, around which the family loved to gather each night.8

  In 1933, James accepted an attractive business opportunity in Duncan, Oklahoma, the hometown of Halliburton Oil Company. Local officials hired him to help revive the economic well-being of the town as the director of the Chamber of Commerce. His salary allowed the Wrights to live in a decent-sized family home with an attractive backyard. After about one year of proving himself, when Jim was in the eighth grade, James moved the family to Seminole, Oklahoma, where he accepted the better-paying directorship of its Chamber of Commerce. Later in the 1930s, James decided to move the family to Dallas, where the bigger city offered even greater opportunities.9

  The thin, young Jim Wright demonstrated his fierce determination by boxing and playing football at the segregated Adamson High School in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, where the family found their new home. He excelled in the classroom, with a special fascination with American history.

  Jim got his first real taste of politics when he volunteered in the 1938 campaign of the Texas gubernatorial candidate Ernest Thompson, a progressive who ran on regulating the oil industry. During one of Thompson’s rallies, the candidate called on the fifteen-year-old to join him on the stage. Jim flashed his crocodile grin and made a passionate speech about why Thompson was the right candidate for the job. “He turned me loose for ten minutes,” Wright recalled, “It was heady wine to make them whoop and holler and respond.”10 Jim wowed the crowd and Thompson. The boy was dis
appointed when Thompson lost, but the experience left an indelible mark. When he graduated from high school in 1939, most of Wright’s friends sensed that he was destined for a career in politics. His classmates nicknamed him “the Senator” and predicted in his high school yearbook that he would be elected to Congress by his mid-thirties.

  Jim attended Weatherford College, a small, affordable junior college with about three hundred students. To save money, he lived at home. While writing for the school paper and participating in student government, he met Mary “Mab” Lemons, an actress on campus, and they started to date. Upon finishing the two-year program, he transferred to the University of Texas at Austin. Mab moved 250 miles from Austin to attend Texas Woman’s University in Denton, but they kept the romance intact.

  Jim continued to dip his toes in politics. While campaigning for the Texas attorney general, Gerald Mann, he met Lyndon Johnson for the first time.11 When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Wright left college in the middle of his coursework to volunteer in the Army Air Corps. He married Mab on Christmas Day 1942, right before going overseas. He had just turned twenty. During the war, Wright flew more than thirty combat missions and thirty combat flying hours in the South Pacific on a B-24 bomber, for which he was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross.

  When he returned to Texas, Wright found work as a salesman, but he never forgot the thrill he felt as part of Thompson’s campaign. A committed liberal with some of his father’s doggedness, Wright would speak to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, which veered to the right.12 Wright proved to be a fearsome counterpuncher. His hair-trigger temper could quickly get away from him. One day, while he was attending a VFW meeting, an oversized and drunken veteran named Dub Tucker purposely brushed into his shoulder while passing him in the hall. Tucker, a bellicose conservative, had heard some of Wright’s speeches and called him a “chickenshit sonofabitch,” slurring his words. When Wright told Tucker that he had done nothing to him personally, Tucker only grew more belligerent. “You’re a damn sissy,” he said. Wright calmly reminded his fellow veteran that they didn’t even know each other. “I know you alright,” Tucker responded. “You’re a commie sonofabitch!” Tucker took a swing at Wright. The future Speaker swiftly turned to avoid the punch, then landed a left hook right into Tucker’s stomach. His anger unleashed, Wright pounded Tucker until he fell to the floor bloodied and bruised. The other veterans, watching in stunned silence, were impressed. The young man might have been a liberal, but he sure knew how to throw a punch.13

  At only twenty-three, Wright won an election to fill an open seat in the Texas state legislature. His first term was rough. Conservative Democrats branded him a radical leftist for proposing to tax the oil industry to help pay for government services, and he caused a stir by calling for higher welfare payments, more education spending, and increased funding for road projects. His critics derided the cabal of liberals with whom he associated as the “Russian embassy.”

  In his 1948 reelection bid, he faced Eugene Miller, a former state legislator with massive gambling debts and alleged ties to organized crime. Miller spread slanderous rumors throughout the district accusing Wright of being a communist. On July 7, just days before the primary, all hell broke loose. On a hot evening, Miller was rushed to a hospital after being shot by a gunman, with one bullet lodged underneath his heart and another settled in his right leg. Miller muttered to the hospital staff that the shooting had been retribution from a “commie” for having attacked his left-wing opponent. Within hours, Miller died from his wounds.

  Miller’s advisers unleashed a whispering campaign accusing Wright of being the gunman and waging a pattern of intimidation. Floyd Bradshaw, a schoolteacher who was the third candidate alongside Wright and Miller, capitalized on the situation by proclaiming that he had received a death threat ordering him to withdraw from the race.

  In an act of desperation, Wright turned to the issue of race in a state where poll taxes and all-white primaries had disenfranchised black Americans since Reconstruction. Wright announced his opposition to civil rights legislation and defended the principle of “states’ rights.” That stance sat well with many of his white constituents,14 but the craven strategy would forever haunt Wright.

  But even that last-minute gambit didn’t work. The rumors and red-baiting had taken their toll. Wright lost to Bradshaw by thirty-nine votes. A Texas Ranger who would spend the rest of his career searching for Miller’s killer found no evidence connecting Wright to the murder.15

  In 1950, Wright bounced back by winning election as the mayor of Weatherford, and he soon proved his knack for constituent service. One morning, a woman called his office to complain that boys near her house were shooting at birds with their BB guns, and another called to warn Wright that grackles, those ubiquitous yellow-eyed Texas feeding birds, were ruining her trees. The mayor almost literally killed two birds with one stone: he went to the home of the first caller, picked up the boys firing off guns, drove them to the second house, and had them shoot the bothersome birds.16

  Four years after being elected mayor, Wright decided to challenge the four-term House incumbent Wingate Lucas. Amon Carter, the powerful publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, stood squarely behind the incumbent, who had done well for the district. Carter published an editorial on the front page of his newspaper attacking Wright for lacking “any well-defined ideas.”17 Wright mounted a populist campaign that targeted incumbency, the political establishment, and Carter. “A place in Congress wasn’t meant to be a lifetime job,” he argued.18 Declaring himself a “people’s candidate” fighting the “local kingmakers,” Wright refused to take contributions of more than $100. He campaigned at such a grueling pace that he lost twenty pounds over just a few weeks.

  In the final days of the campaign, in a Hail Mary move, Wright paid $974.40 for a three-quarter-page ad in the Star-Telegram. The publisher, who in his old age was less temperamental than in his youth, proved willing to print anything if the check was good—even a personal attack against himself—for the right price.19 Early in his political career, outside the halls of power, Wright saw how one could topple a political figure by arguing that he embodied a corrupt system. “You have just met a man,” Wright now warned in an open letter to Carter, “who is not afraid of you.” The letter claimed that the entire newspaper was biased and its coverage of the campaign was illegitimate. The reporters, he said, failed to write stories on most of Wright’s campaign events, while they had published politically biased information that had no basis in fact. “It is unhealthy for anyone to become too powerful, too influential, too dominating,” Wright asserted. “The people are tired of ‘One-Man Rule.’ This is a New Day.” To Carter’s surprise, the young upstart’s strategy worked. Wright won every major county in Texas’s Twelfth District.

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  Wright entered the U.S. House of Representatives in an era when it took a long time for members to obtain substantial power. Freshmen could expect to wait their turn in the seniority system, slowly advancing in their committee assignments the longer they remained in office.

  Speaker Sam Rayburn advised freshmen “to get along, go along.” He adopted his young fellow Texan as a protégé. Young Democrats admired Rayburn, who seemed to have an uncanny feel for how the House worked and could lead a party deeply divided between southerners and northerners who disagreed on civil rights and other key policies. Wright felt frustrated with having to serve his time and wait; he once complained to his other Texas mentor, Lyndon Johnson, who advised him to just be patient. Because Rayburn liked Wright, the Democrats placed him on the Public Works Committee—a plum assignment that controlled huge budgetary resources that were always in demand by legislators.

  Determined not to repeat the kind of brutal defeat that took him out of the Texas state legislature in 1948, Wright became a master of pork-barrel spending. He secured lucrative military contracts for companies like General Dynamics
and Bell Helicopter that had sizable factories in his burgeoning district.

  In the 1950s and 1960s, legislators were expected to deliver as much money to their districts as was politically possible. With a booming economy, higher tax revenue kept flowing into the U.S. Treasury during these decades, which meant that legislators like Wright had a lot of easy money to spend without worrying about growing debt. Political scientists later called it the electoral connection—fighting for your district so that all voters understood they could count on you to be their voice in Washington.20 Wright was able to “drag . . . every last slab of bacon he could from the congressional smokehouse to his constituents in Tarrant County,” noted The Texas Observer.21 Moreover, his Public Works Committee assignment allowed him to help other Democrats do the same by directing earmarked spending their way.

  The first few decades of Wright’s legislative career were as exciting and challenging as he could have imagined. The entrance of a dynamic group of liberal legislators into Congress in the 1956 and 1958 elections energized the Democrats even with a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, in office. During the 1960s, with Lyndon Johnson as president, Wright was proud to be part of the passage of the Great Society, which he saw as a second New Deal. The Great Society included a huge slate of programs, such as federal aid for secondary and elementary schools, student loans and research funds for higher education, Medicaid and the War on Poverty, consumer protection, immigration reform, environmental regulations, and more. Johnson found that he could usually count on Wright as a reliable vote on most issues, even on bills such as Medicare in 1965 that stirred controversy in his district, because he was part of an emerging cohort of moderate southerners distinct from the old Dixiecrats who chaired the committees.