The only time that Wright refused to join the majority of his party on a major bill and bowed to the reactionary elements of his district came in 1964, when he voted against the landmark Civil Rights Act. He later regretted the decision and tried to partially make up for the mistake by supporting the Voting Rights Act one year later. On another core 1960s controversy, Wright—a staunch anticommunist—had backed the Vietnam War.
Throughout the political ups and downs of these years, Wright loved the challenge of whipping up votes on a bill, whether that meant intimidating a colleague to say no or seducing him through promises of appropriations to say yes. He found the process as exhilarating as the final product: when things worked well, laws were enacted that made a huge difference in the lives of average Americans. Wright was consumed with the life of the legislator, always thinking up some new procedural trick or working some new angle. His passion for legislating was on full display during a program that aired in 1965 on the National Educational Television Network. In The Changing Congress, the cameramen shadowed Wright during the workday as he tried to move a water pollution bill through the House and the Senate. The thirty-minute cinema-verité-style documentary provided viewers with a firsthand look at the real textbook Congress as Wright navigated different political land mines—such as the southern conservative Howard Smith, chairman of the House Rules Committee. The program ended with Wright telling the audience in a voice-over, “Somewhere along the line if you’re gonna to do your job up here, you develop a healthy respect, and even a passion, for the game as it’s played on the Hill. It really doesn’t make a lot of difference whether the rules are exactly as you would have written them. If you are going to succeed in Congress, you learn to deal with them, and to win with them.”22 He and Mab reveled during the evening soirees at their home, where they hosted Texas friends and U.S. representatives to dine, smoke, and schmooze after a long day of work. The evenings culminated in Wright sitting at a small round wooden table in the back room by the pantry, where he leaned on the key guests to give him their commitment to a bill. Like his heroes Henry Clay and Sam Rayburn, he could be extraordinarily tough in his one-on-one meetings with colleagues. Unlike them, Wright was known for letting his temper get the best of him, just as it had back in the VFW in 1946. In the middle of a conversation, Wright would cock his eyebrows as he dropped his shoulders. “He looks like he could choke you,” said one official.23
Wright hated the demands of the press, especially for short, TV-tailored sound bites, which didn’t suit his overflowing rhetorical style. But he shone when giving floor speeches, which felt more natural to him than almost anything else. He loved to fill the grand space of the House chamber with booming oratory, controlling his cadence and selecting each word and pause with great care. And as the system promised, Wright’s patience was rewarded: slowly but assuredly, he made his inexorable climb up the seniority ladder.
Wright was not deaf to public frustration with Congress. He understood in the 1960s that many reporters and public intellectuals thought that the House and the Senate didn’t work well and that many legislators were corrupt. He often complained about sensational media coverage of Congress, but he supported 1960s reforms such as tougher financial-disclosure rules and limits on the business activities of legislators.24
Politics back in Fort Worth was as satisfying to him as life in Washington. Wright delighted in feeling like the big man on campus when spending time in his district. When he walked the streets of north Texas, every person he passed seemed to have voted for him or been indebted to him for something. Wright’s closest personal friendships were not in Washington, where colleagues continued to see him as aloof and temperamental, but in Texas, where people seemed to understand him. Wright was personally isolated on Capitol Hill. He didn’t have many close friends in Congress, just trusted colleagues. One reporter called him an “enigmatic loner.” “You don’t chew the fat with Jim Wright,” a Democratic colleague said.25
Wright’s personal life suffered from his total devotion to politics, just as Gingrich’s would. In 1958, Wright and Mab’s relationship was strained when their fourth child, Parker Stephen, died as an infant because of complications from Down syndrome. For once, Wright’s tight public grip on his emotions cracked in the hospital parking lot as he told his three daughters about their brother’s death.
Mab had disliked life in Washington from the moment they arrived. Now Wright faced steep debts from the accumulated cost of the treatments used to keep Parker alive. Eleven years later, in 1969, he and Mab began a two-year legal separation that would end in a no-fault divorce. Wright was forty-six. He agreed to give her their home and most of their possessions, as well as $950 a month in alimony.
Living in a modest downtown basement apartment in Washington, Wright started dating a woman named Betty Hay. She became the love of his life. They met when she worked as a secretary and then as a staffer on the Public Works Committee. Some in Washington suspected that the two had an affair, resenting Betty for having stolen Wright from Mab, who had moved to Virginia and taken a job as a tour guide on Capitol Hill.26
By 1971, the rising star within the Democratic caucus was scrambling to pay his bills. “My finances are in shambles,” Wright confided to his diary. “With what unbelievable folly I have so long ignored them and let them drift. In my 30th year I was the richest young man in town [while] in my 50th—well I’m driving a ten-year-old car, owe so God-awful much money that I’ll need luck to pay it off.”27 Despite the popular image of fat cats working in Congress, public service did not bring much lucre, and the dual life of living in Washington and one’s district was costly. The alimony payments to Mab also added up.
Soon after his second marriage, Wright was again implicated in a scandalous story when Jack Anderson, a legendary muckraker syndicated in hundreds of papers, including The Washington Post, published a column titled SHOOTING AT FISH IN THE PORK BARREL. Anderson recounted the details of a secret session of the Public Works Committee during which several committee Democrats who “in public, pay lip service to the environmental movement” complained “bitterly” about the impact that environmental policies were having on public-works programs and construction. Upon reviewing the fifty-six-page meeting transcript, Anderson wrote that Wright had begun “to assault the environmental acts. Dams and buildings had been ‘brought to a screeching halt,’ he snorted, while the federal government weighed the effects on the environment. ‘That is just a monstrous thing,’ he huffed. He was willing to see people protected by the laws, he said, but ‘the hell with the fish!’”28
Wright resented the piece, which he insisted was based on a fabricated account of the conversation. “The Anderson treatment,” Wright noted to himself, “is so very typical of the growing irresponsibility of sensational ‘expose’ type journalism that increasingly appalls, angers and even frightens a lot of conscientious public officials.” He bristled at reporters who became overzealous in their desire to expose corruption and carefully parsed the suggestive language that Anderson used: “It demonstrates quite clearly how the selective use of a verb is employed to convey to the reader a predetermined impression of character.” The objects of Anderson’s opprobrium, Wright continued, “‘huffed,’ ‘groused,’ ‘blurted,’ ‘snorted,’ or ‘whined,’” while sources the journalist liked “explained” or “pointed out.” Wright didn’t share his private frustration beyond his diary, but the anger hardened within him and cooled his interactions with reporters.29
Nor did Wright think much of the good-government reformers of the early 1970s who promised to clean up the way that “corrupt” politicians conducted their business. On June 22, 1972, he reluctantly agreed to meet with Ralph Nader, the consumer activist who was canvassing Democratic members with lengthy questionnaires about their districts, interest-group support, and voting records. Nader hoped to publish a booklet for voters and the press offering a fuller portrait of who their representatives were. Wright agre
ed with a colleague who asked, “Who the hell elected or appointed Ralph Nader as the judge and the custodian of my conscience?”30 But Wright, who thought his colleague raised a “good question,” had enough sense to fill out the papers.
The Watergate scandal shocked and saddened Wright. He feared that Watergate would confirm to Americans that the entire city of Washington was broken, not just the president. Citizens would now have good reason to believe what muckrakers like Jack Anderson were writing about elected officials.
After Nixon waved goodbye to the nation, a coalition of good-government organizations and liberal Democrats pushed congressional reforms that centralized power in the Speaker’s hands, rather than dispersing authority to autonomous committee chairmen as before. Wright, a curmudgeon with a deep reverence for Congress and its work, watched nervously. The goal of the post-Watergate reforms was to take power away from the conservative southern barons who chaired most of the major committees. Seniority was no longer sacrosanct: the Speaker and the majority leader could insist on the appointment of committee chairs who would support the party agenda. Meanwhile, other reforms provided rank-and-file members with new tools to keep their leaders accountable. The Democratic caucus started to vote on committee chairmen and leadership positions; nothing would be automatic anymore.
The Speaker of the House was one of the main beneficiaries of these changes. The House Rules Committee, which had been an independent fiefdom controlled by conservative southern Democrats until the end of the Nixon presidency, now served as a direct arm of the Speaker. To check the Speaker’s new power, the reformist Democrats simultaneously created new rules and norms—such as stricter ethics regulations—that would allow them to depose a leader who became autocratic or corrupt.
Moreover, technical changes like recorded votes meant that the public could see where each member stood on a given issue. Wright realized that the ironclad security that legislative leaders had enjoyed during the early decades of his political career, when they could avoid challenges to their posts and horse-trade in secrecy, would soon disappear. Sacred political spaces—such as the famous “Board of Education,” where Speaker Rayburn met privately with invited Democrats over bourbon and cards in a small room on the first floor of the Capitol—would no longer be tolerated. And all this was taking place at a time when a young Newt Gingrich, still a college professor at West Georgia College, was sensing the possibilities that the growing public distrust generated and the opportunities that might open up for new leadership in Washington. “From now on,” the Wisconsin Democrat Henry Reuss predicted as he watched the reformers, “the sword of Damocles will be hanging over every chairman.”31
Younger Democrats were willing to shake things up within their own party—ousting powerful committee chairs and enacting procedural reforms—based on the assumption that regardless of what they did, Democrats would retain their power. The “permanent Republican minority” did not appear to pose a serious threat at the time. Reform, in the minds of the Young Turks, would make Congress more responsive and eventually more liberal. “It was the furthest thing from Democrats’ minds that [the reforms] would help Republicans,” one Democratic staffer admitted.32
In this atmosphere, nobody expected Jim Wright to be part of the Democrats’ new cohort of leaders. He was not a legislator who had shown any serious interest in congressional reform. While he respected the growing pressure to make the legislative process as democratic and accountable as possible, he was still more at home with the insular committee system that he had mastered under the tutelage of Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn. But on December 6, 1976, Democrats elected him their new majority leader, the person next in line to be Speaker.
For the first time, as a result of the post-Watergate reforms, Democrats could vote for their majority leader. The campaign was brutal, with four candidates—the favorite was Phil Burton of California, followed by Richard Bolling of Missouri, John McFall of California, and Wright—whipping votes and leaning on colleagues who owed them favors. On the final, tense day, with cigarette smoke filling the air and Democrats huddled into competing camps, the two champions of reform, Burton and Bolling, split the vote. McFall, the majority whip, was embroiled in the Koreagate scandal. Wright defeated Burton on the third roll call—by one vote.33 The outcome shocked everyone in the chamber. Burton glanced up toward the galleries to catch a glimpse of his wife, Sala, who looked at her husband despondently and shrugged, realizing they had been outmaneuvered.34 When the ebullient Texas congressman Charlie Wilson learned that Wright had won, he said, “I damn near soiled myself.”35
Wright, who had chain-smoked Winstons throughout the voting, “shook his head and rubbed his chin in disbelief” when the outcome was clear.36 Recalling Lyndon Johnson, who won his 1948 election to the Senate by just eighty-seven votes and earned the nickname “Landslide Lyndon,” Wright joked, “We Texans are not new to landslides.” He added, “I’m fully aware this is not a mandate.”37 But it did put him next in line to be Speaker of the House.
This result, an accident of fate in an unusual race, had come in the middle of a great transition, when the old power structures of Congress fell. But a plurality of Democrats had chosen one of the most traditional politicians to be first in line to the most powerful post in the House. “No institution can function if a substantial number of members work against it,” Wright warned the newcomers.38 The outcome was bitterly disappointing for Burton’s and Bolling’s supporters. They had not risked so much political capital battling against the old southern committee barons just to see a traditional pol like Jim Wright ascend by one measly vote. The resentment and distrust of Wright among younger Democrats would never disappear.
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Wright might not have been a reformer, but he was willing to be an aggressive partisan. He wasn’t convinced that Democrats needed to change the way they did their business. The aftermath of Reagan’s devastating 1980 victory was no time to play nice. Wright didn’t fear that Democrats could lose control of the House anytime soon, but he now faced a conservative Republican president who was intent on shifting policy sharply to the right and a sympathetic Republican Senate. House Democrats were in the thick of a historic rearguard battle to protect the legacies of the New Deal and the Great Society.
As a leader of his party, Wright concluded that Democrats had to use every tool at their disposal to check the Republicans. His vision of strengthening the Democrats was not reforming the political process but using old-fashioned techniques, like fund-raising and logrolling, to build up the party. By the early 1980s, Republicans had started to outpace the Democrats in fund-raising as the corporate lobbyists who had come to Washington to fight regulations sent more of their money to the Reagan-led GOP.39
Wright worked with Tony Coelho, the feisty Californian, to respond to the influx of corporate funds into Republican coffers. That would prove to be one of Wright’s most consequential decisions. Coelho didn’t mind skating close to controversy or testing the limits of ethical behavior. When it came to money and campaigns, he saw few boundaries to what the parties could do. When Wright empowered him to handle campaign finance for their party, Coelho opened the floodgates. Coelho, who became chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 1981, sought to mimic the results of its Republican counterpart and fostered much closer ties between House Democrats and corporate interest groups.40
Making money for Democrats turned out to be Coelho’s greatest skill. Wright soon gave him the go-ahead to aggressively court new donors. The year before Coelho started, the DCCC raised $1.8 million; six years later, that figure reached $15 million. (That was still half of what its Republican counterpart raised.)41 For too long, Coelho argued, the Democrats had relied on organized labor, whose power was steadily declining. Meanwhile, business and financial communities seeking deregulation had expanded their political operations.42 Coelho wanted some of those corporate dollars for Democrats.
Coelho declared that “special interest is not a nasty word.” He once spotted the Texas businessman James Devlin, chairman of U.S. Telephone, in the House dining room waiting for someone to join him for breakfast. Coelho walked up to him and pushed him to join his elite council of donors for $5,000, which would give him instant access to Speaker O’Neill. Before Devlin could reply, Coelho scribbled his name down on an index card and muttered, “I’ll just put you down for $5,000.”43
Coelho’s juiciest target was the savings and loan industry, which was desperate for federal assistance. Savings and loan thrifts had traditionally operated as small savings banks that served homeowners. The government tightly regulated the interest that the banks could pay on deposits so that rates did not go too high for borrowers; Washington also allowed these lending institutions to make only home mortgage and other personal loans. In turn, the federal government had insured deposits in these banks since the New Deal. During the 1970s, these banks were suffering due to stagflation. With the banks paying out higher interest rates on deposits, many of them struggled to survive. Reagan, with the support of many congressional Democrats, crafted a law that deregulated the thrifts, allowing them to invest 40 percent of their holdings in commercial loans and 30 percent in consumer loans. Right away, bank executives used their money in ventures from high-risk commercial real estate to junk bonds. For a time, many of the thrifts did well, and their executives enjoyed high-flying lifestyles. But when real estate markets collapsed in the mid-1980s in states like Texas and Arizona, the thrifts went broke.
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