Burning Down the House

by Julian E. Zelizer

  His first big article about the Speaker was published on August 5, 1987, titled HOUSE SPEAKER WRIGHT’S DEALINGS WITH DEVELOPER REVIVE QUESTIONS ABOUT HIS ETHICS AND JUDGMENT. Jackson examined Wright’s relationship with Mallick, writing that he helped Wright “earn tens of thousands of dollars from real estate, oil wells and imported rubies.” Jackson quickly picked up on the national implications. The ties between the two men, he said, threatened “to mar the Texan’s auspicious start as a strong Democratic leader of the House.” Jackson recounted allegations about Wright’s Fort Worth friends and repeated Gingrich’s accusation, frequently made in private with colleagues as well as to reporters, that Wright was “the least ethical speaker in the 20th century.”70

  These pieces, like larvae, hatched a swarm of pesky new reporting. Like Jackson, Charles Babcock of The Washington Post was one of the post-Watergate reporters interested in exposing the ways in which politicians abused their authority. In September, Babcock reported that Wright had earned a substantial amount of income through his relationship with William Carlos Moore, a printer and political consultant in Fort Worth. Moore helped the Texan find unsavory ways to make almost $55,000 between 1985 and 1987 by selling a slender book by Wright titled Reflections of a Public Man. The slapdash, 117-page volume, padded with blank spaces and empty pages, was composed of excerpts of Wright’s speeches, writing, and notes.71 As The Washington Post put it, “House Speaker Jim Wright (D-TX) has received almost $55,000 over the past two years as ‘royalties’ on a book he wrote in 1984 that was published by a longtime friend whose printing company was paid $265,000 for services to Wright’s campaign committee last year.”

  Moore published the book himself and gave Wright royalties of 55 percent, far above the conventional rate of 10 percent earned by most authors. Babcock recounted to his readers the trouble that he had tracking down where any sales actually took place. The manager of the big downtown bookstore in Fort Worth, Barber’s, reported having sold about a hundred books. Four other local merchants in the city had never stocked them. Moore explained that most of the copies were sold at “political rallies.” Moore’s background appeared to underscore the deal’s corrupt character: years earlier, the consultant had worked in Washington as political director for the scandal-tainted Teamsters’ union then led by Jimmy Hoffa. Wright fumed about Babcock’s story because he never had staffers work on the project during their official time. Nor had he requested a large advance, he said, because he wanted the book to be sold at an affordable price. But none of that mattered. Now it was in The Washington Post. WRIGHT-GATE, blared the editorial headline in The Detroit News.72

  Such stories convinced Republicans that Gingrich’s strategy could work. During a series of closed-door September meetings, members of the Conservative Opportunity Society agreed that ethics—not such conservative chestnuts as anticommunism and dismantling the welfare state—would be the key theme of their plan to topple the Democratic majority.

  At a September 9 meeting, Gingrich, Walker, and Bob Smith boasted about how positive the press had been “over the August break with regards to the recent ethics initiatives.”73 Just as he had in high school, Gingrich carried around an overflowing binder, now filled with press clippings of ethics stories about Wright and other members that he could hand out. He hoped to persuade the 700 Club, a show on the Christian Broadcasting Network, to start broadcasting a regular feature called “Ethics Watch.”74 On September 16, Gingrich told his closest allies that besides Wright sixteen other Democrats were being investigated by the Ethics Committee or the media, which proved “that this is a real and institutional fight, not a right-wing political vendetta.”75 One member, after listening to Gingrich, succinctly summarized the strategy: “If the Democrats can be made to be illegitimate ethically, they may be perceived as illegitimate politically.”76

  Gingrich sent out a letter to GOPAC members listing ten House Democrats who had been indicted or investigated for legal or ethics violations over the previous year (including Wright). “Together,” Gingrich wrote, “we’ll force the media to focus on this unprecedented partisan corruption of Congress, which I’m calling ‘Sleaze-gate.’ Gingrich anticipated that “by forcing the Ethics Committee to act, we can bring the media down on Democrats.”77

  The New Right was girding for the battle to challenge Wright’s legitimacy. Ethics was Gingrich’s battle ax, but he also had daggers and arrows in his arsenal. Whenever the Speaker appeared to overstep his authority, Gingrich would call him a tyrant, redefining the assertion of leadership as the abuse of power. As Gingrich hustled daily to attach a target to Wright’s back by sending local press clippings to national reporters or calling them directly with tales of the latest misdeeds he’d discovered, the Speaker himself would come to embody the rampant partisanship of the Democratic Party.

  One of the most dramatic early skirmishes involved a budget battle in October 1987. On October 19, the Dow Jones plunged 508 points after the preceding week set records for one-day losses. On the nineteenth, the Dow fell by 22.6 percent (this would be between 5,000 and 6,000 points today). “Really, it’s a blood bath,” one investment executive despaired.78 Worried congressional leaders and White House officials, shocked by the enormity of the drop, convened an emergency summit on October 26 to reach a deal on a budget package that would reduce the $148 billion deficit and calm the markets. The president met with the “Big Five” leaders in Congress, including Wright, Tom Foley, the Senate majority leader, Robert Byrd, the Senate minority leader, Bob Dole, and Bob Michel. Secretary of the Treasury James Baker, the White House chief of staff, Howard Baker, and the White House budget director, James Miller, were there to be the president’s eyes and ears. As the Oval Office summit got under way, Wright proposed a deficit-cutting reconciliation bill with $12 billion in higher revenues. Reagan suggested he might be open to raising taxes as part of a deal with the Democrats, but congressional Republicans refused to compromise.

  Wright brought the deal to the floor without an agreement from the GOP. On October 29, he suffered a stinging defeat: a coalition of 169 Republicans and 48 Democrats voted against allowing his version of the budget legislation to come up for a vote. Conservatives hated the proposed higher taxes as well as a watered-down welfare reform program that Wright had included in the measure. Liberals were upset that he included higher defense spending to placate southern conservative Democrats. Wright desperately needed another round of voting to avoid a total defeat.79

  The House rules stipulated that without unanimous consent Wright could not ask for another vote on a bill the same day that it was defeated. So Wright turned to a parliamentary trick and simply declared it a new legislative day—even holding a “morning prayer”—so that the House could vote again on the deficit-reduction measure before the actual day ended. Visibly outraged and outmaneuvered, Gingrich accused the Speaker of violating the will of the House by holding a second vote, wagging his finger at Wright before the C-SPAN cameras.

  The situation only got worse when the House actually voted. According to a rule adopted in 1973, every recorded vote was supposed to last a minimum of fifteen minutes and then come to a close. However, the Speaker did have the discretion to keep the vote open longer, which many often had. But Republicans were going to be Talmudic about interpreting the rule. As Wright’s team monitored the votes on the electronic board behind the rostrum, which listed each representative’s name next to green or red lights for yes or no, the Speaker saw that he was about to lose again. The California Democrat George Miller, who was holding a grudge against the Speaker over an unrelated matter, voted no and left. Tom Foley tried to stop him as he walked into the elevator, but Miller said nothing they could do would change his mind.

  Desperate, Wright sent Coelho out to find the Texas congressman Jim Chapman, who had voted no but promised that he would switch if truly necessary. Coelho found Chapman sitting on a couch in a darkened area of the cloakroom and tried to call in that chit. But
Chapman refused, saying he didn’t want to risk his seat on this controversial decision. John Paul Mack, one of Wright’s most trusted advisers, let Chapman know that he really didn’t have the option.80 He reminded Chapman how indebted he was to Wright, who had helped him win a special election two years earlier and steered the donations of savings and loan executives his way. Now was the time to return the favor.

  As the clock reached the fifteen-minute mark, and as Gingrich and his comrades fretted on their backbench, Wright refused to state the results, even though the time for voting had expired. He was still one vote down. Members huddled in small groups trying to figure out what was going on, looking up at the clock, then down at Wright. Wright kept gently tapping his gavel against the lectern, delaying as long as possible. Republicans screamed at the Speaker to call the final results.

  Wright announced that a member wanted to switch his vote. Chaos ensued. “Can we lock the damn door?” Trent Lott yelled, pounding the lectern in the well so hard that it bent.81 Coelho appeared at the door to signal to Wright that the member in question was on the way.82 Wright glanced at Coelho, and Republicans glared back at him. With tempers flaring, Mack escorted a sullen-looking Chapman back into the chamber. Republicans watched in shock as Chapman signed a card officially switching his vote from a nay to an aye, with Mack standing intimidatingly behind him in what looked to angry conservatives like a scene out of The Godfather. Ten minutes after the vote should have ended, Wright announced that the bill had passed, 206 to 205. Only one Republican—Jim Jeffords, a Watergate Baby from Vermont—had voted for it.

  Republicans were livid. With C-SPAN covering the proceedings, viewers watched as their elected officials booed and hissed, making a spectacle reminiscent of the popular afternoon interview shows of the era, the crass brawls of The Morton Downey Jr. Show. Springing from his chair like a jack-in-the-box, Gingrich demanded that the House parliamentarian explain how Chapman could change his mind after Wright had announced that the vote was officially closed. Gingrich continued to protest, his nasal, high-pitched voice escalating and accusatory. Wright responded that he had the full authority to allow any member to change his vote as long as he was standing in the chamber—and then brought the discussion to a close. “He is a ruthless left-wing Democratic partisan imposing his will on the House,” Gingrich told reporters as his closing statement.83

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  This overheated procedural brawl fit Gingrich’s narrative. In a memo to colleagues, quoting Winston Churchill’s “war is horrible, slavery is worse,” Gingrich ominously proclaimed, “Given Wright-Foley-Coelho arrogance (and that of their party) we have no choice.”84 Ironically, Wright had swung his partisan fist so hard at the GOP that he ended up fomenting a backlash among a broader pool of Republicans against the old ways of doing business. More members of the GOP were starting to come around to Gingrich’s point of view. Even Wright privately realized that he might have gone too far. “It has totally broken down cooperation between Democrats and Republicans. I have absolutely no respect for Jim Wright,” said the Florida Republican Connie Mack. Dick Cheney growled to the National Journal that the Speaker had proven he was a “heavy-handed son of a bitch.”85

  A few weeks later, foreign policy provided the next partisan battleground between Wright and the Republicans. President Reagan had survived the congressional investigation into Iran-contra; the probe found extensive evidence that National Security Council and Pentagon officials had violated the law, but Congress found no “smoking gun” directly connecting Reagan to the secret assistance for the contras. The hearings unexpectedly turned one of the scheme’s architects, the telegenic and entirely unapologetic Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, into a hero. As “Ollie-mania” swept the country, with admirers buying T-shirts, posters, and pins of the document-shredding marine and National Security Council aide, Gingrich led Republicans in defending North and attacking the investigation as a partisan witch hunt.86 “I do have some difficulty with those of our friends on the Left,” Gingrich said at a speech in Williamsburg, “who are always sure America’s wrong, and are always willing to humiliate America, and to weaken America, on the premise that we may become a wreck, but at least they’ll own the wreckage.”87

  As Reagan’s fortunes rebounded, Speaker Wright began promoting a peace plan for Nicaragua developed by the Costa Rican president, Oscar Arias. Democrats were excited to see the Speaker step into the fray. Nicaragua was a vital conflict where their party sought to take a stand on foreign policy by pushing back against the militaristic impulses of a conservative president who had forgotten the lessons of Vietnam. The Speaker’s intervention posed a serious threat to Reagan, who was determined to rebuild political support for sending more U.S. assistance to the contras. Wright was doubly problematic for the White House because he was not an easy Democrat to attack as “soft on defense.” Even Reagan administration officials had to admit that Wright had strongly supported their policies in El Salvador, even as liberals had blasted the administration for supporting a brutal right-wing regime. Wright had also backed the administration’s requests for several high-cost weapon systems. Reagan had agreed to the Arias plan, which Wright also supported, back in August, before the Black Monday market crash. The Wright-Reagan agreement stipulated that the United States would temporarily withhold military assistance from the contras if the Nicaraguan government made concrete progress on a series of democratic reforms by a deadline of November 7.

  Liberal Democrats felt Wright betrayed them by making a deal with the hawkish president, and Reagan hoped the tentative agreement would fall apart because his preference was to provide arms to the rebels. Much of the country, however, saw the deal as a stunning success for the Speaker, who had reached a compromise with the hawkish Reagan that advanced an objective—peace in Central America—that Democrats desired. “That’s a real leadership thing Wright did,” Gingrich later recalled thinking to himself. “We may be about to lock horns savagely over ethics, but that was real gutsy.”88

  To Wright, the biggest obstacle to implementing the plan was Reagan’s refusal to speak with anyone from the Sandinista government. “How do you negotiate a cease-fire,” Wright asked, “when the Sandinistas would talk to nobody but Reagan, and Reagan and the White House were saying there could be no talks between the Sandinistas directly and the contras?”89 Having read extensively about South and Central American politics since his childhood in Texas, Wright believed that the United States had been too imperial in the region and Reagan needed to respect the regional governments, even the Sandinistas, to achieve peace. A U.S. president dictating the terms would never work.

  Feeling intense pressure as the November deadline approached with no resolution in sight, the Sandinistas decided to open their own dialogue with the contras. Wright agreed to meet with the Nicaraguan president, Daniel Ortega, in his Capitol Hill office, without anyone from the administration present, on Wednesday, November 11. This was a bold move in a country where international diplomacy was usually handled by the executive branch. As snow fell over the city, Wright and Ortega met for an hour to discuss a fifteen-point cease-fire agreement. The Speaker told Ortega that he would need to avoid using confrontational language and to do more to guarantee political freedom for the opposition if he wanted the plan to succeed. Everyone understood that Wright was a huge risk taker, but an apparently unauthorized diplomatic meeting with one of Reagan’s prime international adversaries seemed extraordinarily defiant.

  Three days later, Wright met with Ortega again, this time for almost ninety minutes, and completed the outlines of a peace deal. With international observers looking on, the contras would desist from fighting, be granted amnesty, and be allowed to fully participate in Nicaragua’s new democracy. Wright met with the visiting cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, the widely respected Catholic prelate of Nicaragua whom he had befriended during his trips to the region on congressional delegations, who told his old friend that upon h
is return he would be pleased to present the plan to the contra leaders.

  At a November 13 press conference in the elegant Rayburn Room, Wright announced that these discussions had taken place. Standing before a copy of Gilbert Stuart’s striking portrait of George Washington, Wright made his case calmly, insisting he was no Lone Ranger and claiming that he had told Secretary of State George Shultz about the ongoing discussions several times, including “last night” on the telephone.

  Wright then flew back to his district for some scheduled events. When he landed in Meacham Field, the producers of NBC Nightly News, whose newscast was about to start, rushed Wright to a small, cramped airport office in which cameramen had already set up their equipment. The crew scrambled to clip a microphone onto Wright’s tie, and the camera went live to a national audience. The anchor, Tom Brokaw, peppered Wright with hard-hitting questions, including whether Shultz had formally agreed to specific meetings with Ortega. Cool and composed, the Speaker reminded Brokaw that he did “not have to ask permission” to speak to anyone. Nevertheless, Wright said, neither Reagan nor Shultz expressed hesitation about his assisting on this matter.90

  White House and State Department officials sent a very different message, making it clear that they did not approve of the Speaker’s diplomacy.91 The administration now said that Wright’s actions had endangered the peace process: as a result of the Speaker’s overreach, the State Department said, the Sandinistas felt less pressure to concede to democratic reforms.