After reading the Bankers Monthly story, Marshall Lyman gathered information from Wright’s staff to poke holes in the narrative, even enlisting John Barry, a sharp Washington reporter then shadowing Wright as he researched a book about the Speaker. The Speaker and his staff were furious, alleging that the article was based on the outright manipulation of facts and false claims. Barry thought the piece, for which Adler and Binstein had not even conducted interviews, was shoddy, irresponsible, and flat-out wrong. He had written a letter to the editor of Regardie’s rebutting the article and defending the integrity of a New York Times profile of Wright that he had published in November 1986,6 from which the authors had borrowed heavily and cited incorrectly. Barry had been in the meeting with the federal regulators described in the article and insisted to Lyman, based on his handwritten notes, that their conversations with Wright had focused on the health of the regional economy of Texas and that there was never any discussion of a specific bank or individual until the regulators themselves brought it up. The Democratic power broker and fellow Texan Robert Strauss called for the meeting, not Wright. The only reason Wright agreed to meet with Dixon—who, Barry said, contacted the congressman himself—was the important role of the savings and loan industry in the Texas economy and the troubling complaints that Republican regulators were targeting them for partisan purposes.7 As Barry explained, Vernon S&L was mentioned only when the regulators turned to Dixon’s situation. In Barry’s account, Wright didn’t even seem to know who Dixon was. “At no time,” Barry wrote, “did Wright ask anyone in the room to do anything whatsoever, of any kind, for any individual, or any individual company.” Barry added that the profile was not accurate about the “facts of that meeting” and “distorted and misrepresented” quotations that they had “plagiarized” from his piece in The New York Times.8
Armed with this information, Lyman wrote to the board chairman of Bankers Monthly, the publisher Theodore Cross, to say that the piece was based on “grotesque distortions and deliberately contrived innuendo.”9 Hoping to prevent the publication of a second installment of the story promised for the next month, Robert Strauss burst unannounced into the meeting of the magazine’s board of directors in their New York offices. Strauss threatened to sue Cross, Adler, and the entire organization for libel if they didn’t destroy the remaining copies of the first issue and abandon their plans to publish the second installment, which evidently had already come off the press. The board sat in stunned silence listening to Strauss’s tirade. Though Adler and Binstein insisted that their article was accurate, the publishers reprinted the April issue without the offending second installment.
But the damage was done. Since the article had first appeared, Gingrich had been carrying it around in his show-and-tell binder of clippings and sharing the piece with reporters. “I think you will find the material very disturbing,” he warned Michael Barone of The Washington Post.10 He wrote David Gergen, a former Reagan communications advisor who had started writing for U.S. News & World Report, to complain that his recent article about Attorney General Meese did not mention Wright’s troubles. As a refresher, Gingrich attached two troubling articles about the Speaker. “I need your help and the help of U.S. News and World Report,” in the fight against corruption, Gingrich proclaimed.11 “The need to reveal to the public the corrupt nature of the Speaker of the House of Representatives,” Gingrich wrote to Abe Rosenthal, associate editor of The New York Times, “is necessary if we are ever going to clean” up Washington. “Should a reporter be assigned to cover the story, may I suggest that they contact Karen Van Brocklin on my staff.”12 When he had sent a letter to every member of Congress explaining why Wright should be formally investigated, Adler and Binstein’s work, with its eye-grabbing headline, THE SPEAKER AND THE SLEAZY BANKER, had been one of the key articles he attached to support his case. With the eye of a trained historian, Gingrich had a knack for framing the information in the most grandiose terms possible. He warned fellow legislators that the stories revealed they were facing an “ethics crisis” that “threatens the freedom and liberty of every American” and they had to act.13 The respected Los Angeles Times correspondents Karen Tumulty and Sara Fritz also mentioned the piece in an article, giving the charges even more lift.
Until the Bankers Monthly article appeared, Common Cause had remained notably silent about Speaker Wright. As Gingrich emerged, predictably chasing and chastising, the leaders of the celebrated watchdog group worried about lending support to an investigation that was so rabidly partisan. The founders of Common Cause had worked hard to avoid anything that could justify the claim that government reform was a political issue as opposed to a bipartisan cause in the public interest. Though Gingrich had repeatedly pestered the organization’s president, Fred Wertheimer, to take action against the Speaker,14 Common Cause had ignored his pleas. Wertheimer didn’t like Gingrich, and avoided his calls and shoved aside his letters. But Gingrich pressed on. “Given the key role Common Cause has played on ethics,” Gingrich complained to Wertheimer in a pointed letter about his silence, “your advice on which path to take is vital. Your silence in this matter weakens the cause of honest government.”15 Wertheimer didn’t place much faith in Gingrich, feeling that the legislator pursued “situational ethics,” using the House rules as a partisan bludgeon rather than as a “means to protect the integrity of the institution.”16 He wrote Gingrich that their efforts to strengthen congressional ethics “would be undertaken separately and independently of your own efforts.”17 But by the spring of 1988, the pressure on Wertheimer to request an investigation from the House Ethics Committee was becoming unbearable. The stream of news stories about Wright’s sordid relationship with book publishers, Texas oil executives, and now savings and loan officials all made it hard for Common Cause to ignore the brewing scandal. On May 10, Wertheimer was particularly upset when The Wall Street Journal published a caustic editorial asking why Congress did not receive the same ethical scrutiny as the Reagan administration, which he read as a veiled attack on his organization.18
Common Cause’s chairman, Archibald Cox, a hero from the Watergate scandal who had been the righteous victim of the Saturday Night Massacre, and Wertheimer decided shortly after the Journal’s editorial appeared that it was time to act.19 Cox’s decision to sign on with Wertheimer was significant. The former Watergate prosecutor and Harvard Law School professor stood for many Americans as the embodiment of political accountability. Cox’s opinions carried substantial weight in any debate over political reform, given the experience that he had suffered through.
On May 18, Wertheimer sent a letter to the House Ethics Committee calling on Chairman Julian Dixon to launch a formal investigation into Wright. The letter to the California Democrat did not proclaim that Wright was guilty of any infraction, but citing the savings and loan stories as well as the Washington Post articles about Wright’s book, Wertheimer explained, “Common Cause believes that it is in the best interests of the public, the House of Representatives, and of Speaker Wright for the House Ethics Committee to examine and resolve these matters.”20
Wright was savvy enough to understand that Common Cause’s letter would propel the story like a booster rocket, making it appear to be much more than partisan slander. The letter brought the full weight of the reform world, which was usually seen as a force of good to those who lived outside Washington. One Democrat confidentially admitted, “The fact that an ‘objective’ public interest group has taken the step gives some greater credibility to what has been a partisan effort.”21 Wright tried to assure House Democrats in a closed-door meeting that this scandal would not be a serious problem for the party, arguing that this was all a grandstanding Republican effort to shift public attention away from the scandals plaguing the Reagan administration itself. Wright’s colleagues—moved by his persuasive powers or their feelings of kinship—showed their support by giving him a standing ovation at the conclusion of his speech.
On May 24, Wright
took his case to the public by appearing on CNN’s Larry King Live. When King asked the Speaker about the ethics charges, Wright was ready: “I have written to the Chairman of the Ethics Committee and have said to him that, in light of all this public talk, if he wants to look into it, fine. He will have my full cooperation.” Common Cause’s Wertheimer responded to Wright’s remarks by going even further. He called on the Ethics Committee to appoint an independent prosecutor to ensure a fair investigation.22
The Common Cause report had changed everything. For while it was possible that Common Cause could keep politics out of its own internal decision-making process, it was illusory for it to think it could prevent government reform from becoming weaponized in the partisan wars of Washington. Within an instant of the letter going public, Gingrich sent a missive of his own asking colleagues, “How much evidence does it take to ‘merit further inquiry’ by the House Ethics Committee?” In addition to four editorials from The Wall Street Journal, The Atlanta Constitution, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and The Dallas Morning News supporting an investigation, Gingrich attached the letter from Common Cause, the gold standard of good-government reform.23
* * *
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The dominoes started to fall. The scandal gained national visibility when Republicans entered it into the presidential election. In the summer of 1988, Vice President George H. W. Bush, the Republican nominee for president, joined the campaign against the Speaker. Unlike Robert Michel, a figure largely unknown to the American public, Bush could sway the national debate with a mere utterance. And Speaker Wright’s problems were politically attractive to the GOP standard-bearer because his opponent in the presidential race was going to be the Massachusetts governor, Michael Dukakis, a liberal technocrat who promised that under his watch he would hold the federal government accountable. A central line of attack for the squeaky-clean Dukakis was the ethical baggage that Vice President Bush carried from his time in the Reagan administration.
Republicans were worried. Dukakis was polling extremely well in April and May. Very few vice presidential candidates had been elected to succeed two-term presidents, and Bush seemed like a weak candidate, despite his unexpectedly strong performance in the Republican primaries. The silver-spooned vice president had shortcomings as a leader (Newsweek featured a story about what it called his “wimp factor”). Although he had held a seat in Congress, led the Republican National Committee, and directed the CIA, he struggled to articulate his vision in front of television cameras. A Doonesbury comic strip teased him for “placing his political manhood in a blind trust.” Bush struggled to shed his patrician image, botching carefully choreographed photo ops. His aides winced at a New Hampshire truck stop when the candidate asked for a “splash” of coffee. His sojourns to the massive Bush family compound in Maine didn’t help matters with middle-class Americans.24 Wright once joked that Bush was “the only Texan I know who eats lobster with his chili.”25 Even President Reagan was lukewarm about Bush. He worried, as many on the Right did, about how committed Bush would be to the conservative cause.
Republicans grew more anxious when Dukakis focused in early May on what he called the “sleaze factor” in the executive branch. For the Massachusetts governor, Iran-contra proved that the Republicans could not be trusted with power.26 Dukakis hammered away at the point at every campaign stop: White House operatives had intentionally subverted the law, abused their authority, and hidden their actions with the intention of evading congressional restrictions. Moreover, the vice president was directly implicated in the scandal. There was documented evidence that he knew about the operations. After Oliver North and the former national security adviser John Poindexter were indicted on charges of conspiracy, he had declared that he was friends with both men. As the venerable conservative Wall Street Journal concluded, Bush could not “dispel his Iran contra problems.”27
Dukakis also pointed to other controversies in the Reagan administration that were producing a “cloud of corruption” over the executive branch. These included a scandal surrounding Attorney General Edwin Meese, who was being investigated by an independent prosecutor for alleged financial improprieties involving a pipeline construction deal in the Middle East, and an ongoing investigation in the Pentagon involving billions of dollars in fraudulent contracts. The Pentagon had spent a stunning $640 each on aircraft toilet seats and more than $400 each on basic wrenches—high-priced payoffs to loyal contractors. Republicans, including Gingrich, were desperate to turn attention toward other issues as soon as possible. The opinion that Reagan had run the “most corrupt administration” in American history was prevalent in Democratic circles. When Dukakis brought the sleaze factor up in his stump speeches, the attacks ignited the crowds.
Bush’s campaign adviser Roger Ailes, who had started his career in politics through advising President Nixon, urged Vice President Bush to go on the offensive. He needed to start delivering tougher campaign speeches and airing attack ads to cut Dukakis down to size. When Bush confessed that he worried these tactics would make him look desperate, Ailes responded, “We are desperate.”28
Bush knew that he had to respond before his opponent cemented this perception of him in the public imagination. The task fell on the shoulders of his campaign manager, the hard-hitting, street-brawling South Carolinian Lee Atwater, a veteran of Reagan’s 1980 campaign. When Atwater had a politician in his crosshairs, he could be extremely dangerous. Atwater was to presidential campaigns what the anti-establishment Gingrich was to Congress. One mentor described him as having the “eyes of a killer,” and another observer described him as the “Babe Ruth of negative politics.”29 Atwater practiced a no-holds-barred style, where the goal was to destroy the reputation of an opponent. Rip apart his character, Atwater argued, and then what an opponent said simply wouldn’t matter. Atwater often compared politics to his favorite form of entertainment—professional wrestling.
Gingrich and Atwater could have been brothers born to different mothers. Atwater had first brought Gingrich to the attention of high-level Reagan officials in 1981, describing him as one of the rising congressional stars taking over from the vanishing Dixiecrats.30 The two men, along with Ed Rollins and Lyn Nofziger, had served on the informal advisory group that helped Reagan plan for his reelection campaign. Like Gingrich, Atwater believed in a vicious approach to politics and saw the media as the central arena through which electoral struggles played out. The art of politics, in their minds, was as much about the theater of partisanship as about policy. Although Gingrich was much more serious than the frat-house, rock-’n’-roll-loving Atwater, they were kindred spirits in their tactics for how Republicans could gain power.
Now the shrewd campaign manager thought about how to get his mild and diffident patrician into the cutthroat mentality that he needed to combat Dukakis. With Dukakis up by seventeen points in mid-May, Atwater responded by trying to make the Democrat look guilty by association. While it was difficult for Bush or Atwater to tar and feather Dukakis, given that his personal and professional record was as clean as a whistle, they did see an opening to connect the candidate to a corrupt Democratic Party, which was headed by Speaker Wright. As Speaker, Wright would be in the television spotlight as he chaired the Democratic convention in Atlanta. If the Republicans played their cards right, seeing the Speaker on-screen would remind voters about the corruption of the Democratic Party at a pivotal moment in Dukakis’s campaign. With Atwater at the helm in the Bush campaign, Gingrich could sit back and watch the presidential candidate do the damage for him.
Maybe it was the influence of Atwater, or perhaps it was the pressure to prove his grit, but Vice President Bush decided to jump in headfirst. Wright didn’t see this coming, nor did most Democrats or Republicans. Bush was not known for making the kinds of slash-and-burn attacks that were becoming popular in the House. And as fellow Texans, Bush and Wright had enjoyed cordial relations until that point.
At an appearance in New Jers
ey, the gentle scion of the “civil” Republican establishment seized the opportunity to change the conversation: “I wonder if Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson will join me in calling for the House of Representatives to appoint a special prosecutor to look into its own troubles, starting with the Speaker of the House of Representatives.”31 Bush repeated the challenge in the coming weeks. “Talk about ethics. You talk about Ed Meese?” Bush pondered. “How about talking about what Common Cause raised about the Speaker the other day? Are they going to look into it? Are they going to go for an independent counsel so the nation will have this full investigation? Why don’t people call out for that? I will right now. I think they ought to.”32
Like many Republican leaders at the time, Bush knew that the charges against his colleague from the Lone Star State were based on flimsy evidence—speculative media pieces that alleged technical violations of ethics rules that few members of Congress followed. Nothing that Wright was accused of rose to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. The worst allegations, regarding Wright’s relationship to the savings and loan industry, were based on hearsay and questionable journalism. But the vice president sensed that there was enough “there there” to make the rhetoric stick. And in fact, the tactic succeeded insofar as it took the focus off Republican wrongdoings. One top aide to Michel, Johanna Schneider, believed that Wright’s predicament “minimizes the ability of Democrats to use the ‘sleaze factor’ against George Bush.”33
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