Gingrich felt that it was time to make the investigation official. On the morning of May 26, after giving the press advance notice, Gingrich took a stroll on the first floor of the Capitol toward the office of the sergeant at arms. Tailed by reporters throwing out questions, a somber Gingrich walked past the Board of Education room, where Wright was having a breakfast meeting, oblivious to what was happening outside. Gingrich entered the office of the sergeant at arms, where members could deposit checks and notarize documents. The office looked like a small-town bank, with chipped paint on the walls and a long counter of teller windows. Secretarial staff were on hand to help members with everything from parking to security to office support, and Gingrich asked a clerk to notarize his complaint against Wright. Then, with the document in hand, Gingrich headed directly to the reception room for the Ethics Committee. He had engaged in a lot of hijinks since coming to Washington, but now he was filing formal ethics charges against the most powerful person in Congress.
Signed by 72 out of 177 House Republicans, the official ethics complaint that Gingrich submitted alleged “highly questionable conduct” and enumerated four major “areas” that he said warranted investigation. The first charged that Wright had written to the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, in March 1979 requesting assistance in relation to the investments in Egypt that had allegedly been made by Neptune Oil. The complaint suggested that Wright did this in exchange for a favorable deal on an investment in a Texas oil well. This would have been a violation of a House rule that prohibited members of Congress from receiving compensation from any private individual who could directly benefit from their position of power.
The second charge revolved around another oil deal. Wright sent a letter to Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus in September 1979 requesting help in an oil lease dispute in Arkansas. Gingrich claimed that Wright’s goal was to use his influence to assist Texas Oil, a company in which he had, according to the news stories, purchased stock.
The third accusation from the Republicans centered on the book deal with William Carlos Moore that had been reported in The Washington Post. If this story was true, Gingrich charged, Wright violated another House rule. Gingrich noted that normal book royalties were about 10 to 20 percent, far below the 55 percent the congressman received from Moore. Furthermore, the royalty deal was given to Wright by a person who had been convicted for tax fraud. Gingrich also alleged that Wright used some of the royalties to pay for services performed by companies owned by Moore that had been involved in Wright’s campaigns, a clear ethics violation. Because Moore received payment for campaign work in 1985 and 1986, Gingrich saw this all as a “thinly disguised way to launder campaign funds.”
The final charge Gingrich raised in his letter was that one of Wright’s speechwriters, Matthew Cossolotto, worked on the book. Ethics rules strictly prohibited staff from performing private work for members. This rule was the vaguest of all, because staffers commonly helped produce these kinds of publications. Politicians claimed that some of these books were not “private” work at all but rather a mechanism for them to convey their message to the public as legislators.
All of the accusations were based on thin evidence from the newspaper clippings that had been collected by Karen Van Brocklin, which Gingrich’s office nonetheless claimed met the “evidence standard” to trigger an investigation. “We are not an investigative team,” Van Brocklin slyly said to reporters, “so we have to rely on the press for a lot of information. That’s what they’re there for. And we believe there’s enough stuff out there that looks funny.”34 Yet Gingrich was remarkably candid about how speculative the evidence was. Pressed by New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth, who had cut his teeth investigating Watergate for George McGovern’s 1972 campaign, Gingrich admitted that the charges about the oil investments, for instance, were not “actionable.” He conceded that by the time he had sent his letter to the Ethics Committee, journalists had already confirmed that Wright never purchased any stock in Texas Oil. And Gingrich freely acknowledged that he had no evidence for his claim that the investment with Neptune Oil was risk-free. Jeffrey Smith, a lawyer who helped to draft Gingrich’s complaint, stated publicly that the House rules on outside income were not intended to apply to book royalties, and even Gingrich granted that he had no firm evidence that there had been a scheme to launder the book royalties into campaign activities.35 But none of this stopped him from formally injecting the charges into the record. Given that the accused was the House Speaker, Gingrich knew it would create a media frenzy, something that was far too tempting to pass up, and the accusations themselves, opaque as an oil slick, would be difficult for Wright to clean up.
Even the editors of The New York Times now agreed that the complaints about Wright had for too long been “dismissed” as “politically inspired.” Ever suspicious about the motivations of the GOP, the Times editors concluded that “a credible investigation is needed. . . . There’s no taking politics out of ethics accusations in this election year, but the time has come to get the facts—and get them out.”36
Conservative organizations were enthralled by this turn of events. Citizens for Reagan, a grassroots organization that had been hounding Wright in his home district since the 1980 election, sent out a press release to its seventy thousand members urging, “Your help needed to expose most corrupt Speaker in history,” a phrase that borrowed directly from Gingrich’s rhetoric. The Citizens for Reagan letter also spoke about Wright’s dealings with Nicaragua and claimed that “his Speakership has been marked by dishonesty, lying, intimidation, and the use of a host of anti-democratic practices” like the budget reconciliation vote. The broadsheet concluded by asking citizens to alert their representatives and to write to the Ethics Committee, as well as the editors of their local newspapers.37 The next morning, Dick Cheney walked over to Gingrich while they were in the middle of a quorum call to whisper, “You’re not alone.”38
Now Wright was starting to worry. He had seen how the winds of reform could fundamentally shake Capitol Hill. The Speaker would sit in front of his stately wood desk overflowing with memoranda, handwritten messages, and letters from constituents and colleagues, trying to figure out what he could do to make Gingrich disappear. He didn’t want to focus on this. Yet he had no choice. The aura of power that emanated from the Speaker’s suite could not displace the threat of an opponent who was aiming for his head.39
Michel was isolated, too. The rest of the Republican leadership had signed on with Gingrich. Michel was now calling himself the “Republican” rather than “minority” leader because, as Wright later recalled, “he was being driven by an insistent, vocal band of mostly younger Republican members to act in a more vigorously partisan way. I always felt it went against the grain of his nature, but he had been slowly yielding to their demands with increasingly forceful and partisan statements.”40
The question on Speaker Wright’s mind was this: What would Sam Rayburn have done? Unfortunately for Wright, his mentor was no longer alive to guide him toward political safety. Lyndon Johnson would surely have known how to crush an antagonist like Gingrich, but he had passed away in 1973. Most of the Democratic members in the Texas delegation, one of the most sizable in the House, who would ordinarily be expected to serve as Wright’s most powerful allies, were relative newcomers to Capitol Hill—a result of the turnover the Texas Democratic delegation experienced in the mid-1970s. Many of the delegation’s giants, like William R. Poage, had been swept away by the post-Watergate reforms. Most Texans in the House lacked the institutional know-how or gravitas to offer their fellow Texan much support. Unfortunately for Wright, he and the irascible Jack Brooks—the one Texan with the muscle and knowledge to offer guidance—had a lukewarm relationship. Wright had never forgiven Brooks for voting for another candidate for majority leader in 1976.41
To survive this investigation, Wright would need to find a good attorney. A few weeks earlier, Marshall Lyman had invited the forty-seve
n-year-old William Oldaker, a veteran at one of Washington’s most prestigious law firms, to discuss a number of issues. Their conversation quickly turned to ethics. Oldaker’s last major job had been working on the 1987 presidential campaign of Delaware senator Joe Biden, whose candidacy crashed as a result of a plagiarism scandal. Satisfied with what he heard, Lyman ushered Oldaker into Wright’s office. The two men spoke for another half an hour, and the Speaker hired him on the spot.
Oldaker seemed like a good choice. He was one of those Washington insiders who knew the key players in town and had a sense of just how rough partisan politics could become—or so he thought. Oldaker had his work cut out for him. Wright made it clear he would spend as little time as possible on this matter, believing it to be a distraction. He hoped that simply lawyering up would quash the problem.42
* * *
—
Julian Dixon, the affable fifty-three-year-old California congressman, was in an uncomfortable position for a Democrat. Being the chairman of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, known as the House Ethics Committee, was a thankless job. Nobody wanted to sit in judgment of the colleagues they ate with in the Members’ Dining Room, worked out next to in the basement gym, and deliberated with in committee rooms and the House chamber. Dixon had been closely following Speaker Wright’s case in the newspapers, hoping that the issue would be resolved before it ever reached the Ethics Committee. When he learned about the request from Common Cause, his hope was gone. The Wright saga had fallen directly into his lap.
The House Ethics Committee had earned a bad reputation since its creation in 1967. The solution for previous chairmen of this panel, like John Flynt, had been to do nothing when a complaint was made. With Democrats in perpetual control of the House, Republicans saw the committee as one more example of how the opposition abused their power to protect their own members, regardless of the sordid behavior that ethics investigations turned up. And yet the committee’s ineffectualness was appreciated by many Republicans who took comfort that the committee was hesitant to police its fellow members. An investigation would barely produce a shudder from the accused member. For years, an assignment on the Ethics Committee had been regarded as a demotion or, at best, an easy job that freed up a member to spend time working on other issues.
One of the most egregious examples of committee inaction—especially in the minds of critics like Newt Gingrich—had taken place right after Dixon took over the chairmanship in 1985. The Rhode Island Democrat Fernand “Freddie” St. Germain was the focus of a high-profile ethics inquiry related to the savings and loan industry. St. Germain, the chairman of the House Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs Committee, was accused of accepting thousands of dollars in dinners, entertainment, and travel from savings and loan officials in exchange for his authorship of the 1982 legislation that deregulated the industry.43 A fourteen-month investigation produced a fourteen-hundred-page report, yet the committee did not recommend punishment. No action was taken, Dixon explained, because there wasn’t sufficient evidence that St. Germain had broken any of the congressional ethics rules. His only proven sin, based on the months-long investigation, was doing a sloppy job filling out the financial disclosure forms, which, in Dixon’s mind, was not deserving of punishment. If the Democrats wanted to strip St. Germain of his chairmanship or other privileges, that was their prerogative, not his. Dixon did not feel that the committee could go beyond the House rules in dictating behavior, no matter how noxious it seemed, particularly if the Ethics Committee was going to avoid misusing its authority. Critics called the decision an outrage, and Dixon was badly stung by the affair.44
After this controversial decision, Dixon was desperate to improve the reputation of the Ethics Committee. He respected Wright as a legislator’s legislator, yet understood that investigating the Speaker could lead citizens to believe committee members were serious about doing their job. Dixon could not risk giving Gingrich even the slightest opening that he was not conducting a tough inquiry. Nothing short of a thorough investigation was required.
The action now shifted to one of the more inauspicious spaces in Washington, room HT-2N, a cramped basement chamber in the west front of the Capitol that housed the House Ethics Committee. To get to HT-2N, legislators had to take an elevator down to an unmarked and darkened corridor, devoid of artwork or the tourists who enlivened the rest of the building. Buckets lined the barely lit hallways to catch water dripping down from leaking pipes.45
On June 9, the committee met in a closed session for eight and a half hours. The twelve members, the only committee designed to be equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, huddled around a narrow wooden conference table, engaged in what an anonymous source called a “grueling discourse” about all of the charges Gingrich had raised.46 The committee’s Republicans did not hesitate to vote in favor of a formal investigation, but Democrats were loath to open the door to a politically damaging process. The meeting took hours because Dixon refused to conclude until he had a unanimous decision. One Democrat held out until the very end. A bleary-eyed Dixon, sensing that he was on the cusp of turning him in favor of a yes, popped his head out of the room to tell the reporters that they were still working on their decision and would issue a “statement or a status report” the following day. Speaker Wright, eager to know the outcome, was back home with Betty in McLean, Virginia, while Gingrich finished up dinner at a Capitol Hill eatery where he spent the evening enjoying the attention of a reporter.
At noon on June 10, Dixon emerged from the cloistered committee room to make his announcement. As reporters flocked around him, he began with a warning that his statement would be short and that he would take no questions. His staffer would handle the rest. Looking tired from the long deliberations of the previous day, he stated without emotion that the committee had voted unanimously in favor of a formal investigation into whether Speaker Wright violated the House rules. Wright, he said, had been informed about the decision and promised to cooperate. “I’m sorry I can’t answer any questions,” he said as he walked away, turning the press over to his aide. Dixon wanted to make it crystal clear that he was taking on this responsibility as his obligation to the House rather than out of any craving for media attention.
Dixon’s senior staffer jumped into the horde. There would first be a “preliminary inquiry” by the committee, the aide explained in clinical fashion, something along the lines of a grand jury investigation, into six of the accusations raised by Gingrich and Common Cause. The burden of proof was relatively low at this stage, because the committee was charged only with determining whether there was reason to believe a legislator was guilty. Once they concluded this stage of the process, the committee would issue a report outlining their findings. If there was sufficient reason to believe that the Speaker had violated the rules, the committee would begin a second stage, more like a legal trial, where the standards of evidence would be much higher and where Wright would have an opportunity to present his case to the committee.
As Dixon retreated from the harsh glare of the cameras into the committee room, Wright and Gingrich, who had been watching on television sets in their respective offices, absorbed the news. For Gingrich, it was an exquisite validation. The unanimous decision vastly diminished the ability of Wright’s supporters to claim this was all about politics. This outcome could not have gone better for the Gingrich camp.
The Speaker responded to Dixon’s announcement by convening a press conference. With reporters clamoring, Wright said that he welcomed the investigation and wanted to appear before the committee as soon as possible; he had nothing to hide. Standing behind a lectern and in front of an elegant, packed bookshelf with bound volumes of the Congressional Record, Wright acted as if he were in good spirits. But C-SPAN viewers could see the beads of sweat trickling down his forehead under the glare of the lights. With William Oldaker and Tom Foley, the Democrat majority leader, flanking him, Wright insisted he was confident
that the committee would see that he had not violated any rule. Oldaker had already given the press a twenty-three-page narrative rebutting every charge. When one reporter asked Wright to walk them through the various charges, the Speaker did so without any appearance of guilt or shame. He spoke slowly and with the same modulated cadence in which he delivered his floor oratory. Straining to show a tense smile, Wright explained why each charge was dead wrong. He would occasionally glance over to Oldaker as he spoke, pausing as if to seek confirmation that his answer was on point. Each accusation, in his account, was either bogus, a gross misreading of the ethics rules, or a total misrepresentation of the facts.
The most difficult question came toward the end, when one reporter pressed the Speaker on having his staffer work on his book. Wright first responded that it was always hard for members to determine what was public versus private business. When a reporter asked in disbelief if he didn’t see a problem with a publicly paid staffer working on a book that brought the Speaker personal profit, Wright struggled with his response, talking about how proud he was to write this book and how he had done all the work on it by himself. Profit, he insisted, was not his motive. The reporter pressed him further on the staff member’s work, suggesting that there would be a “howl” around the Hill if Ronald Reagan’s beleaguered attorney general Edwin Meese had done this. “Perhaps,” Wright admitted, it might be good if Congress imposed a tighter standard. He had made a few mistakes in judgment, he acknowledged. Still he insisted, shaking his head, he had broken no rules. When a reporter yelled out a question if all of this was retribution for the scandals that dogged Meese, the Speaker couldn’t help himself. He turned around before walking out the door, saying, “I think you answered your own question.” Then he disappeared into the dark of the adjoining room.
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