Wright was all over the Sunday morning talk shows a few days later, although his feigned, made-for-television charm was absent. He bridled with anger when the anchor on Face the Nation, Phil Jones, questioned whether it would be right for him to chair the Democratic National Convention in July with “this cloud over your head.” “There is no cloud over my head,” Wright responded indignantly. “No sir, I don’t accept that one second.”47 On ABC’s This Week the Speaker insisted, “I have violated no rule, I’m certain. I may have done some things one time and another in my career that were bad judgment, but whatever mistakes I made have not been dishonest.”48
Joining Gingrich, who favored strengthening the investigation with the appointment of an independent prosecutor, the most prominent Republican figure of all stepped in to share his opinion. Although presidents traditionally stayed out of the internal affairs of Congress, at least in public, on June 15, President Reagan told a group of reporters that he supported such a move. “I think everyone would feel that it was more proper if it was done by an investigator outside, an appointed investigator,” the president said in an interview with a gaggle of reporters.49
The press corps wasn’t buying Speaker Wright’s side of the story. A torrent of articles followed, all of them raising the new question about whether Wright was the best face for the Democratic Party. The editorial pages of the local press were brutal—with headlines like SPEAKERGATE, CONTD. in the Boston Herald and LET THE INQUIRY BEGIN in The Albuquerque Tribune—while the national media coverage was not much better.50 “Sleaze is a word the Republicans have had to live with for much of Ronald Reagan’s second term. Now Edwin Meese will have some Democratic company in the public dock,” according to a piece in Time.51 A particularly blistering article appeared in the June 20 issue of The New Republic titled ALBATROSS. Robert Wright, one of the liberal magazine’s editors, wrote, “Since coming to Washington 34 years ago, he’s done a number of things that belong somewhere on the ethics spectrum between shady and criminal.” The magazine, which prided itself on being the voice of post-Reagan liberalism, called on Democrats to embrace the investigation and concluded by saying that “the post-Watergate world calls for party leaders who are cleaner than tradition dictates.” The editors of the magazine, through this piece, were publicly calling on Democrats to consider a new leader, a stunning legitimization of the investigation.52
Moreover, the New Republic piece captured the generational tensions that were unfolding as the press tried to make sense of the Speaker and the deeper issues the widening scandal laid bare. Robert Wright, who was thirty-one, stepped into this partisan tempest not fully aware of the implications of what he wrote. New to political reporting, he had just moved to Washington from New York, where the editorial staff assigned him this story because nobody else was available that week. He later said that the assignment was “an aberration.” He didn’t have any expertise in congressional politics, and his opinions were based primarily on gut-level conclusions he drew during his reporting.
The influx of young journalists like Wright, eager to replicate the kind of hard-hitting work of Woodward and Bernstein in the 1970s, created a massive opportunity for renegades like Gingrich. Well intentioned and often well educated, most of the up-and-coming stars of the media didn’t have a strong grasp of how politics worked in Washington. They arrived with strong convictions about government and political ethics. But they weren’t fully prepared for the ways in which savvy politicians could play them for their own partisan purposes. Gingrich instinctively grasped the possibilities for taking advantage of their idealism; he would throw gasoline onto the fire with one accusation after the other, knowing that the press would eat it up and respond with genuine investigative concerns or for good copy. As a result, the scandal kept growing. “I’ve had two investigative reporters tell me,” Gingrich said, “that when you get involved in this kind of process, it just accelerates—the more you find out, the more damaging it is. I think we might see the end of Wright as speaker before the end of the year.”53
In an interview with C-SPAN soon after publication, the clean-cut Robert Wright, who dressed true to type by wearing a tweed jacket, appeared nervous and was uncertain about some of the basic information asked of him on live television. His fresh face and meticulous grooming made him look extraordinarily young, reminding viewers that this was not a journalist with deep experience covering Washington. On camera he backpedaled. With a slight hint of an Oklahoma accent, Wright acknowledged that the Speaker didn’t do anything illegal. Nor was it clear, he said, that the Speaker had technically violated any ethics rules, other than the most recent allegation that a staffer might have helped with the book while being paid by taxpayers (though he acknowledged that other legislators did the same). Throughout the discussion, the editor displayed a precarious grasp of the congressional rules at the heart of the case and the history of other leaders who had struggled with comparable challenges.
Robert Wright felt that he knew enough to understand that something was wrong. Watergate taught the nation that you didn’t need to be an expert to spot an abuse of power. In fact, many of the experts had missed the story, the same way they had with Vietnam. Younger reporters felt that they had to be willing to analyze what they were seeing in politics with their own eyes without being scared off by the conventional wisdom of Washington. The New Republic editor told C-SPAN that the political class had been “playing fast and loose with ethics for a long time now” and that these kinds of questions had become more prominent and relevant since Watergate.54 His bigger point was that the Speaker was not the best voice for Democrats post-Watergate, even if his actions were “hardly unheard of in politics.” Justifying one’s behavior as part of the status quo was no longer tolerable for many reporters when the status quo didn’t work.
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From Wright’s perspective during that summer of 1988, his biggest advantage was the composition of the Ethics Committee. None of the twelve members, not even the six Republicans, seemed especially eager to take on this challenge. Moreover, Wright knew each panel member fairly well; he had been responsible for the appointments of the Democrats, and he was confident that when they heard the facts, they would not produce a negative report. And fortunately for him, even the committee’s Republicans were not the most partisan in the GOP. He would keep appealing to the committee members throughout the process, on the assumption they agreed with him, that nobody wanted the kind of impediment or distraction to the serious business of legislating that an investigation would inevitably produce. Most of the committee members would be reluctant to take on someone as powerful as the Speaker, fearing the inevitable fallout that would result if they missed their target. Journalists tended to agree. In Newsweek, reporters noted that the committee “rarely votes to censure.” The idea of a punishment more severe than that was beyond the realm of possibility.55
To an extent, Wright had correctly sized up his jury. The Republican side of the committee seemed like a relatively tame bunch. The member most likely to be a problem was George “Hank” Brown from Colorado. A fiscal hawk who had served in Vietnam, Brown had broken with President Reagan in the early 1980s after concluding that the administration was spending too much. As a Coloradoan, he was an advocate of environmental programs, for which the Reagan administration had little appetite. Brown, whom one reporter described as the “picture of distilled earnestness,” developed close ties with Gingrich and his campaign against corruption. Another potential warning sign was that Brown took the responsibilities of the committee very seriously.56 He wanted to demonstrate that the Ethics Committee could take action, because he believed that it tended to “bend over backward” to help fellow members, even when they acted in “egregious ways.”57 Brown also had a personal vendetta against Wright for having short-circuited his welfare reform package during the budget reconciliation battle in October 1987.
Another staunchly conservative GOP member
, Larry Craig, seemed to be compromised. A lanky right-winger with a self-righteous streak, Craig had become embroiled in a scandal in 1982 when his name surfaced amid accusations that there was a drug and prostitution ring involving underage pages serving members in the House.
From Wright’s perspective, the other Republicans were more moderate and malleable. Utah’s James Hansen and Wisconsin’s Tom Petri were middle-of-the-road conservatives. Each represented a district with enough Democratic voters to dissuade them from being seen as Gingrich’s handmaidens. The other two Republicans were insiders who were practiced distributors of congressional pork, something that would be a major issue in this investigation. California’s Charles “Chip” Pashayan, who liked to demonstrate that he was a tough interrogator of witnesses coming before his committees, had nurtured strong support from agribusiness and defense contractors in his home district, and through his position on the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee he had become legendary for doling out congressional funds. And perhaps most crucially for Wright, the ranking member of the Republican cohort, John Myers, was the kind of Republican Gingrich didn’t like or trust. A genial World War II veteran first elected in 1966, Myers believed in bipartisan compromises and maintained terrific relations with members of both parties. The Indiana legislator was described as “a very silent mover in Washington. He didn’t make great waves. He was very effective behind the scenes.”58
The Democratic lineup, likewise, looked relatively good for the Speaker’s case. The committee was stacked with Democrats who were quintessential insiders with little thirst for reform. Although the Democrats had learned the lessons of Watergate, almost none of them were good-government zealots. These were Democrats who revered FDR—not Ralph Nader—and who were more focused on defending the New Deal and Great Society legacies than in fighting for ethical purity.
The California Democrat Vic Fazio enjoyed a personally close relationship with Wright. Elected in 1978, Fazio quickly solidified his district’s support when, after obtaining an appointment on the Armed Services Committee, he directed huge amounts of money to local defense contractors.59 If the committee was concerned about the relationships between House members and lobbyists, Fazio was not going to be the person to sound the alarm. Fazio was also an intensely political person with huge ambitions. He was not about to take on the leaders who could later block his ascent. Some Republicans wanted Fazio to take himself off the committee because he had invited Wright to a Democratic fund-raiser in California and he frequently dined with the Speaker while he was the subject of this investigation, which didn’t sit well with many in the GOP.
The Speaker had another fan in Alan Mollohan, an evenhanded forty-five-year-old Washington-bred corporate lawyer elected in 1982, the son of a former representative, and a member of the Ethics Committee since 1985 who had openly opposed the Wright investigation. A loyal liberal Democrat from a poor West Virginia district, Mollohan had come to appreciate Wright’s leadership, which he saw as an antidote to Reagan’s trickle-down presidency. Moreover, he had no appetite for destroying a colleague’s career. As a moderate force, he was joined by New Jersey’s Bernard Dwyer, a sixty-seven-year-old inside player who avoided the television cameras and usually voted with the leadership. The other senior Democrat was Pennsylvania’s Joseph Gaydos, who was against bringing charges against Wright. Gaydos was so loyal to the Speaker that he refused to attend the press conference when Dixon outlined the charges.
The land mine waiting for Wright was the sixth Democratic member, Chester Atkins from Massachusetts. Elected to Congress in 1984 and only forty years old, Atkins had a pedigree very different from those of his committee colleagues: he was a Brahmin baby boomer with a reputation for integrity and honesty. Atkins had a maverick streak dating back to his undergraduate antiwar-activist years in the late 1960s. He had a healthy dose of distrust for politicians, regardless of what party they came from. Wright’s allies were uneasy about where Atkins would come down on the final ethics vote.60
Then came the wild card. On July 26, the Ethics Committee unanimously voted to appoint a special prosecutor to assist them with the case. In making his formal announcement, Chairman Dixon assented to the wishes of Gingrich and Common Cause but noted that the special prosecutor would work “at the direction of the committee,” could only subpoena witnesses with their approval, and would be limited to investigating the six allegations the committee had voted on.
The decision to hire a special prosecutor was shrewd. The committee believed that a special prosecutor, a hallmark of post-Watergate political reform, would grant legitimacy to their final verdict. Appointing a special prosecutor would insulate Democrats from the inevitable charges that they were too loyal to the Speaker, while it promised Republicans a tough investigation that would not cast them as the villains.
Dixon named Richard Phelan for the job on the recommendation of the ranking minority member, Myers. Phelan, who was planning to run for governor of Illinois on a reform platform, had sought out the job from Congressman Myers through intermediaries, realizing that this would be a high-profile opportunity. The ginger-haired Chicago native was a hard-hitting civil litigator who earned a lucrative $450,000 a year with the fifty-person law firm Phelan, Pope & John. Tall, handsome, and dynamic, Phelan was called “the Presence” by his colleagues;61 he was everything a defendant might fear. One reporter described Phelan as “equally adept at seducing a jury and sacking a hostile witness.” In the courtroom, a reporter observed, “he likes to toss out theories, occasionally wild ones—while associates search for the case law to support them.”62 This wide-angled approach to bringing down his targets suited his ambition to eventually run for office.
Republicans ought to have been jubilant, but outside the Ethics Committee they were concerned. They questioned Phelan’s experience, asking how a lawyer who specialized in liability cases would handle a highly charged investigation into political corruption. Other Republicans knew that Phelan had been named as a delegate to the most recent Democratic convention (although he had not attended) and had raised $100,000 for the primary candidate Paul Simon, a well-respected senator from Illinois. DEMOCRATIC ACTIVIST TO PROBE WRIGHT, complained the conservative Chicago Tribune in its headline. Peter Flaherty, chair of Citizens for Reagan, expressed to Gingrich “deep alarm” over the possibility that Phelan’s appointment would be a “whitewash of the Speaker’s corrupt actions.”63 Gingrich griped that Phelan was the equivalent of the Justice Department hiring a conservative midwestern Republican who had donated $100,000 to Senator Robert Dole to investigate Reagan. “Every Democrat would be up in arms.”64 Paul Weyrich had been proposing a different set of possibilities, such as New Mexico attorney general Hal Stratton, who was close to the “movement,” or Judge Robert Bork, Reagan’s extremely conservative Supreme Court nominee, whose confirmation had been defeated by Senate Democrats in 1987.65
Phelan, with his eye on the 1990 Illinois gubernatorial campaign, sensed that this appointment could be career making. As he went to work, he was eager to prove that being a Democrat had nothing to do with the way he would handle this case. Yet, despite his assurances to the committee, his political ambitions became evident. This was an era of heroic political litigators who were intent on cleaning up Washington. Phelan wanted to join the ranks of legends like Archibald Cox, Leon Jaworski, and, more recently, Lawrence Walsh. This post would allow Phelan to embellish his bona fides by displaying an unwavering sense of indignation about corruption and a conviction that public officials should be more accountable.
The energetic Phelan immediately assembled a talented team of eight litigators to scour the public record for information about every single accusation that had been made against the Speaker. As he had always done in preparing his cases, he wanted to look at as much evidence as possible. This, he said, would be the only way to understand Wright’s intentions in the different relationships being examined, given that the cases were not themselves about explic
it corruption. Though the formal scope of the committee investigation revolved around the six major charges, Phelan felt it was essential to understand how Wright viewed the world so that his actions made sense. Phelan ordered his staff not to leave any stone unturned.
The appointment of Phelan coincided with the publication of Brooks Jackson’s Honest Graft: Big Money and the American Political Process, a searing account of the former DCCC chair Tony Coelho’s seedy fund-raising efforts that garnered widespread attention. The timing of the book’s release could not have been worse for Wright, with its attendant follow-up reporting in several major newspapers about the ties between House Democrats and the savings and loan industry. The publicity delighted Gingrich. He wrote to Republicans in one of his lengthy memos, “Honest Graft and the continued editorials in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, New York Times, and Washington Post are all bringing into focus the sickness of the current House elections’ and ethics’ system.”66
The House Republican leadership and Gingrich were singing the same tune. Even the House minority leader, Michel, stoked the flames of scandal. His office sent the media and House Republicans a provocative report titled The Broken Branch of the Federal Government, an account of the “real crisis of corruption.” The report, which Gingrich had no hand in writing, accused the Democratic leadership of abusing its power by isolating and marginalizing their opponents. The rules, the report said, had been turned into a weapon of the majority. The document reiterated many of the points Gingrich had made and employed the same vituperative language that was regularly featured in COS speeches. It highlighted three issues. First, there was a singular difference between the two parties because “Democrats have been in power 34 years. The power has corrupted their party.” Second, House Republicans had a duty “to expose corruption and the incumbent advantages which make corruption more and more a danger.” Finally, the report called corruption a “growing cancer” that threatened the House.67 House Republicans, including Michel, Cheney, and Lott, celebrated the study for C-SPAN viewers on May 24 by coordinating special order floor speeches to discuss their findings.68
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