If there was still any daylight between Gingrich and the Republican leadership on the matter of the Democratic majority or Speaker Wright, it was becoming hard to see it. The GOP seemed to be rapidly converging around the Georgian’s message about the corruption of the Democratic Party.
Gingrich was pleased to see Michel on board. But he was experienced enough to know that releasing a report to legislators and reporters was not enough. The GOP would have to sell these ideas to the public and relentlessly beat the drum in front of television cameras, on the radio, and to print reporters to do so. Gingrich told his fellow Republicans that they needed to give the news media “a specific hard-hitting critique of what’s wrong with the House Democrats’ machine” and to “force a series of votes on specific ethics problems so [they are] forced to pay attention to the issue every week we are in session.” Because Democrats would never reform themselves and the news media could not be expected to “function as an opposition party,” it was incumbent on House Republicans to “make news by investigating, exposing, and confronting an increasingly arrogant, corrupt, and entrenched House Democratic Party,” Gingrich advised.69 Besides Wright, Gingrich targeted nineteen other Democrats who were working under an ethical cloud.70 He kept reiterating the point that ethics reform and the Democratic monopoly on power were as potent issues as the war on drugs, cutting taxes, or fighting communism. “An honest self-government versus Jim Wright and the corrupt House Democrats project will enthuse our activists, focus the news media and the public, and keep the left on the defensive,” Gingrich promised Republicans as he rallied them to his side.71 Congressional corruption under the Democrats, Gingrich went on to say, as he harkened back to John Dean’s famous diagnosis about Nixon and the presidency, “was a growing cancer, threatening the very essence of representative freedom.”72
A copy of the Republican report had come across Speaker Wright’s desk, but he took comfort in the strength of Congress as an institution, and the Republicans as a party, and this led him to believe that the accusations about Democratic corruption or the investigation into his own career would not become the focus of his counterparts in the GOP. Cooler heads would prevail. His stubborn faith in the better angels of the GOP and his preference for keeping his head buried in the work of governance blinded him to the change in tides. He was now swimming against a political rip current.
Wright did not have time to concern himself with the big picture in American politics, because his most pressing need was to mount a personal defense. On September 14, he appeared before the House Ethics Committee to testify for the first time. While he walked through the murky hallway toward the committee room entrance, a staffer wheeled a hand truck behind him that bore fifty books written by other members of Congress. The Speaker exuded a sense of confidence and displayed his saccharine smile. He was in good spirits for someone who was about to face a congressional inquisition. His attitude was genuine; he believed he had nothing to worry about and nothing to hide. Once his colleagues heard his version of the story, they would understand that the charges were spurious.
As the committee met in their dark basement room for five long hours, Wright reviewed each accusation, explaining to the members in detail why it was either factually wrong or the result of the truth being twisted in such a way that suggested wrongdoing when there was none. He handed out mimeographed copies of press statements distributed by conservative organizations seeking to take advantage of his problems to rile up their base. Turning to the cart that was stacked with books by other public officials, including the volume that Newt Gingrich had coauthored with ten other Republicans, A House of Ill Repute, the Speaker read out loud snippets from the acknowledgments sections to show that they too had received assistance from staffers. Even in the case of Gingrich’s coauthored work, Katherine Watson, his executive assistant, and Sheila Ward, his press secretary, had helped. Wright wagged his finger and shook his fist: “The longer the proceeding goes on, given the desire and the intense attempt of the committee to keep it professional and to keep it in a dignified process, I think you saw from those things [the letters from conservative organizations] that I handed out to you that there is agitative, active effort to use this investigation to engender hate and bitterness. Congress, as an institution, doesn’t need that.”73
Since Gingrich had begun promoting his corruption narrative nine years earlier against Congressman Diggs, many House members believed the Republican opposition was attempting to score political points by criminalizing the normal responsibilities of a legislator. This was not a belief shared by the special prosecutor, Richard Phelan. Despite the committee’s instructions, the restraints on Phelan’s investigation were not followed. As Phelan dug deeper into Wright’s past, looking into all sorts of stories that had surfaced in the press, his investigation widened to include old canards like the 1948 state election story alleging that Wright might have been involved in his opponent’s murder.74 As Phelan’s work stretched into weeks and then months, the stain on Wright’s character remained fresh in people’s minds.
A short-lived national security scandal added to the circus surrounding Wright when the conservative Washington Times reported that he had shared classified information with its journalists about a CIA operation to foment opposition against the Sandinista government. The Chicago-area Republican Henry Hyde, the ranking minority member of the Intelligence Committee, slammed Wright’s comments to the newspaper as “Sandinista propaganda,” calling it “appalling” that the Speaker made these statements.75 The Speaker responded that all of the information came directly from newspaper stories about the Iran-contra hearings. Republicans, he said, were manufacturing a fake crisis. There were also rumors circulating on Capitol Hill that the news stories were being spread around Washington by high-level national security officials who were still fuming about Iran-contra as well as Wright’s efforts to prevent Reagan from sending assistance to anticommunist forces in Central America. The scandal faded quickly when the Intelligence Committee concluded that Wright had done nothing untoward. Still, the episode was unnerving to Democrats, who saw the intensity of anger brewing against Wright within the GOP.
Anonymous quotations started to appear in the press from Democrats speculating about the Speaker’s future. Talk of the possibility of some kind of punishment, which still seemed far-fetched, hung in the air.76 Referring to incidents like the battles over Indiana’s Bloody Eighth and the previous year’s dramatic intervention in the Nicaraguan peace negotiations, Tom Kenworthy of The Washington Post concluded that the Speaker’s “fiery partisanship and hell-for-leadership style already have polarized the House, and some Democrats believe the speaker could be vulnerable to a challenge if the House ethics committee investigation were to result in a harsh report or recommendation for punishment.” There were a few whispers about who might replace him, with stories that Democratic leaders like Coelho and the Ways and Means Committee chairman, Dan Rostenkowski, were meeting more and more with their colleagues as this scandal unfolded. “There’s a lot of group dining going on,” Kenworthy reported one member saying.77 “Behind the scenes,” wrote Steve Roberts in The New York Times, “some aspiring power brokers are sniffing the political winds, taking younger members out to dinner and quietly preparing the way for a possible challenge, should Mr. Wright falter.”78
Still, there was some reason for optimism among Democrats even after Bush overwhelmingly defeated Dukakis in the November election with 426 electoral college votes. The election marked the first time since 1908 when the party that would be out of power in the White House—the Democrats—had increased the size of its majorities in both chambers. Despite his calls in the summer for an investigation into Wright, Bush maintained a collegial relationship with Wright dating back to their days in Texas, so it was questionable whether the president-elect would support an effort to remove him. Democrats still perceived Bush as being committed to bipartisanship. Once the campaign was over, he would not have the sa
me impetus to continue a witch hunt. Politics would go back to normal. And Wright had offered an olive branch after the results were in. Seeing how the electorate voted for divided government, the Speaker promised to work with Bush on issues like the federal deficit, education reform, and protecting the environment. “If there is a mandate, it clearly is for Bush as president and a Democratic Congress to build upon the constructive program we embarked on last year,” he said.
Bush appeared to share this enthusiasm. The president-elect was eager to soften some of the harder edges of the Reagan Revolution by finding areas of possible agreement with Democrats, such as protections for Americans with disabilities, without alienating the Republican base. As a sign of respect to the congressional Democrats, he went to meet with Wright for a ninety-minute lunch at the Speaker’s office on November 18. When Bush walked in, one reporter blurted out the question whether this was a peace mission. Smiling, the president-elect asked how you can “make peace when there is no war” before ducking into the room.79 Following the meeting, Wright told reporters, “He was willing to come halfway, rather than asking me to go down to the White House—if you’re looking for symbolism. I think it shows a willingness to work with us.”80
Things were looking up for Wright when he received a vote of confidence from his caucus on December 5; the Democrats unanimously nominated him to serve another two-year term as Speaker. At sixty-five years old, Wright still believed he had years of service ahead of him and promised his colleagues to work closely with the Republican president on legislation to reform elections in order to reduce the power of private money and to push for federal regulations that would curb the corporate consolidations that were leaving many Americans without jobs.
But the House Republicans were having none of this bipartisan celebration. “You cannot govern from the left in this country. And you cannot govern against the right if you’re a Republican,” Gingrich said.81 Many in the GOP had coalesced around Gingrich’s position.82 Bush’s kumbaya overtures to the Democratic Speaker seemed ridiculous to nearly all of the congressional Republicans, especially after what they had witnessed during Wright’s first term as Speaker. No one in the GOP believed that Wright would change his stripes.
The party lines were hardening in the House of Representatives, where Gingrich’s army gathered momentum. Movement activists were hailing Gingrich as a hero. The Eagle Forum founder, Phyllis Schlafly, told her followers that he “is a real leader. He did what no other Republican Congressman seemed willing or able to do—expose Jim Wright. . . . Gingrich is one of the top strategists of the conservative movement.”83 House Republicans appeared to be more like Gingrich than like Bush when talking about partisan politics. And with a smaller minority, they felt even more desperate. On the same day that Democrats voted for Wright to serve another term, Michel, doing his best impression of Gingrich, stood before his Republican colleagues to announce that ethics rules needed to be stringently enforced and that the lower chamber must be cleaned up soon, starting with the Speaker. “The reputation of this institution has been smeared by members who blatantly break our rules and mock the institution’s inability to enforce a penalty,” the GOP leader asserted.84 Without uttering Wright’s name, Michel made his goal clear. Confirming his shift in tone was the news that a top counsel working for the House Republicans, Hyde Murray, who had been viewed by COS as insufficiently combative, resigned. After affirming a newly combative Michel as their leader, Republicans elected the COS member Vin Weber as secretary of the House GOP Conference. Dick Cheney, now a vocal supporter of Gingrich’s fusillades against Wright, would be the Republican whip. Whatever President-elect Bush said over lunch didn’t matter. The Republican Party had the Speaker in its crosshairs.
Wright went back to Texas to spend Christmas with family and friends. The presidential election had been disappointing, and the tenor of Republican rhetoric was ominous. But his fellow House Democrats were pleased with his performance. He had taken on President Reagan, and he wasn’t showing signs of letting up. The Democrats would certainly have his back. Gingrich and the Republicans might be griping, and the good-government reformers might be making some noise, but from the Democratic perspective in 1988, there was no reason to panic. Not yet.
Five
MISSING THE TEMPEST
Speaker Wright didn’t grasp the enormity of the conservative tempest that was taking shape in the late 1980s. As congressional Republicans started to come to terms with the limits of the Reagan Revolution—given the continued expansion of the social safety net and massive deficits—a growing number of them were drawn to the bare-knuckle legislative style that Newt Gingrich had pioneered.
Though the Speaker and his closest associates continued to think of Gingrich as a historical outlier, conservatives were becoming more anti-establishment in their outlook about Washington. Robert Michel loved to distinguish himself from Gingrich, but in practice the distance between them was shrinking. The Republicans were determined to tear down the political status quo by whatever means necessary. Anti-establishment conservatives were eager to turn the legislative branch into a bastion against liberalism, just as it had been for southern Dixiecrats and midwestern Republicans between the 1930s and the 1960s. Gingrich offered the party another direct connection, like Reagan, to conservative movement activists.
The strength of this insurgency within the GOP caught Wright by surprise. What’s more, the limits of Wright’s own political prowess increased the friction between him and his party, just when he needed support the most. The ferocity of the Right in early 1989 transformed the political environment in which the Speaker’s case was to be judged. As the House Ethics Committee probed deeper, Democrats started to buckle, while Republicans were looking more and more like the party of Gingrich.
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Speaker Wright got a taste of the growing fury in a feud over a proposed congressional pay raise. Almost anytime that legislators had voted to grant themselves higher salaries—a duty that Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution bestowed on them, should they desire it—political fireworks ensued. There was usually some member of Congress and some cluster of voters who saw this decision as yet another example of how politicians abused their power, a story that resonated in a nation that was deeply distrustful of government. Historically, each of the twenty-two times that Congress voted on stand-alone legislation to increase salaries between 1789 and 1968, legislators faced political heat. When Congress voted to give itself a pay raise in 1873, from $5,000 to $7,000 a year, the Ohio Republican William Lawrence observed that the only other events to have “aroused as much indignation” had been the Missouri Compromise and the first shots fired at Fort Sumter.1
In 1955, Wright’s freshman year, when Congress proposed to raise salaries from $17,500 to $22,000, the young Texan got a mountain of angry mail from his district back home. Unsettled by the response, the newcomer informed his colleagues that he planned to vote against the legislation. It seemed like the safe thing to do. That was until he paid a visit to Speaker Sam Rayburn’s office. “Mr. Rayburn frowned that businesslike frown of his and said, ‘Jim, if you vote against the pay raise, it’s for one of two reasons: either the job you sought isn’t that important a job, or you’re saying that you aren’t a big enough man for the job,’” Wright recalled. He voted for the raise. He also survived politically.2 But Americans still hated when their representatives jacked up their pay. In 1967, Congress attempted to insulate legislators from this kind of fallout. It established an alternative mechanism by which a presidentially appointed federal salary commission would recommend raises. The raise would automatically take effect unless the House and the Senate both voted against it.
But the reform had not worked as planned. Congressional pay raises remained as unpopular as ever. Post-Watergate Americans believed that their representatives enjoyed a lifetime sinecure embellished by exotic junkets provided by interest groups and extravagant boondoggles p
aid for by taxpayers, like expensive steak dinners, first-class air travel, and black town cars to shuttle them around. The Abscam scandal, which resulted in the expulsion of the Pennsylvania Democrat Michael “Ozzie” Myers and the resignation of the New Jersey senator Harrison Williams, left the public with indelible images of corrupt congressmen taking bribes. Middle-class Americans struggled to make ends meet while their elected representatives enjoyed perks like gymnasiums and free parking, subsidized health care, and a $3,000 tax deduction to offset their expenses in Washington.3 In 1987, at the end of Wright’s first year as Speaker, after a 2 percent raise automatically went into effect, Congress took a ribbing. As the Saturday Night Live comedian A. Whitney Brown joked in the show’s “Big Picture” segment, “I’m sure some of them need the money. After all, it’s not easy raising a family these days when you are saving up for a legal defense fund. You have to admit $90,000 a year doesn’t go far when you are looking at multiple indictments. My question is, though, why can’t they get a raise from the military contractors and tobacco lobbyists like they’ve always done?”
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