Following his prepared remarks, the reporters started barking out questions about the Gingriches’ personal finances and the book arrangements. When one reporter asked if he helped obtain federal funds for a profitable steel cable company in Carrollton called Southwire, Gingrich acknowledged the story was true but explained that his efforts were aimed at helping a major employer in his district. He did not obtain these funds as a payback to James Richards, the company’s president, who had invested in the promotional fund for his book.55 As the aggressive questions kept coming, Marianne Gingrich burst out of the room in tears, muttering that nobody in the press actually had an interest in looking at the evidence. Her dramatic walkout might have been staged political theater, but it had an effect, regardless. “I think she just blew up. . . . She’s entitled,” Gingrich explained to the reporters as they watched this spectacle unfold.56 Standing outside in the corridor shaking, Marianne told the reporters who had followed her that “it was awful in there” as her husband remained trapped inside answering the hostile questions.57 Though neither Gingrich’s statements nor her tirade ended the controversy, they were sufficient to temporarily calm the storms and make sure that reporters turned back to the main event: Speaker Wright.
By the end of the month, some Democrats were telling reporters, off the record, that the Speaker would not survive. It seemed as if all the Democrats could do was to wait a few more weeks, when the trial would begin, and just hope that somehow the news stories moved in a different direction. Horace Busby, a longtime aide to Lyndon Johnson who had remained in Washington as a high-powered lobbyist and consultant, sent out a memo to his clients, mostly Democrats, warning that the next stage of the process would be grueling. The Speaker’s fate would be “based more on politics than ethics.” Busby was an experienced Washingtonian. He dismissed all of the news reports about the gloomy “mood” among legislators about the Speaker’s future—including Gingrich’s prediction that Wright would be gone by June—as meaningless. The speculation was irrelevant. As of late April, Busby didn’t see any chance of Democrats taking action against the Speaker: “There is nowhere near a majority of House Democrats ready to give the GOP its victory.” Nor was Wright going to step down, even if establishment figures implored him to do so. Unlike Nixon in 1974, Wright was a “scrapper.” Wright also had a good “chance of winning on a House vote; that could be an incentive for him to force a roll call.” The House was under no pressure to act, especially with the “Slo-Pitch Presidency” of George H. W. Bush.58
Meanwhile, in preparation for the hard days ahead, the Speaker’s office revamped its legal team. The new lineup was meant to bolster the Speaker’s ethics defense and send a message to his fellow Democrats that they should not abandon him because he intended to fight until the bitter end. Based on the earlier conversations with his Texas friends who had warned that Oldaker was not up to the job, the Speaker now reached out to some of the most prominent legal names in town. The legendary eighty-two-year-old Clark Clifford, who had advised Democratic presidents since Harry Truman, had been expecting the call. Clifford was the biggest fixer in town, and almost every politician who had ever been in trouble turned to him. When they met in the Speaker’s office, Wright asked Clifford to sign on as senior adviser. Without hesitation, Clifford said yes. To join him, the Speaker also brought in Richard Ben-Veniste, the former Watergate assistant special prosecutor, and Stephen Susman, a top national litigator from Houston renowned for his aggressive courtroom style. “If you want to change the rules,” as Susman would say, “you don’t do it retroactively.”59 The New Jersey representative Robert “the Torch” Torricelli was also invited to join the team; as a voice from the northeastern wing of the party, he was selected to blunt the image of Wright as just an old-fashioned southerner.60 Though he was a sitting member of the House, the rules did not prohibit him from representing a fellow legislator. By anyone’s reckoning, here was a dream team of legal advisers. They relegated Oldaker to a secondary role.
As Wright and his legal team prepared for the fight ahead, the Democratic whip team conducted an informal vote count to see where House Democrats would side on the Ethics Committee report, and the numbers were not good. They concluded that Wright was going to lose. Personally unpopular to begin with, now the Speaker, because of his poor judgment, would potentially cost them seats.
Understandably, none of Wright’s colleagues in the leadership wanted to break the news to him, knowing his temper. Tom Foley, the majority leader, asked Dick Gephardt to handle the job. Gephardt turned to Tony Coelho, the majority whip, who in turn asked Robert Torricelli. The thirty-seven-year-old congressman, now part of the new, revamped legal team, obliged. When he entered the ornate Speaker’s office, Wright looked up to see what he wanted. The straight-talking Torricelli held his breath for a second and bravely blurted out the news about the whip’s count. Standing by the door with trepidation, with a large set of Texas bullhorns hanging over his head, he informed the Speaker that the Democrats would likely vote in favor of the ethics report. After a moment of awkward silence, Wright looked down at the floor and placed one hand on his desk as he slowly leaned over. With the other hand, he reached down to take off his shoe. Then Wright looked up and, in a fury, threw his shoe at Torricelli’s face. Torricelli ducked in the nick of time, realizing why none of his colleagues wanted to be the messenger. The Speaker didn’t say anything else. Torricelli left the room. Underneath Wright’s anger was the unpleasant realization that he was unlikely to survive the vote of his own party.
* * *
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As if the situation were not bad enough, The Washington Post uncovered the criminal past of one of Speaker Wright’s top staffers and published the kind of riveting human-interest story its readers devoured, one with violence, physical assault, and attempted murder. Ken Ringle, a Washington Post Style section assignment editor, put out a bombshell piece on the troubling personal background of the Speaker’s top adviser: John Paul Mack. The story destroyed the last shreds of Wright’s reputation, killing any political sympathy that still existed for keeping him on the job.
Ringle was not a journalist whom anyone would have foreseen playing a role in the Speaker’s saga. Although he had worked at the Post for almost two decades, Ringle, a Democrat, didn’t regularly cover Congress or the story currently obsessing his colleagues. He simply had not been “keeping up with Jim Wright.”61 Ringle was a “generalist” who covered “crazy, offbeat” topics in formats ranging from historical essays and book reviews to firsthand accounts of cultural events in the city. While he had covered some presidential and congressional campaigns, he was not very absorbed with the House or Senate on a daily basis. What distinguished his writing was his ability to tune in to the quirky rituals and customs that others didn’t notice, and above all he was attracted to the human-interest side of the people who made the government work. Freed from the conventions of “hard news” journalism, and from professional norms about appearing objective, he could write with literary flair and capture the personalities of Washington (practicing what was called the New Journalism, as pioneered by writers like Tom Wolfe). He focused his gaze on the embattled Speaker.
Ringle’s interest in Jim Wright originated in his friendship with a woman named Pamela Small. He first encountered Small in the mid-1970s when she was working as a tour guide for the Post. The paper’s headquarters had become a popular tourist attraction after the Watergate scandal. The two hit it off immediately. Small was outgoing and personable, and they liked to joke around whenever they saw each other. Once, sometime around 1976, Small was giving him a hard time as they traded friendly barbs. Ringle noticed that there was a scar on her neck directly under where her scarf had slipped down. Jokingly, he asked if she got that “falling off her tricycle.” Small’s face turned somber, and she responded, “No, some guy cut my throat.” Stunned, Ringle asked if the assailant had been caught. She said he had, though he got off too easily. Sensing that she di
dn’t want to talk anymore about whatever had taken place, he moved on. Though their friendship continued, neither of them would bring up the issue again for a long time.
Ringle was only vaguely aware that his friend’s career had taken off. Small worked for the Hartford Insurance Group Corporation in public relations in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1980 to 1985 before returning to take a job as a public affairs executive at MCI Communications, a major telecommunications firm in Washington. Sometimes her work called for her to attend events on the Hill. Quite accidentally, she learned that her assailant worked in the office of Majority Leader Jim Wright. A friend with a job on the Hill had told her about having dated someone named Mack. Small, who warned her friend to stay away from him, didn’t know how significant his job actually was. During her visits to Capitol Hill, she had been fortunate to never encounter him.
One night when Ringle and Small were having dinner, she told him about this and said that he “ought to look into it.” After all their years of interactions, Small still had not shared with Ringle what had actually happened to her on that frightening night in August 1973. This was not surprising. She had worked hard to forget about the crime and didn’t want it to define how people thought of her. Although Small encouraged Ringle to investigate the story, he hadn’t followed up, assuming that the person who attacked her was a low-level office worker—maybe emptying wastebaskets—whom Wright had assisted through a work rehabilitation program. Years later, Ringle admitted that his journalistic instincts had utterly failed him.
But during an editorial meeting of the Style section staff in late February 1989, one of the editors, Mary Hadar, asked if anyone in the room had an interesting angle on the Wright saga that had not yet been explored. Though he still didn’t know much about Wright, Ringle remembered what Small once told him over dinner. Raising his hand, Ringle mentioned that he knew someone who “got attacked” by a man now working for the Speaker. When Hadar asked him what this person did for Wright, Ringle admitted he didn’t know, nor did he have the details about what happened. Intrigued, Hadar gave him the green light to move forward with the story.
Upon returning to his office, Ringle called Pamela. Until then, Small had refused to share the details of her story with anyone, worried about becoming a media sensation, especially after conservative newspapers had touched on the attack in 1987. She remained fearful of going public. But she had become aware that, in the heat of Wright’s political scandal, several major networks and newspapers were snooping around for her side of the story. She decided to share the details with Ringle so that she could explain what happened on her own terms and with a focus on her experience rather than only the political implications for Wright.62 She gave him her attacker’s name: John Mack.
Eager to learn more, Ringle drove back to his office to look through a copy of the Congressional Directory, which confirmed the details that Small had told him.63 Through a little digging, he discovered that the Steering and Policy Committee was a direct arm of the Speaker’s office, controlled by Wright, and that it had the power to shape the policy agenda for the entire House Democratic Party and to make committee appointments. Ringle discovered Mack earned a very good salary for a staffer—$89,500. He was officially the “executive director of the Steering and Policy Committee.” As the director of this committee, Mack effectively functioned as the Speaker’s main assistant, even though his official job title did not reflect this fact. Mack’s desk was located in the Speaker’s Lobby, close to the office where Wright would hold ceremonial events.64 When Mack came to visit a legislator, everyone on Capitol Hill knew that he represented Congress’s most powerful member. A consigliere of sorts, Mack was known to be thin-skinned and impatient with anyone he suspected of being disloyal to Wright. Ringle was stunned that Mack held a job of this stature given that he had been convicted of a felony. Mack was a power broker with a criminal record. He couldn’t legally vote, yet he had immense influence over what legislation the House would consider.
Ringle, who hadn’t seen Small in more than a year, asked her once again to dinner to discuss the details of her attack, which took place in the back room of a furniture store, an act so violent that she required several rounds of surgery. Small told Ringle that she didn’t want her name used in the story, given that she had kept this information private for most of her adult life, but over the next few days they continued to discuss the gruesome details of what had happened.
Ringle soon learned that a few months after the House officially elected Wright as Speaker in January 1987, members of Congress were alerted to Mack’s history of violence. Many legislators and reporters had known about Mack’s crime, including Wright, but never appeared to have questioned his holding such a prominent position. The concern about Mack had begun when members of Congress received an ominous letter that warned that the Speaker’s “top aide is [a] violent criminal.” Allegedly written by a former Virginia policeman who was “offended” to see Mack holding a position of influence, the telegram stated, “You and the American people should be aware that John Paul Mack, top aide to House Speaker Jim Wright, tried to kill a woman in 1973 and was sentenced to 15 years in the Virginia State Prison system. Despite his brutal crime, John Paul Mack served only 14½ months in prison. He got out so soon because Congressman Jim Wright offered him a job! This was in 1974.” The writer added a stunning revelation: “Jim Wright’s daughter was married to John Paul Mack’s brother at that time.”65
The Washington press corps largely ignored the story, feeling that the letter had been a smear job from conservative opponents. Several members of the press had come to know Mack personally. He was respected by members of both parties as a dedicated public servant who spent up to thirteen hours a day in the office. It was hard for them to fathom that the person they spoke with regularly had been guilty of a horrendous crime. The deputy national editor of The Washington Post, Edward Walsh, concluded there was no reason to run a piece on the story in 1987, fourteen years after the crime, because it would be unfair to Mack.
The only exception had been the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s ace investigative reporter Dave Montgomery, who had long been covering Wright’s many connections. In August 1987, he published a lengthy story about Mack titled SHADOW OF VIOLENCE HAUNTS WRIGHT’S TOP AIDE, which included an anonymous quotation from Pamela Small. When Wright had become Speaker, Montgomery decided to take a harder look at the staffers who surrounded the new leader, just as he had been exploring the world of money brokers who inhabited Wright’s district. The article recounted how Mack had “clubbed and slashed a woman customer, then left her unconscious and near death in her parked car.” Montgomery noted, “With the help of his sister-in-law—Wright’s daughter Kay—Mack was given a clerical job in the congressman’s office after he was freed on a work release program.” The piece went on to cover much of the story of the crime and Mack’s life ever since.66 Mack had offered to resign to save the Speaker any embarrassment, but Wright refused the offer.67
Given the meager coverage, it was not that surprising that Ringle didn’t know about this open secret. In an era when print publishing still dominated, stories in the small city and state newspapers were easy to miss or could be quickly forgotten unless someone dug around in the microfilm or had a phalanx of research assistants gathering clippings on a daily basis. In a profile of the Speaker’s team that Edward Walsh published in The Washington Post on March 17, 1987, absolutely no mention was made of the crime.68
Many of the staffers and legislators who knew about Mack’s background felt that it was fine for him to work on the Hill after being rehabilitated. The most generous explanation was that he had served his time in prison and that people deserved the ability to restart their lives. More problematic was the gendered fault line in Washington that Ringle was confronting. The sexist culture in Washington paid scant attention to the ongoing aggression toward women. Female legislators were accustomed to being considered less formidable than their m
ale peers; female staffers knew whom not to be alone with.69
This was a historical moment before the national conversations catalyzed by Anita Hill, Monica Lewinsky, or Christine Blasey Ford. The term “date rape” had only recently gained national attention, and laws combating sexual harassment in the workplace were still relatively new. Congress was exempt from most of the laws that did exist based on the principle that no branch of government could infringe on the prerogatives of the other. Within Congress, there was no such thing as a human relations department. Each member’s office was responsible for handling its own workplace, which in practice meant that these issues could be ignored. In this environment, the poor judgment of a few men, who were not sensitive enough to the violence regularly inflicted upon women, could allow for the hiring and promotion of a violent felon. Mack’s was the most egregious case imaginable, but it still grew out of the same broken environment on Capitol Hill that disregarded these sorts of workplace gender issues.
When Wright was asked directly on the record about Mack in the first year of his speakership, his response garnered little attention. The host of CBS’s Face the Nation, Phil Jones, asked him about it in June 1988 while interviewing him about the Ethics Committee investigation. Jones said that various issues had raised questions about the Speaker’s judgment, like “one of your top aides, John Mack, is a man who bludgeoned a woman back in the 1970s with a hammer. He left her for dead. He was convicted on this, sent to prison, was later released to his brother and his brother happened to be your son-in-law at the time. And you hired that man.” Now he was working, Jones pointed out, on the public payroll. Wright responded that Mack had “problems. I don’t know why. It was something that happened before I knew John. The sheriff asked me to give him a chance, give him a job. And I did when he was a young man, still a teenager, maybe twenty, twenty-one, and he has worked admirably well. And I think does a splendid job. I believe in giving people a second chance, Phil. That’s my philosophy, and I’m glad I’ve done it. I’ve never had occasion to regret that I did.”70 That was enough to end that part of the conversation.
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