Burning Down the House

by Julian E. Zelizer

  Ringle couldn’t afford to take Small’s word for what happened. He went to work at a frantic pace to interview all the people who had been involved in the incident and to review any documents that he could find to discern what had taken place.

  Deeply appalled that so many evidently knew about but ignored these facts, Ringle resolved not to do the same. He decided to drive to Fairfax to look at the court records from the case. The key to his investigation, Ringle realized, was to obtain the police report and the transcript from the sentencing hearing, which had been transcribed in shorthand but was so ignored by the press that it had never even been written out. Ringle had to find an aging stenographer who knew the shorthand in question, which most court reporters no longer used (this record had never been sealed by the court).

  No newsman had ever questioned the doctors who treated her, or the prosecutor who told Ringle that “Mack was lucky. He ended up just one step from murder.”71

  What he read from the transcription astounded him despite everything he already knew. What had not been clear in Pamela Small’s own accounts of the night, or even in the stories that followed, was how truly vicious the attack had been. Mack’s assault had been much more of an attempted murder than an “altercation.”

  Mack’s tenor during the hearing was also unsettling. The transcript showed that when asked by the prosecutor why he stabbed Small, he answered, “Just blew my cool for a second,” stunning even the interrogator. As he read through the sentencing transcript, the savagery of the attack—Mack’s “beating her over the head and stabbing her,” as the prosecutor described—and its aftermath took Ringle’s breath away.

  Armed with his interviews with Small, her family, and the hearing transcript, Ringle began to compose his article. He persuaded Small to allow him to use her name in the story and to include a photograph, explaining that the revelation of her identity would bring attention to what happened in a way that hadn’t been possible in the previous news accounts, when her identity remained anonymous. Because of their long friendship, Small trusted Ringle and let him move forward with the full story. But she insisted that the picture not make her identifiable.

  On the morning of Thursday, May 4, 1989, the four-thousand-word story, MEMORY AND ANGER: A VICTIM’S STORY, landed like “a bomb,” one reporter said, “in a capital shaken by the ethics inquiry into Mr. Wright’s dealings.”72 The story featured a picture of a grinning John Mack with his round face and blond mustache placed on top of the Capitol dome, next to a photograph of Small contemplatively looking into the distance. Ringle described the slightly overweight Mack as “Wright’s right-hand man and, since Wright became speaker of the House, [Mack] has been arguably the most powerful staff member on Capitol Hill.”

  Ringle recounted a terrifying story that sounded utterly different from an “altercation.” In August 1973, Small, then a twenty-year-old college student at American University, had gone to a discount home furnishing store to purchase some items for her new apartment. She was the only customer in the store. When she finished her shopping, Small walked to the cash register to pay for the goods. Mack started to add up the total. But Small noticed that one of the window blinds she was buying had a small crack. She asked if he could replace it. Mack believed there were more in the storeroom and asked her to go back with him so she could make sure they were the same. Although no one else was in the store, Small felt no reason to be wary because the young sales associate appeared calm and at ease.

  When Small entered the room, Mack’s entire demeanor changed. He “blocked the door and ordered her to lie face down on the floor.” When she refused and attempted to escape, he “grabbed a hammer and slammed it into her skull. She immediately lost consciousness but he continued pounding, exposing the skull in five places. Then he grabbed a steak knife, stabbed her five times in the left breast and shoulder near her heart, and slashed her repeatedly across the throat.”

  Assuming that she was dead, Mack carried her body into Small’s Toyota station wagon parked outside. He drove the car around town for about half an hour, getting rid of her purse and wallet before returning and abandoning the car in a back alley near the store. Leaving the keys in the ignition, Mack walked away to see a movie. He did not return to the store that night.

  After lying in the car for eight hours, Small regained consciousness. Feeling the blood dripping down her head, she struggled to save herself. When she spotted the keys in the ignition, Small managed to crawl into the front and miraculously drove the car for a mile to a twenty-four-hour gas station on the Little River Turnpike. The attendant, horrified by the sight of the battered woman, whose body and clothes were drenched in blood, called the police and paramedics. They rushed her to the emergency room, where a general surgeon, a plastic surgeon, a neurosurgeon, and a thoracic surgeon worked frantically to save her life. During the first seven-hour surgery, they reconstructed Small’s collapsed lung and covered the exposed parts of her skull with skin.

  Mack was arrested on August 19, 1973, the day after the crime took place, and entered a guilty plea. It was difficult to understand the motivation behind his attack. Ringle explained to readers that Mack had been raised by a good family; his father was a navy officer, and he had never had any run-in with the law. Mack’s employers called him a conscientious worker. Mack blamed his actions during his sentencing hearing on tensions in a new marriage and the stress of long shifts at work. “I just blew my cool for a second,” he said during the sentencing hearing. That vague explanation, which failed to take real responsibility for his actions, would haunt Small.

  But everything about how the case was handled seemed odd, Ringle explained. Poring over all the facts that he found in his research and reading of earlier accounts, Ringle spelled out the benefits that might have come from Mack’s connection to Wright. To begin, Judge Burch Millsap of the Fairfax County Circuit Court sentenced Mack to fifteen years in the Virginia State Penitentiary for malicious wounding, instead of attempted murder, which would have carried a minimum of twenty years. The judge also suspended seven years of the sentence, a decision that stunned the Fairfax commonwealth attorney, and said that because there was no acceptable psychiatric prison facility available, the court could place Mack in the Southwestern State Hospital for treatment.

  As Mack awaited his sentence, he served time in the Fairfax County jail, which was normally reserved for people who had committed minor crimes. He remained in the institution much longer than expected because his sentencing trial was postponed several times. He worked as a cook during the day and took accounting classes at a local college in the evening. When the court finally sentenced him in December 1974, it counted the time served in Fairfax (more than a year) and never moved him to the state hospital but allowed him to remain in the low-security facility. Then he was released in 1976, after just twenty-seven months, for good behavior through the state’s rehabilitative program. He left prison with an offer of employment in Congressman Jim Wright’s office.

  Ringle then turned to the fact that Wright’s daughter was married to Mack’s brother. They had dated since high school. Wright wrote several letters to the court, all of which remained sealed from public view, even before the sentencing hearing in which he attested to Mack’s good character and informed the court that he would be pleased to employ him in his office, despite his having no political experience or college degree, if he were to be released.

  Ringle also told readers how Small learned of Mack’s release from prison. It was a year after his parole. As she explained, “I was with this girl I knew who worked on the Hill.” They had spent the day shopping in Virginia, and the girl “kept talking about this guy she was dating named John who worked in Jim Wright’s office. And it was ‘John this,’ and ‘John that.’” Small didn’t pay much attention until they drove past the site where Mack had attacked her. And her friend said, “You know we’re right around where John used to work,” which gave Small a “very eerie fe
eling. . . . I stopped the car and I said, ‘You know, you haven’t told me John’s last name.’ And she said, ‘John Mack.’” When Small realized who her friend was dating and that he had been let free, she burst into tears.

  And then she said something that was undeniably true. Mack has “got a very powerful, very important job now,” Small observed, “and he wouldn’t have it if he hadn’t tried to kill me. I find that more than a little bizarre.” She had “watched with mounting alarm and anger the growing power of the man who tried to kill her.” Then Ringle quoted Tony Coelho, the third most powerful Democrat among the House leadership: “Rightly or wrongly under our system of law John Mack owed his debt to society, not to this young woman.” Coelho had learned about the crime in 1987 but decided that he would not hold it against Mack. In fact, the men had become friends and had also gone into business together, investing in a computer software company as well as a rental property.

  As he ended the story, Ringle described how each of them—assailant and victim—had moved on with their lives. Besides his great job, Mack was enjoying the tenth year of his second marriage to a woman named Kim, the assistant and appointments secretary of the Massachusetts Democrat Nicholas Mavroules. With their two children, the Macks lived in a lovely home in an affluent Virginia suburb. Meanwhile, Small fought back from near death to normal life astonishingly quickly, and refused either to think of herself as a victim or to act like one, but she understandably had emotional struggles, including incidents where she would find herself overwhelmed by a “paralyzing sense of panic . . . of powerlessness.” The article noted that Small had not received any financial compensation, as was required after Congress passed the 1982 Victim and Witness Protection Act.

  Copies of the Post circulated across the capital. “Appearing as it did in a week when Wright’s supporters were trying to play down the numerous allegations of his financial irregularities, Small’s story had explosive impact on the political world,” wrote Eleanor Clift in Newsweek.73

  The Washington talk radio host Diane Rehm, whose popular show on WAMU public radio was a must-listen for politicians and journalists, opened her phone lines late in the morning of publication for discussion. And callers flooded the lines to express their outrage that someone like Mack could be employed in the Speaker’s office. Then, with three minutes left before the show went off the air, Rehm took one more call from a man who was extremely upset. The caller told Rehm that Mack had abducted and raped his wife—two years before the Small attack. Rehm’s jaw dropped as she listened and then replied that those were “pretty serious” allegations. The caller said that his wife had not followed through on the charges against Mack because she was too scared of him and feared that nobody would believe it was a rape, given that they had been engaged.

  After her show was over, Rehm fielded about ninety inquiries from news organizations who had heard about the call and were seeking additional information about the new rape accusation. A subsequent call to the Fairfax County police where the young woman lived at the time confirmed that the incident had been reported to law enforcement officials. The woman’s mother also spoke to Rehm and recounted the story in detail. Even before the caller’s allegations could be verified—and Ringle and the Post never could verify it and didn’t run it—the Associated Press put out a story about the radio conversation on its wire.74

  Members of Congress, their staff, lobbyists, reporters, White House officials, and even foreign ambassadors, meanwhile, read through the piece with meticulous care. Although Ringle framed the piece as relevant to ongoing debates about criminal rehabilitation and the compensation that should be given to crime victims, what fixated readers was Mack’s relationship to Speaker Wright. The story was absolutely stunning when told in full detail and on the pages of a prestigious newspaper. There were no denials coming from the Speaker’s office about what Ringle reported, only that some top Democrats thought that he had been punished enough for the crime, so his work in Congress was not a problem. Nothing more was offered. The gruesome story quickly sank in.

  With a tin ear for the political temperature surrounding Wright, the story, or the charged cultural dynamic of the time, Tony Coelho responded to the article by insisting to reporters that other legislators would “line up” to hire Mack if he was fired.75 As jaws dropped in Washington, other Wright supporters with tin ears also dug in to insist that the Speaker had done nothing wrong. Mack, they said, had paid his debt to society by serving his jail time, and he had never been obligated to compensate the victim under the existing law. Mack, who believed himself to be rehabilitated, didn’t grasp the impact the story was having. “I was flabbergasted,” he later told the author Suzanne Garment. “I wasn’t accused of anything except rising too high. They never talked about the years I spent as a $9,000-a-year filing clerk, working my way up.”76 Karen Van Brocklin assembled quotations from Democratic leaders that Gingrich shared to convey the party leadership’s myopic response.77

  The erosion of support for Mack rapidly accelerated. Several female legislators, such as Pat Schroeder, co-chairwoman of the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, called for Mack’s immediate dismissal. Schroeder was outraged upon learning the details. She had experienced Mack to be personally gruff and aggressive, a man who had often yelled at her colleagues in the caucus in public (so much so that once they walked into the women’s restroom to avoid his verbal barrage).78 The Washington Post story was a breaking point. “I believe in rehabilitation,” she said, after having been one of Wright’s supporters throughout the scandal, “but not when it leads to such a high position.”79 Schroeder said she was shocked upon reading the article that Mack “never really said he was sorry. To be forgiven, you have to repent.”80

  She was not alone. A group of congressional Republican women, including the Maine representative Olympia Snowe and the Illinois representative Lynn Martin, drafted a letter requesting that Mack be fired. The Maryland Republican Constance Morella, part of this campaign, explained that it was a “human story. It touched the heart.” Morella, whose office received thirty-eight calls about the story, didn’t think Mack could continue to hold his position.81 Female staffers working for both parties also expressed outrage. Letters calling for Mack to be fired filled up legislators’ mailboxes.82 The Washington Post likewise received an overwhelming number of letters from readers, many of them women, who saw what happened to Small as a horrendous injustice and questioned the way that the rehabilitation of male aggressors was handled.83 The Congress-watcher Richard Cohen wrote in his syndicated column, “The stunner is that politicians whose job it is to stay in touch could be so out of touch. . . . These men of the House came pretty close to adopting a boys-will-be-boys defense of Mack. He was hired as if his crime had been tax evasion and not, as women know, one of misogynist rage. Would Mack have been hired had he attempted to lynch a black person? Would he have been one of the most important men in Washington if he had scrawled a swastika on a synagogue or, even, been caught torturing a cat? The answer, thrice over, would be ‘no.’”84

  Standing by his top aide, the Speaker stuck to the explanation he had given reporters when they asked in previous years about the details of the crime. “[I] was not told the details of the crime,” he said, an answer that didn’t satisfy many people even when he told the same thing to Phil Jones in 1988. Wright insisted that the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office and his daughter had assured him that Mack was fully rehabilitated at the time he was hired. “I was told that he had served some 27 months upon conviction of a crime,” Wright declared. “The sheriff told me he had been a model rehabilitative prisoner and recommended him highly.” The sheriff, James Swinson, according to the Speaker’s recollection, had commended Wright for giving him a chance, although Swinson told Don Phillips of The Washington Post that he did not remember ever having spoken to Wright at the time.85

  Not a single male Democrat publicly condemned Wright, but there was little that could be done to
protect him from the fallout. “You could feel the steam go out” of support for the Speaker, Oldaker recalled. The “damage” was done, given how brutal the story was. “It’s hard to overstate what an impact that had,” Oldaker added, because Mack was known as the Speaker’s “alter ego.”86 Clark Clifford was quickly losing confidence in his ability to make Wright’s scandal go away now that Mack’s criminal background was in the spotlight. Clifford later recalled to a reporter, “The story was so shocking, and it was presented in a manner that it made people withdraw in horror. It was tough, boy it was tough.”87

  Oldaker approached Mack and said that he would have to resign. Given the perilous charges the Speaker faced, there was no way that he could keep Mack on the payroll. Wright, who felt worse for Mack than for himself, wanted him to stay, but Oldaker insisted the situation was too dire. This was no time for personal loyalty. The other attorneys working on the case agreed. Torricelli would later tell a reporter that the Speaker’s “primary focus must be on strengthening his legal case. Anything that diverts attention from this is to his detriment.”88 As the Speaker walked through the hallways of Congress, members were turning corners to avoid encountering him.

  The media pushed the story out from Washington and into the hinterland. The Los Angeles Times–Washington Post News Service reprinted Ringle’s piece in its papers, which included the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the San Jose Mercury-News, and The Atlanta Constitution. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times gave the story prominent coverage and added original reporting of their own about the attack. The syndicated columnist Mona Charen asked her readers, “If you heard that a young man who had driven a hammer into a young woman’s skull five times, stabbed her and repeatedly cut her throat, later went on to become a senior aide to the Speaker of the House of Representatives what would you say? Sounds like a bad soap opera? Something Aaron Spelling would dream up? Maybe so—but it’s true.”89 The network evening news shows aired horrendous black-and-white police images from the attacks, showing huge bloody slashes on Small’s back, throat, and even feet. In her report for NBC News, Andrea Mitchell interviewed one of Small’s physicians, Dr. Eugene Stevenson. “She was in pretty bad shape, the attack was pretty brutal,” he said as he pursed his lips, remembering the moment.90 “If Small had the bad fortune to be shopping at World Bazaar that night,” noted Time, “Mack had the good luck to have a brother married to Congressman Jim Wright’s daughter.”91 The same conservative radio talk show hosts who lit up the airwaves telling their listeners to oppose the congressional pay raise now turned their ire toward the Speaker’s employment choices.92 Many congressional staffers, worried about speaking out against a figure as powerful as Mack, refused to answer questions about him when confronted by reporters.93