Burning Down the House

by Julian E. Zelizer

  Right-wing organizations turned their full attention to the Speaker. The Conservative Campaign Fund sent out flyers urging their supporters to “help put Jim Wright on trial!” Outlining all of the charges made against him, the organization said that it felt sickened by “Wright’s corruption and dishonesty.” The pamphlet asked how the national media would react if a conservative Republican was caught “laundering $60,000 in phony book royalties from his campaign chest into his own pocket with the help of a former convict and Jimmy Hoffa bagman,” or if that person had “secured $30 million in federal funds for a construction project that his business partner was developing,” or put “a relative on the Congressional payroll at $87,500 who served prison time for bludgeoning an innocent woman.”3

  By early May, the question was not whether the Speaker would survive but rather how long he would last. Gingrich’s quip in March that he was placing bets as to whether Wright would be gone by June seemed eerily prescient. Almost all of Wright’s support within the Democratic caucus seemed to have faded, and his opponents were preparing to deliver the coup de grâce.

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  On May 18, a group of influential Democrats gathered behind closed doors in the Speaker’s dining room to discuss Wright’s situation. Iowa’s Dave Nagle, a liberal second termer who took great pride in his connections to the leadership, officially called the strategy session with a small group of mainstream Democrats who hesitantly remained supportive of Speaker Wright. His intention was to provide these Democrats with an encouraging update about where things stood with the Wright investigation—both legally and, more important, politically. Nagle felt loyal to the Speaker, who had given him a great assignment on the Agriculture Committee, which played well with the farmers in his district, and Wright also had attended a big steak-fry fund-raiser in his honor.4 When Nagle entered the dining room, he anticipated a friendly crowd. All of the attendees, a cautious bunch by nature, had been assured by him that the deliberations would be secret so that they could speak their minds.

  With emotions running high, the meeting quickly veered in a very different direction than Nagle anticipated. One member after another stood up to describe his or her concerns about the immense political carnage that the Ethics Committee report would produce within the party and how the scandal might affect the next year’s midterms. If the committee concluded that the charges passed muster, Democrats would be in deep trouble. With Lee Atwater and Ed Rollins licking their chops over every piece of bad news about Wright and a bull’s-eye hovering over their campaigns, the Democrats feared that Republicans would make deep inroads into their majority. It pained them to watch how that little gadfly Gingrich had successfully made corruption the lever that could enable Republicans to retake control of the House for the first time since 1954. What once seemed fatuous was looking real. And they were angry, bemoaning that if Wright had played it straight all those years, Gingrich would never have had an opening. Wright had enabled Gingrich by lighting multiple fires.

  Congressman David Obey, until that point an ardent defender of the Speaker, admitted for the first time that he did not think Wright could last. Obey said that although the Speaker had the right to a proper defense and a full trial, that was different from the very real political challenges confronting the party as a result of the investigation. Or, as the folksy Obey put it, the “tactical problem [Wright] faces is that the actions he takes to defend himself on one battlefield are entirely different from the actions he may need to take to defend himself on another. Sometimes you can’t defend yourself against a run and a pass at the same time.” The conversation became so contentious that the Connecticut Democrat Barbara Kennelly called for bringing the meeting to an immediate conclusion. And although the meeting was supposed to be confidential, some members leaked to reporters what happened. No one was happy to see the Democrats’ misery chorale splashed across the front page of The New York Times the next morning.5

  What might have cheered the Democrats was the fact that their mounting alarm was not driven by actual evidence of electoral unrest. Their fears were entirely propelled by speculation and anxiety; most polling data suggested that there wasn’t a big problem, at least not yet. The Gallup numbers indicated that a large majority of Americans were simply not paying close attention to the ethics story. Less than half of those surveyed could even identify who Jim Wright was. The public was much more concerned about the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill that had taken place in Alaska that March than about whether a Texas congressman had flouted some esoteric rule about honoraria or whether his wife should have been using a company Cadillac. The poll found that a mere 15 percent of respondents had “very closely” followed the issue.6 “This still remains, relatively, an inside-the-Beltway phenomenon,” Nagle assured his colleagues after their disastrous meeting in the Speaker’s dining room. “The fact that there is not widespread interest out in the country does strengthen the speaker’s position.”7

  Yet the Democrats were scared, as the not-so-secret caucus conducted by Nagle had revealed. Members of Congress worry about their constituents’ opinions—about the issues, about their voting records—not only in the moment but in the future. They are deeply wary about possible challengers and what they might do that would come back to haunt them in an opposition ad.8 Speaker Wright’s problems, in other words, were theirs too. Given that nobody had thought that Gingrich’s campaign would ever go as far as it had, there was little reason to be confident that the crisis would fizzle. And Wright seemed so irredeemably flawed as a politician and as a person that few of them cared to defend him any longer. The Speaker spent most days holed up in his office talking with his attorneys, another red flag that real trouble was ahead.

  There was also growing reason to believe that Gingrich, with his smug, know-it-all posturing, could divine the nation’s mood better than any poll. Individual members were starting to panic. On May 19, the seven-person Indiana delegation of Democrats met in the office of Congressman Lee Hamilton for more than an hour. Hoosier Democrats tended to be sensitive to the political winds, given their state’s large number of Republican voters.

  All of the members who walked into Hamilton’s cramped office expressed their feelings of anger about the difficult position the Speaker had put their party in. They feared that there would be terrible ramifications in the midterm elections. There wasn’t much more to say. But one congressman who left the room, Philip Sharp, ran into a reporter from a local newspaper who happened to be sitting in the reception area. The reporter asked Sharp what was going on in Hamilton’s office. The congressman, still feeling the emotional charge from the meeting, blurted out, “It’s time for a leadership change.”9 His statement carried weight. Sharp was a Watergate Baby and a subcommittee chairman widely respected among Democrats.

  Sharp’s opinion was shared by others who objected to Wright’s leadership style. Though he didn’t say this to the reporter, Sharp, like most Democrats, believed that Wright had an abrasive personality and didn’t always think through his actions. Nor did he surround himself with the best people. Many members of the rank and file felt that Wright didn’t give them opportunities to participate in making decisions and that he depended on a top-down leadership model to keep his Democrats in order. By running the caucus with a strong hand, the Speaker rubbed against a desire for participation that had remained strong in the post-reform House. Sharp’s statement appeared the next day in an Indiana newspaper that was part of the national Knight Ridder news service, which in turn reprinted the piece all over the country.10 He was the first Democrat to publicly call on Wright to step down.

  By the time Sharp made his statement in mid-May, with the Ethics Committee report and the Mack scandal in the background, several major newspapers were calling on Wright to resign. The conservative Chicago Tribune, not surprisingly, was one of the first to make this demand. “Every day brings new evidence of [the Speaker’s] financial misconduct,” it noted
. “Every day also seems to bring a new defense, a new strategy, none of which appears to be working. Meanwhile, the House is paralyzed in much the same way the audience is transfixed during a horror movie as it awaits the final, fatal attack on a character bleeding from a thousand stab wounds.”11 The liberal Los Angeles Times editorial page, in a blistering piece titled SUFFICIENT REASON TO GO, acknowledged that Wright deserved a fair trial but concluded that he should no longer serve as leader: the “speakership is different” from an elected seat in the House. “It is a privilege, not a right. Wright sits in the Speaker’s chair by virtue of his selection by a majority of his peers in the House.” The problem for Wright, wrote the Times, was that he could no longer lead by example or serve as an effective voice for the Democratic Party.12

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  The next few days didn’t turn out as Wright and his attorneys had hoped or planned.

  Wright’s attorneys filed motions with the Ethics Committee to dismiss the charges that the Speaker had wrongly taken $145,000 in gifts from George Mallick and intentionally circumvented the honoraria restrictions, a plan to put the whole charade of the hearings to bed.13

  Dixon and Myers agreed to consider the motion in a committee hearing. They likewise decided that they would begin the televised portion of their deliberations with the motion to dismiss on May 23. All three major broadcast networks—NBC, CBS, and ABC—planned to show clips from the hearings in their nightly newscasts. CNN would provide more extensive live coverage, while C-SPAN planned a gavel-to-gavel broadcast without commentary. Outside Wright’s chambers, reporters staked out the Speaker looking for any nugget of news or insight or drama. Eventually, Wright walked out to address the group following Dixon’s announcement that the committee would hold one day of hearings on the motion to dismiss. Wright confidently described his case as “very, very strong.” When one reporter asked if he would “consider stepping down,” as some colleagues wanted, the Speaker predicted there would be no need to do so because he would be successful in making his case to the committee members. As reporters continued to raise questions about other accusations and investigations, he abruptly walked away.14

  Newt Gingrich coolly took in all the prehearing preparations. He had been voraciously reading through the papers and watching television to see how this unfolded. The minority whip, who was now starting to tackle other issues as Wright’s career unraveled, kept up his whisper campaign with reporters and colleagues, spreading word through Karen Van Brocklin of other scandalous allegations about the Speaker that were still being investigated and that would provide even more evidence for the Ethics Committee to reach a damning conclusion.15 Gingrich didn’t think much of the last-ditch effort by Wright’s attorneys to stop this process in its tracks. Indeed, on a television talk show, Gingrich gleefully predicted that the Republicans “are looking at the collapse of a left-wing machine.”16

  On May 23, fifty weeks after they voted in favor of moving forward with the investigation, the Ethics Committee convened in a crowded committee room in the Rayburn Building to hear the case. The flashing bulbs that greeted everyone entering the door were a reminder that this was no ordinary meeting. Wright decided that he would not attend, based on the recommendation of his lawyers, who believed his presence would create too much of a distraction. Like most House members, he would watch on a television set in his office.

  The cavernous and brightly lit hearing room had been set up like a courtroom. Susman’s team sat at one table with Phelan’s team poised at a table next to it. There was a lectern separating the two teams, from which the lawyers could address the committee. The committee members sat at a long table on a raised dais in the front of the room, with Dixon seated in the center. In between the committee and the tables where the attorneys sat were cameramen and stenographers. Behind the lawyers there were five rows of chairs, filled with friends and family, mostly of the Speaker, as well as a handful of public spectators who had lined up at 7:30 A.M. to secure one of the limited seats. As the face-off began, Dixon, with his glasses perched on the tip of his nose, asked for quiet in the room and announced that a quorum of the Ethics Committee was present. Dixon drily explained that they had gathered at this hearing to consider the motion to dismiss. While Susman and Phelan looked right at Dixon as he read through each of Wright’s assertions in lawyerly fashion, the other lawyers shuffled through their papers preparing for debate. Dixon outlined the schedule for the six-hour proceedings. Each attorney would have a chance to make his oral arguments before the committee asked questions. There would be no second round of questions from the committee. Dixon called on Susman to begin.17

  With his square muscular body and measured cadence, Susman cultivated the appearance of a tough-talking, straight-shooting good-old-boy lawyer. One journalist compared him to F. Lee Bailey, the renowned criminal defense attorney known for his folksy mannerisms in high-profile cases.18 As Susman stood before the lectern, wearing a well-pressed navy suit and red power tie, he framed the issue with a kind of “let’s get on with it” pragmatism that was notably short on grandiloquence but neatly captured the defense strategy. The question, he said, was not whether Wright’s decisions had been morally sound but whether he had broken any rules or laws.19 “Why worry about due process for a dead man?” Susman asked rhetorically, and why should this committee “stand in the way of a lynch mob” as well as a conviction that was based entirely on allegations of “guilt by association”? His client rejected every single charge that Phelan had leveled against him. How ironic it was, in fact, that Wright, who had no more money in his bank account than when he started his service in the House, was accused of being bought by lobbyists despite a career devoted to fighting for the common man. And if “Jim Wright is driven from office without a chance to respond to the charges against him, without his day in court, then justice delayed will be justice denied, to the discredit of this committee, this Congress and the American people,”20 Susman said, his deep Texas drawl rising with a sense of indignation.

  So why then was an innocent man seeking a dismissal of the charges rather than waiting for his day in court? The answer, Susman continued, was that it was not right to try a member for actions that didn’t actually violate any rules. When Wright had stood before the Ethics Committee the previous year, Susman reminded them that the charges being discussed were very different from those he now faced. Those charges had been dismissed. But the committee had denied Wright the chance to testify about the new charges emerging from Phelan’s report. Nor had he been able to see the evidence collected against him. Wright never had the chance to bring his own witnesses to testify. All of this was inherently unfair, Susman argued. The charges, which were unsubstantiated, had done considerable political damage, even though he was certain that they would never stand up in the second stage of the ethics process. The Speaker was paying a heavy price and had not been proven guilty. As Wright’s team had done in their public statements, Susman aimed to raise doubts within the committee about the process. He characterized Phelan’s investigation and report as sloppy, inaccurate, and purposely misleading.

  Methodically diving into each accusation, Susman sharply criticized the committee, asserting that they lacked any shred of evidence following an investigation that cost $1.5 million. He urged the members to think about how their own relationships could be used against them should they decide that Wright was guilty. By accepting that Wright was guilty, Susman warned, every one of them—no, every member of Congress itself—would be vulnerable simply for carrying out the normal business of a legislator. “The very meaning of a line in the law is that you intentionally may go as close to it as you can if you do not pass it,” Susman said, citing Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in a 1930 case. That’s the law of the land, he said. It was simply “not fair” to punish a man for going as close to the line as he could.21

  Susman urged the committee, whom he called “judges,” to avoid treating Wright in a different
way than they would other legislators. And Republicans should not be allowed to rewrite the ethics rules just to get retribution on Democrats for other controversies that had occurred in recent years. “The desire to pay some Democrats back for Tower, to pay Congress back for North and Meese, to blame the S&L mess on a Texan, to pay the Speaker back for the failure of the congressional pay raise bill to pass,” are all “fierce emotions” that fuel interparty “fighting and feuds,” Susman argued, but should not be allowed to drive the decisions in this specific case.

  But for all of Susman’s oratorical skill and carefully crafted arguments, he did not come across as effectively on television as Wright’s supporters had hoped. Unused to television cameras, he made a series of tactical errors, such as displaying poster boards that printed portions of the ethics code that defined wrongdoing, timelines of Wright’s alleged infractions, and quotations from evidentiary documents about the case. Susman remained in front of the charts while speaking, highlighting the violations that Wright had not committed. He recited the quotations about Wright’s alleged wrongdoing and then rebutted those charges, all while standing in front of the easel that displayed the ethics rules. Under the harsh glare of the television camera, his visual aids provided an ongoing reminder to viewers of the charges made against the Speaker, like the chyron today on the bottom of a cable news broadcast.

  Susman compared Wright’s Mallightco business partner George Mallick with a sordid list of lobbyists associated with prior congressional scandals, with the intention of distinguishing the real estate developer’s actions from more serious violators, like the notorious Koreagate lobbyist Tongsun Park. But in doing so, he only seemed to underscore to viewers how shady the recent history of the Democratic majority had been. Others were turned off by Susman’s appeal to the camaraderie of legislators. Donna Keaton, a member of the public who obtained a seat that morning, recalled what she had seen during the 1973 Watergate hearings and said that Susman’s “appeal to the spirit of rapport that the House members feel for each other” was unappealing. “If you play on that,” she explained, “you don’t have to deal with the issues.”22