Burning Down the House

by Julian E. Zelizer

  On Wednesday, May 24, the day after the hearings, the Ethics Committee met in private to discuss the presentations of the day before. While the committee was deliberating, the lawyers on each side also decided to meet. Sensing that the committee would reject the Speaker’s motion, Phelan felt as if he had the upper hand. He arranged to meet with Robert Torricelli in a discreet area outside the Capitol basement offices that was hidden from the press, just a few steps away from where the committee was working. Dixon wanted more than anything to bring this episode to an end, and over the weekend he had sent word to Torricelli through a staffer that the committee was open to discussions about an endgame that fell short of the House voting to expel the Speaker. Torricelli, who was a bit younger than the rest of Wright’s team, was savvy enough to understand that the House leader was in serious trouble. He looked Phelan in the eye and heard the offer that the prosecutor wanted to put on the table. Wright, Phelan explained, would resign from the speakership within the next few days and appoint the Speaker pro tempore, in exchange for the committee’s dropping the “direct interest” charges involving matters that took place before 1986 (which meant those that would affect Betty). Torricelli said he would take the offer back to Wright. The Speaker was not happy. Upon hearing the terms, he said that he would not let an outsider to Congress dictate his future. He wanted to be present when the House decided on his replacement rather than leave the decision making up to someone with a temporary appointment.35

  When the Ethics Committee broke for lunch, Republicans walked out to the balcony located next to the committee room in order to mull over the potential for a deal. When they returned without any definitive decision, Dixon announced to the media that they would reconvene at 3:00 P.M. Half an hour before they regrouped, Phelan and Torricelli met again, this time on the terrace where the Republicans had been standing a few hours earlier. The New Jersey native informed the prosecutor that the Speaker was quickly losing interest in a deal because he feared that the press would depict it as an admission of guilt. Phelan made a new proposal, only slightly better, that he hoped would be more palatable to the Speaker. The committee would immediately drop all of the “direct interest” charges if Wright agreed to resign but would give him enough time before stepping down so that he could play a part in the selection of his successor. Phelan added that the committee would want a letter of resignation in hand or some comparable document to assure them Wright would follow through with his end of the bargain. Phelan warned that the window for deal making was closing. If Wright did not agree to these terms, Phelan was confident that he would suffer. He told Torricelli that he had Atkins’s vote assured. The Ethics Committee had information about another oil investment near Sabine Lake that Phelan assured Torricelli would blow up in the Speaker’s face. The investigation would drag on, more Democratic support would crumble, and the number of Republicans backing expulsion would multiply.36 Giving Torricelli an icy stare, Phelan warned that this route would destroy Wright’s career and his legacy in the history books.

  With that warning, both men returned to their respective parties to talk things over. In room 201 of the Speaker’s private office suite, surrounded by walls decorated with war medals and photographs from the Speaker’s career in politics, Wright’s four lawyers slowly explained to their client that this was the committee’s final offer. Wright grew redder and his skin tightened as he curtly responded that he couldn’t accept it. It was impossible for him to leave the House on these terms. Resignation would still appear like an admission of guilt. Nor would he let an unelected official determine the fate of the House. At 3:30 P.M., the Speaker’s office released a statement: “There is no deal now. There will be no deal in the future. I eagerly await the time and opportunity when my side of this whole question may be heard clearly by my colleagues and the American people. To this end, I shall press ahead.” Phelan angrily marched over to the Speaker’s office to meet with Wright’s team at 4:30, only to be told in person that there would be no deal. He bolted out of the Speaker’s suite indignant and ready to fight even harder when the next stage of the Ethics Committee investigation began.37

  Dixon realized that the committee, too, would have to press on. By the end of the day, the frustrated chairman announced to the press that the committee would recess for the holiday without taking any action on Wright’s request to dismiss the charges.

  Privately, Gingrich delighted in watching the legal noose tightening around his opponent’s neck. He believed it was better for the process to drag on to the midterms. Now he decided to come out of the shadows. Appearing on ABC’s Good Morning America, he told Charles Gibson and Joan Lunden, “As long as he’s a member of the House I think our position is that it is totally inappropriate for the Ethics Committee to engage in plea bargaining.” If Wright was going to step down, in other words, he wanted him to do it before any kind of deal was made so that the Speaker’s disgrace could be maximized.38

  Democrats were making ominous predictions to the news media. During a breakfast with reporters, the Texas Democrat Mickey Leland said, “I have hope Jim Wright can survive. I’m a Catholic. I believe in miracles.” Another Texas Democrat, Charles Stenholm, standing outside the weekly luncheon for the Texas House delegation, was not so jokey. “The speaker is in serious trouble. And the speaker’s problems have translated into unfortunate problems for all of us.” Members were most concerned about the damage that the scandal would inflict on them in their own midterm campaigns. “What you have is a group of people who live in terror of television ads,” according to one Democrat from Illinois. “Every time they get near a tough issue, they start imagining the TV ad some opponent could dream up and use against them.”39

  As the holiday weekend airwaves filled up with vitriol, the Speaker and his wife escaped to a secluded location so that they could have space to think. Leaving without being noticed was not easy. Wright’s McLean home had become a permanent stakeout site for reporters looking for pictures and asking for new information, what reporters called a “death watch.” To prevent the press knowing that the Speaker would be getting out of town at this critical moment in the story, Betty walked out of the house to pick up the newspaper in order to distract them. As expected, as soon as she came out, the cameras started snapping and reporters barked out their questions. In a scene straight out of a John le Carré thriller, the Speaker, wearing a trench coat and a hat, snuck out the back door and walked across the yard into the home of Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, who lived behind them. Wright’s friend, and Washington insider, Bob McCandless was waiting in Leahy’s garage to drive him away.40 They parked their car in the Rayburn Building garage, where they met up with Betty, and then got into a different car to make their escape.41 The couple drove away from the Capitol, breathing more freely when they left the city, the signs of spring radiating around them. They drove for hours, trying to make sense of what had happened and what came next.

  When they arrived at the peace of McCandless’s lake house in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, they got out of the car and walked in the front door, unpacking their bags as if everything were just as it always was. Almost instantly, the solace enabled Wright to tap into feelings that had eluded him for months.

  Unbeknownst to his colleagues, he and Betty had decided the time had come to step down for the good of the institution, his party, and his family. The past few months had been unforgiving. Wright, who had privately mulled over resigning for several weeks, spent most of his time responding to new allegations rather than governing. There was constant dread that another story was around the corner. Legislative plans for a new domestic agenda to revive the economic security of middle-class Americans or initiatives to solidify the peace in Central America lay stuck in the mud of scandal. What bothered the Speaker more than anything else were the charges against Betty, who had done nothing to bring this on. “Beyond that,” he later recalled, “it was clear that Congress would have an almost impossible task conducting the nat
ion’s important business while this distraction cast a pall over its corridors. And I was tired. Dog tired. Mentally and physically fatigued. My duty seemed clear. If I could not be an effective Speaker, providing moral leadership, I had no wish to be Speaker.”42

  After deliberating with his wife and speaking with his children on the phone, the Speaker concluded that the damage being caused to the Democratic Party, as well as to the House, was too great for him to continue. “I looked out on the distant horizon and over the mountains and over a glassy little lake, and I was able to see this through the quiet of nature, the cows and birds and trees. I just decided there’s more to life than trying to live in the middle of a whirlwind continuously.”43

  Based on what his lawyers and advisers were telling him, the vote count on the Ethics Committee and in the House looked bad. Phelan warned Wright’s team that he had the votes he needed to move forward with the second stage of the investigation, a bloc of six Republicans and at least one Democrat (Atkins). The odds were utterly against him, and Wright was nothing if not a realist. As he sipped a drink and stared into the long shadows of the pines, he knew that barring some dramatic revelation, none of the members would vote to dismiss the charges. That would move the circus right onto the House floor, his beloved House floor, for a full vote. At this point, his colleagues would have a number of options on the table. A majority of the House could vote to censure him, subjecting him to the kind of public shaming that Charles Diggs endured under Speaker O’Neill in 1979. Or, even worse, two-thirds of the House could vote to expel Wright from the chamber, kicking him out of the job. Examples of expulsion were rare, with most of these votes taking place around the time of the Civil War against legislators sympathetic to the Confederacy. However, Wright knew expulsion could happen, even in this modern era. He was a firsthand witness, and a supportive vote, in 1980 when the House expelled the Democrat Michael Myers for accepting bribes in the Abscam sting. Myers, who uttered the memorable phrase “money talks in this business and bullshit walks,” was escorted out of his job by a House vote of 376 to 30, marking the first time that the House had taken such an action in over a century. The House could also penalize Wright financially, which would be devastating to someone who had struggled to stay afloat.

  Finally, there was the Bush Justice Department, which, according to the Los Angeles Times, was ready to conduct a full-scale investigation through its Public Integrity Section into whether Wright was guilty of criminal violations.44 David Runkel, the spokesman for Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, predicted, “I expect the department will take an independent look.”45 The Internal Revenue Service was ramping up its investigative apparatus to look into possible criminal charges involving the hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial exchanges between Wright and Mallick, which involved possible income-tax improprieties. There were even murmurs among some Republicans of another possible bombshell, suggesting that the Speaker had improperly interfered in the negotiations with Nicaragua.46 Wright was facing a devastating end to his career as a public servant. He wouldn’t take that, and he couldn’t handle the thought of Betty suffering through this either.47

  Wright’s children and sisters called to say that he should fight and that they would stand by his side, but he no longer believed that this was the best course of action. If there was a time when the Wrights felt that this would all blow over, that time was gone. Now he and Betty feared that allowing the investigations to drag on would cost him millions in legal fees. He already owed an estimated $500,000 and was working to raise the money to cover the costs. If he continued to fight, he could be left bankrupt, humiliated, and ineffective.

  Nor was the decision only about his own future. For all the news stories about Wright’s allegedly greedy behavior, the Texan was a politician who loved his party and loved Congress. During the last few weeks of his saga, Wright had been thinking hard about what kinds of troubles he would cause for Democrats as they headed into the midterm elections. The House had been the last bastion for the liberalism that Democrats had championed since FDR. Now that President Bush had defied the odds and succeeded Reagan, it wasn’t clear when his party would find its way back into the White House. Ever since Republicans gained control of the Senate in 1980, Democrats were never quite as confident about the permanence of their majority. Wright couldn’t bear to think that his scandal would be the issue that finally cost the Democrats majority control over the lower chamber, as Ed Rollins and Lee Atwater were hoping for.

  Putting partisanship aside, this was no longer the Congress that he had entered decades earlier. “I loved my job. I love Congress. In the end,” he recalled, “I loved it too much to stay.” The House had changed insidiously since the days when Sam Rayburn insisted that legislators could disagree without being disagreeable. It “had hardened, elements within it grown cold and vicious, intent on destroying the mutual respect that was its vital fluid. Worse,” from his point of view, this had happened “on my watch. I had not been wise enough to prevent it.”48

  Gingrich and his ilk had been emboldened. The minority whip took to the airwaves on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend to lob out another provocative statement. He said that the Speaker and Coelho were only the tip of the iceberg. Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, Gingrich predicted that the country was “going to be further shocked when the news media digs deeper to discover that it doesn’t stop with Coelho and Wright, that it goes on to more and more people.” Employing McCarthyite innuendo, he argued that there were “at least I think another 9 or 10, maybe more than that,” who would be under serious investigation within the Democratic Party. When Coelho criticized Gingrich for the “smearing of hundreds of people,” Gingrich followed up in two additional interviews by naming names: Harold Ford of Tennessee, Gus Savage of Illinois, Robert Garcia of New York, James Traficant of Ohio, Roy Dyson of Maryland, and Walter Fauntroy of the District of Columbia, Gingrich said, were in serious trouble based on the unfavorable news stories he carried around in his binder.49

  The partisan battles would only intensify. Democratic colleagues were angered and sharpening their daggers to go after the Republicans. They were already proceeding with their ethics complaint against Gingrich as retribution for what had happened to the Speaker. Anticipating the backlash against him, Gingrich told reporters, “I’ve had six people tell me that the Democrats they have talked to have said, ‘We’re going to destroy Gingrich.’ . . . I knew that sooner or later, the Democratic machine would try to get even.”50 Chief Deputy Majority Whip David Bonior promised, “I suspect that Mr. Gingrich will get at least as fair treatment as others have received recently.”51

  There was no end in sight, and this deeply troubled the Speaker. He didn’t want to become an ugly chapter in future history textbooks about how the parties had torn themselves asunder and, in the process, destroyed the Congress he loved so dearly. If Wright sacrificed himself to the institution he’d served for thirty-four years, there was still a chance, in his mind, that the partisan warfare would diminish.

  With all of this in mind, Wright drafted a resignation speech. The dramatic oratory flowed out of him and right onto the paper as it had done so many times before, this time with a speech to demarcate his own demise. He jotted down ideas that would combine a vigorous defense against the charges that Phelan had made with a bolder warning against the kind of political damage that would ensue if the parties continued with the ethics battles that had consumed the last few months. When he finished, he put down his pen, turned off the light, and went to join Betty in the comfort of their bed. Having the first draft of a speech in hand was therapeutic for a legislator like Wright. Being able to define the terms of this drama and the endgame, as unpalatable as the outcome would be, still offered him a chance to close the story, to go into the history books defining what this had all been about. Republicans might want to make this a tale about scandal and corruption, but he would rise to the occasion upon his return to Washington and paint his
final action as a heroic effort to save Congress. At least that was his plan as the weekend getaway came to a close.

  Back in the Capitol on Tuesday, May 30, Speaker Wright would only tell the press, “I think I know what I should do. I think I know what I believe to be in my best interests and the interests of the institution. I want to be fair to myself, my family, my reputation, and I want to be fair to this institution that I’ve served for 34 years.” Reporters turned elsewhere to gain a sense of where this was going.52 Happy to take the spotlight, the Texan Charlie Wilson told a packed room of reporters that Wright would be ending his career. “He’s resigning, that’s what he’s doing, he’s resigning,” Wilson bluntly stated. He then went on to complain that his friend was being tossed “under the blowtorch” by “my nervous colleagues.”53 Although Wilson’s predictions seemed to be an all-knowing statement from a trusted ally, there was a temporary halt to the circus when the legendary eighty-eight-year-old Democratic representative (and former senator) Claude Pepper of Florida, chairman of the House Rules Committee, passed away in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. There were plans to have his body lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda. Wright, who participated in the memorial service for Pepper with a moving speech about what he had done for the common man, walked away from the ceremony even more convinced that he had to bring his own scandal to an end so that the party could move forward.

  Anticipating that the Ethics Committee was going to meet again on Thursday, the Speaker believed that this was the last possible moment to end the trauma on his own terms, without it appearing that he was stepping down as a result of his guilt.

  Around noon on May 31, Wright met with Majority Leader Foley to let him know that he intended to resign later that day.54 The Speaker didn’t say much, but he did want his colleague to know that he was tired of living in this toxic atmosphere. He wanted to take care of his family. He wanted to let the House return to some kind of regular order. He wanted the partisan wars to end. With his reserved demeanor, Foley listened to Wright without revealing any great emotion. He had been expecting this conversation, so he had been prepared to hear that he would have to take on the great responsibility of leading the House, repairing the Democrats, and figuring out a way to stop the destructive warfare between the political parties. Wright said that he would deliver the news to the rest of his colleagues on the floor of the House. He asked Foley and his assistant to keep this information confidential.