Burning Down the House

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Burning Down the House Page 32

by Julian E. Zelizer


  After the meeting, Wright went to his weekly lunch with the nineteen Democratic members of the Texas delegation in the Speaker’s dining room, where they were scheduled to pose for their annual photograph. The mood in the room, the site of the meeting where Democrats had rejected Nagle’s efforts to calm the storm just fifteen days earlier, was somber. As the participants dined on steak and potatoes, the smiles on a handful of faces seemed forced. Even the most loyal Texans like Charlie Wilson understood that the end was near. There was none of the boisterous joking and schmoozing that was familiar at these regular get-togethers. It was difficult for some of them to look Wright in the eye, knowing how bad things had become. Wright didn’t tell them what he planned to do, but most of the Texans sensed that a resignation announcement was just a matter of time.55 When a few Democrats surrounded him to urge that he resist the pressure to leave, the Speaker admitted that the scandal had been tough on him and Betty but then couldn’t say any more as he choked up.56 Wright let them know that he would be making a statement on the floor that afternoon at 4:00, and he hoped that his friends could be in the chamber to watch. After lunch, the Speaker returned to an office on the second floor to put the finishing touches on his speech. He called his most loyal allies in the House and told them his decision.57

  At 3:00 P.M., revealing just how much tension existed between the parties, Foley met with Robert Michel for twenty minutes to inform him of what was about to happen. The minority leader, visibly upset that the Speaker had not told him of this news personally, sat in stunned silence. Michel was just about to convene a regularly planned meeting with his leadership. He informed the handful of members who had arrived at his office early that they should head directly over to the floor. For everyone else, his staff hung a sign on the door that read, THE 4 P.M. WHIP MEETING FOR TODAY HAS BEEN CANCELED. Gingrich was reportedly seen “walking jauntily” with his doughboy gait toward Michel’s office and didn’t seem at all surprised when he read the sign; he seemed to have the information already.58

  The chamber was already nearly full by 3:30. Ordinarily, members poured in at the last minute before a vote but not on this historic occasion. Expecting that the Speaker was going to resign, everyone wanted to be in the room for one of the most anticipated speeches in years. The high-intensity television lights, usually reserved only for presidential addresses, went on at 3:49.59 A CNN team was there to carry the speech live, along with the three networks, all of whom were using C-SPAN’s feed. Photographers set up their equipment in the chamber and scrambled to find the best angles from which to document the moment.

  Right at 3:59, the sound of rumbling and murmurs faded as the Speaker entered the hushed chamber carrying a copy of his book and folders filled with documents. All eyes turned toward the doors, and Democrats and some Republicans stood up to applaud. Wright walked around the front row so that he could shake hands and pat the backs of legislators from both parties before he strode up to the lectern in the well.60 The members knew this was the end, but they didn’t know what he would say. Wright did not smile. Gone was the confident Speaker who had manhandled Republicans over a budget vote and Nicaragua. The Texan looked tired and worn down. For this occasion, Wright wore the kind of black suit that would be fit for a funeral.

  Betty sat in the front row of the gallery overlooking the House floor alongside their daughter, Virginia, and Wright’s attorneys. Tony Coelho sat with the California delegation, thinking about his own departure, while the Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen found a place among the House Democrats so that he could be present to watch his friend and colleague. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, a student of congressional history whose departure from the House earlier in the year had triggered the process resulting in Gingrich’s becoming whip, leaned against the back rail.

  As Wright began his remarks, viewers saw a “discomforting” close-up, according to one television critic, as he brought his long career in Congress to an end. There was a voyeuristic element for cable viewers, who were looking at the final moments in the political life of a leader who had fallen in partisan battle. Never a fan of television, Wright didn’t look into the cameras but focused instead on the people in the room.61 Unlike Richard Nixon, who had addressed the nation from the quiet of the Oval Office and bade farewell in the East Room before White House friends and staff, Wright played out his moment of public disgrace among his colleagues and opponents.

  For a politician who famously shunned the modern news media throughout his career, not even allowing journalists to record their meetings with him, there was something unsettling about watching Jim Wright end his career in front of the television cameras. With a large stack of documents in front of him, he started his speech by thanking his constituents and his colleagues for a wonderful career. Wright noted that just a few days earlier, 78 percent of his district approved of the job he was doing, including 73 percent of Republicans, and he was “very proud of that.” Next, with the color returning to his face, he took a moment to boast about all the accomplishments of the One Hundredth Congress. “Together, we made it possible for great leaps forward to be made in such things as our competitiveness in the world. Together, we fashioned the beginnings of a truly effective war on drugs to stamp out that menace to the streets and schools and homes of our nation. We began the effort to help the homeless. We still have work to do to make housing affordable to low income Americans so that there won’t be any homeless in this country. We did things to help abate catastrophic illness, and to provide welfare reform legislation, clean water legislation, and a great many other things that I shall not detail.”

  The Speaker then turned to his troubles, reminding everyone how the original five accusations against him were dismissed before three new charges were raised, noting that the much discussed sixty-nine counts were simply multiple iterations of three questions. Pausing for a moment, he ruminated about how press leaks had tarnished his reputation and that of the institution. He spoke of the horrible ordeal he had suffered, his Texas twang trembling with emotion. The Speaker held tightly onto notes that were both typed and handwritten, trying to use this opportunity to clear his name even if his career was done.62 He waved his hands in the air as he spoke, occasionally removing his glasses to mop the sweat that was trickling down from his brow as a result of the lights and the stress. The chamber was so silent while he spoke that it was possible to hear the sound of reporters shuffling their notepads and the squeak from the gallery door whenever it opened.63

  With his soon-to-be successor sitting behind him, much of what the Speaker said was yet another carefully parsed defense of everything he had done. Trying to clear his name, he reviewed each point that the Ethics Committee and Richard Phelan had raised in order to rebut their claims. This was his time in court. No one stirred. No one dared. “Let’s look at them, one by one,” he said, reminding his colleagues that the Ethics Committee only said he might have violated the rules, not that he did.

  He defended his wife as hardworking and qualified, the only one in their four-person investment company who really had time to do the work. “Betty alone, among all of us, had the time and the opportunity and the experience and the desire to give effort and energy to exploring and promoting investment opportunities.” The Speaker pulled out the manila folders that he had carried in with him, swinging his arms and waving affidavits from businesspeople attesting to all the work that she performed for their investments. He castigated Phelan for saying that his wife was paid money without having delivered any “identifiable services or work products.” He and Betty co-owned the company from which she received her salary and the car. Exasperated, Wright asked what Phelan wanted: “You want so many pages of cancelled short-hand notes? So many pages of typed manuscript? She wasn’t a carpenter. Is a woman’s mental study and her time and her advice not to be counted as a work product?” Wright said, as he glowered at his colleagues, that his wife had left her government job to avoid conflict-of-interest accusations. “Ho
w many colleagues in the House and the Senate do you know whose wives are on the public payroll doing good work?”

  Wright’s emotions intensified as he moved through the different sections of the speech, his oratory striking even to the Republicans. One characterized it as being “perfect English, you could almost see the paragraphs and the sentences, perfectly formed as he spoke.”64 The Speaker attempted to maintain a smile, which was so tense it looked as if it were painted on his face, when describing the accusations against him, vigorously shaking his head and waving his index finger as he angrily explained why Phelan and the House Ethics Committee had been so wrong.

  Speaking about George Mallick and the benefits he had allegedly received, Wright asked dismissively, “Now, how do they arrive at that suggestion? I’ve known this man for more than twenty-five years. He’s been my friend—[a] good, decent, hard-working man of Lebanese extraction.” He never asked him to vote for any bill or to intercede with any agency, he said, “not once.” The Speaker mocked the committee’s observation that Mallick had a direct interest in federal tax legislation. After all, the charge would apply to almost every citizen. Wright quoted Congressman Obey, looking down at his op-ed and the affidavit in his folder, reminding everyone that his colleague from Wisconsin had drafted the House ethics rules and had said “unequivocally, emphatically, unambiguously, both in an affidavit that he wrote and [in] a report he wrote for The Washington Post that [the rule] doesn’t fit George Mallick’s case. He doesn’t have an interest in legislation as defined under the rules, the rules that David and his committee wrote.” Wright slowly scanned the chamber as if pleading with his colleagues to agree with how wrongly he had been treated, how unfair his entire situation had been.

  And then there was the matter of his book. The goal of publishing Reflections of a Public Man was to distribute his ideas to the widest possible group of people, Wright said. His ideals stemmed from a populist ethos, not greed. His only sin was to write for the people. “It’s probably not great literature,” he admitted, “but I like it.” After taking a moment for dramatic effect and leafing through a copy of the book, he asked the members, “If monetary gain had been my primary interest, don’t you think I would have gone to one of the big Madison Avenue publications, the houses there that give you a big advance?” Tip O’Neill, Wright reminded his peers, earned a million-dollar advance for his book. “You know maybe—maybe somebody got the impression that buying a book was the price of getting me to make a speech. I never intended that impression. I never suggested that. I hope that friends of mine did not,” he added. Even if members of his staff were overeager to sell books, and even if some organizations had the sense that they needed to buy the book if they wanted him to make a speech (which he denied ever requesting), the rules did not prohibit the sales.

  To prove that Phelan was the person who lied, Wright pulled from his material an affidavit from Gene Payte, one of the bulk buyers of Wright’s book, who claimed that the prosecutor had purposely twisted his testimony that he purchased more books than he received so Phelan could falsely claim that the people who bought the book had no interest in the actual product, just getting money to Wright. The Speaker had been burning up about this story since Dixon and Myers had threatened Payte with contempt of Congress for making public statements about executive session deliberations; Phelan had ignored Payte’s statement in his report. “What do you think of that?” Wright asked his colleagues. “A private citizen, a reputable citizen of my community, misquoted in a document published at public expense, sent widely to newspapers throughout the country, widely cited as authority, uncritically, assumed to be accurate. The citizen being misquoted issues an affidavit to straighten it out, so that he is not misquoted in the public record. And then”—Wright leaned in and glared into the chamber before going in for his takedown—Payte is “warned by the committee that he might be held in violation and in contempt of Congress if he doesn’t shut up.”

  The Speaker asked his colleagues to look again at the charges and to see them for the illogical mess they were. He had no problem with rules; indeed he believed they were important, and he valued ethics investigations. But members were “entitled to know what the rules mean” and if they had changed since they were written. If the rules needed to be revised, the House needed to do it the legal way, “to vote” on it. Wright even talked about what changes he thought would be good, such as an outright ban on all honoraria in exchange for the elusive salary increase.

  The bright camera lights had raised the temperature at center stage where he stood. As sweat slowly dripped down his forehead, visible on the television screen when he looked down at his notes, about forty-eight minutes into a one-hour speech, Wright seemed to stumble for a moment, teetering on the verge of losing control of his emotions, as he said it was “intolerably hurtful” to the government that federal officials were “resigning” as a result of “ambiguities” and “confusions surrounding the ethics laws.” Wiping the sweat off his forehead and neck and blinking away tears, he warned, “It’s happening.”

  Regaining his strength, Wright delivered the most powerful punch of the hour. Pausing from his critique of the specific accusations, he stepped back to make a bigger statement about the direction of congressional politics. It was “grievously hurtful” to all of American society when “vilification” comes at the hands of “self-appointed vigilantes carrying out personal vendettas against members of the other party.” Hoping that his resignation might stop the scorched-earth policies that politicians had adopted, Wright insisted it was “unworthy of our institution” for “vengeance” to become “more desirable than vindication.” Shaking his left fist in the air, he urged both parties to “bring this period of mindless cannibalism to an end!”

  As he paused after uttering these powerful words before the hushed chamber, the camera zoomed out to show the legislators vigorously applauding. Wright remained silent as most of the legislators in the room gave him a standing ovation.

  Among those standing was Newt Gingrich, the instigator and object of Wright’s fury. Throughout the address, the Georgian, who was about to turn forty-six, had been sitting next to Guy Vander Jagt and Oklahoma Republican Mickey Edwards, attempting to keep a straight face. But his discomfort was palpable. Knowing that reporters were watching his every move, he attempted to find a place for his hands, sometimes stuffing them into his pockets and at other times resting them behind his lower back. Gingrich listened with evident frustration as the Speaker attempted to justify all of his actions. When Wright warned of “mindless cannibalism” and the entire chamber rose to its feet, Gingrich hesitated, unsure what to do, because in his mind the Speaker was guilty and this scandal had not been a product of the warfare Wright suggested. Recognizing that he was the “self-appointed vigilante” to whom Wright referred, Gingrich leaned over to whisper something in Vander Jagt’s ear and then decided to join everyone. To show comity, he stood up and clapped, even though he disagreed with everything that was being said. But he knew what Wright’s endgame was, and that satisfaction trumped the soon-to-be-departing Speaker’s momentary grab for vindication. And, Gingrich felt, he would get the last word once Wright was gone.65

  After a few moments, the legislators took their seats again. Wright admitted to poor judgment and to making decisions that he wished he could take back. It was a come-to-Jesus moment where he recognized, publicly, why Democrats were so frustrated with his actions. Standing with his hands on his hips and elbows pointed outward, he admitted, “Have I made mistakes? Oh, boy, how many? I made a lot of mistakes. Mistakes in judgement, oh yeah.” But making mistakes, as everyone in the room had done, he said, was very different from being a criminal.

  Taking off his glasses to emphasize the seriousness of this moment in congressional history, the Speaker now addressed the controversy about John Mack, whose association with him he acknowledged had deeply troubled his supporters. “I didn’t know the nature of the crime that he
had been convicted of. I knew only that John Mack was a young man who my daughter had known in high school and my daughter was married to his brother, incidentally; that’s how she knew about John,” Wright said. When his daughter brought the story to him, she knew only that Mack had been convicted of assault and had served twenty-seven months in the Fairfax county jail. Disputing the worst of the story from The Washington Post, he said, “I did not interfere with the court. I didn’t suggest anything to the court. . . . I didn’t inquire, maybe that’s bad judgement, I didn’t inquire as to the exact nature of the crime.” After being told that Mack was a “model rehabilitative prisoner,” Wright decided to give him a job as a file clerk for $9,000 a year. To the Speaker, this was an act of altruism and compassion rather than some malicious scheme to set an abuser free. After that, Mack “really blossomed and grew and developed and those of you who know him can’t conceive—as I never could conceive when finally just two years ago I read in the newspaper—the precise nature of that crime. It just didn’t fit his character.” According to Wright. “Now, was that bad judgment? Yeah, maybe so. It doesn’t have anything to do with the rules but it’s got all mixed up with it, and I don’t think, though, that it’s bad judgment to try to give a young man a second chance.” Doubling down on a defense of what he did, Wright reiterated that America doesn’t stand “for the idea that a person should ever—forever be condemned.” As Betty listened to her husband’s defense from the gallery, tears streamed from her eyes.66

 

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