The downfall of Speaker Wright opened up a new period in American politics, the era of Gingrich. It was notable that the allegations surrounding Wright were not nearly as significant as the allegations surrounding Nixon during Watergate—not even close. In certain respects, this made his decision to resign even more dramatic. At the point when he stepped down, the accusations were still relatively minor in the minds of many experts and involved technical violations of internal ethics codes, not presidential efforts to obstruct the law or even a sex scandal so embarrassing that there was no way to remain in office. Yet this was enough to bring him down. His resignation shaped the way that several generations of legislators and voters would think about governance and politicians.
Gingrich’s successful campaign had also tainted the aspirations of good-government reformers and journalists in the aftermath of Watergate. After the Nixon era, reform organizations pushed measures through Congress that increased transparency and created new rules governing behavior, and journalists became more aggressive in uncovering corruption and wrongdoing. In these years, there was hope in Washington that things could be different. Few were so naive as to think that the political system would be governed by angels, but there had been genuine optimism that the changes that occurred after Nixon’s disgrace would make things better. That hope faded once Gingrich asserted his power. He had used congressional reforms and an investigative press as weapons to devastate his opponents. He had made Democrats and Republicans see how even the best-intentioned reforms could be turned against a fellow member. Every legislator felt a bit more vulnerable after May 31, 1989.
Wright’s dream that the parties’ anger would dissipate once he was gone was wildly off the mark. His leaving only whetted the appetite of Republicans like Gingrich for more political takedowns. Over the next decade, the scandal wars escalated to create one of the most contentious periods in the government’s history as the needs of governance and of legislating steadily took a back seat to the imperatives of intense partisan warfare where compromise was considered toxic and where almost any threat to destroy another politician’s career or hijack the legislative process was permissible if it was legal. The era would be dominated by ongoing accusations, vilification, investigations, resignations, and the forced removal of elected officials from office as Gingrich played Napoleon and Waterloo was not on the horizon. He survived the initial wave of attacks on his own ethics record by simply moving forward in defiant fashion. He kept finding success as he went after the ethical wrongdoing of Democrats—the Ways and Means Committee chairman, Dan Rostenkowski, would be next—and as he did, a growing number of Republicans became increasingly excited about Gingrich’s style and message. They believed his promise that the Republicans could gain control of Congress. For a party that had been out of power for so long, the spectacle of what he did to the Speaker energized them.
The gospel of Gingrich kept spreading. He literally shared his rhetorical style through a GOPAC pamphlet first distributed in 1990, titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” which he crafted with the pollster Frank Luntz, that offered a road map to replicate his way with words. Responding to Republican candidates who, GOPAC said, had told them, “I wish I could speak like Newt,” the memo recommended using certain words repeatedly like “corruption,” “traitors,” “sick,” “radical,” “shame,” “pathetic,” “steal,” and “lie” to describe the Democrats.27
And he was still scrapping with members of his own party. Gingrich defiantly walked out of a budget meeting when President George H. W. Bush finally agreed to raise taxes as part of a deficit-reduction package in 1990. He never forgave the president. Because of the showdown over taxes, the Republican consultant Eddie Mahe said, “Newt comes out a big winner with a lot of people in the country who think the agreement is bad, and he has the guts to say so. He has reasserted himself as the natural leader of the conservative movement.”28 For Gingrich, the issue was much bigger than taxes. “The number one thing we had to prove in the fall of ’90,” Gingrich said, “was that, if you explicitly decided to govern from the center, we could make it so unbelievably expensive you couldn’t sustain it.”29 Gingrich’s engagement in internecine squabbles, combined with the sizable number of Democratic voters in the suburbs of Atlanta, nearly cost him his seat in 1990, when he beat David Worley, a thirty-two-year-old lawyer, by fewer than a thousand votes. The exuberance that Washington seemed to feel toward Gingrich did not translate to his district, where some wondered why he spent so much time on his national aspirations as opposed to the bread-and-butter needs of his constituents. At one town hall meeting filled with hundreds of constituents, Gingrich heard angry voters complain about his priorities as well as his blind eye to Republican scandals. But despite the complaints from his district, Gingrich won reelection, and for him that was all that mattered.
He staked his entire future on being able to fulfill the promises that he had been making to his fellow party members. He never lost his instinct to go in for the kill in pursuit of his goals. Quoting Mao Zedong, Gingrich liked to say, “Politics is war without blood.”30 Gingrich kept using corruption as the spear to attack the Democrats. In early 1992, he helped to weaken the political standing of many prominent Democrats (and some Republicans, including himself) during the House bank scandal when the media reported that hundreds of members were overdrawing their House checking accounts without any penalty whatsoever. Among those implicated were Henry Waxman, the environmental advocate from California; Ron Dellums, one of the leading African American representatives, who was committed to social justice; and George Miller, one of the most prominent and effective liberal voices in his caucus. When Michel tried to work with Speaker Foley to minimize the disclosure in the press of the names of members implicated in this scandal, because Michel realized that Republicans were vulnerable to the backlash as well, Gingrich exploded. “This is about systematic, institutional corruption, not personality,” he said in an interview. “To ask the Democratic leadership to clean things up would be like asking the old Soviet bureaucracy under Brezhnev to reform itself. It ain’t going to happen.”31 Gingrich took a big bite of this scandal, and he wouldn’t let go. “We don’t know what happened. But I don’t think you can restore trust in our institution by taking our dirt and sweeping it under the carpet,” said Ohio’s John Boehner, one of his close allies.32 Calling themselves the Gang of Seven, Gingrich, Boehner, Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum, Iowa’s Jim Nussle, and three other Republicans relied on made-for-cable television theater pioneered by Camscam to make their point. Nussle wore a brown paper bag over his head in front of the C-SPAN cameras to let voters know how ashamed they all were to be members of the institution. When Democrats pointed out that Gingrich himself had twenty overdrafts, he didn’t flinch. Such revelations of hypocrisy never seemed to shake him. He responded by claiming that the Democrats were “rigging” their investigation to “get him.” In the aftermath of the cold war, he envisioned himself as a crusader for good, comparing himself to figures such as Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia and Lech Wałęsa in Poland who had brought down communism.33 The bank scandal was followed by the congressional post office scandal, which was based on an investigation showing that members had misused their franking privileges—their right to send mail to constituents without paying postage—for personal gain. Meanwhile, Gingrich’s public anger about President Bush’s agreement to raise taxes didn’t help Bush’s electoral standing on the Right, contributing to Arkansas governor Bill Clinton’s victory in the presidential election in November.
With Bill Clinton in the White House, Gingrich broadened his portfolio of issues to include more than corruption. He stood at the center of the partisan maelstrom that formed over the progressive tax increase that the president rammed through the Democratic Congress in 1993 as well as the failed effort to reform the health-care system. Gingrich used both of these measures, the successful bill and the failed proposal, to paint Clinton—and the Democrats—as big-g
overnment liberals when the nation had shifted to the right with the Reagan Revolution. In October 1993, Michel, tired of being Gingrich’s punching bag, a perpetual symbol on the Right of why the GOP failed to gain power, announced he would retire, placing Gingrich next in line to be the top Republican. Michel knew that if he tried to stay in power, Gingrich was planning to come after his job. At the press conference announcing his retirement, in a thinly veiled shot at Gingrich, Michel complained of members who indulged in “trashing the institution.”34 But his warnings came much too late. Like most gatekeepers who allow insurgents in for their own political purposes, Michel had been swallowed by the revolution. The barbarians were no longer at the gates because Michel had allowed them to walk right through barriers in the takedown of Speaker Wright: now Gingrich was in control.
Even though Gingrich liked to present himself as a big-idea man, the truth is that his contributions as a partisan tactician were far more important than anything he did in terms of policy. With few exceptions, his policy ideas came directly out of the familiar toolbox of the conservative movement—tax cuts, strong defense, minimal government, limiting bureaucratic power, curbing reproductive rights—with a few original proposals thrown in, such as his passion for the space program and a handful of centrist positions like being pro-environment. Gingrich made his biggest impact on the GOP by defining what partisanship should look like and by expanding the boundaries of what was permissible in the arena of congressional warfare. Washington was becoming a “less civil government, it’s becoming more polarized and it’s becoming more vicious,” Wright told C-SPAN.35 Gingrich was not responsible for growing partisan polarization on Capitol Hill, but he legitimated ruthless and destructive practices that had once been relegated to the margins.
Following a battle plan similar to the one he gave Paul Weyrich in 1975 when he was still a hungry political striver, Gingrich nationalized the 1994 midterms by drafting his “Contract with America,” a slick ten-point plan that combined conservative programmatic goals including a balanced budget amendment, an anticrime package, and higher defense spending with congressional reforms that built on his long-cherished themes. Gingrich proposed subjecting Congress to the laws that applied to the rest of the country, imposing term limits on committee chairs, and requiring that committee meetings be open to the public. Gingrich coordinated with hundreds of campaigns across the nation in order to make sure they delivered a common message. The Contract with America was a key part of the final weeks of Republican campaigns in 1994. They used the “document,” distributed as a tear-out page in TV Guide that was designed to be placed on Americans’ refrigerators, to define their candidacies. The contract offered voters a checklist to monitor after the election, to assure them that the Republicans would keep fighting for the ideals of Ronald Reagan while changing the broken legislative branch of government. “He is chief cheerleader, chief fund-raiser, chief recruiter and chief message developer,” New York’s Bill Paxon, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said of Gingrich.36
Gingrich’s plan worked. For the first time in forty years, Republicans took over the House and the Senate. More than thirty-four Democratic incumbents, including Dan Rostenkowski and Jack Brooks, lost their seats. The number of Republicans in the House swelled from 176 to 230. In the Senate, their majority rose to fifty-four. In the Cobb Galleria Centre ballroom in Atlanta, Georgia, embellished with “Newt Blue,” Gingrich walked into a room of boisterous supporters who chanted, “Speaker! Speaker! Speaker!” “This is the beginning of the revolution!” proclaimed a young, up-and-coming Sean Hannity on his Georgia radio talk show on WGST. And it surprised no one when House Republicans unanimously elected Newt Gingrich their Speaker, making him the most powerful person in Congress. He replaced Robert Michel, who had retired from the House under relentless pressure from Gingrich. Almost nobody in the GOP had anything bad to say about Gingrich at that moment. Unlike in 1954, after the GOP leadership decided to end its four-year reliance on the controversial renegade senator Joseph McCarthy, whom they had used to attack the Democrats before losing their majority,37 this time the party elite never put on the brakes. Instead, they made the renegade their leader. Gingrich was the new normal, and he was seen as being good for the party. He promised something and delivered. Whatever they might once have thought about his tactics, they worked. Winning felt good, and for the once-beaten-down GOP it was the best revenge.
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More than five years after Wright left Washington and settled into a second act back in Fort Worth, where he wrote and taught courses at Texas Christian University, Gingrich got what he’d come to Washington for sixteen years earlier. The former Speaker watched in dismay as the media showered attention on Gingrich, who treated his perch like the presidency, depicting him as a brilliant political mastermind and the exciting voice of a new generation in the GOP. Gingrich had reached the top of the congressional hierarchy, the post that Wright had once proudly held. Toppling Speaker Wright had been pivotal to his ascent.
After Gingrich took over as Speaker, Wright asked the House Chaplain to deliver a lengthy handwritten note to his successor. (He didn’t bring it himself, realizing that the media would turn it into a sensational story.) In the missive, written on February 15, 1995, from his perch in Fort Worth, Wright did what he felt was “one of the most difficult things” in his life—offering Gingrich full forgiveness. His heartfelt letter expressed genuine admiration for Gingrich’s “tactical leadership” before explaining that he was “angry and personally offended” that Gingrich had called him a “crook.” The language, Wright said, was “inappropriate and uncalled for.” Wright believed that Gingrich owed him an apology. “If you are a gentleman, you’ll give one.” Even though a respected lawyer had encouraged him to “sue you for slander,” Wright explained that he didn’t want to add that “harassment” and “distraction” to his new job. So, though it was “not easy for me,” Wright wrote, “I want you to know that I forgive you. . . . We all have recited: ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.’ To repeat the words is easy. To perform the deed is difficult. At least it often is for me. But you are forgiven. Totally. It’s wiped out. That and the other hostile things you have said and caused to be done to me and Betsy in the past. We forgive you.” In response, Gingrich could barely muster an ounce of sympathy. In a letter that was not written until December 3, the Speaker responded that he “thought and prayed over your personal note,” and stated that “I wish you no ill and I will seek to avoid saying anything that would further hurt you or your family.” Wishing Wright a good holiday season without “distraction from the news media or me,” Gingrich simply thanked him for writing the note, nothing more.38
The next four years were a roller coaster in Washington as Gingrich, whom Time named its 1995 “Man of the Year,” unleashed his style of partisan warfare from the highest levels of power. Facing off against President Clinton, Republicans under Gingrich demonstrated that they would make extreme threats, such as allowing the federal government to shut down over a budget dispute with the White House. If Clinton didn’t think Gingrich would go through with this, he did, leaving tourists stranded at the National Zoo in Washington, government workers without paychecks, and Americans hoping to go overseas unable to obtain visas. Republicans suffered a national backlash against their tactics. But Gingrich didn’t care. Within the GOP, he was a hero.
From the moment Gingrich had become Speaker, House Republicans had investigated, investigated, and investigated the Clinton administration, doing everything they possibly could to undermine the president’s standing. Speaker Gingrich had strengthened the institutional apparatus of Congress to undertake this process by merging a number of committees with oversight power into the Government Reform and Oversight Committee. He stacked this committee, which had more oversight power than any committee in the history of the House, with loyal freshmen and appointed Indi
ana’s Dan Burton as the chair in 1997.39 Burton, who was known as a “pit bull” and had proposed mandatory AIDS testing for every citizen, was part of Gingrich’s rotating cabal of COS members in the 1980s who used C-SPAN as a platform to tarnish the reputation of Democrats. Burton had led the infamous campaign in 1994 challenging the official finding that the White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster had committed suicide, fueling conspiracy theories that he had been murdered.40
And yet life at the top, Gingrich would find, was not the smooth sailing he had envisioned. The instability that Gingrich had created for congressional leaders turned against him and the Republicans when they controlled the institution. In 1997, Gingrich became the first Speaker in the history of the institution to be punished for violating the ethics rules. The Connecticut Republican Nancy Johnson, chairwoman of the Ethics Committee, who had once watched in bittersweet dismay at the takedown of Jim Wright, said when presenting the resolution to her colleagues, “The penalty is tough and unprecedented. It is also appropriate. No one is above the rules of the House.”41 Whereas Wright stepped down before the House moved forward with his case, Gingrich remained in place as the House voted 395 to 28 to reprimand him and impose a $300,000 financial fine for his using tax-exempt contributions to support partisan videos (masked as educational courses) and then misleading the Ethics Committee about what he had done. Still, he held on to his position.
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