Sitting for an interview in his Texas home, with an artificial log burning in his gas fireplace as his two dogs napped on the floor, Wright told his New York Times interviewer, Sam Howe Verhovek, “Here I am determined that I’m going to be statesmanlike, and there you are tempting me” by bringing up Gingrich. With his bushy eyebrows, now totally white, becoming animated, he couldn’t resist saying, “McCarthy comes to mind.” Wright, who described Gingrich in his memoir as an “arsonist who torches the building without supposing that the flames could consume his own bedroom,” continued to maintain hope that the House could change for the better.42 He was wrong.
Gingrich’s ethical problems didn’t slow him down one bit. The Speaker forged ahead in going after President Clinton, who was Gingrich’s new Jim Wright, just at a grander level. Gingrich never hesitated to say whatever was necessary to tarnish the president’s reputation. He poached ideas from conspiracy theorists and repeated them from the post of a party leader. “He took these things that were confined to the margins of the conservative movement and mainstreamed them. What I think he saw was the potential for using them to throw sand in the gears of Clinton’s ability to govern,” recalled David Brock, a onetime Republican attack dog who had reformed his ways.43 The House Republican campaign led to President Clinton’s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice over his sexual relationship with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.
The public thought that impeachment was a step too far and punished Republicans in the midterm elections. Gingrich, who had pioneered this partisan warfare, paid the price. He had become a liability. He now had a checkered ethical record and a compromising sexual affair of his own, and Republicans didn’t flinch at asking him to step down. Gingrich had no one to blame but himself. Not only did his personal lifestyle expose the hypocrisy of his conservative moralism, but he had been hoisted by his own petard. He set the ground rules whereby political leaders were expendable if they got in the way of partisan needs. In Gingrich’s case, the pursuers were members of his own party. Even though they owed their power to him, they would not let him jeopardize their control of the House and use it to block a Democratic president. His presumed successor, Louisiana’s Robert Livingston, didn’t even make it to the Speaker’s chair. In a dramatic moment, Livingston surprised his colleagues during a speech in which he called on Clinton to step down by announcing that he would resign. His former extramarital affairs also made him a liability. Republicans picked the Illinois Republican Dennis Hastert as their Speaker. The low-key Hastert, who seemed squeaky clean, would reestablish some order among Republicans, although years later it would be discovered that he was guilty of the worst crimes in the bunch.
At some level, as painful as Gingrich’s downfall was, he might have found some solace in watching his students heed his lessons. Nothing was sacrosanct in Washington. What could be more Gingrich than that?
It was an exhausting era where there were no winners, least of all the American people. An entire generation of Democrats and Republicans came of professional age watching a brutal style of political warfare in the 1980s and 1990s that spared nobody. The kinds of political fights that were once associated with the extreme fringes of democracy entered the mainstream, where they would stay.
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Early on, when writing about the dangerous curiosity that the young Newt Gingrich appeared to be, Speaker Wright had been correct in saying that he was like Joseph McCarthy. The difference was that the Wisconsin senator had been quashed within a few years in the early 1950s, whereas Gingrich climbed all the way to the top. His rabid political style became the echo chamber of the Republican Party. Now nothing was out of bounds as to what either party could do to the other in its drive to obtain a majority. Everything and everyone was fair game.
Although politics was always rough in America, and the nostalgia for better times is usually misplaced, the overall level of respect for elected officials and governance rapidly diminished as a result of this era in congressional history. With distrust in government and the willingness to obstruct legislation on the rise, the better angels that were once the staples of our democracy—reasoned opposition, compromise, civil discourse, respect—could no longer keep darker drives or sentiments in check.44 Under Gingrich, the dark id of democratic politics triumphed in this scorched-earth battle. The Tea Party Republicans elected in 2010 in a backlash to President Barack Obama’s first two years in office embodied everything that Gingrich had preached. In the Senate, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell perfected this style of politics in the upper chamber. Their generation assumed that Gingrich’s partisanship was the new normal. As Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, two beacons of fair-minded Washington punditry, admitted in The Washington Post, “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”45 Their hostage-taking approach to politics—where legislative norms were shattered and ordinary decisions, such as raising the federal debt ceiling or funding the government, became tools to achieve political power regardless of the costs to the democracy—grew directly out of Gingrich’s having made anything permissible by bringing down the Speaker.46 Whereas individual leaders were expendable in Gingrich’s 1989 worldview, routine legislative processes were on the cutting room floor by the time of Obama’s presidency.47
When Gingrich ran for president in 2012, Wright, who was eighty-nine years old, seemed less reluctant to state his opinion of the former Speaker. Calling Gingrich “very sociopathic” in an interview with The Dallas Morning News, he said, “In my view, he’s not the kind of person who we should put in a position of authority or responsibility over other people. He has an insatiable desire to attack and scandalize anyone who seems to stand in the way of his own personal desires and ambitions.”48 One of the people whom Gingrich immediately hired to assist him with his campaign was the Republican pollster and strategist Kellyanne Conway, who had built her reputation by working for the Speaker in the 1990s. Conway sold her client to the public as a politician who offered a unique mix: he was an outsider with “inside knowledge.”49
Gingrich’s presidential campaign was one part Reagan and one part Tea Party. He drew on many of the now traditional goals from the 1980s, including tax cuts, deregulation, and restricting abortion, while also appealing to a new brand of conservatives. He pledged to build a fence along the U.S.–Mexico border and defended the Apprentice star Donald Trump’s spurious and easily disputed claims that President Obama was not actually born in the United States. “I know that there is a desperate need to attach racism to everything but in fact I think that Donald Trump said what he said because it’s the right thing for him to say,” the candidate said to reporters in the lobby of a Trump hotel.50 He couldn’t resist championing a few outlandish ideas, such as his belief that child labor laws were outdated. Gone were his moderate positions, including his support for environmentalism and an individual mandate to purchase health care.
Following poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, Gingrich surprised the experts as his poll numbers rose. He found success by positioning himself as a conservative populist, attacking the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney for having worked at Bain Capital. Gingrich claimed that Romney’s cutthroat investment decisions left working-class towns in shambles. When he won the South Carolina primary, some experts started to think that he had a real shot at the nomination. He also used attacks on the news media as a pillar of his message. “The thing that struck me was what conservative audiences reacted to, even more than attacks on Obama, was attacks on the media,” Gingrich said.51 But his campaign lacked discipline. Despite Conway’s best efforts, Gingrich kept veering off message, and his management style was a total mess. His moneymaking ventures as a consultant and businessman—more than $100 millio
n earned in his first decade after being Speaker—became problematic for someone who wanted to be seen as a man of the people.52 As the campaign sputtered in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, Gingrich decided to suspend his operations in May and to endorse Romney. Despite his failure to secure the nomination, he proved that he was still a serious presence in national politics. “With this campaign, Gingrich established himself as someone who has been a serious force in Republican politics in five different decades, a pretty remarkable accomplishment,” noted the National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein.53
But his worldview remained the same as it had been the year that he brought down Speaker Wright. During an interview with the conservative pundit William Kristol in 2014, Gingrich took a look back at his life and career. To sum up his views about the different psychologies within his party, he explained to Kristol that the Republican establishment’s goal was to “get as much as it can without being disruptive.” The heart of the Republican insurgency, from Goldwater to himself, was “to be as disruptive as necessary to get what you want.”54
Enter Donald J. Trump. Reflecting on his presidential victory in 2016, the outgoing president, Obama, told his biographer David Remnick just weeks after the election, “We’ve seen this coming. Donald Trump is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years. What surprised me was the degree to which those tactics and rhetoric completely jumped the rails. There were no governing principles, there was no one to say, ‘No, this is going too far, this isn’t what we stand for.’ But we’ve seen it for eight years, even with reasonable people like John Boehner, who, when push came to shove, wouldn’t push back against these currents.”55
The forty-fourth president was right. When Tea Party Republicans stormed into town after the 2010 midterm elections, with their nihilistic view of government as well as their insistence on doing whatever was necessary to bring down the status quo, and Donald Trump shocked the nation by winning the 2016 election against one of the most experienced public servants in modern political history, all of them had a debt to the anti-establishment conservative populism pioneered by Newt Gingrich that shaped an entire generation of Republicans. The Wright scandal was the beginning of this end, and its shadow looms large and grows longer with each passing day.
Elected in 1954, Jim Wright came of age in an era of Congress dominated by pork-barrel spending, bipartisan deal making, and closed-room negotiations. Younger members followed Speaker Sam Rayburn’s dictate, “to get along, go along.” On November 22, 1963, Wright welcomes Vice President Lyndon Johnson and President John F. Kennedy at a rally in Fort Worth. Later that day, Kennedy would travel to Dallas, where he would be assassinated.
Newt Gingrich, who received a Ph.D. from Tulane University, started his career as a history professor at West Georgia College in 1970.
Gingrich speaking during his 1976 campaign for the House of Representatives against Democrat John Flynt—his second attempt—surrounded by his wife Jackie and their two daughters, Jackie Sue and Kathy. He won office two years later when Flynt retired. The first Republican to represent this district, Gingrich shifted to the right and campaigned as part of the growing conservative movement.
Speaker-elect of the House Tip O’Neill and Wright meet with the press on December 6, 1976, after Democrats elected Wright to be majority leader. Given that younger Democrats had been ousting old southern barons in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, few pundits expected Wright to be victorious. But a four-way race opened up space for him to defeat two prominent reform-oriented colleagues.
President Ronald Reagan delivers his inaugural address from the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 1981. Gingrich, who watched from the crowd, still felt that Democratic control of the House of Representatives meant the “Reagan Revolution” would be stifled, and that the media would blame the president. Reagan’s election left him doubly determined to do whatever it took to win majority control.
In early May 1984, Gingrich and his allies in the Conservative Opportunity Society (COS) orchestrated a series of blistering attacks on Democrats in front of the C-SPAN cameras. Gingrich, who understood better than most the potential of cable television, read from a report that criticized Democrats for being “weak on defense.” Viewers could not see that the chamber was empty when Republicans called on Democrats to respond.
Gingrich’s personal life was always problematic. A syndicated Doonesbury cartoon in 1984 popularized the story from the left-wing magazine Mother Jones, whose reporter found that Gingrich discussed divorce with his wife while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery.
The Conservative Opportunity Society emerged as the congressional wing of the Reagan Revolution. In 1986, the year that Democrats would retake control of the U.S. Senate, Reagan met Gingrich and Robert Walker (PA) and Connie Mack (FL) of COS. Walker, an unexpected star to conservative C-SPAN viewers, looks toward the camera.
The mood among Republicans was bleak in the weeks that followed the 1986 midterm elections. Not only had Democrats recaptured control of the Senate, but the Iran-contra scandal stoked fears that the president could be impeached. At this cabinet room meeting on November 25, Reagan is in a state of shock as he meets with congressional leaders about the sales of arms to Iran, including Senators Robert Dole and Robert Byrd, as well as Minority Leader Michel and the next Speaker of the House, Wright.
Having reached the pinnacle of power, Wright stands proudly in the doorway of his office in 1987, his first year as Speaker.
Wright’s diplomatic efforts in Central America to bring an end to the Nicaraguan civil war angered conservative Republicans. On August 5, 1987, Wright and Robert Michel stood outside the White House following the announcement of a Central American peace plan.
Bipartisan good government organizations created in the 1970s in the wake of Watergate demanded higher standards from politicians. Gingrich and newspaper reporters had raised questions about Wright’s behavior. When Fred Wertheimer and his organization Common Cause called on the House Ethics Committee to launch an investigation into Wright in May 1988, Gingrich’s campaign against the Speaker gained more legitimacy.
Gingrich turned Wright’s legislative work and personal relationships in his district into a political vulnerability. The ethics investigation looked into whether Fort Worth real estate developer George Mallick had given Wright, his long-time friend and investment partner, sizable gifts in exchange for influence over federal legislation that benefited his business.
The redevelopment of the Fort Worth Stock Yards into a major tourist attraction became another part of the investigation. While Wright’s supporters praised his success at turning this area of the city into a stretch of town filled with saloons, restaurants, stores, museums, and western heritage celebrations, critics like Gingrich argued that the federal funding used in this project was part of a sordid nexus of government money, real estate developers, and crooked congressmen.
Gingrich found growing support from the Republican establishment, including the 1988 Republican presidential nominee, Vice President George H. W. Bush. South Carolinian Lee Atwater, who ran Bush’s 1988 campaign, injected the Wright scandal into “mainstream” Republican politics. Confronted with criticism from Governor Michael Dukakis about the “sleaze factor” in the Reagan White House, Bush pointed to Wright as evidence that Democrats were corrupt. Atwater’s hardball style of politics meshed well with the campaign against the Speaker that Gingrich was leading in Congress.
Wright and his wife, Betty, at an event at the Capitol Hilton on December 18, 1988. Betty, who was usually dressed to the nines, also became a focus of the investigation. The Washington rumor mill blamed Wright’s need for money on her spending habits. The attacks on his wife were more upsetting to Wright than almost any o
ther part of the saga.
Wright meets with President Bush on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, February 8, 1989, soon after the House rejected the 51 percent pay raise. Wright had been caught off guard by the impact of conservative talk radio, which had been freed from restrictions with the elimination of the fairness doctrine. The poorly handled legislation undermined Wright’s standing within the Democratic caucus at the exact moment when he needed stronger support in his party.
Atwater (right), Ed Rollins (center), and Republican operative Roger Stone (left) meeting about GOP strategy. When Rollins, the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, announced that Wright would be “Target No. 1” in the 1990 midterm elections, Democrats ran for cover as they believed that the Speaker was making all of them vulnerable.
When President George H. W. Bush appointed Wyoming representative Dick Cheney, one of Wright’s fiercest critics, as secretary of defense one year after the failed confirmation of Senator John Tower, the position of House minority whip suddenly opened up and created a vacancy in the Republican leadership.
Gingrich had the uncanny ability to brush aside his own political scandals, even as he pursued the Speaker. On March 20, 1989, two days before Republicans voted for a new House minority whip, Newt and Marianne, his second wife, spoke to the press about his book deal for Window of Opportunity to counter ethics accusations that Democrats had leveled against him.
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