Burning Down the House
Page 37
Because of his role in the Wright investigation, Gingrich gained an official seat in the Republican leadership, a turning point in his career. Robert Michel, a symbol of bipartisan civility who had nonetheless capitalized on his colleague’s fierce campaign against the Democratic leadership, congratulated Gingrich when he won the race for minority whip on March 22, 1989.
By the spring of 1989, Democrats felt that the Speaker was under siege as Gingrich escalated his attacks. Flanked by top House Democrats, Wright stands in the Rayburn Room on April 13, in front of a portrait of George Washington (who never told a lie), at a press conference to respond to the ethics charges.
Gingrich walks around the halls of the Capitol carrying the House Ethics Committee report in his arms.
Congressman Julian Dixon (CA), chairman of the House Ethics Committee, directs a hearing on April 20, 1989. Special prosecutor Richard Phelan sits to his left. Phelan’s ruthless prosecutorial methods were extremely effective at raising concerns within the Ethics Committee and the media even though Wright’s supporters pointed to mistakes, misstatements, and misleading information contained in his lengthy report. Wright’s attorneys mounted a legalistic defense of their client while Phelan painted a damning portrait of corruption and scandalous behavior.
On April 21, the day after a last ditch effort to dismiss the charges failed, Wright sits with a forced smile for the cameras in his Capitol Hill office. He was barely containing his frustration that the Ethics Committee was dragging its feet in allowing him to respond to the accusation that he was guilty of sixty-nine violations of House rules.
Wright’s standing deteriorated rapidly on May 4, 1989, when journalist Ken Ringle (pictured here at his desk) published a bombshell story in The Washington Post. The lengthy piece revolved around a brutal assault that had taken place years earlier on Pamela Small by John Mack, who had gone on to become Speaker Wright’s top aide.
Colorado representative Pat Schroeder, who had remained loyal to the Speaker despite her doubts about his liberalism, emerged as one of the most vocal opponents of Mack being able to keep his job. Schroeder was outraged by the story and saw Mack’s presence in the leadership as further confirmation of the male culture that dominated Capitol Hill.
When the powerful majority whip Tony Coelho resigned on May 27 because of his own financial ethics scandal, the murmurs about Speaker Wright stepping down intensified.
On May 31, 1989, Wright delivered his resignation speech, in which he warned against “mindless cannibalism.” Here he holds up a copy of Reflections of a Public Man, a book that became the focus of the scandal.
Gingrich listens angrily to Wright’s resignation speech. Gingrich felt that Wright was blaming Republican partisanship rather than taking responsibility for his own actions. At the same time, Gingrich realized that he had become a major political force in Washington.
One of the workers in Jim Wright’s district office captures the feeling of many Capitol Hill veterans about the resignation speech.
Wright and his wife depart from the Capitol following the resignation speech. Wright hoped that his stepping down would calm the partisan wars on Capitol Hill. A horde of reporters are on hand to capture this historic moment. Betty’s steely glare offers a stark contrast to the Speaker’s smile.
Wright’s hopes of ending the worsening partisan wars did not come true. Instead, Gingrich went on to become one of the nation’s most influential Republicans as a result of his taking down Wright. His style of Republican partisanship prevailed. In November 1994, Republicans would take control of Congress for the first time in forty years and elect Gingrich as Speaker of the House.
Former Speakers Wright, Tom Foley, Gingrich, and Dennis Hastert meet during a tense ceremony on November 12, 2003. Wright forgave Gingrich, but the Georgian never really apologized for what he had done.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many colleagues, friends, and family members have made this book possible. As most people who know me understand, I work at a frenetic pace. At Penguin Press, Scott Moyers raised some important questions early that helped me develop my argument, urged me to slow down, and pushed me to use some “intellectual muscle” that had been dormant. My editor, Christopher Richards, offered shrewd editorial comments and guided me through the final stages of turning this manuscript into the book that you have just read. He offered the kinds of careful line edits that are rare in this day and age of publishing. Ryan Boyle, my production editor, and Ingrid Sterner, the copyeditor, brought the book to a smooth conclusion. My agents, Andrew Wylie and Jacqueline Ko, encouraged me to move forward with the book from the moment that I pitched Andrew the idea.
Several colleagues were generous enough to read the manuscript and provide commentary, including Eric Alterman, John Lawrence, and Eric Schickler. Mike Crispin, Mark Schmitt, and Kevin Kruse offered comments on portions of the book. Jake Blumgart assisted me with the final fact-checking, while David Walsh collected the permissions for the photos.
Susan Leon and Madeleine Adams provided excellent editorial assistance. Blynne Olivieri and Michael Camp of the University of West Georgia, Susan Swain of Texas Christian University, and Frank Mackaman of the Dirksen Congressional Center all helped me move through the archival collections that are the foundation of this book. Numerous participants from this saga were generous enough to allow me to interview them about their recollections. Thanks as well to David Murph for taking me to meet with Speaker Wright and sharing his own memories. Norma Ritchson was kind enough to arrange the interview with the Speaker.
Although Newt Gingrich was unfortunately unable to find time for an interview, I was able to use his archives, one of the most comprehensive and thorough collections of congressional papers that I have encountered in my career. While most congressional archives are filled with letters from constituents and copies of public documents, Gingrich’s papers include private memoranda, staff memos, taped interviews, and strategy documents that offered me a rare window into the career of a major legislator.
Special thanks to John Barry, who wrote a magnificent book about Speaker Wright the year of his downfall. Not only has John been a friend, generous with his advice and smart suggestions, but he also provided me with many boxes of material that he had collected for his own research years ago. Most important, he gave me the hard-to-get minutes of the closed Ethics Committee hearings about Speaker Wright. The material was wonderful, as was his guidance. He read through the final manuscript with great care, pointing out some errors in the draft and pushing me to refine the narrative. I am grateful for my new friendship with him and his delightful wife, Anne.
Princeton University continues to provide the best intellectual home possible. The deans and department chairs have been strong supporters of my work. Bernadette Yeager kept me organized and handled more paperwork than I can thank her for. New America and the New-York Historical Society also offered me fellowships so that I could spend my sabbatical years working on the book.
My family has been absolutely incredible. My parents, Gerald and Viviana Zelizer, as well as my mother-in-law, Ellie, have been supportive and enthusiastic. My wife, Meg, read through the book, talked over the story many (many!) times, and always provided insightful suggestions. More important, she is my best friend in the world. She keeps us laughing and makes sure that we keep moving forward. We do everything together, we continue to build a wonderful life, and she has created a rock-solid foundation upon which everything else rests. She moved us to our city of dreams, New York, where this book came alive.
Our children, Abigail, Sophia, Nathan, and Claire, make the home magic, and it has been great watching them become young adults in the course of completing this work. One day, I hope that they will see the political world become a little more tempered, and perhaps they can be an essential part of making that true.
NO
TES
Abbreviations
CCP Common Cause Papers (Princeton, N.J.)
GHWBP George H. W. Bush Papers (College Station, Tex.)
JWA Jim Wright Papers (Fort Worth, Tex.)
MSP Mel Steely Papers (Carrollton, Ga.)
NGP Newt Gingrich Papers (Carrollton, Ga.)
RMP Robert Michel Papers (Peoria, Ill.)
RRPL Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (Simi Valley, Calif.)
VTA Vanderbilt Television Archives (Nashville, Tenn.)
Oral History Interviews
John Barry, October 30, 2014
George “Hank” Brown, August 4, 2016
Mickey Edwards, July 13, 2015
Vic Fazio, August 3, 2016
Martin Frost, March 2, 2018
Mary Hadar, December 8, 2015
Brooks Jackson, December 17, 2014
Ladonna Lee, April 10, 2017
Fred McClure, September 9, 2016
Ginger McGuire, September 9, 2016, and July 13, 2019
David Montgomery, December 19, 2014
William Oldaker, July 9, 2015
David Osborne, April 17, 2017
Tom Petri, August 1, 2016
Richard Phelan, July 2, 2015
Dan Renberg, May 30, 2018
Kenneth Ringle, November 24, 2015, and June 30, 2015
Ed Rollins, May 29, 2018
Patricia Schroeder, August 17, 2018
Philip Sharp, November 2, 2016
Pamela Small, July 8, 2019
Suzy Smith, December 8, 2015
Robert Torricelli, May 15, 2017
Steve Waldman, May 26, 2015
Fred Wertheimer, July 21, 2015
Jim Wright, February 5, 2015
Robert Wright, April 16, 2015
Prologue: Speak Like Newt
1. McKay Coppins, “The Man Who Broke Politics,” Atlantic, November 2018.
2. Mara Siegler, “Steve Bannon Almost Appeared in Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’” New York Post, September 14, 2018.
3. The broader impact of this polarization on American life and politics can be found in Kevin Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (New York: Norton, 2019); Michael Tomasky, If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How It Might Be Saved (New York: Liverright, 2019); Steve Kornacki, The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism (New York: Ecco, 2018); E. J. Dionne Jr., Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism—from Goldwater to Trump and Beyond (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016); Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2012); Ronald Brownstein, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (New York: Penguin, 2008).
4. Joanne Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).
5. Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, 26.
6. Tim Alberta, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump (New York: Harper, 2019), 340.
7. Newt Gingrich, “What I Saw at President Trump’s Inauguration,” Fox News, January 25, 2017, www.foxnews.com/opinion/newt-gingrich-what-i-saw-at-president-trumps-inauguration.
8. Sarah Westwood, “The Expendables,” Washington Examiner, December 16, 2016.
9. Newt Gingrich, Understanding Trump (New York: Hachette, 2017). Gingrich came out with another book in 2018 praising Trump’s first year and a half as president. See Gingrich, Trump’s America: The Truth About Our Nation’s Great Comeback (New York: Center Street, 2017).
10. The only other book on this story is John M. Barry, The Ambition and the Power: A True Story of Washington (New York: Viking, 1989). Barry’s book is outstanding. Writing right as the scandal came to an end, Barry focused on the ability of Gingrich to manipulate a gullible press into being part of his attack. My book, which sees the press and good-government organizations in a more positive light, and Speaker Wright as well as the Democrats in a much more problematic position, builds on Barry’s work. More than Barry, I argue that the Democrats played a bigger role in the outcome, both through the limits of the reforms they adopted in the 1970s and through the pressure they decided to put on the Speaker in fear for their political future. I also believe that the entire Republican Party, from the House minority leader, Robert Michel, to Vice President George H. W. Bush, was much more complicit in Gingrich’s campaign than previously assumed. Finally, with the perspective of hindsight, I also emphasize how Gingrich’s success was part of a much bigger sea change taking place in Republican politics that was not apparent when Barry wrote his book. The best biography of Jim Wright is J. Brooks Flippen, Speaker Jim Wright: Power, Scandal, and the Birth of Modern Politics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018).
Chapter 1: The Making of a Renegade Republican
1. Fred Gregorsky, Memo, November 20, 1978, box 230, no file, NGP.
2. Connie Bruck, “The Politics of Perception,” New Yorker, October 9, 1995, 53.
3. Robert Vickers, “Decision 2012: Meet the Newt Gingrich You Never Knew,” Penn Live, January 30, 2012.
4. Candace Gingrich with Chris Bull, The Accidental Activist: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Scribner, 1996), 30–31.
5. Gail Sheehy, “The Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich,” Vanity Fair, September 1995.
6. Mel Steely, The Gentleman from Georgia: The Biography of Newt Gingrich (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000), 4; Paul Walker, interview with Mel Steely, June 25, 1984, box 21, audiotapes, MSP.
7. “Ambitious Zoo Keeper,” Daily Boston Globe, September 1, 1954.
8. “A Conversation with Newt Gingrich,” C-SPAN video archives, December 10, 1986. All of the C-SPAN video archives can be found at www.c-span.org.
9. Nancy Gibbs and Karen Tumulty, “Newt Gingrich, Master of the House,” Time, December 25, 1996.
10. Sheehy, “Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich”; Newt Gingrich, interview with Mel Steely, January 13, 1989, box 21, audiotapes, MSP.
11. Gingrich, interview with Steely, January 13, 1989.
12. Steely, Gentleman from Georgia, 10.
13. Steely, Gentleman from Georgia, 12.
14. Steely, Gentleman from Georgia, 4–5; Walker, interview with Steely, June 25, 1984.
15. Steely, Gentleman from Georgia, 5.
16. Newt Gingrich, interview with Morton Kondracke, December 13, 2012, Jack Kemp Oral History Archive, 2; Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1960, rev. ed. (New York: American Past, 1988), 60–61.
17. Steely, Gentleman from Georgia, 15.
18. Steely, Gentleman from Georgia, 16–17.
19. Gingrich, interview with Mel Steely, January 13, 1989.
20. Dale Russakoff, “He Knew What He Wanted,” Washington Post, December 18, 1994.
21. Craig Shirley, Citizen Newt: The Making of a Reagan Conservative (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2017), xxi.
22. David Kramer, “The Long March of Newt Gingrich,” Frontline, PBS, January 16, 1996, www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/newt.
23. Fred Gregorsky, “The Basics of Newt Gingrich,” April–September 1983, box 230, NGP.
24. Gregorsky, “The Basics of Newt Gingrich.”
25. Adam Hochschild, “What Gingrich Didn’t Learn in Congo,” New York Times, December 4, 2011; Joshua Keating, “Newt in the Congo,” FP, November 22, 2011; Newton Leroy Gingrich, “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo, 1945–1960” (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1971).
26. Shirley, Citizen Newt, xx–xxi.
27. On the trends that were reshaping the entire Sunbelt, see Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economi
c Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
28. Steely, Gentleman from Georgia, 47.
29. Shirley, Citizen Newt, 4.
30. “Gingrich Accuses Congress of Incompetency and Indifference,” Atlanta Daily World, April 18, 1974.
31. “Newt Gingrich,” Atlanta Daily World, November 3, 1974.
32. Editorial Board, “We Support Gingrich Too,” Atlanta Daily World, November 5, 1974.
33. Richard D. Lyons, “Charges of Wrongdoing Being Ignored in Congress Races,” New York Times, October 27, 1976.
34. Newt Gingrich, Lessons Learned the Hard Way (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 85.
35. John Dillin, “How Can Republicans Make a Comeback?,” Christian Science Monitor, November 7, 1974.
36. Steely, Gentleman from Georgia, 64.
37. Gibbs and Tumulty, “Newt Gingrich: Master of the House.”
38. Bruck, “Politics of Perception,” 55.
39. Shirley, Citizen Newt, 15.
40. Lyons, “Charges of Wrongdoing Being Ignored in Congress Races.”
41. John A. Lawrence, The Class of ’74: Congress After Watergate and the Roots of Partisanship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).
42. “Gingrich Speaks to Young Republicans,” press release, August 24, 1976, box 38, File: Speeches, NGP.
43. Steely, Gentleman from Georgia, 81.
44. “Goldwater to Visit 6th District,” Atlanta Daily World, October 8, 1976.