It's My Party

by Peter Robinson

  What went wrong? When I posed the question to Gingrich himself, he answered, in effect, nothing.

  “Go back and look at the assumptions of Washington in the summer of 1994,” Gingrich said. Everyone in Washington—the administration, Congress, the press—believed the federal government would run $200 billion a year deficits indefinitely, that taxes would continue to go up, that welfare would remain an unreformed mess, and that federal spending would continue to grow. “Now look at the accomplishments of the last five years,” Gingrich said. The federal budget is in surplus, taxes have been trimmed, welfare has been reformed, and although federal spending has indeed continued to grow, the economy has grown even faster, so that relative to the private sector the government outlays have actually shrunk.

  “It’s like a movement in plate tectonics,” Gingrich said. His hair looked grayer than I remembered it from television, but other than that Newt was Newt—intense, voluble, self-assured. “We shifted the basic nature of American government about ten points to the right.”

  If Republicans had scored such a success, then why had the GOP seen its majority in the House reduced in the election of 1996, then reduced again in 1998? Why had Gingrich found himself forced to step down as speaker?

  “I was representing a proactive agenda executed through the legislative branch in opposition to the executive branch,” Gingrich replied. In other words, Gingrich was behaving as though he, and not Bill Clinton, was the president. “We pulled that off for three years, from 1994 through some of 1997. That’s probably as long as anybody in American history has ever been able to do it.”

  While Speaker Gingrich was spending those three years attempting to force President Clinton to cut programs and balance the budget, House Republicans saw their popularity plummet. The low moment took place during the government shutdown of 1995. Intent on balancing the budget, Gingrich gave Clinton a choice: either accept a Republican budget or close the government. Clinton closed the government. Functions considered “essential” continued—the Pentagon stayed open, Social Security checks continued to be put in the mail, and so on. But a great many “inessential” functions did indeed cease. The Smithsonian shut down. The National Parks closed. Gingrich was certain the public would blame the president. The public blamed the House Republicans instead. Although they had been hoping to increase their majority in the elections of 1996, the House Republicans lost eight seats instead. Their morale has never recovered. But what Gingrich sees when he looks at this record is success. “Now, for one wave of change,” he said, “what we accomplished is a hell of a deal.”

  Almost the moment my interview with him came to an end, it struck me that Gingrich was America’s answer to Napoleon Bonaparte.

  I do not mean to poke fun at Gingrich when I say this. I mean that the parallels between the two men are truly striking. Napoleon rose to power during a period of uncertainty and indecision in France, unifying the nation by demonstrating tactical brilliance and an indomitable will. As emperor, he remade the politics of Europe. But Napoleon overreached, embarking upon a project—crossing the entire continent of Europe to conquer the vast landmass of Russia—that one look at the map demonstrates to have been mad. Likewise Gingrich. He rose to power in the GOP when the party was still reeling from the defeat of George Bush, demonstrating Napoleon-like tactical brilliance and an indomitable will as he unified Republicans, then led them to victory. As speaker, he remade American politics, not as dramatically, to be sure, as Napoleon remade the politics of France, but nevertheless shifting American politics considerably to the right, just as he claimed when he spoke to me. But Gingrich overreached, embarking upon a project—turning the speakership into a “counterpresidency,” as George Will puts it—that a glance at American history shows the founders never intended and no speaker has ever been able to sustain.

  According to the notes of the small court of flatterers that accompanied him into exile, to listen to Napoleon hold forth on St. Helena you would have thought he was still emperor and that the catastrophic winter retreat from Moscow had never taken place. Once again, likewise Gingrich. He continues to radiate certitude so convincingly that when you listen to him you find yourself believing that only the victories mattered and that the defeats—the loss of morale, the shrunken majority, the way the public came to see Republicans in the House not as idealistic reformers but as hardhearted zealots—were all irrelevant.

  Which brings us back to the Republicans in the House. To understand their present state of mind, it helps to think of them as veterans of the Grande Armée. After all that Gingrich put them through, they might as well have trod barefoot through the snows of Russia.

  IMPEACHMENT, ANYONE?

  Journal entry:

  Searching for the office of Congressman Henry Hyde today, I got lost, coming to a stop at a T in one of the Rayburn Building’s dozens of identical marble hallways. For a moment I was completely disoriented. Then I smelled it. Cigar smoke. I followed the scent straight to Hyde’s office.

  In my experience there are two kinds of people who smoke cigars. The first kind is the arrogant jerk, a category that would include many Wall Street tycoons and southern sheriffs. Jerks like to lord it over others, and for them cigar smoke is an assertion of power. The second kind is the old gaffer, a category that would include one of my favorite great-uncles. They don’t mean anyone any harm. They picked up the cigar habit when they were young and still think of cigars as an innocent pleasure. Henry Hyde? After the impeachment proceedings, millions of Americans, who saw in Hyde a man maniacally bent on getting President Clinton, would assume that Hyde is the first kind of cigar smoker, the arrogant jerk. (One of the reasons I wrote this book is that during the impeachment proceedings my agent asked how a nice guy like me could belong to the same party as a jerk—he actually used the word—like Henry Hyde.) But after spending an hour with Hyde, I can tell you that he’s actually the second kind of cigar smoker, the old gaffer. I’ll go further than that. He’s one of the most appealing old gaffers I’ve ever met.

  When I walked into his office, Hyde was seated at his desk. The desk was heaped so high with letters, legal pads, mementos, newspapers, and other items that it looked as if the janitor had emptied a wastebasket on top of it the night before. Placed atop the desktop clutter—it would have been impossible to clear a space for it—lay a large, amber ashtray in which sat a lit cigar. Hyde stood to greet me happily. More than six feet tall and approaching, by my estimate, 260 pounds, Hyde wore a rumpled dark suit with suspenders in place of a belt. When I asked for permission to record our conversation, Hyde replied, “Tape away, tape away!” with an air of amused theatricality. The mane of white hair, the jollity—Hyde reminded me of Frank Morgan playing the Wizard of Oz, not the great and terrible Oz who frightened Dorothy and her friends, but the lovable old man behind the curtain.

  As chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Hyde conducted the hearings into the impeachment of President Clinton, then served as leader of the House managers during the Senate trial of the president. Puffing his cigar, Hyde answered every question about the impeachment proceedings that I put to him.

  Had the proceedings hurt him in his district? Hyde couldn’t say. “I never took a poll. I had a duty to perform as chairman of the Judiciary Committee regardless of the wishes of my district.”

  Had Hyde known just how bad the House managers looked on television? All eleven were white Christian males. Opposite them on the floor of the Senate, President Clinton’s defense team included an African-American woman, a Jew, and, in Charles Ruff, the eloquent White House counsel, a man in a wheelchair. The contest looked like eleven curmudgeons in bad suits taking on … the people. Hyde had indeed known just how bad it looked. But there had been nothing he could do about it. All the managers, he explained, were drawn from the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, a group that, with just one exception, was made up entirely of white Christian males. The exception was Mary Bono, who was completing the term of her husband,
Sonny Bono, after his death in a skiing accident the previous winter. Not even a lawyer, Bono had only served on the committee a matter of months. “If I had put her on it would have been an affirmative action move,” Hyde said. “I didn’t want to be hypocritical. So we did the best we could with what we had.”

  Hyde proved thoughtful, equable. I couldn’t even get him to criticize the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr. Believe me, I tried.

  Starr spent many years and tens of millions of dollars conducting investigations, I said. He probed Whitewater, in which the Clintons are alleged to have participated in defrauding a savings and loan institution; Travelgate, in which, as part of a plan to give contracts for government travel to Clinton cronies, the administration used the FBI to sully the reputations of the innocent civil servants who were running the White House travel office; and Filegate, in which Clinton operatives directed the FBI to give the White House nine hundred files on members of the Reagan and Bush administrations. Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate. All three involved allegations of serious wrongdoing, and two of the three, Travelgate and Filegate, involved gross abuses of presidential power. Yet when Kenneth Starr finally delivered his referral to Congress, it contained nothing but thousands of pages of Monica. Monica snapping her thong at the president. Monica talking dirty to the president. Monica performing sexual acts on the president while he spoke on the telephone to members of Congress. Henry Hyde served a long and honorable career in the House. Then Kenneth Starr decided to cap Hyde’s career with smut.

  “Weren’t you disappointed when you learned that Starr’s referral dealt with nothing but Monica?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Hyde replied. “We all wondered what had happened to the other scandals, especially Travelgate and File-gate, since there were so many patently bizarre aspects to both of those.”

  “Then don’t you believe that Starr should have done a better job? Don’t you believe that his referral should have included the other scandals?”

  Hyde puffed his cigar. He replied pleasantly. “I’ve not talked about it with Mr. Starr. I look forward to having that conversation with him someday.”

  Only once was I able to get Henry Hyde to mete out any blame. He fixed it on himself. When the Senate refused to permit the House managers to stage a genuine trial—the Senate imposed restrictions that ranged from the petty, refusing to let the managers use an overhead projector to present certain evidence, to the basic, limiting the managers to three witnesses, each of whom could only be questioned on videotape, not in person on the Senate floor—Hyde had been too courteous.

  “It might have been appropriate,” Hyde explained, “for me to stand up and say, ‘Gentlemen, in a fair trial, we ought to be able to present our case. We can’t. We’re hog-tied. I don’t think that’s what the Constitution envisioned.’ I never said anything like that. I just bowed gracefully from the waist and took what they gave us.”

  If Henry Hyde had been bitter, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Starr had forced Hyde to hold hearings only on Monica. The Senate had made it impossible for him to stage a trial. James Carville and other Clinton operatives had spent months reviling him. Cranks had threatened his life. The press had dug up an affair he had had three decades before, humiliating him. I kept expecting Hyde to avail himself of a standard technique of politicians, waving at me to turn off my tape recorder, then, safely off the record, savaging his enemies. Instead Hyde remained on the record, self-effacing and affable, refusing to speak ill of anyone but himself. Only once did his equanimity desert him. Even then he expressed not anger but bewilderment. For the life of him, Hyde said, he couldn’t understand why the American people had responded to the impeachment proceedings as they had.

  Hyde explained that he had never expected the Senate to convict the president. “But I was always of the mind that if the American people could hear the story in a coherent way, putting all the pieces together, they would become as revulsed at this situation as we [the House managers] were. That never happened.” Even though the Senate blocked a full trial, the House managers made it clear that the president had obstructed justice, lying under oath and tampering with witnesses. “But the poll figures never moved,” Hyde said.

  “Did that shake your confidence in the American people?” I asked.

  “Yes it did,” Hyde said. He took a long, thoughtful draw on his cigar. “What is the explanation? A lack of community concern? People saying to themselves, ‘My job is okay, the unemployment rate is down, interest rates are down, inflation is down?’ ” Hyde looked troubled. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. I’m still trying to figure it out.”

  It now looks as though the impeachment proceedings may have helped Republicans after all—the American people didn’t want Bill Clinton removed from office, but they came to hold the Clinton administration in such low regard that they don’t particularly want Al Gore to succeed Bill Clinton, either. Yet the House Republicans remain dazed by the impeachment proceedings all the same. Bill Clinton was the one who had a tawdry affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter, then obstructed justice to hide it. The House Republicans were the ones whose poll ratings fell. How could that have happened? If instead of pursuing a Republican agenda with zest and self-confidence the House Republicans find themselves scratching their heads, dazed and uncertain, they may perhaps be forgiven. They’re still trying to figure it out.

  THE MANAGING PARTNER

  Congressman Christopher Cox of California and I got to know each other when we worked at opposite ends of a hallway in the Reagan White House. Chris, who holds a degree from Harvard Law School, was a member of the counsel’s office. One of his duties was to prevent unauthorized use of the presidential seal.

  “It’s mostly little mom-and-pop outfits that misuse the seal,” Chris explained to me in his White House office one afternoon. He pulled open a drawer of his desk. Inside lay a heap of glass paperweights with the presidential seal engraved on the bottom, dinner plates with the presidential seal painted in the middle, and cellophane bags of stale peanuts with the presidential seal stamped on the side of each bag.

  “How do you get the people who make this stuff to stop?” I asked.

  “I write them a letter on White House stationery, telling them to cease and desist or face the full prosecutorial powers of the United States government.” Chris broke into a grin. “I like getting things done.”

  First elected to the House in 1988, just months after leaving the Reagan administration, Chris has demonstrated the same zest for getting things done as a member of Congress that he demonstrated as a member of the White House staff. Still trim and handsome he has authored a dozen important pieces of legislation, including one of the only two bills ever enacted over President Clinton’s veto, the 1995 Securities Litigation Reform Act. He has climbed into the ranks of the House leadership, serving as chairman of the House Policy Committee, a capacity in which he helps to establish the agenda for the entire Republican caucus. He chaired the select committee that investigated allegations of Chinese spying. In 1999, after nearly a year of work, Chris’s committee produced a three-volume report, which quickly became known as the Cox Report, concluding that the Chinese did indeed steal American nuclear secrets, leaping from 1950s-style nuclear weapons to 1990s-style nuclear weapons on the basis of what they learned, and that the Clinton administration let them get away with it. In recent months, Chris has authored proposals to rein in trial lawyers and to keep the Internet free of taxes.

  Given all that Chris had achieved in Congress, when I visited him on Capitol Hill I expected him to speak of the institution with pride. Instead he spoke about it with frustration. “Congress is a two-centuries-old bureaucracy. As everyone knows, the founders designed Congress with a lot of checks and balances to make sure that not a lot got done very fast.” Chris shook his head. “It worked. Not a lot does get done very fast.”

  Chris offered the Cox Report as a case in point. When he was appointed chairman of the select committee that published
the report, Chris knew that some of the committee’s findings would probably reflect badly on the Clinton administration. Chris therefore decided that he wanted the committee to be able to publish its report unanimously, without as much as a single dissent from any of its members, demonstrating that the report had the support of the committee’s four Democrats as well as its five Republicans. To produce a unanimous report, in turn, Chris decided that he had to avoid holding hearings in public. Now, public hearings represent a revered congressional tradition. Yet Chris was convinced that the members of his committee would find it impossible to resist partisan posturing once television cameras had been permitted into the committee room. Chris got lucky. Since much of the material the committee would be dealing with was classified, it soon became clear that the committee was going to have to hold many of its meetings in secret in any event. Chris was able to persuade the other members of the committee to hold the remainder of their meetings in secret as well. “There was a dividend to dealing with classified material,” he said.

  Even after sidestepping one of the most cumbersome aspects of congressional procedure, public hearings, Chris found that he still had to spend the next six months, the period during which the select committee conducted its investigations, working twelve to sixteen hours a day. “I put everything on hold, all the way up to and including a lot of family things. I was an absentee dad for a lot of this period of time,” Chris explained. When the three-volume Cox Report was finally published, every member of the select committee did indeed support it, making it one of the few unanimous and bipartisan committee reports that the House of Representatives has ever produced. Yet the work left Chris exhausted. “It was just a huge effort,” he said. “Huge.”