20

          THE  MAN  WHO  LEFT  THE  HOUSE

           BECAUSE  HE  LOVED  IT

            For 27 years I watched Jim Wright.  For most of his Congressional career I stood at his elbow.  I saw him scrape Stockyards horse dung off his boots as an obscure Congressman from Fort Worth and I saw him gavel into session the historic 100th Congress of the United States.  I looked over his shoulder as he talked with poor bedraggled wretches in homeless shelters and with Presidents and Prime Ministers.  I saw him  happy enough to float on a cloud and sad enough to cry, if he had only known how.  Over these years I got to know him pretty well.  Except for the times when we felt like strangling each other, I enjoyed it a lot. 

            On January 6, 1987, this man, Jim Wright, my boss and my friend, was sworn in as Speaker of the House of Representatives--a boyhood dream come true.  He was the elect of the elect--occupying an office which had been held only by 47 other Americans in the history of our country.  It was heady stuff to see the man I had come to know so well now occupying the supreme legislative office mandated by Article I of the Constitution of the richest and strongest nation on earth. 

            While I realized that the new Speaker had inherited this Bicentennial Congress only as a happenstance of the calendar, I hoped this was a favorable omen.  Even if not, it was an opportunity to watch history being written on the first few calendar pages of our country’s third century.  On one of those pages maybe I could even leave an anonymous smudged fingerprint.

            Even though many of us on his staff had done our best to help him reach this goal, this victory was his alone.  He had paid his dues and bided his time.  Impatient by nature, he had restlessly served 32 years in the House, including 10 as Majority Leader enveloped in the sizable shadow of his friend Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill.  

            But now this charming old pol had returned to his beloved Boston, and Jim Wright was the inheritor not only of his awesome responsibilities but also of his  elegant office suite in the East Front of the Capitol.  The atmosphere reeked of history. 

            Outside, across the plaza, towered majestic magnolias and poplars and oaks, along with a massive English elm believed to be a hundred years older than the Capitol itself.  In the marble hallway in front of the Speaker’s suite stood a strapping Capitol policeman, guarding the former Mayor of Weatherford, Texas, who now was second in the Constitutional line of succession to the Presidency of the United States.

            Just outside the door of the new Speaker’s spacious private office sat his Executive Assistant, Kathy Mitchell, working both as his scheduler and private secretary with the same quiet efficiency she had given these tasks for most of her adult life.

            As Administrative Assistant and Chief of Staff to the Speaker, I had a private office with built-in bookcases, a handsome walnut desk, and a swivel chair suitable for a Supreme Court Justice.  At a desk nearby worked my associate, Anne Page.  She handled Air Force arrangements for official foreign trips for members.  In addition to many other duties as well, she always managed to sneak me notes identifying people in my office whose names she instinctively knew I couldn’t remember.     

            In this new, rarefied atmosphere, it was easy to feel intimidated.  Having your boss ascend to the Speakership is a sobering experience, and frankly I had a few concerns about the magnitude of the job.  All over Washington I knew there were fellows who would gladly have given the leftmost portion of certain highly-prized parts of their anatomy for the job I now held.  Moreover, many had better educations and higher IQ’s than I, not to mention fewer candles on their birthday cakes and considerably more hair. 

            Ironically, many of these people--some of them good friends of mine--yearned far more than I did for prominence and power.  It was nice, of course, suddenly to be addressed as Mr. Lynam by people who in the past had probably suspected I was a clerk-typist in the House stationery store.  But the fact is that I always felt pretty much like what I was--a Texas newspaper reporter, hired by Jim Wright a quarter century before, who had worked for him ever since with as much diligence and loyalty as I could muster.  My friend Craig Raupe always said there were two kinds of people in Congress--members and clerks--and you should damn well never forget which one you were.  I was a clerk. 

            Soon after meeting Jim Wright for the first time back in the early 1950’s, it was obvious to me that he had a mind that soaked up information faster than those paper towels sop up coffee spills on TV.  Moreover, he could retrieve information like a 486 computer.  At work I quickly learned the peril of giving him any information, even in casual conversation, unless you were absolutely sure what you were talking about.  Once in House debate I was stunned to hear him refer to a California school controversy that I had mentioned flippantly as a passing thought several years before.  I had not told him that my sole source for that information came from a couple of sentences on a radio newscast to which I was only half-listening. 

            Through the years, I came to admire his heart as well as his mind.  In an office conversation after work one night, he mentioned having read about a psychologist who advanced an interesting theory.  It held that the events which children experience in their 12th year are most decisive in shaping their feelings and values for the rest of their lives.  For Jim Wright himself, I realized later, this was surely true.  This formative year of his life had come during the depths of the Great Depression--and it profoundly affected the way he thought about the needs and hopes of everyday people.  

            Never realizing he had told the story before, he somberly recounted to me several times the pain and humiliation that befell his grandfather in those grim days.  He had labored faithfully on the same job for 23 years.  Yet the company abruptly fired him at age 63 to avoid paying the modest pension it had promised him at 65.  The family watched in anguish as this proud man’s sense of self-worth was steadily eroded away as he failed, day after day, in his desperate search to find another job.  As a youngster Jim Wright didn’t understand at first why his mother and father uprooted their family from their comfortable home in Weatherford and moved to Fort Worth.  Later he found out they had done so for only one reason--to rent an apartment in his grandfather’s house.  Without this rent money to make house payments, his grandfather and grandmother would have been evicted.

            Often he would recall, too, how his mother always shared their family’s food with jobless men who rode freight trains from town to town, searching in vain for work.  When these hungry vagabonds trudged to the back door of the Wright home, they always got a sandwich or a bowl of stew, even though his parents at one point were forced to sell the family piano to put food on their own table.  It was the memory of these bleak days, embedded forever in Jim Wright’s mind, that I believe provided the first defining moment of his Speakership.

            It all started quietly, in the dead of night, about six weeks earlier.  Driving down Constitution Avenue one morning, sleepy motorists were astonished to see a life-sized Bethlehem manger scene, the ultimate symbol of Christmas, standing prominently on the northeast corner of the pristine Capitol grounds.  A contingent of Washington’s homeless--the wretched refuse we prefer to have only on somebody else’s teeming shore--had erected the scene during the night and now had gathered protectively around it.  Mitch Snyder had struck again.

            You don’t remember Mitch Snyder?  Well, even if future scientists finally discover how to clone human beings, they would still have a problem building a Mitch Snyder.  There is no way the pieces would logically fit together.  You would need a batch of genes from a quiet, selfless humanitarian like Mother Teresa, spiked with a batch of combative genes from a crafty Washington political manipulator like Dick Morris.  On the surface, it would be an impossible mix.  Yet in Mitch Snyder, there it was.

            A former management consultant who once did a brief prison term, Snyder over the years had thrown his talent and energy into mobilizing help for the homeless people of Washington.  Others had done this, too, but none with the instinctive leadership ability--or the personal daring--of Mitch Snyder.

            Over the years the sight of Washington’s homeless people--wretched, ragged and often mentally impaired--had become as common as the sight of the city’s pigeon-splotched statues.  With their plastic bags and trademark grocery carts, these forlorn men and women sleep or sit staring blankly on street corners and in city parks.  Yet they seem largely invisible to most of the capital’s 9 to 5 downtown business crowd as well as to the GS-8’s laboring in obscurity behind the frosted glass panels in the corridors of government.

            Unable to stir much interest in the White House or Congress about the plight of these people, Mitch Snyder in 1984 took a bold and dangerous step.  During the President Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign, he began a one-man hunger strike, demanding  that the government make available a decaying and abandoned federal building on 2nd Street NW for use as a homeless shelter.  He nearly died. 

            The presidential campaign was in its 51st day, with the election only two days away.  Mitch Snyder had withered away into a skeletal ghost of himself.  Then, when word filtered out that “60 Minutes” was preparing a segment dramatizing this man’s willingness to sacrifice his life in an effort to help the homeless, President Reagan capitulated.  He agreed to turn the building into a “model” shelter, even though later, Mitch Snyder would have to fast twice more to get the $6 million that had been promised to refurbish the shelter. 

            After the success of that epic public drama, Mitch Snyder began to play the Washington press corps like Tiger Woods plays golf.  Always eager to puncture official pomposity in Washington, especially on behalf of a person who seems free of devious motives, reporters gloried in Mitch Snyder’s spunky attacks on the establishment and made his a household name.  As an educated and forceful man, Mitch Snyder could surely could have built a comfortable and affluent life for himself in the suburbs.  Yet he chose to sleep in a crowded and smelly homeless shelter, to dress in tattered jeans and to identify completely with the street people of Washington.  Soon his fame spread.  CBS did a movie called “Samaritan” on his good works.   The press enshrined him as “Mr. Homeless” in America and enthusiastically assisted him in high-pressuring Washington officialdom. 

            And then, a month and a half before Jim Wright was to become Speaker, Mitch Snyder turned his attention to Capitol Hill.  With the help of his homeless group, the Community for Creative Non-Violence, he erected the Christmas manger scene on the Capitol grounds as a disquieting holiday reminder that, like many Americans today, long ago in Bethlehem, even the Christ child was homeless. 

            For any such display, however meritorious its cause, to be placed on House and Senate property was, of course, a violation of federal law.  Fully aware of this, Mitch shrewdly organized a 24-hour vigil around the display.  This guaranteed that if the Capitol police tried to remove the exhibit from government property, they would face an angry confrontation with poor, homeless people who were there to protect it.  Wouldn’t the 11 o’clock news love this?  Wouldn’t the newspapers love scenes of the Capitol police brandishing nightsticks to subdue a group of poor, hungry people defending a Christian manger scene symbolizing the plight of the homeless? 

            Once again, Mitch Snyder had put Washington officialdom on the spot.   Christmas, a season of warmth and generosity,  was approaching.  The scene, with its Biblical figures, carried deep religious connotations.  While most Americans surely were concerned about the homeless, most probably thought that, when you came right down to it, helping these unfortunate people was really the government’s responsibility--certainly not that of individuals like themselves.

            Realizing how easily they could fall into the diabolical trap Mitch Snyder had set, neither the Capitol police nor their bosses, the Sergeants at Arms of the House and Senate, made any move against the display.  Not in a thousand years would any of these authorities have dared take any action unless they had direct orders from, well, uh, the Speaker.

            At this point, in early December, 1986, any action to move the display would have required an order from Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill.  Since his term as Speaker would not expire until the new Congress was convened in January, the likable red-faced Irishman still held ultimate authority over the Capitol police.  With Congress in recess, O’Neill was, of course, back home in Boston.  It is extremely doubtful  that he ever even considered ordering police action.  Even if so, his hand could have been stayed by his recollection of events like that of the United States Army attacking a rag-tag army of bonus marchers in Washington in 1932.  Shown in countless television documentaries today, these old newsreel films depict a haughty General Douglas MacArthur, astride a prancing horse, directing his troops against destitute World War I veterans.  Like the homeless of 1986, these Americans who fought at Saint Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne had come to the Capitol grounds seeking help from their government.  Tip O’Neill, a man with a big heart, would have cringed at being remembered as a latter-day Douglas MacArthur.  Besides, Tip O’Neill knew the torch was about to pass.  Within a matter of days, it would be January 6, 1987.

            This was the 105th anniversary of Sam Rayburn’s birth, and the day Jim Wright had chosen to take his oath of office.  It was a joyous, tumultuous day at the Capitol for hundreds of friends who had flown up from Texas, and for thousands of other well-wishers from the Washington area.  They watched the ceremony.  They celebrated.  Thousands of others back in Fort Worth celebrated, too, as they watched the events over a satellite television hookup.  Busy, euphoric and maybe  a bit dazed, Jim Wright enjoyed probably the most gratifying day of his life.  Friends who had known him since childhood swapped stories describing the disposition, the temperament and the character he would bring to this high office.  None knew that within 24 hours, a tiny, unexpected incident would let Jim Wright define himself more clearly than any of us could have ever done.

            Jack Russ was worried.  As Sergeant of Arms for the House, he shared with a Senate counterpart the day-to-day responsibility for the Capitol Police.  Realizing the Christmas manger scene on the Capitol grounds was as sensitive as an unexploded bomb, he nevertheless could bite his lip no longer.  He brought his problem to the new Speaker, who was busy getting settled in his Capitol office.

            As work crews moved in and out with furniture and books, Jack Russ explained that he had repeatedly warned Mitch Snyder and his followers that their display violated federal law. 

            “What do they say?” asked Jim Wright.

            “They don’t say anything.  They just stand there and smirk at me,” he said. Frustrated and angry over this blatant violation of a law he was sworn to enforce, he asked the new Speaker to give him permission to act.  He wanted to remove the display, by force if necessary, and to subdue and arrest any of the homeless people who tried to resist.

            Jim Wright walked to the window of his office.  In the fading winter sunlight, he silently gazed toward the northeast corner of the Capitol grounds.  His eyes were directed toward the manger scene, but I was not sure that was the only image in his mind.  In a moment, he turned back to the Sergeant at Arms.  “No, Jack,” he said.  “There’s got to be a better way.”  

            Disappointed, Jack Russ moved toward the door.  As he left, Jim Wright ordered him not to undertake police action--at least not right now. 

            “This is one,” he said quietly, “that I’m going to have to handle myself.”

            What happened next was vintage Jim Wright--and nobody could have been more surprised than Mitch Snyder.  The moment Jack Russ left the office, Jim Wright dispatched an exceptionally able member of our staff, young, soft-spoken Steve Charnovitz, to the manger scene.  “Find Mitch Snyder,” he said.  “Tell him  the Speaker would like to talk with him, if it’s convenient.”  Less than half an hour later, Mitch Snyder found himself sitting face to face and sipping coffee with a very unusual Washington official--one who, so far, at least, had neither scowled at him nor seemed intimidated by his presence.  

            You got the impression that he was far more surprised by Jim Wright’s friendly welcome than he would have been by a Capitol police SWAT team attack.  As he sat in his rumpled Army surplus jacket and tattered dungarees, he spoke movingly of the urgent needs of the hungry and the homeless--and how nobody in official Washington seemed even to be interested, much less willing to help.

            Almost begging, he said, “If you would just come down to the shelter with me, you would understand.”  And then came a moment I will remember forever.

            Jim Wright leaped from his chair and grabbed his topcoat.  “Let’s go!” he cried.  

            Mitch Snyder was petrified.  “Not now!” he protested, shaking his head in astonishment.

            Clearly unprepared for this kind of instantaneous response from anybody connected with the government, Mitch Snyder mumbled an explanation that it was nearly dark and besides, he wanted to notify the press of the Speaker’s scheduled visit.  Maybe it was my imagination, but in Jim Wright’s eye I thought I caught a twinkle which  lasted only a millisecond.  In any case, the message to me was unmistakable.  Even if his books had not yet been placed on the shelves, and even if his pictures had not yet been hung on the wall, the House of Representatives had a new and different kind of Speaker. 

            Three days later, escorted by Mitch Snyder and accompanied by a swarm of reporters and television crews, Jim Wright stepped over a cat sprawled in a worn hallway and entered the run-down shelter at 2nd and D Streets NW.  Grossly overcrowded, the building housed 800 men, many of them elderly.  Some were sitting or sleeping on cots lining the rooms and hallways.

            “Comfortable and polite middle-income people don’t like to focus on this problem,” Jim Wright said.  Moving from cot to cot, he talked with a few of these  bedraggled and benumbed men who lived in the shadows of American life.  He listened attentively to Mitch Snyder’s urgent appeal.  Then, before leaving, he promised to press for passage of  a $500 million bill to provide help to the nation’s homeless--$400 million more than the Reagan administration was asking--plus an emergency food aid bill.  Quietly and without protest, Mitch Snyder and his friends moved their Christmas manger scene off the Capitol grounds.

            To me, Jim Wright’s success in this tiny incident seemed to be a microcosmic preview of his Speakership.  Old instincts die hard, and for years as a newspaperman I had always looked for some small, telltale incident or omen that seemed to offer an insight into a larger view.  In the private cocoon of my own mind, I accepted his adroit handling of the Mitch Snyder episode as exactly this sort of portent--a harbinger of successes yet to come.  Undoubtedly I attached to it a symbolism far beyond its real importance.  This is it, I wanted to believe.  This is the daring, go-it-alone, do-it-now, get-it-done leadership style that would be Jim Wright’s heritage in the history books.  I knew its boldness would frighten the timid and discombobulate the orthodox.  But I wanted to believe it would pave the way for one of the most dynamic and productive Congresses in history.  I also thought, in my euphoria, that all Americans would cheer such forceful leadership and wish him well.  Over the next 29 months, I would see how right I was on the first part, and how dead wrong on the second.    

            At this writing it’s been almost ten years since Jim Wright stood in the well of the House and resigned both his Speakership and his seat in Congress.  So tragic and unfair were some events which led to his resignation that even today, nearly a decade later, I find them painful to relate.  On September 16, 1988, he went before the House Ethics Committee and addressed all the issues that had been raised against him by Congressman Newt Gingrich of Georgia.  But then came a runaway “outside counsel” with burning political ambitions and a blank check to wine and dine committee members, plus swarms of right-wing political enemies and, in its instinctive zeal for piling on, the press.  Day by day the accusations were stacked, one atop another, like lumber stockpiled for a gallows.  And by then it was too late.  Hounded and pilloried until his ability to lead the House was eroded and virtually destroyed, only one honorable course was left open to Jim Wright.  To prevent further harm to the institution he loved, he must resign.   

            To me, this seemed a frightful penalty to extract from a man who was never charged, even by his fiercest political enemies, with having violated any law.  His role as a national leader--and indeed, his whole political life--was compromised, and eventually voluntarily ended, by charges that he violated the rules of the House.

            He never claimed he was entirely blameless.  In his resignation speech he wondered in anguish if he himself had caused a lot of his trouble.

            “Maybe I have,” he said.  “God, I hope I have not, but maybe I have.  Have I been too partisan?  Too insistent?  To abrasive?  Too determined to have my way?  Perhaps.  Maybe so.”

            Courageous words, these.  Today they stand in sharp contrast to the efforts of other national leaders, both before and after Jim Wright’s time, to blame their problems on others.  Whether justified or not, this Jim Wright refused to do. 

            While his forceful personality surely antagonized some, I believe his troubles were rooted also in the malignant mood of ill will that began to spread through the House at least three years before he became Speaker in 1987 and continues to grip the institution even now.  For most of the 1990’s, the House has been stirred by deep political partisanship and even hatred.  A proud and strong-willed leader became a highly inviting target for the frustration and resentments and anger that remain rampant today.

            It was in 1984 that a small group of Republicans, led by Congressman Gingrich, methodically began attacking the reputations and the motives of their Democratic colleagues.  Since C-SPAN covered “special order” speeches by individual members each day after the House had finished its legislative business, this group used the free cable television exposure to inveigh against the character and patriotism of Democrats, singling out many by name.  Some were denounced as “dictators” and “cheaters.”  By policy, C-SPAN cameras had always focused tightly on the person who was speaking, rather than on the chamber at large.  Thus, in 17 million homes, a person watching C-SPAN had no way of knowing these partisan speeches were going unchallenged mainly because they were being made to an empty hall.   

            When Democratic members complained to Tip O’Neill that they were being deprived of a chance to defend themselves, the Speaker ordered C-SPAN cameras to begin panning the chamber.  For the first time viewers were able to see that these vitriolic attacks were being spewed out over a vast sea of empty seats.

            On May 15 Gingrich appeared on the House floor to defend an earlier  coordinated Republican attack on Democratic foreign policy statements.  For Tip O’Neill, this was the last straw. 

            Red-faced and furious, the massive, white-maned lawmaker lumbered up the aisle and leveled an accusing finger at Gingrich.  “You deliberately stood in the well of this House and took on these members when you knew they would not be here,” he thundered.  “It’s un-American.  It’s the lowest thing I’ve heard in my 32 years here.”

            While O’Neill’s words were surely no worse than many of the Republican attacks calling him “corrupt” and “the most partisan Speaker in history,” his counterattack was indisputably harsh and was stricken from the record.

            This, then, was the climate of antagonism into which Jim Wright stepped as Speaker.  While it would eventually destroy his effectiveness and prompt his resignation, it would not prevent the 100th Congress from becoming one of the most productive in memory. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in his role in ending that despicable little war in Nicaragua.

            Like millions of his generation, Jim Wright knew about war.  Only days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, he dropped his studies at the University of Texas and enlisted in the Army Air Corps.  He got his wings a year later and was ordered to the Pacific, where he flew B-24 combat missions and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.  But Jim Wright also knew about peace.

            Infatuated even in his high school days with the study of history, he steeped himself in accounts of the events which shaped our country.  Of these, none intrigued him more than President Woodrow Wilson’s heroic but ultimately futile effort after World War I to win Senate approval for the League of Nations.  While his high school pals doted on the comic strip exploits of Detective Dick Tracy, Jim Wright read with growing admiration how this ailing President whistle-stopped across the country in 1919 in an effort to bring our country into an organizaton fostering peace among nations.  As Jim Wright sat in his room in the 1930’s and burrowed into his history books, he wondered again and again why Woodrow Wilson’s lonely quest for peace seemed to have been so frivolously rejected.  Deep in the psyche of an impressionable red-headed teenager in Texas, a tiny seed had been planted.

            Other formative ideas and questions took root, also.  There was, for example, the military service he knew his father had been called upon to render in 1916 on the U.S.-Mexico border.  As the captain of a National Guard unit, the elder Wright had been sent to the Rio Grande to prevent Pancho Villa’s forays into the United States.  To the son, it seemed incongruous that military action should ever be necessary between neighboring nations at peace.  He began to dig other books to learn more about Mexico and Latin America.

            Decades later, after joining his Congressional staff, I discovered the depth of Jim Wright’s bedrock belief that our hemispheric neighbors were entitled to the same respect we demanded for ourselves.  His reason, repeated like a mantra in speech after speech, was simple:  No area in the world is more important to the future of the United States than Latin America.  He championed the Alliance for Progress, the Latin-American development program launched in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy.  A few years later, having been appointed to the U.S. Mexico Interparliamentary Conference, he began crawling out of bed at 5:30 to attend Spanish language classes before beginning his regular work day on Capitol Hill.  As the only member of the U.S. delegation to address the Mexicans in their own language, he earned a measure of respect seldom accorded Norteamericanos.  With enhanced credentials and ever-growing interest, he traveled widely and built solid friendships among Latin America’s democratic leaders.  

            It does not seem unusual, then, that a man with these credentials would be invited to help bring peace to Nicaragua.  What was astonishing was the source of this invitation.  It came from  President Ronald Wilson Reagan. 

            In his role as Majority Leader and later as Speaker, Jim Wright found Ronald Reagan a curious combination of talents and interests.  He didn’t know quite what to make of the man.  Like millions of other Americans, Jim Wright found him to be a charming fellow--a wonderful story-teller, gracious and self-effacing.  The thing that disturbed Jim Wright was that Reagan the President had demonstrated time and again in personal contacts that he didn’t seem to know a damn thing about running the government.  Nor did he seem particularly anxious to learn, leaving day-to-day leadership to a coterie of arch conservative advisers.  And there was another curious thing.   

            How did Reagan come to embrace Republicanism after having been a stalwart Democratic liberal?  Even as the darling of the right wing, Reagan as President offered generous praise of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman and Sam Rayburn.   

            “I think I’ve got it figured out,” Jim Wright mused one day.  “He only likes dead Democrats.”

            It was in July, 1987, that a good friend, Tom Loeffler, came to the Speaker’s office.  As a four-term Republican Congressman from Texas who had left the House to make an unsuccessful race for Governor, Loeffler and Jim Wright knew and respected each other.  Today Loeffler had come to the office as an emissary of the President.  The Reagan White House knew, of course, that Jim Wright enjoyed widespread respect and had numerous friends throughout Central America.  But the President’s advisers had missed a subtle point.  They didn’t know about the convictions that had grown over the years from those high school history books.  Tom Loeffler asked if Jim Wright would join the President in trying to bring peace to Central America.

            A bipartisan peace initiative?  With Ronald Reagan?  Warning flags went up in Jim Wright’s mind.  While he trusted Tom Loeffler, he was understandably wary of the Oliver North element in the Reagan administration.  True, the Iran-Contra scandal had virtually wiped out any chance that Congress would provide further military funding to the U.S.-backed Contra forces.  Yet the new Speaker was not sure the Reagan administration really had given up on the idea of using force to topple the leftist government of Nicaragua.  Could this be a devious White House scheme to issue a phony call for peace which, when it failed, would be an excuse for demanding more money from Congress to pursue the war?

            Many of his fellow Democrats were certain this was the case.  They warned him he would be walking into a trap.  The liberals were furious.  They regarded it as an obvious attempt at deception on the part of the Reagan Administration and its most fanatical supporter of the Contras, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams.

            It was a tough call for Jim Wright.  It would be a high-wire act without a net.  He would be strictly on his own.  If it blew up in his face, he would look naive and foolish.  There were, of course, other considerations.          

            The war had cost the lives of a hundred thousand people in El Salvador and Nicaragua during the past six years.  There was no assurance that the Contra forces would ever prevail over the Sandanistas.  Moreover, such festering violence always posed the risk that U.S. troops could eventually become involved, just as they had in Vietnam.  Yet President Reagan insisted that the Sandanistas could obtain peace only by negotiating with the Contras.  Daniel Ortega, the Nicaraguan leader, was demanding talks directly with the United States.  For this miserable little war, there appeared to be no end in sight. 

            Many thoughts must have been weighed in Jim Wright’s mind over these next few days.  Maybe he wondered how another man, nearly seventy years before, laid his power and prestige on the line in a courageous bid for peace, only to collapse and suffer a paralytic stroke.  Maybe another thought dwelled on political power which, like money, is useless if not used.  Maybe yet another was the realization that if he did not act, nobody would.  And maybe there echoed in his mind the words he spoke to Jack Russ.  This is one I’m going to have to handle myself.  In the end, that is exactly what he did.  He sent word to the President that yes, he would cooperate in a joint call for peace.            

            Do it now.  Get it done.  With the encouragement of his longtime friend, President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, the Speaker drafted a proposal for a six-point Reagan-Wright peace plan.  To his surprise, the White House accepted it with only modest changes.  The plan included an immediate cease-fire, an end to all outside military support for both sides, restoration of all civil liberties, and preparations for free elections.  Then, only a few days later, as he worked to build support in Congress, Jim Wright received heartening news. 

            The five Central American presidents, meeting in Guatemala, had agreed on a peace plan of their own that embraced most provisions of the Reagan-Wright plan.  Drafted by President Arias, the new plan differed mainly in that the cease-fire would not be immediate, but would come within ninety days.  Jim Wright was elated that a peace initiative, even if not exactly his own, had come so far so fast.     

            Calling him “an extraordinary player in the Central American events,” an editorial in The Washington Post added: “He’s taking a large chance, but a necessary one, in helping open the way to convert the Arias plan from paper to reality.”

            But the Reagan people started having second thoughts.  Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger called on the White House to junk the whole effort.  Contra hardliners became even more distraught when they learned the Speaker had sat in on a meeting between Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and the respected Catholic leader being asked to mediate the peace, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo.

             The nearly hysterical pro-Contra clique in the White House was chided in The Washington Post by columnist Philip Geyelin.  “Come now,” he said.  “The Speaker was doing nothing inconsistent with the role that was urged upon him by the administration’s top people last summer.”

            House Democrats were ecstatic.  “He beat ‘em,” cried Congressman George Miller, a California liberal who had warned of a trap.  “I wouldn’t have given a plugged nickel for what he was thinking of doing.”  Republicans were considerably less complimentary.

            “He’s the most arrogant abuser of power I’ve ever seen,” complained Minority Whip Trent Lott of Mississippi.  Congressman Dick Cheney of Illinois, chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, got so mad at Jim Wright be began to wax nostalgic about the warmth and affection of the previous Speaker, Tip O’Neill.  “There are no such feelings for Jim Wright,” he observed.   If Jim Wright winced at such observations, it may have prompted him only to work harder.           

            Within the first few months of his Speakership, the House had overridden two Reagan vetoes--one on clean water, the other on highways and mass transit--and passed a budget drastically re-ordering national priorities.  Public opinion polls showed vigorous support for these actions.

            “Wright has emerged as a political lone ranger, leading Democrats into high-risk territory often before they are ready to go,” said The Washington Post.  His “approach marks a dramatic shift in the running of the House and in the role of the House Speaker as Washington’s No. 1 Democrat.”                

            All this worried Newt Gingrich.  Jim Wright already had surpassed even his highest expectations.  In his book, The Ambition and the Power, John M. Barry quotes a Gingrich observation:  If Wright ever consolidates his power, he will be a very, very formidable man.  We have to take him on early to prevent that.  Thus, like a battlefield commander stalemated by an unexpectedly strong force, Gingrich soon switched his attack to another sector--the House Ethics Committee.     

            His initial accusations were based on newspaper clippings, some eight to ten years old, dealing with Jim Wright’s personal finances.  Certain that he knowingly had done nothing wrong, the Speaker asked the committee to look into the charges.  He was sure this would take no more than a couple of weeks at most and lead to complete exoneration.

            But then came two unexpected events.  One was that Common Cause, supposedly a non-partisan citizens’ lobby, joined Gingrich in calling for an investigation of Jim Wright.  This gave a measure of respectability to what up to then had been seen merely as a Gingrich political ploy.  Many Democrats were infuriated.  Having worked closely with Common Cause on issues like arms control and halting Contra aid, they felt betrayed.  They suspected that the formerly high-minded lobby group had taken this action to raise money and to make good its claim of bipartisanship.

            The other blow came when Richard J. Phelan, an ambitious Chicago lawyer, was named as outside special counsel for the investigation.  The moment Phelan’s name surfaced, I received an urgent call from a leading Fort Worth attorney.  As a longtime friend of Jim Wright’s, the local lawyer knew Phelan and warned that he would approach this crucial position as a prosecutor looking for headlines rather than an impartial set of facts.  Jim Wright’s attorney, William C. (Bill) Oldaker, and I were urged by our Fort Worth friend to fight for another counsel--one who would be even-handed and who entertained no personal political ambitions.  In this we were unsuccessful, but our friend’s fears were well founded.  After observing Phelan’s handling of the investigation, Legal Times in its issue of April 24, 1989, described his role this way:              

            “What began as the rather flimsy efforts of Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) to harass Wright during an election year became, in Phelan’s hands, a broad-based indictment of much of the speaker’s personal dealings over decades in public office.  Phelan used the original charges brought by Gingrich as a springboard into all of Wright’s financial affairs.”

            The journal noted that Phelan regularly wined and dined committee

members--the judges and jurors in the Jim Wright case--while running up $150,000 in “out-of-pocket expenses” during the investigation.  Any such ex parte activity by Oldaker would have been considered unethical.  To bolster his personal efforts, Phelan enlisted seven associate attorneys.  The eight lawyers billed the committee for more than 6,000 hours of legal work at $125 an hour, Legal Times reported.

            By now this wide-ranging investigation had begun to take on a life of its own.   Gingrich kept up a growing drumbeat of attacks.  Right-wing zealots became ever  more certain they could now cripple if not destroy Jim Wright.  Planted stories, many without foundation, were foisted on news organizations.  Swept up in the feeding frenzy, the press became a wolf pack, with reporters vying with each other  to come up with new accusations or horror stories about the alleged misdeeds of the Speaker.  One newspaper exhumed a story about a forty-year-old unsolved murder in which a Jim Wright opponent had been mysteriously shot to death during a race for the Texas Legislature.  Try as we would, it was tough for our staff not to take on a bunker mentality. 

            One day David Montgomery of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram--the hometown paper for which I had worked two years as a reporter--called me to say he was checking out an accusation that the Speaker’s wife was illiterate.  David had talked with Betty Wright many times.  He knew she had worked on the executive staff of Hotel Texas in Fort Worth in the 1950’s and later on the House Public Works Committee in Washington.

             Furious, I refused even to acknowledge such a question.  “You know damn well that’s not true, David!” I shouted.  “Why are you doing this?”

            Jim Wright was even more infuriated than I, but he responded by trying to make a joke of the question, saying that Betty was literate in English, Spanish and shorthand.

            To a few reporters, the reason for the wave of vicious rumors and dirty tricks was obvious.  “House Speaker Jim Wright has reached the top of the heap in Washington.  The proof is not in adulation, but in the amount of vitriol poured on him by frustrated Republicans,” wrote columnists Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta.

            They pointed out that Jim Wright was cast as a the consummate bogeyman in Republican fund-raising literature.  One letter sent out by the Council for Inter-American Security was so vicious it caused two board members to resign.  It accused Jim Wright of “treasonous acts” because he met with Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo and Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega in a quest for Central American peace.

            Even Jim Wright supporters back in Fort Worth were subjected to abuse.  Some friends were awakened by late-night telephone calls. “This is an urgent message from the Speaker of the House,” cried a recorded message.  Then it claimed to be a fund-raising pitch for ex-Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, whom Jim Wright had never supported.

            In Washington, reporters got anonymous tips that Jim Wright had lied about  his role as a flyer in World War II.  Another was an utterly groundless accusation that he beat his wife so badly she had to be hospitalized.  Less preposterous but equally untruthful, stories were planted that Jim Wright flew free on a corporate airplane owned by a nursing home.  There was no such airplane.  Another story asserted that Jim Wright was under investigation for an income tax violation.  The next day an Internal Revenue Service official disavowed this falsehood.   

            President Reagan’s top economic development official, Orson Swindle III, even flew to Fort Worth and spoke before a civic club, accusing the Speaker of wasting taxpayers’ money by earmarking $11.8 million in federal grants to revitalize the Stockyards area. 

            In his dedicated efforts to root out every last vestige of what he considered Jim Wright’s evil and nefarious deeds, Phelan focused on the Speaker’s little book, Reflections of a Public Man.                             

            This was a 117-page paperback consisting of short speeches, articles and essays written by Jim Wright over the years.  It was printed by Carlos Moore, a longtime friend who ran a small Fort Worth printing company.  Moore pointed out that his firm incurred far less overhead than big publishing houses in New York, and proposed a royalty split giving Jim Wright 60 per cent, or $3.57, of the book’s sale price of $5.95.  

            From these book sales the Speaker made about $55,000.  Some were bought as gifts for their members by labor and business organizations which supported Jim Wright.  Phelan saw this as a scheme Jim Wright contrived to circumvent the House limitation on speech honoraria. 

            Several earlier books by Jim Wright had been published by big New York firms, and a few lonely voices in the press saw this latest publishing arrangement as somewhat less heinous than the Texas chainsaw murders.  Henry Mitchell, a Washington Post columnist, pooh-poohed claims that this was not an honest-to-goodness book and that an author should not receive a royalty higher than the usual 10 per cent.   

            “Would Wright’s book be judged a ‘real’ book if only the publishers, with their usual greedy low cunning, had raked off the profit instead of the author?  A businessman is applauded in America if he makes huge profits, but a book author is thought to be guilty of something irregular if his royalty arrangements are unusually lucrative,” he wrote. 

            But the pendulum had swung too far.  At this point no Republican would have dared to breathe a word in Jim Wright’s behalf.  Many Democrats, while proud of the House’s accomplishments under his leadership in the 100th Congress, refused to venture into the whirlwind of controversy which had enveloped him.

            Even at home, there was no peace for the Speaker.  The press had begun its “death watch” at his home in suburban Virginia.  When he woke up in the morning he would find reporters and television crews encamped on his lawn.  When he ventured outside, boom mikes were thrust in his face.  “When are you going to quit, Mr. Speaker?” came the insistent shouts.

            Jim Wright’s only consistent comfort came from polls conducted among the people who knew him best--his constituents, the people he had served for 34 years.

These polls showed 81 per cent of the people in his Texas district would vote for him again.  Among Republican voters, his level of support was 72 per cent.     

            In those last few days, a few Congressional friends tried to negotiate some means of accommodation between Jim Wright and Phelan.  Jim Wright would have no part of this.  He rejected outright anything that smacked of a plea bargain.  

            It was not until his resignation speech, ironically, that he got an unfettered opportunity to take his side of the story fully and coherently to the public.  Now, in the glare of nationwide television, he had asked for and was granted one full hour.   In a dramatic speech filling ten pages of the Congressional Record, he cited facts and included authoritative documents disproving the charges against him in all three basic areas--that his wife Betty did no real work on a job paying $18,000 a year;  that her employer, George Mallick, had a “direct interest in legislation;” and that the book was an effort to skirt the limit on speech honoraria.

            Even though he felt certain of the rightness of his actions, Jim Wright realized weeks before his final speech that in truth, he could not expect to provide the dynamic leadership he believed the House deserved--the kind that had marked his first two years as Speaker.  So rampant was partisan hostility in the House that, even with his innocence ultimately confirmed, he knew his Speakership had been damagingly compromised.  The very spectacle of a Speaker so grievously accused by his political enemies was turning the House into a media circus and disrupting the nation’s legislative business.

            The Speakership was not necessary to Jim Wright’s happiness.  His self-respect was.  If he couldn’t be an effective Speaker, he didn’t want to be Speaker at all.   

            “I do not want to be a party to tearing up this institution.  I love it,” he said.

“Let me give you back this job...as a propitiation for this whole season of ill will.”

            He urged members of House not to take retribution on each other.  “All of us in both political parties must resolve to bring this period of mindless cannibalism to an end,” he said.  “There’s been enough of it.”

            On May 31, 1989, Jim Wright stood alone in the well of the House, secure in his enormous sense of dignity, and spoke his final words in the historic chamber that he loved. 

            “I am not a bitter man.  I am not going to be.  I am a lucky man.  God has given me the privilege of serving in this, the greatest lawmaking institution on earth, for a great many years, and I am grateful to the people of my district in Texas, and grateful to you, my colleagues, all of you.  God bless this institution.  God bless the United States.”