Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia was a rising star in the GOP by 1987, either despite or because of his aggressive political tactics toward other members. Almost as soon as the Georgian had entered the House in 1979, he began making ethics charges against colleagues for alleged improprieties, notably against Barney Frank and Charles C. Diggs. In addition to personally spearheading these investigations, he transformed the speech of the political right from pointed rhetoric to sheer vitriol, referring to past and present Democratic speakers of the House as “crooks,” “traitors,” and “thugs.” This kind of personal attack against the opposition and even fellow Republicans would be seen again and again in the rise of other ambitious politicians in the years ahead.
But Gingrich was an early adopter. The junior representative campaigned across the country for a new type of fight against Democrats—referring to Democrats as not just rivals but enemies and regaling crowds with talk such as: “The values of the left cripple human beings, weaken cities, make it difficult for us to in fact survive as a country . . . The left in America is to blame for most of the current, major diseases which have struck this society.”
He spoke of waging a civil war against liberals. He told supporters at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing Washington think tank: “This war has to be fought with a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars.”
This was a new kind of slash-and-burn politics that left even Republicans aghast. Senator Bob Dole refused to shake Gingrich’s hand on stage. “Newt was willing to tear up the system to get the majority,” Trent Lott, the Republican whip from Mississippi said. “It got to be a really negative pit over there, but that was probably the beginnings of the Republicans being able to take control.” Gingrich took the reins of a political action committee (PAC) dedicated to helping Republicans win elections. Soon thereafter, the PAC issued materials advising others to “speak like Newt,” using words like “decay, traitors, radical, sick, destroy, pathetic, corruption, and shame” when referring to Democrats.
When the Democrats took back control of the Senate in the mid-term elections of 1986 and Jim Wright ascended to Speaker, Wright tried to consolidate power. Early signs showed that his efforts were working. After Wright led the passage of a budget without a single Republican vote in April 1987, Gingrich told a congressional reporter, “If Wright ever consolidates his power, it’s clear he’ll be a very formidable man. We have to take him on early to prevent that.”
Gingrich began his one-man ethics investigation against the Speaker; it would last for two years. He argued for the appointment of an outside ethics counsel that would investigate instances of individual breaches in conduct. Gingrich had a flare for the dramatic. He and a few other like-minded Republicans had begun a practice of waiting until the House’s business had finished and the chamber had mostly cleared. It was in this period of proceedings called Special Orders when members could make one-minute speeches on any issue they liked, unconstrained by the normal strictures of procedural debate when the House considered bills and resolutions. The one-minute commentaries would be included in the Congressional Record, and viewers at home could watch, although since the cameras stayed fixed on whoever stood at the dais speaking, those at home had no idea there were often no members in the audience.
Gingrich and the others would approach the dais and deliver fiery speeches against the sins of liberalism. As a measure of courtesy, other members were supposed to receive notification about any continued talks on the floor, but many suspected that these notices did not always arrive in time. In one particularly egregious instance, in 1984 Gingrich accused several (absent) Democrats of being “blind to Communism” and challenged them to step forward and defend their positions if they could. No one did, because the room was empty, save a few teenaged congressional pages.
Representative Jack Brooks, a shrewd Texas Democrat and oversight watchdog, found this to be an abuse of the cameras, which had been configured to increase transparency in Congress, not diminish it. Brooks had then Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill institute a change to the programming. Every so often the cameras would now scan across the seats of the floor, revealing that some of the grandstanders were often preaching to an empty chamber. Republicans accused Democrats of playing dirty and arrogantly abusing their power. The conflict became known as “Camscam.”
After Republicans caused a stir over it, O’Neill confronted Gingrich on the House floor before a full chamber: “You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House and challenged these people [when you knew they would not be there] and you challenged their Americanism. And it is the lowest thing that I have ever seen in my thirty-two years in Congress.”
The thunder of applause showed that many in the House agreed. However, Trent Lott took issue with O’Neill’s language, seeing it as a personal attack, which was forbidden by House rules. He asked that the House parliamentarian take the Speaker’s words down from the record, which he did, in a rare rebuke to a sitting Speaker. Footage of the incident ran on all three networks that night, giving a significant boost in visibility to the fledgling C-SPAN network.
Three years later, with O’Neill retired, Gingrich continued to use theatrics in his crusade against Speaker Wright. He refused to formally request an ethics investigation into the speaker’s financial dealings himself, but in May 1988 the citizens’ lobbying group Common Cause, compelled by the constant charges, made the request for him. The alleged violations centered around income from bulk sales of the Speaker’s 1984 book, Reflections of a Public Man, which consisted of his speeches and essays. Gingrich then followed up with his own request. Among the charges were that Wright used his staff to help compile the book and that he had circumvented House limits on speaking honorariums by having trade associations purchase copies in lieu of paying him speaking fees.
It was clear to many that this was the effort of one man to destroy another. Some saw it as a personal vendetta because Wright had orchestrated Democratic opposition to providing military aid to the Contras in Nicaragua. Nevertheless, the House Ethics Committee conducted a six-month investigation, the majority of which was held in private, but a steady stream of leaks found their way into the press. The drumbeat of accusations against Wright, and soon his wife Betty as well, went on and on, clogging up congressional operations. Soon accusations and subsequent investigations flew against House Majority Whip Tony Coelho and chair of the House Budget Committee, Bill Gray.
Brooks, speaking to a crowd in Washington on May 18, 1989, fielded a question about the investigation. He did not hold back:
I think it’s a disaster for Congress; if we don’t win this fight, it’s going to ruin Congress. That will suit Gingrich well; he wants to destroy Congress. Then he thinks they can rebuild it. Now that’s the way I look at it.
I have never seen Congress at a lower level of back-biting, knifing each other, partisanship, never in thirty-seven years. And I’ve dealt with what, eight Speakers. Joe Martin was Speaker when I came to Congress, Republican from Massachusetts. Honest as could be. Straight as a string, nice old boy, courteous, pleasant, his word was good. I liked him. I respected him. Never said one word against him.
Charlie Halleck came up not as Speaker but as [minority] leader. Halleck was mean and devilsome. Liked to drink and party. But Halleck was honest. He was a good partisan fighter. We got along with Charlie Halleck fine. Liked him. There wasn’t any feeling of acrimony. I remember sitting many times, well most every night, with Sam Rayburn in the Board of Education [a small private office in the Capitol], drinking a little coffee in the evening. We started drinking coffee about 5:30 p.m. I didn’t take cream. Many a time Charlie Halleck would come down there and visit, raise hell with me, raise hell with everybody, just argue and talk and visit about our issues. But there was never any hard feeling. We didn’t go out to the press and say, “Halleck had a real load on last night.” None of that business. Course not. Course not. Had nothing to do with his thought processes.
I’ve never seen, I’ve seen all kinds of problems and tough ones, but nothing ever like this. Nothing like this. And it’s destroying Congress. It may destroy it if they let it. But if they do this to Jim Wright, they’ve already started on Coelho, they’ll start . . .
The FBI, last year, went and got a copy of the financial disclosure forms of every chairman in the Congress. Now I don’t know why they got it for. They didn’t say they were going to investigate. They just got it because they like to read? Or they just collecting numbers on paper? I don’t know what their collection is. But you and I can understand what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to put the pressure on every chairman. And they just got a list. They’ll go through the list.
What they’re mad at Jim Wright about on the program is his effectiveness, not his ethics. That’s what they’re going to be mad at all the Democrats about. If you elected anybody as Speaker, they would start finding fault with him because they’re not for him. I don’t mind them being against him, but I think when they hide partisan attacks like this, it doesn’t look good. It’s not good for Congress. It’s not healthy. It’s not conducive to encouraging decent people to run for Congress.
I feel sorry for people who’ve got a couple years in Congress. If they think they can enjoy the next twenty years in Congress, they’re crazy, the way it’s going now.
Less than two weeks later, on May 30, 1989, Wright announced that he would address the entire House the next day. He then spoke in private with Brooks and attended a friendly luncheon with other members of the delegation. Brooks said the speaker seemed “cheerful and happy” and had not explicitly told his friend what he was about to do, though Brooks had an inkling. The next day Wright stood at the dais on the House floor in front of a full chamber:
It is intolerably hurtful to our government that qualified members of the executive and legislative branches are resigning because of the ambiguities and the confusion surrounding the ethics laws and because of their own consequent vulnerability to personal attack. That’s a shame. It’s happening. And it is grievously hurtful to our society when vilification becomes an accepted form of political debate. And negative campaigning becomes a full-time occupation. When members of each party become self-appointed vigilantes carrying out personal vendettas against members of the other party. In God’s name, that’s not what this institution is supposed to be all about. When vengeance becomes more desirable than vindication. Harsh personal attacks upon one another’s motives and one another’s character drown out the quiet logic of serious debate on important issues…
Surely that’s unworthy of our institution, unworthy of our American political process. All of us, both political parties, must resolve to bring this period of mindless cannibalism to an end! There’s been enough of it!
Those remarks brought the entire House to its feet. Gingrich, to whom much of the criticism was directly pointed, hunkered down throughout the address. Wright continued:
Well, I tell you what, I’m going to make you a proposition, let me give you back this job you gave to me as a propitiation for all of this season of bad will that is going around. Give it back to you. I will resign as Speaker of the House effective upon the election of my successor.
He finished by imploring both parties for restraint. He asked that they not try “to get” somebody from the other side as payback, even for his own sake. The institution ought to be more mature than that, he said.
