The old Democratic establishment that Gingrich helped bring down had rotted before he got to Congress.

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F
or decades, analysts and pundits have tried to trace the origins of the polarization, intense partisanship, and the “politics of personal destruction” that characterize so much of contemporary American politics. In Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party, Julian Zelizer attributes much of it to the rise of Newt Gingrich, from backbencher in the minority party to the first speaker of the first Republican House of Representatives in 40 years. That is a tall order for anyone to fill, even someone with the audacity, ambition, vision, and inexhaustible energy of Newt Gingrich.

Zelizer’s book purports to tell the tale of how Gingrich took down Jim Wright, the Democratic speaker of the House from 1987 to 1989. Gingrich is presumed to have accomplished this by cynically exploiting the ethics reforms enacted in the post-Watergate era. He is also said in these pages to have left in his wake a vicious new kind of slash-and-burn politics that resulted in the election of Donald Trump as president. To accept at least the first part of this thesis, one would almost have to think that the “old order” (a term Arthur Schlesinger Jr. used to describe the political establishment that preceded the one Franklin D. Roosevelt created) that Gingrich allegedly brought down was devoid of all but the most petty and benign forms of corruption, and was dedicated to advancing the public interest. Not even Zelizer believes that. He knows that the rehabilitation of Wright and the other “good ole boys” who ran the House for their own purposes, rendering themselves impervious to any discernible form of accountability, would pose insurmountable challenges to the most thorough and creative of revisionists.

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Wading through the narrative Zelizer supplies of the serial ethical, legal, and moral infractions of Wright and his fellow Democrats, the reader comes away wondering why, if Gingrich was, in fact, responsible for pulling down this house of cards, no one had done it much earlier. To buy the rest of Zelizer’s argument, one would have to forget that Gingrich resigned from the house in 1999, 17 years before Trump’s election. (One could of course look to Gingrich’s unsuccessful campaign for the 2016 presidential nomination. But should Trump have looked for them, Pat Buchanan’s two tries for the same prize in 1992 and 1996 and George Wallace’s third-party run in 1968 might also have served as precedents.)

The best Zelizer can do for Wright is to argue that whatever wrongs he committed were not as serious as Watergate and were more ethical infractions than legal violations. In the aftermath of that gargantuan scandal, Congress went through the motions of demonstrating that it could police itself by passing a series of ethical reforms, which they never took all that seriously. Moreover, the House Ethics Committee was never intended to be much of a force within the House. Serving on it was not a job members rushed to take on. Most adhered to the “there but for the grace of God go I” principle. And most regarded serving on it as dues they had to pay en route to a more prestigious assignment.

In the opening chapters of Burning Down the House, Zelizer reconstructs what life was like on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue in the post-Watergate era. Democrats ruled the roost and acted as though they expected to do so in perpetuity. Members owed their seats to wealthy donors and powerful interests in their districts, whom they rewarded with largesse. Often, members of Congress and their relatives and political operatives wound up, legally or otherwise, on the payrolls of those who made their careers possible. It was not uncommon for donors and recipients to weave tangled webs of mutually beneficial “investments.”

With a good many members from effectively one-party states, gerrymandering protected them from having to worry about serious opposition in both primary and general elections. Often, friendly calls were made from House leaders and, sometimes, from national bigwigs to state legislative leaders whom they urged to keep “good old Charlie at his post.” Jokes likening redistricting to “incumbent protection programs” circulated in party cloakrooms. Adding to this mix, powerful Washington lobbyists and their clients contributed generously to partisan congressional committees and to members’ reelection campaigns, overwhelmingly to the majority party.

Were this not enough, the prevailing party kept the minority party docile by awarding it insufficient staff, heavily stacking committees in favor of the majority, allowing Republicans to ask questions at hearings only after every Democrat had finished (often after the press had departed), and failing to consult with the minority party on either the House or committee agendas, or on the allocation of the House’s internal budget.

(Disclaimer: I served as a staffer to the House minority prior to Gingrich’s time as speaker. Among my first assignments was to inquire what the possibilities were for an honor student and National Merit Finalist from my boss’s district to serve as a House page, if only for a month in duration. After I telephoned the Republican Leader’s office, the person to whom I was transferred dropped her voice to a whisper. To this day, I believe she suspected her conversations were being overheard. She explained how hard these things were to obtain and promised to give it a “gentle try.” She volunteered that she had seen only three constituents of Republican members serving in such posts.)

I did not need to read Zelizer’s book to appreciate why so many Republicans, including many who neither shared Gingrich’s agenda nor liked him personally, rallied behind him when he struck. The act that finally galvanized them was the Democrats’ seating, by four votes, a Democrat they declared the winner of a bitterly contested election.

Newton Leroy Gingrich was born June 17, 1943, outside of Harrisburg, Pa. His parents’ marriage dissolved prior to his birth, and Newt took the surname “Gingrich” from his stepfather, a career military officer, who adopted him. A precocious child, who confessed to feeling more at ease in the company of adults than with peers, Gingrich first made headlines at the age of eleven, when he tried to persuade the city of Harrisburg to establish a municipal zoo.

Gingrich spent his childhood on military bases in the U.S. and abroad before settling with his family in Georgia. He majored in history at Emory University and earned a Ph.D. in European history from Tulane in 1971. He was teaching at West Georgia College in Carrollton when he first ran for Congress.

In 1974, Gingrich challenged longtime Democrat John Flynt, a segregationist. Flynt was first elected to Congress in 1954, the same year as Wright. He also shared Wright’s propensity to leverage his public post to increase his net worth. Gingrich was clearly the liberal in the race. The League of Conservationist Voters endorsed him. Democratic consultant Bob Beckel, then with the liberal National Committee for an Effective Congress, saw him as part of a new breed of Republican, more in touch with an increasingly educated, suburban, and rapidly changing South than were the Democrats they were challenging. The Atlanta Daily World, the oldest African-American newspaper in Georgia, endorsed him. Those who knew Gingrich well were not surprised. While at Tulane, Gingrich had been southern regional director of Nelson Rockefeller’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Years later, on the eve of Gingrich’s ascension to the House speakership, Tim Russert, host of Meet the Press, asked him, a confessed “conservative,” to explain why he’d supported Rockefeller. “Because he was trying to integrate the South, which neither of the other possibilities, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, were doing,” Gingrich shot back.

The South in the ’70s was in the process of realigning from solidly Democratic to predominantly Republican, but these changes came slowly to Flynt’s district. Gingrich ran well but could not withstand the anti-Republican backlash of Watergate. In a rematch with Flynt two years later, while he came close, Gingrich fell victim to the coattails of Georgia’s favorite son, presidential candidate Jimmy Carter. With Flynt having retired in 1978, Gingrich defeated Democratic state senator Virginia Shapard by 7,500 votes.

He entered the House with three major goals: “to defeat the Soviet Empire, replace the welfare state, and replace the Democrats as the majority party in the House.” No one ever accused Gingrich of thinking small. He took inspiration from an early hero, Richard Nixon, who advised him, “If you really want to become the majority, you have to fill the place with ideas.” Zelizer thinks it odd that Gingrich would seek advice from a “disgraced president.” But Nixon had first been elected to Congress in 1946, after Republicans had taken control of Congress for the first time since losing it in 1930. Nixon had been particularly active and productive as a freshman. Eight years after his first election, he was vice-president-elect.

The big ideas that Gingrich would later advance in the Contract for America and during the Clinton era (welfare reform, free trade, balanced budgets) would have to wait. His immediate priority upon entering the house in 1979 was corruption in the House.

The layers of rot on which Wright, his predecessors, and his peers serving in the House in 1978 rested were showing signs of collapse well before Gingrich first entered their lives. Two months after Nixon resigned the presidency, Wilbur Mills, the legendary chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee (and the subject of a previous book by Zelizer) was apprehended for jumping into the Tidal Basin with a stripper called “Fannie Fox.” Mills still won reelection in his gerrymandered district, with 60 percent of the vote. Two years later, Wayne Hays, chairman of the House Administration Committee, resigned after a mistress he had hired as a secretary confessed to a reporter that she could not type. (The staffer, Elizabeth Ray, was miffed that she had not been invited to her boss’s wedding.) Two celebrated bribery scandals, “Koreagate” and “Abscam,” did little to increase public esteem for Congress as an institution.

The “Watergate class,” elected in 1974, pressed the House to revise its rules at the expense of imperious committee chairmen, who were selected on the basis of seniority. (They were called “barons” for good reason.) The Democrats added 40 seats to their majority that year. Of the 91 House freshmen, 87 were under 45 years of age. With members of committees now able to select their chairmen, the clout of the newcomers helped topple three of them. (One of those they deposed had been in the longtime habit of addressing new members as “boys and girls.”)

Years before he became speaker, Wright had signaled that he would not be sympathetic to what became the policy agenda of these younger members: environmental protection, consumer rights, conflict-of-interest bans, ethics reform, transparency. A champion of large public works, Wright said that he wanted people protected, but “the hell with the fish.” While he grudgingly completed questionnaires that a plethora of post-Watergate public-interest groups sent him, he bellowed in private, “Who the hell elected Ralph Nader the judge and the custodian of my conscience?” The most prestigious and influential of the new “good government” groups that sprang up was Common Cause, the brainchild of John Gardner, a former cabinet officer and foundation executive. The organization’s prestige skyrocketed when Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor Nixon had unceremoniously dismissed during the “Saturday Night Massacre,” took its helm.

The “Watergate babies” felt no allegiance to Wright and his ilk. They also felt free to criticize the ethics of their elders without fearing that the docile Republican minority would benefit from dissension within Democratic ranks.

Gingrich’s first target after entering the House was Democratic Detroit congressman Charles Diggs. Also elected to Congress in 1954 (one wonders what the orientation for new members was like in 1954!), Diggs was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus. In 1978, the year Gingrich won his first election, a grand jury indicted Diggs for having accepted $60,000 in kickbacks from staff, and for payroll padding, among other charges, and a jury subsequently convicted him. New to Congress, Gingrich decided to take Diggs on. With Wright insisting that Democrats police their own, Gingrich demanded that Diggs resign. Along with 13 other Republicans, he filed a complaint against Diggs with the House Ethics Committee. Two reform Democrats, future majority leader Richard Gephardt and Philip Sharp, joined them.

Diggs worked out an arrangement with the Ethics Committee through which he agreed to accept censure and pay a fine (presumably out of his ill-gotten gains). He then resigned in June 1980, after the Supreme Court rejected his criminal appeal. He served seven months of a three-year prison sentence.

Prior to Wright’s elevation to the House speakership upon the retirement of Tip O’Neill, stories had been circulating about suspicious financial arrangements involving Wright, oil and savings-and-loan interests, and vendors. Wright had helped a developer who was seeking to revive a portion of the congressman’s native Fort Worth to obtain federal assistance. The developer, who also happened to be Wright’s business partner, had promised to pass along some of the funds Wright had obtained to another business in exchange for a piece of the other company. He also had hired Wright’s wife at a full-time salary, allowed her full use of the company Cadillac when she was in town, and provided her with an apartment.

A second scandal revolved around Wright’s relationship with Donald Dixon, head of the Dallas-based Mount Vernon Savings and Loan Association. Dixon had made a series of high-risk loans, which he sold to smaller institutions. With plummeting oil prices, much of the regional savings-and-loan industry was going under. Wright, in his capacity as speaker, threatened the Federal Home Loan Bank Board that he would not support federal bailouts for savings-and-loans unless regulators went easy on Dixon. Press accounts of his actions caught the attention of Common Cause. Its president, Fred Wertheimer, wrote to the House Ethics Committee chairman, requesting both an investigation and the appointment of a special prosecutor to untangle this spiraling mess.

Gingrich filed several other complaints, citing other instances in which Wright had misused his position. The one that received the most attention was the allegation that, to circumvent the limit House rules placed on honoraria members could receive for delivering speeches, Wright received $55,000 in royalties from a book his staff assembled of his previous speeches. The Washington Post had reported that the publisher was a printer and political consultant to whom Wright had paid $265,000 for services to his campaign the previous year.

Indispensable in ending Wright’s career was a new breed of reporters who had come to town. Younger, better educated, and more idealistic than the breed the old “Capitol Hill gang” had grown used to, they took inspiration from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (of All the President’s Men fame). Zelizer suggests that these writers’ youth, idealism, and political innocence rendered them susceptible to manipulation by Gingrich and those who did his spinning. This overlooks the self-confessed naïveté of “Woodstein” (as Woodward and Bernstein came to be called). Younger or middle-aged, neophyte or savvy, the press, much more than Gingrich, exposed Wright’s most egregious failings. (Zelizer reports that what became known as the “money and politics beat” was in full bloom before Wright’s antics became front-page news.)

Given the clubby atmosphere of the institution he headed, Wright might well have survived all his chicanery had it not been for the Washington Post’s unveiling of one of the bloodiest and most violent scandals ever to hit Capitol Hill. A friend of features editor Ken Ringle told him that, 16 years earlier, she had been repeatedly hit on the head with a hammer, stabbed and slashed with a knife, and left for dead. She later discovered that her assailant was working in the office of the speaker.

The man turned out to be Wright’s top aide. He had served only 27 months of a 15-year sentence. Through Wright’s intercession, the former felon, not long after leaving prison, took a job as a clerk with the House. It happened that the man was the brother of Wright’s son-in-law. The feminist writer Andrea Dworkin charged that Wright had manipulated the system to shield a violent criminal and that Hill insiders had known about what the man had done but had entered into a conspiracy of silence. Wright tendered his resignation as speaker on May 31, 1989.

Zelizer is correct when he says that Wright’s resignation was a “turning point in American politics.” He is wrong when he asserts that all that transpired thereafter, up to and including the election of Donald Trump, can be laid at Gingrich’s door. Gingrich deserves much of the credit for the vision and strategy that delivered the House to the Republicans after 40 years in the political desert. In the 1994 congressional elections, they picked up 54 seats and recaptured the Senate, after having lost it eight years earlier.

But, as was the case with the toppling of Wright, in “nationalizing” the congressional elections of 1994, Gingrich received lots of inadvertent help from Democrats. There were the scandals in the House bank, its post office, its carpentry shop, and the imprisonment of Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski. Zelizer does not think any of these of major import. Future attorney general Eric Holder, as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, thought the Rostenkowski matter important enough to have prosecuted it. There were also the controversies and scandals of the first two years of the Clinton presidency: the tax hike, Whitewater, “travelgate,” “filegate,” “don’t ask, don’t tell”—and the biggest enchilada of them all, “Hillarycare.” While all of these occurred beyond the time frame of Zelizer’s study, he leaves little doubt that he considers these incidents to be as “minor” as he does those of the Wright era. Together, they made for one heck of a storm. For this, he assigns all the blame to Gingrich, who, to be sure, made the most of it. That Gingrich was and remains a man of flaws as well as virtues is beyond question. He was prone to inconsistencies, contradictions, hypocrisy, and hubris. Impulsive by nature, he showed a remarkably tin ear when it came to his own perceived and actual ethical lapses. One would have thought that within weeks of having led the GOP to a most impressive victory in 1994, he would have been the last person to be hauled before the Ethics Committee, and later fined, as a result of a convoluted book deal.

Yet Gingrich’s greatest strength was his capacity to see around corners and to sense the coming of the perfect political storm. The gang that ran the House of Representatives of yesteryear and their defenders did not see him coming. And they still will not forgive him for their own myopia.