Contracts Made and Broken
EVERY NEW PRESIDENT WANTS TO MAKE HIS OWN MARK ON HISTORY, NO matter how much he owes his predecessor. Harry Truman, who praised FDR for creating the New Deal and winning World War II, did not hesitate to differ sharply with Roosevelt’s foreign and domestic policies, adopting a strong anti-Soviet stance as early as 1946 and threatening to draft striking railway workers (a key element of the old Roosevelt coalition) into the army. Told that he was violating Roosevelt’s stated wishes and policies, Truman replied that the buck now stopped with him.
Although personally picked by Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft considered Roosevelt’s ideas to be too “progressive” and steered a more conservative course as president. Roosevelt was so upset that he ran against Taft in 1912, a move that helped to put Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the White House. Asserting his independence in 1960, Richard Nixon waited until almost the last moment to seek President Eisenhower’s campaign help—and lost one of the closest presidential contests in American history.
Even George Bush, who ran as a “no new taxes” conservative in 1988, had no sooner been sworn in as president than he declared that the purpose of America “is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.”1 Conservatives wondered: Was he saying that America under Reagan had not been kind or gentle? Wouldn’t liberals seize on his words and argue that they confirmed the 1980s as an unhappy, even desperate, time for many Americans?
No one expected George Bush to be a carbon copy of Ronald Reagan, but conservatives noted that the new president did not even mention the outgoing president’s name in his inaugural address. Conservative unease increased when Bush named Louis W. Sullivan, known for his proabortion views, as secretary of health and human services and Richard Darman, a protax moderate, as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Across the government, Reaganauts were informed that their services were no longer required.
And then there was the new president’s heavy emphasis on ethics in government, as though the previous administration had been an ethical swamp. As Bush biographer Herbert S. Parmet put it, conservative ideology was out and Bush loyalty was in. The New York Times summed up the new mood neatly with the headline, “Reagan Doesn’t Work Here Anymore.”
New Right conservatives like Richard A. Viguerie nodded their heads and said, “We told you so.” In a 1984 cover article, Conservative Digest had described George Bush as an “elitist” with “life-long ties to the liberal eastern Establishment.” The populist magazine pointed out that as a congressman in the late 1960s, Bush had voted for foreign aid and Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan. He was not a conservative and “will never be a conservative,” declared Conservative Digest. After all, when Bush lost his 1964 bid for a U.S. Senate seat from Texas, he blamed his defeat on conservatives whom he called “nut fringe zealots.”2 Time would prove Viguerie’s prediction about the Bush presidency to be accurate.
But for the conservative movement, the most important Washington events of 1989 came not from the Bush administration but from the House of Representatives, where Newt Gingrich engineered the forced resignation of Democratic Speaker Jim Wright and his own ascension to the number two Republican post, by just two votes.
Gingrich began attacking Wright’s ethics in 1987, focusing on a sweetheart book deal that earned the Texas congressman a 55 percent royalty, about four times the most generous author’s arrangement. Wright received $54,000 in “royalties” in 1985-1986 for a 117-page paperback, Reflections of a Public Man, a collection of his homilies and poems. It was sold, reportedly, only through a single Fort Worth bookstore. A child of the media age, Gingrich constantly worked the press on the assumption that “if enough newspapers said there should be an investigation, Common Cause [the liberal public interest group] would have to say so. Then members would say it. It would happen.”3
As Gingrich foresaw, Common Cause president Fred Wertheimer soon asked the House Ethics Committee to appoint an outside counsel to investigate both Wright’s book deal and his role in helping Texas savings and loan operators in financial trouble. Gingrich promptly filed his own complaint, citing the royalty arrangement and Wright’s oil investments, thus forcing an investigation of the man he called “the least ethical Speaker in this century.”4
By the spring of 1989, Wright’s career was effectively over, following the release of an ethics committee report stating that the speaker was guilty of sixty-nine violations of House rules, in addition to excessive profits from bulk sales of his book.5 Wright announced his resignation in May, brought down by his own wrongdoing and the take-no-prisoners tactics of a self-described conservative “revolutionary.” Of the two factors, as conservative analyst M. Stanton Evans wrote, the more important was Wright’s improper conduct, which was so blatant that it could not be ignored even by a House of Representatives that was 258-175 Democratic.6
At almost the same time, Gingrich took a decisive step toward his longtime goal of becoming House Speaker. It was obvious that Bob Michel of Illinois, a member of the World War II generation, was coming to the end of his long tenure as Republican House leader. But who would succeed him? Trent Lott of Mississippi had been the House Republican whip and Michel’s likely successor, but he had left the House in 1988 and had run successfully for the Senate. Lott and Gingrich had worked closely in the House, with Lott strongly supporting the Conservative Opportunity Society (COS), a band of conservative backbenchers organized in 1983 by Gingrich. Gingrich often referred to Lott as “my mentor.”7
Jack Kemp was another possible Republican leader (and COS supporter), but he too had left Congress after his unsuccessful run for the presidency in 1988. Kemp got a consolation prize from President Bush, the top spot at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Succeeding Lott as Republican whip was Dick Cheney of Wyoming, a solid 90 percent conservative (according to the American Conservative Union) and heir apparent to Michel. But when John Tower was rejected by the Democratic Senate as Bush’s secretary of defense, the president nominated Cheney. The game of political chairs left the office of House Republican whip open. Although Michel’s personal choice was the mildly conservative Edward Madigan of Illinois, Gingrich quickly announced his own candidacy. Veteran GOP strategist Eddie Mahe summed up the Gingrich-Madigan contest: “Newt’s conception of the job is figuring out how to become a majority. Madigan’s concept of the job is figuring out how to get along with Democrats.”8
Gingrich was the underdog, but that was nothing new. He declared that the choice was activism versus passivism. Gingrich and his COS associates—Robert S. Walker of Pennsylvania, Vin Weber of Minnesota, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Dan Coats of Indiana, Connie Mack of Florida, and Dan Lungren and Duncan Hunter of California—worked all weekend before the vote on March 13. (It is a measure of Gingrich’s ability to pick winners that Gregg, Coats, and Mack all become U.S. senators, and Lungren California’s attorney general.) The Gingrich team reached out to all elements of the party, Left and Right, stressing Gingrich’s vision of a Republican majority. “By Monday morning,” recalled Walker, “we had 60 people committed to vote for Newt for whip…. The last 30 or 35 votes came real hard.”9
Among the first members that Gingrich telephoned personally, according to political reporter Dan Balz, were two moderate House Republicans, Nancy L. Johnson of Connecticut and Steve Gunderson of Wisconsin. Johnson and Gunderson committed to Gingrich and began lining up other moderates. Johnson told her colleagues: “This is a leader who has the vision to build a majority party and the strength and charisma to do it.”10
No one knew whether Gingrich could actually do so, but anything was better than the Republicans’ current status as a seemingly permanent minority in the people’s branch of government. As one observer put it, “The Democrats ran over them; the Republican White House ignored them; Senate Republicans often belittled them…. it was a miserable existence.”11
Even so, Gingrich was a tough sell. Although he quoted conservative heroes like Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, he also cited spacey non-conservatives like futurist Alvin Toffler, who preferred direct to representative democracy regardless of what the Constitution said. Gingrich, moreover, was controversial and egotistical. Undeniably brilliant, he was almost willfully unorganized. By his own admission, he was an idea man, not a vote counter, which was one of the whip’s primary responsibilities. But he had high energy, a burning desire to succeed, and a surprising willingness, when he wanted to, to listen to others—“a part of his personality that is least understood by his critics,” according to the Washington Post.12
Gingrich received help that critical weekend not only from moderate Republicans but from the New Right. Paul Weyrich, who had met Gingrich in 1979 when he first came to Washington, spent an hour and a half with Congressman Phil Crane convincing him to back Gingrich rather than Madigan, his colleague from Illinois. “He’s not one of us,” Weyrich freely conceded to his fellow movement conservative, “but he will do business differently. He is an opportunity to break out of the box we’ve been in.”13 Reluctantly, Crane agreed to support Gingrich.
Every vote was critical, and Gingrich finally squeezed out a narrow victory by just two votes, 87 to 85. His election as House Republican whip was a pivotal event in the history of the conservative movement. If Gingrich had not become the number two Republican in 1989, he would not have been in a position to succeed Bob Michel when he retired. When Michel announced in 1993 that he would leave at the end of that Congress, Gingrich garnered the support of a majority of House Republicans to be the new party leader within a week—and began preparing the way for a historic document, the Contract with America.
History was also being made across the Atlantic Ocean, with the disintegration of the iron curtain from Berlin to Warsaw to Prague to Bucharest. The collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe came from decades of political tyranny and economic backwardness—and initiatives launched by farsighted Western leaders like Ronald Reagan and John Paul II.
While the West basked in remarkable prosperity and personal freedom, the East slipped further and further into an economic and political morass from which escape seemed impossible. With no incentives to compete or modernize, Eastern Europe’s industrial sector became a monument to bureaucratic inefficiency and waste, a musty museum of the early industrial age.
As the New York Times pointed out, Singapore, an Asian city-state of only 2 million people, exported 20 percent more machinery to the West in 1987 than all of Eastern Europe.14 Life expectancy declined dramatically in the Soviet bloc, and infant mortality rose. The only groups exempted from social and economic hardship were Communist party members, upper-level military officers, and the managerial elite.
Increasingly, the once-impenetrable iron curtain was breached by modern communications and technology, allowing the peoples of Eastern Europe to see how the other half of Europe lived. Increasingly, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, and East Germans demanded change and reform, not only in the marketplace but in the realm of human rights and liberties.
The miraculous year began in February 1989 with talks in Poland, after months of strikes, between leaders of the still-outlawed Solidarity union and the communist government. In March, seventy-five thousand demonstrated in Budapest on the anniversary of the 1848 revolution in Hungary, demanding a withdrawal of Soviet troops and free elections.
In April, Solidarity and the Polish government agreed to the first open elections since World War II, and the union’s legal status was restored. In July, Soviet leader Gorbachev reminded the Council of Europe meeting in Strasbourg that he rejected the Brezhnev Doctrine, stating that “any interference in the domestic affairs and any attempts to restrict the sovereignty of states, both friends and allies or any others, are inadmissible.”15 His public abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine speeded up powerful forces of change already in motion.
In September, an exodus began when Hungary opened its borders with Austria and allowed thousands of East Germans to cross its borders to defect to the West. On November 9, a tidal wave of East Germans poured across the border as travel restrictions were lifted, and the Berlin Wall fell after nearly four decades. Only that summer, East German communist boss Erich Honecker had declared defiantly that the wall would stand for at least another hundred years. Millions of Czechs and Slavs walked off their jobs and onto the streets, and the communist government of Czechoslovakia resigned.
The year of miracles ended in December with the execution of Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu and the election of Vaclav Havel, who had begun the year in jail, as president of Czechoslovakia. The sudden collapse of communism like a house of cards confirmed what Walter Judd had often said: “Tyrants have almost always looked invincible until the last five minutes, and then all of a sudden they fall apart.”16
Meanwhile, in America, Newt Gingrich was trying to loosen the tight and sometimes tyrannical hold that Democrats had on the House of Representatives. Many political observers said it was a hopeless task; some even wondered whether the Democrats would control Congress for another hundred years. But Gingrich was no Don Quixote on a glorious and unrealistic quest. He was at last well organized, well financed, and focused on his primary goal: to create a conservative governing majority. In many ways, he was not that different from the three “misters” who had dominated conservatism since the 1940s. Like Bob Taft—Mr. Republican—Gingrich was intensely ambitious and an unapologetic partisan. Like Barry Goldwater—Mr. Conservative—he was fiery in his speech and thrived on controversy. Like Ronald Reagan—Mr. President—he was a charismatic leader and passionately in love with ideas.
With a nod to Mao Zedong, he declared, let a thousand ideas bloom, although not all did. At the National Republican Congressional Committee, which he visited often in the early 1980s, a bemused staff changed the labels of three filing cabinets to read “Newt Ideas” and labeled one last drawer: “Newt Good Ideas.”17
From his teen years on, Gingrich had been a fountainhead of ideas, seeing himself as a “transformational figure” who would devote his life to saving America from its enemies, within and without. He became a Republican in 1952 at the age of nine, under the influence of his aunt and uncle. He read voraciously—histories, biographies, science fiction, and even the Encyclopedia Americana, which his stepfather, Bob Gingrich, a career officer in the infantry, gave him at eleven.
A pivotal experience was a family visit in 1958 to the World War I battlefield of Verdun. The fourteen-year-old boy surveyed the shell-scarred, mine-pocked land and peered through the windows of the ossuary, a receptacle of the bones of more than 100,000 unidentified bodies. A sense of horror and reality pervaded the impressionable young American. As he wrote in his 1984 book, Window of Opportunity, “I left that battlefield convinced that men do horrible things to each other, that great nations can spend their lifeblood and their treasure on efforts to coerce and subjugate their fellow man.”18 Gingrich thereafter dedicated his life to trying to prevent a recurrence of such a devastating war through military strength and moral preparedness.19
The family later moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, where Gingrich was active in high school politics, managing the campaign of a friend, Jimmy Tilton, who was running for senior class president. Tilton won, and Gingrich got his first sweet taste of winning politics.
On the defining issue of southern politics, race, Gingrich was always an integrationist, rejecting the segregation that characterized most of Georgia. He embraced the 1960 Nixon-Lodge ticket as a “progressive reform ticket” while what he called “the forces of corruption, racism and one-party rule” aligned themselves with the Georgia Democratic party.20 And he became a Republican for pragmatic reasons as well; with so few Republicans in heavily Democratic Georgia, he was assured, as biographers Judith Warner and Max Berley put it, of “rapid recognition and instant exposure.”21
At Emory University in Atlanta, he founded a Young Republican club and managed an unsuccessful Republican congressional campaign. In his sophomore year, he told his fellow YRs that the Republican party believed in five things: “personal freedom, limited government, the federal system, the law, and capitalism.”22 Few other twenty-year-olds could have offered a more succinct and accurate summary of Republican philosophy.
Graduating from Emory in 1965 with a degree in history, Gingrich entered graduate school at Tulane University in New Orleans. He received a draft deferment because of his wife (his former high school geometry teacher) and their two small daughters. It would have been “irrational,” he later argued, for him to volunteer and leave his young family behind (although other young fathers did).23
He became active in the 1968 Louisiana presidential primary campaign of Nelson Rockefeller, who was challenging, albeit ineffectively, Richard Nixon. Gingrich actually favored Ronald Reagan as the GOP’s 1968 presidential candidate. He had seen Reagan “annihilate” Robert F. Kennedy in a nationally televised debate in 1967 and realized that the California governor was not “some shallow Hollywood actor.”24
Convinced that Nixon could not win, Gingrich went to work for Rockefeller when Reagan insisted he was not a candidate. Gingrich admired Rockefeller for his support of a strong national defense and his outspoken commitment to civil rights, always a defining issue for Gingrich.
Receiving his doctorate in history, the activist-scholar spent the next decade in Carrollton, Georgia, thirty-five miles west of Atlanta, teaching history at West Georgia College and trying to get elected to Congress from the Sixth Congressional District, which stretched from Atlanta’s suburbs to distant rural communities. He ran against the incumbent Democrat, John J. Flynt, a segregationist and symbol of Old South courthouse politics, in 1974 and again in 1976. He lost both times, but only by a couple of points. Each time, Gingrich portrayed himself as a “moderate conservative,” even declining to take sides in the heated 1976 primary battle between Ford and Reagan.
By word and action, Gingrich disavowed his former liberal Republican connections. He was convincing enough to be endorsed by Paul Weyrich’s Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress in 1974 and again in 1976. He promised if elected to close tax loopholes “which allow the very rich like Nelson Rockefeller” to avoid taxes, and sent a telegram to President Ford in 1974 “stating his objections” to the appointment of the New York liberal as vice president.25 He even omitted from his official biography the fact that he had once worked for Rockefeller. Although he was endorsed by the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club, Gingrich was clearly moving to the right.
Almost broke but undaunted after his 1976 loss, Gingrich resolved to run for Congress a third time. At an Atlanta fund-raising dinner in the fall of 1977, the thirty-four-year-old Gingrich announced that he believed “deeply in the need for a conservative majority government.”26 At the time, just three years after the Watergate scandal and one year after the defeat of President Ford by an obscure southern governor, most Republicans were worried about the political survival of their party, let alone achieving a majority.
Undeterred, Gingrich uttered a battle cry a few months later that shaped his congressional campaign and the next two decades of his career. He castigated the Republican leadership, blaming Ford’s pardon of Nixon for his 1974 congressional defeat and calling both former presidents “pathetic.”27 And he described what the GOP needed to become a majority party:
This party does not need another generation of cautious, prudent, careful, bland, irrelevant, quasi leaders who are willing to drift into positions because nobody else is available. What we really need are people who are tough, hard-working, energetic, willing to take risks, willing to stand up in a slug fest and match it out with their opponent.
You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power … to build a majority capable of sustaining itself.28
It all came together for Gingrich in 1978. He was able to raise seed money from a group of wealthy supporters of his previous campaigns. He was highlighted by political reporter David Broder of the Washington Post as one of several rising Republicans who were challenging Democratic incumbents. And he met in Washington with Eddie Mahe, one of the GOP’s top operatives and a former political director of the Republican National Committee. “It took me three-and-a-half minutes,” Mahe recalled, “to find out he was smarter than I was and I should listen to him.”29
Gingrich campaigned and won in 1978 as what can be called a New South conservative: economically and socially conservative, strongly anticommunist, pro-civil rights, and environmentally liberal. He received one-third of the black vote, an impressive showing given the nearly all-white composition of the Republican party in the South. Gingrich easily beat his Democratic opponent, state senator Virginia Shapard, by fifty thousand votes, although Shapard was endorsed by the powerful Atlanta Constitution, which criticized Gingrich for allowing his imagination to “run away with him in this election year” (a reference to his attack ads).30
The congressman-elect barely took time to thank his campaign supporters for all their hard work before traveling to Washington to talk to anyone who would listen about his plans to make Republicans the majority in America. He spent three hours with Congressman Guy Vander Jagt of Michigan, chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee. Vander Jagt, who had kept in touch with Gingrich for five years, later appointed him head of a task force to plan a Republican majority. “I skipped him over about 155 sitting Republicans,” he admitted.31
Gingrich talked openly about radically changing the balance of power in government. “The Congress in the long run,” he told Congressional Quarterly, “can change the country more dramatically than the president. I think that’s healthy. One of my goals is to make the House the co-equal of the White House.”32
It was an audacious statement and an impossible goal. Congress can change the country, and has done so throughout modern American history, from rejecting the Treaty of Versailles in 1920 to resisting U.S. involvement in World War II in the late 1930s to the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 over President Truman’s veto. But because of its multiple membership and divided leadership, Congress’s impact is necessarily limited and usually short-lived. The president can focus like a laser on an issue while Congress is debating which issues to focus on. And certainly Gingrich’s omission of the Senate is significant.
Nixonian in his ability to seek out centers of political power, Gingrich called on New Right leader Paul Weyrich in his office just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. He told Weyrich that although he did not consider himself to be part of the New Right, “I identify with you. We can be strategic allies as we work together to gain power.”33 Antiestablishment from his first days in Washington, Weyrich admired the freshman congressman for his willingness to “take on the entrenched interests of either party,” whether it was House Speaker Tip O’Neill or Republican leader Bob Michel.34
For the next few years, Gingrich and conservatives worked together. The transformation of Newt Gingrich into a movement conservative seemed complete. Gingrich often co-chaired the weekly luncheon meetings of the Kingston Group (one of Weyrich’s coalition groups). Ed Feulner recalls Gingrich’s attending several of the Heritage Foundation’s brown bag luncheons. “He was very bright,” said Feulner; “very.”35 Heritage was sufficiently impressed to include Gingrich in a special 1983 discussion of the “future of conservatism.” The other participants were conservative heavyweights Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and editor Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal.
As he did wherever he went, Gingrich would spout a new idea or propose a new study, and conservatives would dutifully carry out the research. But the alliance began to fray as conservatives wearied of receiving, in return for all their efforts, little more than new ideas and more new policies that were never implemented. Gingrich, aware of the growing disaffection, asked Weyrich what he should do, and Weyrich, never at a loss for advice, told the two-term congressman that he would remain a backbencher until he targeted some powerful figure and “went after him.” If you succeed in bringing him down, predicted Weyrich, “you’ll become a force to be reckoned with in this town.”36 Weyrich was not certain that Gingrich could do it, but he was sure the young congressman would one day be a “very important conservative leader.”37
Conservative publisher Richard Viguerie, for his part, openly admired the Georgia congressman and put him on the May 1982 cover of Conservative Digest with the headline, “A New Conservative Leader for the ’80s.” The magazine described Gingrich as “a prototype conservative populist” and quoted Congressman Jack Kemp as calling him “a key intellectual figure within the Republican Party.”38
The article revealed a politician who knew where he was going and seemed utterly confident he would get there. He was for dismantling the Great Society but keeping the New Deal in order “to meet all the underlying desires to protect the needy and elderly.”39 He expressed a fervent interest in technology, particularly outer space, and explained that the exploration of space was the modern-day equivalent of the building of the Panama Canal or the transcontinental railroads.
That January, in a Washington speech to conservative leaders, Gingrich had outlined what he called a “conservative opportunity society.” Among its seven principles were the need for American military strength (Gingrich called himself a hawk, “but a cheap hawk”); an emphasis on local governments, volunteer agencies, and the private sector rather than centralized government; and “workfare” rather than welfare. He called for a coalition among “economic conservatives, national defense conservatives, and social conservatives,” all committed to “traditional American values.”40
In the Conservative Digest interview, he argued that the conservative movement had to go beyond political action committees like NCPAC and the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress and encourage a proliferation of special interest groups. Among his suggestions: Americans for Jobs and Prosperity Through Space, Victims United Against Violent Crime, and Americans for Strong Local and State Government. “The very basis of American society,” Gingrich told Conservative Digest, borrowing from Alexis de Tocqueville, “is the right of individuals to be involved in voluntary associations.”41
At about this time, Gingrich talked candidly with the Washington Post’s David Broder about the future of his party and the nation:
I am a Republican, but I think the greatest failure of the last 20 years has been the Republican Party, not the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has attempted to do what the governing party should do—govern. But it failed. And when it failed, there was nobody there to take up the burden. And I think that in order for this civilization to survive, at least as a free society, we’ve got to have a more rigorous and cohesive sense of an alternative party.42
Gingrich was looking everywhere for ways to lead the GOP to a rebirth of what he saw as its heyday: from the 1850s through the first decade of the twentieth century, during all of which it was the party of economic growth and individual opportunity. In his first year in the House, he led a Republican drive to expel Democratic congressman Charles C. Diggs of Michigan, who had been convicted for diverting money from his congressional payroll to his personal use. In his second year, he brought House and Senate candidates to the Capitol steps, where they posed with presidential candidate Ronald Reagan and asked voters to elect a Republican majority in Congress. It almost worked: Republicans won a majority in the Senate in 1980 and picked up thirty-three seats in the House.43
In 1983, Gingrich took the first of several steps that would transform him in just six years from a relatively obscure House member into a formidable conservative force. And during those years, he voted right nearly all the time: his 1984 rating from the American Conservative Union was 91 percent.
Gingrich decided that he needed his own political organization to carry out his revolutionary agenda. Following the disappointing 1982 midterm elections in which House Republicans lost twenty-six seats, Richard Nixon told Gingrich, “You can’t change the House yourself. You have to go back and form a group,” one centered on ideas. The former president warned that this task would not be easy. House Republicans, he said, “are not used to having ideas and they’re not used to thinking that ideas matter.” That had to change, Nixon argued. Republicans had to become more interesting, more energetic, and more idea-oriented.44 Gingrich emphatically agreed, and soon created the Conservative Opportunity Society, a House caucus of likeminded young conservative activists.
Gingrich’s political strategy, wrote political reporters Dan Balz and Charles R. Babcock, was simple: Erode the people’s confidence in the “corrupt” Democrats who had controlled Congress for thirty years and develop a set of Republican ideas and programs that would appeal to a majority of voters.45 Reagan had already laid the foundation for the positive side of the strategy with his 1980 campaign theme of “family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom” and his specific proposals to cut taxes and limit government.
Gingrich’s critical contribution was on the negative side: to attack and keep attacking the Democrats. Democratic leaders like Jim Wright called Gingrich “a nihilist.”46 But, in truth, Gingrich was a political revolutionary in the American tradition, a Sam Adams or a Patrick Henry, determined to wrest power from the Democrats who had grown accustomed to dealing with go-along, accommodationist Republicans like Bob Michel and Gerald Ford. The always genial Michel was well known for sparring with House Speaker Tip O’Neill on the House floor and later playing golf with him.
Gingrich, Vin Weber, Bob Walker, and several dozen other House Republicans began meeting once a week. “Trent Lott was the godfather,” Gingrich recalled. “He hosted a weekly luncheon.”47 They described themselves as direct descendants of the founding fathers, fighting for freedom and against a too-powerful government.
COS’s undisputed enemy was the liberal welfare state, a primary target of conservatives from Bob Taft through Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan to the present. Gingrich stressed that although President Reagan unquestionably had “slowed down” the liberal welfare state, he had not fundamentally changed its character or its size. Advocates of the welfare state still wielded considerable power and influence. COS members therefore sought “wedge” issues, like abortion, school prayer, and anticommunism, that would split the Democratic coalition by forcing Democrats to choose between their base constituencies—organized labor, blacks, liberal special interest groups—and the majority of Americans. COS members also developed magnet issues, calculated to draw voters to the Republican vision for America—issues like tax reform, crime, and immigration.
Gingrich and his colleagues drew from a rich reserve of conservative ideas, including Reagan’s prepresidential speeches, William F. Buckley’s early writings, and Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative. Dick Armey would later remark that Goldwater’s “eloquent defense of freedom has altered our country forever.”48 In a December 1983 memo to Weber, Hugh Gregg proposed nine core issues for the COS to champion, including a line-item veto, a balanced budget amendment, tougher penalties for crime, welfare reform, High Frontier (Reagan’s SDI), House rules reform, and voluntary school prayer.
With his political organization firmly in hand, Gingrich next considered how best to communicate his revolutionary message. He decided that, unlike Lenin, he did not have to create his own newspaper—particularly given the in-House television network, C-SPAN, launched in 1979.
Actually, it was Bob Walker, the Republicans’ official point man during floor debate, who learned from the telephone messages he kept getting that lots of people were watching C-SPAN’s coverage of the House. In early 1984, COS members began using the period set aside for special orders at the end of each day’s regular session to talk about conservative issues. Few House members were present, but C-SPAN’s cameras were, and they daily piped COS’s presentations to the 17 million Americans with access to C-SPAN. In short order, Gingrich and his fellow Young Turks became television celebrities, and other news media began paying increasing attention to them.
It was time to step up the attack. In May 1984, COS members took command of an almost empty House floor and condemned the Democrats, including majority leader Jim Wright, for writing a “Dear Comandante” letter to Nicaragua’s Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega. Gingrich labeled “appeasers” the Democrats who had a “pessimistic, defeatist and skeptical view toward the American role in the world.” Dramatically, he challenged them to respond to his charges. Naturally, no one did, since he was addressing a chamber devoid of Democrats.49
The COS indictment stung the Democrats—particularly because there was so much truth in it—and several days later, a still angry O’Neill took the House floor. Shaking his finger at Gingrich, he shouted, “You deliberately stood in the well before an empty House and challenged these people and you challenged their Americanism! It’s un-American! It’s the lowest thing I’ve ever heard in my 32 years here!”50
O’Neill had overreacted; personal attacks are against the rules of the House. He was formally reprimanded for his emotional outburst, and his words were stricken from the Congressional Record, an almost unprecedented rebuff of a Speaker. Earlier, O’Neill had tried to nullify the speeches of COS members by ordering the C-SPAN cameras to pan the empty chamber when they spoke. But the old Democrat did not understand the new media. COS’s target had always been the living room, not the House floor. From the beginning, Weber later explained, COS was trying to build “a cadre” among C-SPAN viewers.51
Some senior Republicans—and even a few COS members—were uncomfortable over Gingrich’s harsh rhetoric and confrontational tactics. Michel counseled his younger colleague to be “gentlemanly,” and back-bencher Dan Coats suggested that “Newt’s belief” that “you almost had to destroy the system so that you could rebuild it” was “kind of scary stuff.” Still, Coats admitted, “We wouldn’t have gotten to where we are today had Newt not kept pushing it as hard as he did.”52
But leading conservatives like Trent Lott, Jack Kemp, and Dick Cheney encouraged Gingrich and other COS members to keep pushing. They understood that there was only one way they were ever going to capture the House: They had to stay on the offensive. President Reagan too appreciated the importance of the COS, using the phrase “an opportunity society for all” in his 1984 State of the Union address.53
The president also paid personal tribute to Gingrich, thanking him for organizing a rally on the Capitol steps to support the administration’s prayer-in-school amendment. Supporters and opponents alike wondered whether Gingrich ever slept. He would regularly call one Reagan White House official at 6:30 A.M., believing that he could influence the official’s thinking for the whole day “if he got to him early enough.”54
Having created his own political caucus (which would never have occurred to Barry Goldwater) and with free access to a national television network (which Robert Taft would have disdained), Gingrich now proceeded to establish his own tax-exempt think tank, the American Opportunity Foundation. For Newt Gingrich, ideas had true political power. Eddie Mahe, one of the organizers, explained that the foundation was supposed to generate funding for “the research and education that all of Newt’s projects tend to need…. He just sucks up information.”55
Gingrich added another important political tool to his arsenal in 1986 when former Delaware governor Pete DuPont offered to hand his political action committee, GOPAC, over to him. DuPont was preparing to run for president and did not want GOPAC, which he had started back in 1979, to be compromised by his presidential candidacy. A delighted Gingrich accepted DuPont’s generous offer and proceeded to transform GOPAC from a fund-raising committee for state and local candidates into a hard-hitting, national political organization. In short order, GOPAC was sending training tapes to thousands of GOP candidates running for federal as well as state and local office. Among other things, the tapes suggested “contrast words” to use against opponents, including “decay, failure, shallow, traitors, pathetic, corrupt, incompetent, sick.”56
With GOPAC funds, Gingrich traveled across the country to recruit, train, and campaign for candidates. Barry Goldwater had done much the same thing, but always within the framework of official party organizations like the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, which he had headed. Reflecting the emerging new politics, Ronald Reagan had formed his own PAC, Citizens for the Republic, following his 1976 presidential bid. Gingrich proudly referred to GOPAC, which spent an estimated $8 million between 1991 and 1994, as “the Bell Labs of GOP politics.”57 The head of the Republican “labs,” however, was not the chairman of the Republican National Committee but Gingrich himself.
The PAC and the foundation were components of the “far-flung network of political and philosophical organizations” that Gingrich used, with purpose and passion, to spread his new conservative message across the country.58
A disputed congressional election in Indiana gave Gingrich one more major opportunity to demonstrate his political muscle before taking on Speaker Jim Wright. Democratic incumbent Frank McCloskey narrowly defeated Republican challenger Richard D. McIntyre on election night 1984 but was declared the loser—by just thirty-four votes—by Indiana’s Republican secretary of state. At issue were a number of contested ballots. House Democrats, who constituted a majority, refused to seat McIntyre in January 1985.
After a drawn-out legal battle, a House task force composed of two Democrats and one Republican voted to seat Democrat McCloskey. Furious Republicans were convinced that Democrats had stolen a congressional seat from their would-be colleague, Richard McIntyre. On May 1, 1985, McCloskey took his seat, and within minutes the entire Republican membership—old bulls and young turks—marched out of the House and down the steps of the U.S. Capitol in protest, the first House walkout in ninety years.
Vin Weber is convinced that the walkout, conceived by COS, was crucial to Gingrich’s emergence as a political leader of the House and future Speaker. The McCloskey “steal” was all the proof the Republicans needed that the Democrats were indeed corrupt and that politics as usual could no longer be tolerated. “I don’t think,” said Weber, “that Republicans ever looked upon the Democrats the same.”59 They were even ready to think the unthinkable—like forcing a House Speaker to resign.
Hell hath no fury like a conservative betrayed. President Bush had campaigned and won easily in 1988 as a read-my-lips, no-new-taxes conservative. But in the second year of his presidency, his lips were saying something else. All through 1989 and 1990, technocrats in the White House, led by OMB director Richard Darman, and liberal Democrats on Capitol Hill pressured the president to do something about the stagnant economy, growing by barely 2 percent, and the rising federal deficits, estimated at some $160 billion. For them, the solution was obvious: raise taxes.
Conservatives argued that such a move would be bad policy and worse politics. In May 1990, the Heritage Foundation’s Daniel J. Mitchell warned that new taxes would “slow economic growth and could lead to a recession.” He stated that the primary cause of the deficit was not lack of tax revenue but “runaway government spending.” Citing the Congressional Budget Office, Mitchell pointed out that federal tax receipts had doubled over the past decade, from $517 billion in 1980 to an estimated $1.067 trillion in 1990. A panel of conservative economists insisted that the budget deficit problem was being “hyped” to stampede voters into accepting an unnecessary tax hike. There was no deficit crisis, they asserted, only a political crisis for big spenders seeking more funds for their grandiose programs.60
Bush, however, caved in and agreed to make a deficit-cutting deal with the Democratic Congress, which included “tax revenue increases”—in other words, new taxes. “If George Bush had pardoned Willie Horton or burned Old Glory on the lawn of the White House,” reacted Daniel Mitchell caustically, “it would hardly have rivaled the flip-flop he has committed on taxes.”61 An ABC News/Washington Post survey agreed; it showed public disapproval of the Bush administration’s tax flip-flop by 54 to 45 percent.
Although present at the bipartisan budget negotiations, Gingrich did not attempt to conceal his disinterest, spending much of his time reading novels and making notes. But he did send a two-page memo to the White House in late July assailing the administration’s surrender strategy. He suggested that the Democrats were borrowing from one of their heroes, Woodrow Wilson, who had once commented, “You should never kill someone who is in the process of committing suicide.”62
On Sunday, September 29, 1990, the leadership of both parties met with President Bush before a Rose Garden signing ceremony. Gingrich, the number two House Republican, astounded everyone, especially White House aides, by announcing that he did not believe the plan would pass Congress and that “he wouldn’t support it.”63 He was speaking not just for himself but for conservatives in and out of the administration.
The plan was neatly summed up by conservative analyst Charles Kolb, who wrote that the Bush administration “had just agreed to raising taxes, renouncing Reaganomics, and acquiescing in major domestic spending increases, while simultaneously castigating GOP members of Congress who were willing to stand up for real spending cuts, economic growth and lower taxes!” A glum Vice President Dan Quayle would later concede that all Bush got was “four months of agony and a broken promise that would haunt him for the rest of his presidency.”64
Conservatives were outraged by the compromise. “The issue,” wrote National Review, “is whether the decade of Reaganism meant anything, or whether Mr. Bush merely thought his promises were a vehicle to the Oval Office, to be discarded at his convenience.”65 Human Events reared back and fired a high, fast one at Bush’s head, calling the budget deficit reduction deal “one of the worst political and economic blunders ever made by a sitting Republican president.” According to the conservative weekly, Bush did not just retreat before the Democrats, “he surrendered. Unconditionally.”66
Heritage senior vice president Burton Yale Pines later remarked that George Bush could have been conservatism’s Harry Truman, codifying the Reagan legacy as Truman had FDR’s New Deal. Instead, said Pines, Bush did almost “everything he could in the most crass and oedipal way to undermine the Reagan Revolution.”67 Columnist Patrick J. Buchanan declared that the Bush administration stood for “continued growth in social spending—paid for by cuts in defense—and higher taxes on working folks.” It also stood for “owls against loggers, feminists against Virginia Military Institute” and a “New World Order where our wealth is spread around the globe through foreign aid and institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank.” If George Bush were renominated for president in 1992, asserted Buchanan, “the Reagan Revolution would be over.”68
Buchanan’s harsh assessment of the administration’s domestic policies was essentially correct, except in one critical area, the federal judiciary, where Bush expanded conservative influence, particularly with one brilliant but explosive nomination.
“My name is Clarence Thomas,” the strong, vibrant voice said, “and I like what you have to say!” It was the morning of Christmas Eve 1979, and J. A. (Jay) Parker, the black editor and founder of the conservative Lincoln Review, was sitting in his downtown Washington office when he picked up the phone. For the next forty minutes, Parker mostly listened as Thomas, a legislative assistant to Senator John Danforth (R-Missouri), talked about politics, black-white relations, and how much he had enjoyed reading the quarterly journal’s views on free enterprise, limited government, and traditional moral values. “I thought I was the only one out there,” Thomas said several times.69 It was the beginning of a close and enduring friendship between the young black lawyer on Capitol Hill and the founding father of the contemporary black conservative movement in America.
Jay Parker was one of the few blacks active for Barry Goldwater in the early 1960s, the first black to sit on the national board of Young Americans for Freedom, the first black conservative to start his own public affairs firm in Washington. Over the years, he developed a national network of black conservative writers and thinkers that included Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution and Walter Williams of George Mason University. It was not a large network. Sowell and Williams recall joking in 1971, “If we wanted to have a pinochle game among black conservatives, we couldn’t.”70
But by the late 1970s, black conservatives were a growing force in the conservative movement. It was not surprising, then, that following Reagan’s 1980 presidential victory, transition coordinator Edwin Meese III asked Parker to head the effort at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Parker invited his young protégé, Thomas, to join the transition team. The hardworking Thomas wound up coauthoring the EEOC report. It was the beginning of a rapid rise in Washington for the Georgia-born black lawyer.
During the Reagan years, Thomas served in the civil rights division of the Department of Education, as EEOC chairman, and as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. He was an eloquent defender of equal opportunity but a blunt opponent of equal results through affirmative action and other government edicts. He once remarked at a “black alternatives” conference that the worst experience of his life was attending college and law school with whites who believed he was there only because of racial quotas. “You had to prove yourself every day,” he said, “because the presumption was that you were dumb and didn’t deserve to be there on merit.”71
He staked out a legal and philosophical position that was part traditional conservative and part libertarian. He praised natural law—the idea that there are governing principles higher than any written law—pointing out that the Declaration of Independence is a classic American statement of natural law with its proclamation that persons are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”72
His 1991 nomination to the Supreme Court became a cause célèbre when Anita Hill, a former colleague at the Education Department and the EEOC, accused him of sexual harassment. Hill’s testimony, despite sharp questioning by skeptical Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, persuaded many watching the televised hearings that Thomas had harassed her in some fashion. Judge Thomas returned to the committee to deny categorically all of Hill’s charges and to compare the proceedings to “a lynch mob.” Subsequent female witnesses, black and white, who had worked with Thomas testified they had never been misused or harassed by their boss.
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted, largely along party lines, to confirm Thomas’s nomination. Following an often sharp debate in the Senate, Judge Thomas won confirmation by a vote of 52 to 48, becoming (at age forty-three) the youngest member of the Supreme Court. Since then, Justice Thomas has become an increasingly influential conservative voice on the Court.
He once told a college audience how much he admired Thomas Sowell and Jay Parker for refusing to give in to “the cult mentality” that “hypnotizes” so many black Americans. “I only hope,” Thomas said, “I can have a fraction of their courage and strength.”73 Justice Thomas has demonstrated both traits as he continues to insist that blacks, like any other group in America, should be free to think for themselves and not be obliged to follow racially prescribed lines. “We have no hope of stopping drive-by shootings in the streets,” he declared, “until we can stop drive-by … character assassination.”74
The Persian Gulf War was most Americans’ idea of a perfect war: short, almost bloodless, victorious, and in prime time. Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Over the next six months, President Bush carefully secured UN and then congressional approval to use force against Iraq if its troops did not leave Kuwait. Bush authorized the start of Operation Desert Storm on January 15, 1991, and on February 24, 1991, after five weeks of punishing air and missile strikes, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf launched a twofront ground attack. Most of the Iraqi army was quickly routed. Just one hundred hours after coalition forces attacked, Bush ordered a cease-fire. Despite many predictions of massive U.S. casualties, only 148 Americans were killed in action. Kuwait was a sovereign nation once again, and oil reserves essential to the West were safe.
General Schwarzkopf and General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, became overnight heroes, returning soldiers were hailed in a series of victory parades, the ghost of the Vietnam War was finally laid to rest, and President Bush enjoyed public approval ratings of some 90 percent.
Then, more rapidly than ever before in modern politics, a president seeking reelection went from prohibitive favorite to unpopular underdog. In less than eighteen months, Bush’s approval plummeted nearly sixty points to the mid-thirties just before the Republican convention in July 1992.
The central reason was smoldering public dissatisfaction with a dipping economy. Median household income in 1991 fell 3.5 percent. Only 1 million new jobs were created during the first three and a half years of the Bush presidency—the worst record of any administration since World War II. And unemployment hit 7.7 percent, the highest since the 1982-1983 recession.
The public was quick to assign blame. When the federal government failed to provide emergency relief quickly in the wake of Hurricane Andrew in August 1992, a Gallup Poll showed that Americans, by 57 to 35 percent, thought that President Bush cared more for the suffering of victims in Kuwait and Bosnia than for the suffering of Americans in Florida and Louisiana. It was a devastating judgment that Bush could not overcome.
The president was also a victim of what has been called the Churchill syndrome, a term political scientists coined to describe the surprise defeat of British prime minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 elections after he had guided his country to victory over the Nazis in World War II. Like Churchill, Bush was being told by an inward-looking electorate, “You’re a wonderful global leader, but you don’t understand our problems here at home.”
Confronted by a superb campaigner in Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, a united Democratic party, and a well-financed third-party nominee—billionaire Ross Perot—Bush went down to defeat in November 1992. He received only 37.4 percent of the popular vote, less than Barry Goldwater did in his humiliating 1964 loss to Lyndon Johnson. Clinton carried thirty-two states and the District of Columbia, and won 370 of the 538 electoral votes. Another mark of the public’s widespread discontent was the 19 million votes cast for Ross Perot, whose 18.9 percent of the vote total was the highest for an independent presidential candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
Clinton won a plurality among independents, who had last supported a Democrat in 1964, and prevailed among suburbanites, who for the first time constituted a majority of voters. According to political analyst William Schneider, the suburban voters of 1992 were quite different from the silent majority of the 1970s and the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s. They were young, well educated, moderate, independent, and “very unhappy” with the nation’s economic performance in the past four years.75
Some Bush partisans persisted in blaming conservative Patrick J. Buchanan for the president’s defeat, arguing that the sharp-tongued television commentator’s primary challenge had divided and weakened the Republican party. But Buchanan’s strong showing in New Hampshire (where he received 37 percent of the primary vote and nine of twenty-three delegates) forced Bush to begin stressing traditional GOP themes and to move to the right of center, where the majority of American voters are to be found (as the elections of 1980, 1984, and 1988 demonstrated).
Human Events drew an apt parallel between Buchanan and Congressman John Ashbrook of Ohio, who “paved the way for the Buchanan challenge” when in 1972 he became the first modern-era conservative to battle an incumbent Republican president.76 Buchanan, however, was unable to mount a sustained challenge to the better-organized and better-financed Bush, who made much of a personal endorsement by Ronald Reagan.
There was also the liberal argument that the Republican National Convention in Houston was a profile in extremism that badly damaged the GOP’s reputation and Bush’s chances. In truth, the Republican convention boosted President Bush’s standing in the polls. Before Houston, he trailed Clinton by anywhere from sixteen to twenty-one points in the polls. The day after forceful speeches by “right-wingers” Buchanan and Pat Robertson, a survey showed that Bush had closed to within six points of the Arkansas governor.77 And after his effective acceptance speech, filled with conservative rhetoric and themes, Bush was only two points behind Clinton. He never got that close again.
In the Senate that fall, Democrats retained their 57-43 margin; in the House, Republicans picked up only a modest ten seats. Democrats still enjoyed a solid 258-176 majority. Vic Fazio, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, gloated that the Republicans “had a major failure.”78
And they almost had heart failure when Newt Gingrich retained his seat by a microscopic margin of 980 votes out of more than seventy thousand cast in a Republican primary. How could so prominent a Republican leader, who outspent his opponent by ten to one, almost lose? Because he had been relocated to an entirely new congressional district where he had never helped anyone get a social security check; because his opponent, Herman S. Clark, also was conservative and a strong conservationist; because Gingrich had twenty-two overdrafts at the House bank and a taxpayer-supported car with a $60,000-a-year driver; and because a liberal coalition, including the United Steelworkers of America and the League of Conservation Voters, had targeted him for defeat. Cross-over voting is allowed in Georgia, and thousands of Democrats voted in the GOP primary. “Newt presented a very inviting target,” wrote political columnist Dick Williams.79 If five hundred more Democrats had crossed over, Newt Gingrich would not have become the Speaker of the House of Representatives two years later.
Conservative reaction to President Bush’s defeat in 1992 ranged from sarcastic to frustrated. The president “inherited an impregnable fortress from Mr. Reagan,” wrote National Review editor John O’Sullivan, “and set assiduously about undermining the ramparts. All that Mr. Clinton did was lean on it.” To make sure that no one missed the point, the magazine added, in an unsigned editorial, that “firm, principled leadership, rooted in an accurate understanding of the nation’s problems (too much government, and a governing class that maintains its power by enlarging the government), is the best way to create [a] majority—the essence both of governing well and of winning elections.”80
“Who would ever have thought,” asked one prominent conservative, “that a Republican president closely identified with the Reagan revolution would be defeated by a Democratic challenger campaigning against him from the right?”81
Sorting through the results, political consultant Donald Devine suggested that in the wake of Bush’s defeat, there were now four major schools of Republicanism: the deficit cutters, represented by Bob Dole; the opportunity society/supply-siders, led by Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp; the social conservatives, epitomized by Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson; and the federalists, as defined by Ronald Reagan, who argued that the conservative purpose was to reestablish American government “on the terms originally intended by the founders.”82 Devine did not or could not suggest any successor to Reagan.
Heritage president Ed Feulner insisted that America, and the conservative movement, owed George Bush a “great debt of gratitude” for his lifetime of service to the country, for bringing dignity to the White House, for standing firm on judicial appointments like Clarence Thomas, and for steering the Persian Gulf War so skillfully. But on the twin issues most important to the majority of Americans, taxes and spending, he had “stumbled badly.” And during his campaign, Bush had failed to convince the electorate that he knew what he wanted to do in a second term. Bush proved, said Feulner, that “a ‘leader’ without a cause is a leader without a following.”83
For his part, Clinton knew precisely the image he wanted to project: he was a “different kind of Democrat,” a founder of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council, not the successor to ultraliberal George McGovern. While campaigning, Clinton said he favored a balanced budget amendment, federal deregulation, free trade with Mexico, the line-item veto (which he had had as Arkansas governor), the death penalty, getting tough with China over its brutal violations of human rights, and intervening in the war in former Yugoslavia. All these were issues that, in the words of COS member Vin Weber, “Ronald Reagan would probably have been running on if he ran in 1992.”84
President-elect Clinton insisted that he was a New Democrat who sought a “third way” between the Big Government of liberal Democrats and the No Government of conservative Republicans. His third way, he said, would foster community, encourage opportunity, and demand responsibility. One of Clinton’s most applauded lines during the fall campaign was his pledge to “end welfare as we know it.”85
Whatever his intentions, however, the new president quickly surrendered to Democratic liberals in Congress, who had their own ideas about the best balance between government and society. The end result, particularly Clinton’s proposed top-to-bottom overhaul of the nation’s health care system, so alarmed the American people that they were ready to listen to a Republican alternative called the Contract with America.