In their political backgrounds, Reps. Bill Archer, J.D. Hayworth, and Mary Bono share little in common.
But last November, these three Republicans played key roles in ending one of the most turbulent and unconventional eras in the House's history. Following the House Republicans' unexpected five-seat loss in the Nov. 3 elections, Archer, Hayworth, and Bono each separately reached the conclusion that Newt Gingrich should consider stepping down as House Speaker in the new Congress. When each of them conveyed that message to Gingrich in telephone calls within a few hours of one another on Friday, Nov. 6, the stunned Speaker realized that his base of party support had collapsed.
In those frantic days after the election, a few House GOP rebels made high-profile public pronouncements that they would not vote to give Gingrich another term as Speaker. As Gingrich made cross-country phone calls from his Marietta, Ga., district to some 60 other House Republicans to try to round up support, Archer, Hayworth, and Bono responded with significant questions about whether he could continue as the top House leader.
According to a close Gingrich confidant, it was these three loyalists from three different generations in the House who perhaps had the most impact in leading the 55-year-old Speaker to the decision, that Friday afternoon, to quit the job for which he had spent a lifetime preparing, the job in which he had fully intended to serve another four years. He had perhaps even hoped that his tenure as Speaker would serve as the precursor to a presidential bid.
"The Speaker sought me out and said he needed my vote," recalled Hayworth, a frequently bombastic ex-sportscaster from Arizona. "I said it could be a tough race. I said he needed to ask himself how he could run the majority. I said that it hurt me to say this, because he is my friend and mentor, but that he had to ask himself whether now was the time for a graceful exit from the stage. He said to me, 'So, you feel I should reassess.' He was very businesslike and pleasant, not brusque. He said he needed my vote. I didn't commit. I said, 'Mr. Speaker, call me back.'"
Hayworth's words must have struck Gingrich hard. Hayworth is one of the most partisan of the 73 House Republicans first elected in November 1994, a true Gingrich revolutionary. Moreover, he owed much loyalty to the Speaker, who had given him ample campaign help and other rewards, including a seat on the Ways and Means Committee.
By the time that Gingrich phoned Bono of California, she was already worried that the poor election results would result in another coup attempt. "I feared it would be bloody," recalled the ex-waitress and political novice who was elected just a year ago to the seat that had been held by her late husband, Sonny. "I didn't suggest that he sacrifice himself," Bono said. "I felt I could not pledge my support. I am so new at this, and I wanted to see how it would unfold." Later that day, Bono learned that Gingrich had quit. "I was devastated," she said. "But I felt that I said and did the right thing. In the end, it was his choice."
The final blow, that Friday, quite likely was the call that Gingrich received in mid-afternoon from Archer of Texas, the mild-mannered Ways and Means Committee chairman and an imperturbable 15-term House veteran. On Wednesday and Thursday of that week, Archer had stuck by Gingrich, even when several House Republicans urged that he himself should run for Speaker. But at 7 a.m. on Friday, Archer was awakened at his Arlington, Va., home by another House Republican, someone who, he says, "has become quite close to me and is considered in the middle" ideologically. "He spent 20 minutes telling me that I was the only one that had the respect of all the wings when we needed a change in Speaker," Archer said. "I said OK, I would consider it."
After Archer arrived at his Capitol Hill office that morning, his telephone kept ringing with calls from colleagues telling him that they would vote against another term for Gingrich as Speaker. "When I was convinced that they meant it, I called Newt at 3 o'clock and reported to him that they meant it," Archer said. "I said that I should share this with him. . . . There was a moment of silence. He said perhaps he should resign. I said that was his decision. And I said that I was convinced that he could not be elected Speaker, and that I was thinking of running myself, to avoid putting the House through this."
At 2 p.m., then-House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob Livingston, R-La., had held a rally outside the Capitol to announce his own bid for Speaker. Then, less than 30 minutes after the conversation with Archer, Gingrich began telephoning from his district office to tell his aides and closest advisers that he had called it quits. Shortly after 7, his Capitol office issued a terse statement announcing that the Gingrich era was ending. Gingrich's swift and dramatic exit was a fitting conclusion to his four years as Speaker. It had been a sensational and ultimately exhausting ride for the GOP-thrilling achievements, gut-wrenching disappointments, and endless conflict.
During the past four months, Gingrich's departure has been overshadowed by the House impeachment and the Senate trial of President Clinton, as well as by Livingston's withdrawal as the designated Speaker following the revelations of his marital infidelity. But it is worth reviewing the rise and fall of the Gingrich speakership, which marked the end of the Democrats' 40-year era of House control. The Gingrich era may have been brief, but it may also have been epochal; it has become clear in recent weeks, as lawmakers have struggled to define an agenda, that it will not be easy for the narrowly divided House to transcend the partisan bitterness of the Gingrich years.
Interviews with nearly a dozen current and former lawmakers who were key allies of Gingrich's, and several of his former aides, revealed notable areas of agreement about his successes and failures. Despite several requests for his views, Gingrich continued his post-resignation policy of no news-media interviews. "He doesn't feel he needs to defend himself," said a source who remains in contact with Gingrich. "He feels that being silent for a while is OK." Meanwhile, the ex-Speaker has been working actively behind the scenes to reposition himself. Privately, Gingrich's associates believe that his twisting, swooping, plunging career has at least a few more turns left to go.
Articulating the Vision
From the onset of his House career, Gingrich was determined to rewrite the rules of courtesy and compromise that governed lawmakers' behavior and served to limit partisan warfare. Within months of winning (on his third try) a House seat as a Georgia Republican in 1978, the former history professor was challenging his own party's leaders as too cautious and the House as too willing to abide corruption.
In 1980, Gingrich led the move to expel veteran Rep. Charles C. Diggs Jr., D-Mich., who had been convicted of accepting kickbacks. Facing a likely ouster, Diggs resigned. In 1983, Gingrich and a handful of restless House Republicans created what he termed the "Conservative Opportunity Society" to push for a radical overhaul of the "liberal welfare state." Soon after that, Gingrich so rattled then-Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr., D-Mass., that the House's presiding officer was forced to chastise O'Neill for using harsh rhetoric in criticizing Gingrich on the House floor.
By 1986, the upsetting backbencher was preparing to move into a more aggressive leadership role. In an interview late that year with National Journal, Gingrich said that President Reagan-who, entangled in the Iran-contra scandal, had entered his relatively weak, final years in office-represented only the first stage in the Republican Revolution. "He is the brilliant articulator of a vision that will take a generation to sort out," Gingrich said at the time.
Soon it became clear that Gingrich saw himself as the next leader of that crusade. He launched a strenuous campaign against Speaker Jim Wright, D-Texas, formally accusing Wright of unethical behavior in selling to lobbyists bulk orders of a book he had written. Gingrich's complaint forced an investigation by the House Standards of Official Conduct (Ethics) Committee into Wright's literary career; the resulting critical report, in the spring of 1989, forced Wright to step down. Meanwhile, Gingrich was consolidating his strength within his party. That March, he won election as GOP Whip by just two votes. By October 1993, when Minority Leader Robert H. Michel, R-Ill., announced his retirement, Gingrich was his obvious heir.
Gingrich's allies from these early years, many of whom later became his critics, regard his successful efforts to redirect the Republican congressional brigade-and thereby the Republican Party and politics in general-as a lasting and significant achievement. "Newt was a historic figure who changed Congress and the country," said recently retired Rep. Bill Paxon, R-N.Y., a one-time key lieutenant of Gingrich's who later had a bitter split with him. "He was a great visionary who could see the trend moving in our direction. He moved it faster and farther than others could have done."
Robert S. Walker, a Republican from Pennsylvania who retired from the House in 1996 and remains one of Gingrich's closest allies, views his former partner in more singular terms. "Newt was not the second stage of the Reagan Revolution," said Walker, who now is president of the Wexler Group, a Washington lobbying firm. Gingrich's leadership of the GOP's quest for control of the House in 1994 was "an opening gun of 21st-century politics, and he understood that," Walker added. "For the first time, a national party designed a campaign that was a positive articulation of issues and appealed to [voters] as individuals." This campaign, of course, was the Contract With America, a document signed by nearly all of the Republican House candidates in 1994, committing a Republican House to voting on 10 main planks and a variety of subtopics, ranging from balancing the budget to strengthening national defense. In working with other House Republicans to craft and showcase this document before the 1994 elections, Gingrich played several key roles: chief political strategist, fund-raiser, spokesman, and internal cheerleader.
To this day, Republicans of all ilks gush when they reflect on Gingrich's role in their 1994 campaign victory. "Newt was the most forceful member of the [Republican] Conference in saying we needed a positive agenda to motivate people," said conservative Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., an architect of the contract. Said moderate Rep. Christopher H. Shays, R-Conn., another Gingrich ally at the time: "Newt energized Republicans to realize we didn't have to be in the minority forever, and he gave us an agenda and objectives. . . . Only Newt could do this. He got us focused on what we wanted to accomplish."
And Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich.: "Newt Gingrich led us out of the wilderness after 40 years. His vision changed the way that we thought about ourselves, so that we could be a majority [party] with an agenda that the American people wanted."
Even the opposition concedes that Gingrich was highly effective during the 1994 campaign. "He was a galvanizing force and an articulate spokesman for them," said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Martin Frost of Texas. But Frost is quick to add that once the Republicans won the majority, Gingrich "tried to do too many things."
Indeed, even some Republicans were reeling from exhaustion by the time GOP leaders fulfilled their commitment-in early 1995, after many longer-than-usual work weeks and late-night sessions-to hold House votes during the first 100 days of the 104th Congress on every measure of their contract. Moreover, the highly disciplined House Republicans passed every proposal, except for a proposed constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress, which required a two-thirds majority.
Only three of the contract's items were backed by a majority of House Democrats: requirements that Congress comply with workplace laws, restrictions on the federal government's placing of "unfunded mandates" on local governments, and stronger rules against child pornography. As a result of bitter partisan divisions or minimal interest in the Senate, as well as Clinton's veto of product-liability legislation, those three were the sole parts of the original contract that were directly enacted. Other key provisions that later became law were included in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and the 1997 balanced-budget deal between Clinton and GOP leaders.
Leading the Charge
The Contract With America days were at times exhilarating for Gingrich and his newfound majority. But the Speaker's image in the press was largely negative, and it soon got much worse. Republicans agree that the disastrously defining period for Gingrich as Speaker began in mid-1995, when he attempted to overhaul the federal budget.
At the center of that conflict was Gingrich's showdown with Clinton. The two party leaders faced off over their spending priorities, both refusing to back down, in a process that culminated in a four-week shutdown of the federal government during the winter of 1995-96. Before that budget standoff, Clinton, who had been battered by the Republicans' November 1994 takeover of Congress, seemed to be in such a weak position that reporters asked him whether he was still "relevant." By the time it ended, with press coverage heavily favoring the White House interpretation of the crisis, Clinton clearly emerged as the victor-and it was Gingrich who was permanently weakened.
With the assistance of congressional Democrats and their interest-group allies, Clinton was highly effective in painting the Republicans' proposed budget cuts as draconian and mean-spirited. Gingrich, a man of short fuse and tin ear, was the perfect foil for such a campaign. During the heat of the crisis, Gingrich flew with Clinton aboard Air Force One home from Israel after the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Gingrich wanted to meet with Clinton during that flight, but was snubbed; even more galling to him, he was seated in what he regarded as the steerage section of the plane. This treatment may or may not have been calculated to inspire resentment. Regardless, it did. An irritated Gingrich complained to reporters about his treatment. That won him a front-page headline in the New York Daily News: "Cry Baby."
A number of Republicans acknowledge that Gingrich vastly overestimated himself and underestimated Clinton in pushing the fight of 1995 to a one-man-standing conclusion. While moderate Rep. James C. Greenwood, R-Pa., calls Gingrich "inspirational, a real commander, in almost a military sense," he added: "His biggest mistake was to fail to understand that the 1994 election was not an open invitation to knock the President off his feet." Republicans further failed, Greenwood added, as "we miscalculated how the Democrats would use jiujitsu on us to flip us over with our 'unprincipled' stand."
In his 1998 book, Lessons Learned the Hard Way, Gingrich conceded that the budget war had been a fiasco. "The idea of a grand showdown over spending had long been a staple of conservative analysis," Gingrich wrote. "I was to learn something about the American people that too many conservatives don't appreciate. They want their leaders to have principled disagreements, but they want these disagreements to be settled in constructive ways. This is not, of course, what our activists were telling us. They were all gung-ho for a brutal fight over spending and taxes. We mistook their enthusiasm for the views of the American public."
Republicans, concluded Gingrich, had forgotten the lesson that they should have learned from Reagan's legislative victories: "The White House media operation trumps any effort of that kind by the Congress."
By the spring of 1996, both the White House and Gingrich had called a budgetary truce, and stopgap funding legislation was passed. Eventually, in mid-1997, negotiations between congressional Republicans and the White House led to the passage of the five-year balanced-budget deal. Some Republicans continue to insist that the results justify Gingrich's methods. Large federal surpluses are now forecast for years to come, in contrast to the deficits that Clinton's Office of Management and Budget in January 1995 had predicted would continue at about $200 billion annually to 2000 and beyond. And Gingrich allies boast that it was their policies-not the Democrats' 1993 tax hike and deficit-reduction package-that brought the good economic times.
"It's only because the House Republicans shut down the government that we got a balanced budget," said Walker. "We suffered some short-term damage. Over the long haul, it was the single most important thing that we did."
Shays, who parted company with Gingrich on other issues, called the 1997 budget agreement with Clinton "our major achievement." He said that the chief failures in the fiscal showdown were not strategic, but rhetorical. "The mistake was not in shutting down the government, but how the President positioned us," Shays said. "None of us [Republicans] did a good enough job in selling our accomplishments."
One repercussion of the budget showdown was to force congressional Republicans to work with the Clinton White House in mid-1996 to reach agreement on several legislative proposals-including welfare reform and a modest health care bill-so that each side could claim accomplishments during that fall's political campaign. "The fundamental problem may have been unavoidable," said Greenwood. "To keep the majority, over the long haul, we have to compromise with the President."
But this bout of bipartisanship also had the effect of undermining the presidential bid of Republican Bob Dole, who had had an awkward relationship with Gingrich before quitting as Senate Majority Leader in the spring of 1996. Gingrich wrote in his 1998 book that although Dole politically would have been "better off with our having reached no agreement with Clinton . . . he loyally stuck it out with us, to what would be, for him, the bitterest end."
The dilemma that was becoming apparent to the Republicans was that the core of their agenda could not be enacted-or perhaps even defined-until their party controlled both the White House and Congress. In the 68 years since 1931, however, that has happened only once-during the first two years of the Eisenhower presidency.
Planting the Seeds of Destruction
By the time that the 105th Congress began in 1997, the rumbling within the Republican Party over Gingrich's failings as Speaker had become audible outside party confines. From early in the 104th Congress, Gingrich's style had infuriated many allies. Hoekstra, who was a corporate marketing specialist before he was elected to the House, sent three memos to Gingrich in 1996, criticizing his lack of focus and lack of follow-through. "He was not doing the things as Speaker that he needed to do," Hoekstra said. "We lost our focus on the agenda and on saying who we are."
Other House Republicans bristled over Gingrich's proclivity to dominate the power levers, especially in dealing with committee chairmen. "He had more authority than previous Speakers, especially in the early months," Camp said. "It probably went too far. We will rise or fall as a majority to the extent we are a team."
There was no question that Gingrich possessed a great talent for hurting himself with public missteps, and for persisting in this talent. Occasionally, after some particularly unfortunate public relations episode, a chagrined Gingrich would exile himself for a while, saying that other Republican colleagues should come to the forefront. But he never could contain himself for long, and the next gaffe was usually worse than the previous one. With each rhetorical overreach or legislative misfire, he further weakened himself among House Republicans.
A particularly grave self-inflicted wound was Gingrich's ethics trouble, which resulted from his myriad activities outside the House, including teaching, book-writing, and an active speaking schedule. The trouble dated back to 1995, when Rep. David E. Bonior, D-Mich., filed the primary ethics complaint objecting to the financing of a college course that Gingrich taught in Georgia.
In late 1996, the Ethics Committee concluded its two-year investigation with a statement of alleged violations, which Gingrich formally admitted. During January 1997, Gingrich was only narrowly re-elected Speaker, and two weeks later, the House reprimanded him for his ethics violations and fined him $300,000. Recently, the Internal Revenue Service issued a ruling that cleared the Progress and Freedom Foundation-the tax-exempt organization that financed Gingrich's course-of all impropriety in organizing the class that he taught. But the time and resources that Gingrich and his allies invested in his defense clearly were a distraction.
(Bonior, who criticized the IRS for failing to "ask the right questions" in seeking information about Gingrich from the Ethics Committee, said that the ruling did not change his view of Gingrich's modus operandi. "He destroyed the institution, and several lives along the way," Bonior said. "He sowed so many suspicious seeds of hatred that it became very difficult to operate.")
During the summer of 1997, the simmering tensions involving Gingrich boiled over into a bungled coup attempt. The uprising began as a series of meetings among House Republican rebels of the Class of 1994 who were disgruntled about the Speaker's occasional break with the conservative agenda. Later, the discussions spread to include four senior members of the Speaker's leadership team. Although the details remain fuzzy on the precise nature of the threat to Gingrich and the steps taken to quell it, the participants undoubtedly discussed possible ways to remove Gingrich.
This peculiar incident nearly sparked a meltdown among House Republicans after Majority Leader Richard K. Armey, R-Texas, alerted Gingrich to the peril. The only immediate consequence was Gingrich's firing of Paxon as the chairman of his leadership operations. But in the coup's aftermath, Gingrich distrusted the elected party leaders, and a deep chill descended between Armey and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas.
Taking the Fall
Just as Gingrich was the chief beneficiary of the House Republicans' sweeping success in 1994, he was the logical victim when things got really bad in 1998. "When a naval ship ends on a reef, the captain gets the blame," said Rep. Marshall "Mark" Sanford, R-S.C.
The Republicans' nearly empty legislative scorecard was one sign that Gingrich's leadership had run dry. Other than the balanced-budget deal, not much significant legislation was passed in 1997. By March 1998, the media-and the Democrats-had begun to suggest that this was a "Do-Nothing" Congress. Still, during the rest of the year, Republicans gave themselves few legislative accomplishments to take into the 1998 campaign. "We created high expectations for ourselves that couldn't be filled," said a former senior House GOP leadership aide.
In hindsight, GOP members gave several explanations for the debacle of 1998, not the least of which was Washington's obsession with the Monica Lewinsky scandal that began unfolding in January 1998. Gingrich, according to a lawmaker who requested anonymity, often expressed in private his view that "everything will be OK because Clinton will collapse" from the impact of the investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.
Monica Lewinsky aside, however, so many things went wrong for the Rebublicans on so many fronts in 1998 that it is hard to pinpoint a specific final cause for Gingrich's demise. By last year the party was suffering a widely shared malaise, which was compounded by continuing clashes between its many factions and by the Speaker's own personal weariness.
According to many Republican lawmakers, the most basic of problems was the lack of an agenda beyond the Contract With America that had brought the GOP to power in 1994. In particular, Republicans were left rudderless by their inability to chart a new course in response to the emergence of federal budget surpluses.
"We didn't recalibrate our message to make a more powerful case for tax cuts and our new priorities," complained Hoekstra. That shortcoming was exacerbated by congressional Republicans' support for a spending binge-a spree most evident in the highway-funding bill last spring, and in the 11th-hour omnibus appropriations bill last autumn. "That took away our centerpiece, to be the responsible party," Shays said.
Gingrich the backbench visionary was never able to come up with a new message as Speaker. He tried, though. In May 1995, Gingrich-then riding high following the passage of most pieces of the contract-spoke at a three-day House GOP retreat in Leesburg, Va., about his desire for Republicans to focus on "third-wave" issues dealing with the Information Age economy. Such issues had long interested Gingrich, but they didn't do much at all for a Congress filled by lawmakers who needed to show the voters concrete achievements in the here and now, not gauzy promises of a utopian future. One chairman called Gingrich's proposal "psychobabble," Walker recounted.
"Despite all his efforts, he couldn't persuade House Republicans to go along with his new set of ideas on conservatism," said Jeffrey A. Eisenach, a key Gingrich aide in the early 1990s and now president of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, which he helped found in 1993. "He could have been a superb Speaker," Eisenach said. "But in the context in which he was operating, every mistake was magnified, and every success was dismissed. He was up against, one, a very focused political enemy fighting for his life; two, the media certainly were not friendly to Newt; and three, the majority was too small to [be able to] govern."
Clearly, the discipline that Republicans had shown during the Contract With America and budget debates disappeared soon thereafter. Long-standing divisions re-emerged between fiscal disciplinarians and social-issue activists, and among libertarians, states' righters, and advocates of a federal role. "We weren't demonstrating an ability to govern," said Michael R. Johnson, who is the senior vice president and political director at APCO Associates Inc., a public affairs firm. Johnson served for seven years as chief of staff to Michel and has remained an adviser to House Republicans. "The whole party believed we can govern by communicating messages," he said, "instead of doing the work."
Yet others who were interviewed for this story refused to blame the congressional GOP at large, and instead faulted Gingrich's own leadership skills. More than a few Republicans complained that he was not suited to be a day-to-day legislative leader. "It's a tedious, boring, and, in some ways, demeaning job-holding people's hands and tending to runny noses," said one GOP lawmaker.
Paxon offered that Gingrich's "problem was that, as the guerrilla leader with the focus of taking the Capitol, he was not able to translate that into an effort with leadership, equilibrium, and focus." And even Daniel P. Meyer, Gingrich's chief of staff from 1989-96, said that one explanation for Gingrich's legislative limitations is that he is a "political warrior. He sees things in black-and-white." The party's decision to select Livingston, and then J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, as Speaker reflected an obvious desire for legislative expertise over electoral skills.
Last November came the denouement. The election results hurt terribly, not only because the Republicans lost five seats, but because Gingrich had confidently predicted a double-digit gain-even on the morning of Election Day. "He was surprised by the election, and he didn't have the answers," Camp said. Others said that the outcome revealed that Gingrich had become too dependent on a few confidants, chiefly his longtime political adviser Joseph R. Gaylord. "Newt could have survived one more time, if he had laid the groundwork for a seat loss," said a Republican insider.
In the end, Republicans concluded, Gingrich was forced out because he had lost "his reservoir of good will." Ironically, that identical phrase was used by Democrats a decade ago to explain the exile of then-Speaker Wright. Given the public's short attention span, it won't surprise many if Gingrich eventually returns to the campaign world, perhaps to indulge his obvious interest in presidential politics. For now, however, Capitol Hill regards his departure with very dry eyes.