The Unwinding Page 3

  In 1978, with vandalism in the cities, stagflation across the country, and a humorless moralizer in the White House preaching sacrifice, the public’s mood was sour, frustrated, suspicious of bureaucracies and special interests, antigovernment, antitax—populist and conservative. Gingrich’s Democratic opponent was made to order, a wealthy liberal female state senator originally from New York. Gingrich knew exactly what to do. He moved to the right and went after her on welfare and taxes. He had a new rock in his pocket, “the corrupt liberal welfare state,” and he nailed her between the eyes with it. The Moral Majority was about to take Washington by storm, and Gingrich talked about family values, said that his opponent would break her family up if she went to Washington, and featured Jackie and the girls in his ads.

  But Jackie looked fat and unattractive, and it was an open secret in political circles that Newt was cheating on her. Like most Arousers of those who Fan Civilization, he had powerful appetites, but he had not grown up to be the most desirable of men—big head under big graying helmet, cold clever grin, belly pushing against his sky-blue waistline—and his successes were limited. He tried to keep it to oral sex so he could claim literal fidelity if anyone asked, but within two years the marriage was over, another adoring woman about to become the next Mrs. Gingrich, the Advocate of civilization standing at Jackie’s hospital bed as she lay recovering from uterine cancer, a yellow legal pad with divorce terms in his hand. Years later, Gingrich would attribute his indiscretions to hard work brought on by patriotic zeal.

  Gingrich won easily in 1978, and his party picked up fifteen seats in the House (the freshman class included Dick Cheney). It was a sign of what was coming in 1980.

  The Organizer of the pro-civilization activists arrived in Washington with a plan. He would kick over the old order, put fear in the ruling Democrats, call them a “corrupt left-wing machine” (another rock—his pocket was bottomless), go after committee chairmen, bait Speakers of the House until they were red-faced with rage. He would shake up the timid Republicans, too, shame their leaders, create a cadre of young fighters, teach them the ways of politics (he liked to quote Mao: “war without blood”), give them a new language, an ecstatic vision, until the party would turn to its terrible child for deliverance. Then he would save the country—Speaker—President—Leader (Possibly) of the civilizing forces.

  And Gingrich did most of it.

  He saw all the available weapons on the battlefield, some never used before. Two months after his arrival, C-SPAN switched on its cameras in the House of Representatives, broadcasting Congress to the public for the first time. Gingrich immediately knew what to do—take the floor after regular order was over and give incendiary speeches to an empty chamber that would bring media attention and slowly build a devoted TV following. (Regardless of the rock labeled “elite liberal media,” he knew they loved a fight more than anything else.) In 1984, a speech calling the Democrats appeasers brought down the wrath of Tip O’Neill—“It’s the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my thirty-two years here!” But the Speaker’s remarks, being personal, were stricken from the record, and the incident landed Gingrich on the nightly news. “I am now a famous person,” he crowed, understanding the new rules of celebrity—that it would not be a bad thing to say, for example, “I have an enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet. And I’m doing it.”

  The old party system had become obsolete, snuffed out by high-minded reformers who wanted to end patronage and political bosses in smoke-filled rooms. Gingrich saw this happening, too—how politicians were turning into entrepreneurs who depended on special-interest PACs, think tanks, media, and lobbyists more than on the party hierarchy. So he gave speeches around Washington, wrote a book (financed by supporters), and created his own power base, with a fundraising apparatus and a political action committee. He recruited Republican candidates around the country and trained them with his own words and ideas on videotapes and cassettes, like a motivational speaker, understanding that language was the key to power. His memos included vocabulary lessons: if you discussed your opponent with words like betray bizarre bosses bureaucracy cheat corrupt crisis cynicism decay destroy disgrace impose incompetent liberal lie limit(s) obsolete pathetic radical shame sick stagnation status quo steal taxes they/them threaten traitors unionized waste welfare, you had him on the defensive, and if you described your side with change children choice/choose common sense courage crusade dream duty empower(ment) family freedom hard work lead liberty light moral opportunity pro-(issue) proud/pride reform strength success tough truth vision we/us/our, you had already won the argument. The Gingrich lexicon could be arranged into potent sentences regardless of context, or even meaning: “We can empower our children and families to dream by leading a moral crusade for liberty and truth if only we are tough and have common sense.” “Corrupt liberal bosses cheat, lie, and steal to impose their sick pathetic cynicism and bizarre radical stagnation in order to destroy America.” Thus a whole generation of politicians learned to sound like Newt Gingrich.

  And he saw that the voters no longer felt much connection to the local parties or national institutions. They got their politics on TV, and they were not persuaded by policy descriptions or rational arguments. They responded to symbols and emotions. They were growing more partisan, too, living in districts that were increasingly Democratic or Republican, liberal or conservative. Donors were more likely to send money if they could be frightened or angered, if the issues were framed as simple choices between good and evil—which was easy for a man whose America stood forever at a historic crossroads, its civilization in perpetual peril.

  By the end of the eighties, Gingrich was radically changing Washington and the Republican Party. Maybe more than Reagan—maybe more than anyone else. Then history went into high gear.

  In 1989 he bagged his biggest prey when Jim Wright, the Democratic Speaker, resigned because of ethics charges that had been relentlessly pressed by backbencher Gingrich. Seeing what total war could achieve, the Republicans made him one of their leaders, and the Teacher of the Rules of Civilization did not fail them. In 1994 he nationalized the midterms by getting nearly every Republican candidate to sign his Contract with America in front of the Capitol, pronouncing it “a first step towards renewing American civilization.” In November his party took both houses of Congress, for the first time since that African safari double feature. It was the Gingrich revolution, and he became its Robespierre—Speaker of the House, media obsession, equal ruler with the red-cheeked Arkansas boy in the White House, whose origins and desires bore such a striking resemblance to his own.

  Gingrich called Clinton a “counterculture McGovernik” and “the enemy of normal Americans.” He thought he could bend the president to his will: Clinton wanted to be loved, Gingrich wanted to be feared. They spent 1995 circling around the budget. When they met in the White House, Gingrich dictated terms, while Clinton studied Gingrich. He saw the nine-year-old’s insecurities writhing beneath the fiery words. He understood why none of Gingrich’s colleagues could stand him. He saw how to exploit the grandiosity. Clinton’s need for love gave him insight, and he used it to seduce his adversary while setting traps for him, and when at the end of the year the United States of America was forced to close for business, it was Gingrich who got the blame.

  And that was the end of the primary mission.

  Gingrich remained Speaker for three more years. He achieved things that the media would never give him credit for—credit went to the boy from Arkansas (he always got the hottest women, they wanted him even before he came to power). Then the logic of total war caught up with both men. In 1997, Gingrich was reprimanded by the House and fined a record three hundred thousand dollars for laundering political contributions through his various nonprofits (some of his allies wanted to escort him to the guillotine). In 1998 there was only one thing, and that was Monica. When oral sex and lying failed to destroy Clinton, and the Democrats defied history by picking up seats in the midterm
s, the Gingrich revolutionaries turned on their leader. He resigned the Speakership and his seat, saying, “I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals.” The last vote he ever cast was to impeach his rival. Later, he admitted to carrying on an affair throughout his time as Speaker with a woman twenty-three years his junior. He left Congress after two decades but stayed on in Washington.

  By then it was Newt Gingrich’s city as much as anyone’s. Whether he ever truly believed his own rhetoric, the generation he brought to power fervently did. He gave them mustard gas and they used it on every conceivable enemy, including him. At the millennium the two sides were dug deep in opposing trenches, the positions forever fixed, bodies piling up in the mud, last year’s corpses this year’s bones, a war whose causes no one could quite explain, with no end in sight: l’enfer de Washington.

  Perhaps he had wanted it this way all along. Politics without war could be rather boring.

  The young Tiffany-wearing congressional aide with whom he had been cheating on the second Mrs. Gingrich became the third. Washington’s think tanks and partisan media made a place for him, because he had helped make theirs. Like his rival, he spent his time out of office with rich people. Never having had money (he was in debt throughout most of his career), he set out to make a lot of it, selling his connections and influence—for shifting the entire planet required him to grab every opportunity in the bipartisan lobbying industry. And his books came out in frantic conveyor-belt fashion, seventeen in eight years—for America’s decay kept growing deeper, its elite liberal media more destructive, its secular-socialist machine more radical, the Democrat in the White House more alien, and the desire to save America was undimmed, and the need to be heard was unquenchable.

  He finally ran for president when it was much too late, but the old man in the white helmet with the cold clever boyish grin still found what he wanted whenever he reached into his pocket.

  JEFF CONNAUGHTON

  Jeff Connaughton first saw Joe Biden in 1979. Biden was thirty-six, the sixth-youngest person ever elected to the United States Senate. Connaughton was nineteen, a business major at the University of Alabama. His parents lived up in Huntsville, where his father worked for thirty years as a chemical engineer with the Army Missile Command, a job he’d landed after flying forty-seven missions over Europe, China, and Japan with the Army Air Corps, then attending Tuscaloosa on the GI Bill, then going from a dollar an hour in a Birmingham steel mill to an Arkansas furniture factory to National Gypsum in Mobile to the booming postwar defense industry. Working on small-rocket propulsion was a good middle-class job, topping out at fifty-five thousand a year, underwritten by the federal government and the Cold War, but Mr. and Mrs. Connaughton had both grown up in poverty. Jeff’s father had watched his father march through Washington, D.C., with the Bonus Army in 1932. Jeff’s mother was from Town Creek, Alabama, and as a little girl she and her sisters had helped out during the hard times by picking cotton on her grandmother’s farm. When she was five, she saved a nickel to buy her mother a birthday present. One day, the little girl fell ill with a 104-degree fever, and when the ice truck passed outside and her mother wanted to buy a block of ice to cool her fever, she refused, because her five cents was the only money in the house. It was a story Jeff always thought he’d tell if he ever ran for office.

  The Connaughtons split their vote. Jeff’s mother could remember the day FDR came to Town Creek to open the Wheeler Dam, and all the children ran down to the station and watched in a solemn hush as the president was lifted from the train into a car. She would vote Democrat all her life. The first time Jeff’s father went to vote, in Alabama after the war, and asked how to do it, the poll worker said, “Just vote for the names beneath the rooster,” which was the symbol of the Alabama Democratic Party, the only one that mattered back then. On the spot Mr. Connaughton became a Republican, and he remained one over the following decades as the rest of the white South caught up with him. But years later, after Jeff went to Washington to work for Biden and became what he would call a Professional Democrat, his dad voted for Clinton—even for Obama. By then, most everyone in their suburb was staunchly Republican, and someone stole the Obama-Biden signs right out of the Connaughtons’ front yard. Mr. Connaughton was voting for his son.

  Jeff Connaughton was short and sandy-haired, smart and hardworking, with the lifelong inferiority complex that’s bred into boys from Alabama. Growing up, he had no clear political views. In 1976 he was inspired when Ronald Reagan spoke at the Republican convention about “the erosion of freedom that has taken place under Democratic rule in this country”; in 1979, when Jimmy Carter diagnosed a “crisis of confidence” in America, warning that “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” Connaughton defended what came to be called the “malaise” speech in an opinion piece for The Tuscaloosa News. He was a swing voter until he moved to Washington; he also revered the Kennedys. Once, in 1994, he attended a fundraiser at Hickory Hill for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, with Ethel and other Kennedys graciously welcoming every guest on the front lawn of the manor. Connaughton slipped off into the study, where he wasn’t supposed to go, and took from the shelf a bound volume of Robert F. Kennedy’s speeches—the original manuscripts, with handwritten notes. Connaughton’s eyes fell on a sentence that read, “We should do better.” Kennedy had crossed out “should” and replaced it with “must.” Connaughton was holding holy scripture. That was his first idea of politics: great speeches, historic events (the assassinations), black-and-white portraits of JFK in the Oval Office and the Rose Garden. He was that overlooked and necessary thing in the annals of Washington, not Hamlet but Rosencrantz, not a principal but a follower—years later he would say, “I am the perfect number two guy”—drawn to the romance of public service and to power, which eventually became inextricable.

  In early 1979, when Connaughton was a sophomore, a friend at the University of Pennsylvania asked him to be Alabama’s delegate to the annual meeting of the National Student Congress, in Philadelphia. The plane ticket would cost a hundred fifty dollars. Connaughton was granted twenty-five bucks from the student government’s budget, and The Tuscaloosa News offered to give him seventy-five dollars for a story based on the experience. The last fifty dollars came out of the cash register at a Wendy’s where Connaughton ate a couple of meals a week—the manager was touched by the story of a college student trying to pay his way to a national assembly whose purpose was to combat apathy on campus and restore faith in politics a few years after Watergate and Vietnam.

  The first speaker at the meeting in Philadelphia was an ultraconservative Republican congressman from Illinois named Dan Crane, one of the many thousands of men and women who go to Washington as the elected representatives of the American people and serve out their time in the halls of Congress without leaving a trace. The second was Joe Biden. He began by saying, “If Representative Crane had just given you the liberal point of view, this would be the conservative view: You’re all under arrest.” The line brought down the house. The rest of the speech didn’t leave a mark on Connaughton’s memory, but the speaker did. Biden was youthful, he was witty, he knew how to talk to college students. Connaughton never forgot the moment.

  Back in Tuscaloosa, he started the Alabama Political Union, and for its first event in the fall he invited Biden and Senator Jake Garn, a Republican from Utah, to debate the SALT II arms control treaty. Both senators accepted (in 1979 there was no ban on accepting the five-hundred-dollar honorarium the university was offering—just a restriction limiting outside income to 15 percent of a senator’s $57,500 salary, which had taken effect on January 1), but then Garn backed out. The debate threatened to be reduced to a mere speech.

  Connaughton got in his Chevy Nova with a friend who was visiting from Brigham Young University and who, like Garn, was a Mormon. They drove fourteen hours to the nation’s capital to change Senator Garn’s mind. Connaughton had never been to Washington, and the Beltway offered no obvious exi
ts into the city—it was more of a moat than a conduit—and the Capitol dome kept appearing in the distance and then disappearing. Finally they found their way onto backstreets that led toward Capitol Hill. This was poor, black Washington, blighted Washington, the Washington of the district’s 80 percent, neighborhoods that Connaughton would rarely see again in the two decades he would live and work in the city.

  In the morning, they found Garn’s office in the Russell Senate Office Building, along one of the lofty and immensely long corridors, behind one of the high, forbidding mahogany doors. Because he had brought a Utah Mormon with him, Connaughton was granted an unscheduled audience right there in the waiting room with the senator himself, but he was unable to change Garn’s mind—he had another commitment the day of the debate. So Connaughton and the Mormon friend left and wandered around Russell—two young out-of-towners dwarfed by the white Vermont marble and Concord granite and dark mahogany and the clubby, bipartisan institutional dignity that was still intact, though it would soon begin to crack and then crumble—looking for a Republican senator to sign up. But the halls were nearly empty, in an undemocratic hush, and Connaughton barely knew what any senators looked like. He might have glimpsed Howard Baker, Jacob Javits, Chuck Percy, or Barry Goldwater. Among the Democrats, Hubert Humphrey had died recently, but Edmund Muskie was still there, and Frank Church, Birch Bayh, Gaylord Nelson, George McGovern. All of them soon to be swept away.

  Suddenly a buzzer went off, and out of nowhere the corridor filled with tall, gray-haired, distinguished-looking men. Connaughton and his friend followed them into an elevator (wasn’t that little Japanese man in the tam-o’-shanter S. I. Hayakawa?), down to the basement and the subterranean electric cars that shuttled back and forth along a thirty-second track between Russell and the Capitol. Among the senators striding toward the next car was Ted Kennedy, who smiled at being recognized and shook hands with the friend, who had stepped forward. As for Connaughton, he was too awestruck to move. (The public didn’t know it, but Kennedy was preparing to challenge President Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination: it was Biden who had first alerted Carter, in early 1978, that Kennedy was coming after him.)