The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (4 page)

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 midterms,
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.