Speaker Jim Wright

Power, Scandal, and the Birth of Modern Politics

J. Brooks Flippen

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781477316320
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The rise and fall of a Texas Democrat: "A definitive, richly detailed biography [and] an engrossing history that sheds light on our own fractious times." ? Kirkus Reviews (starred review) A former Golden Gloves boxer and WWII bombardier, Jim Wright entered Congress to fight a different kind of battle, making his mark on virtually every major policy issue of the later twentieth century: energy, education, taxes, transportation, environmental protection, civil rights, criminal justice, and foreign relations among them. He played a significant role in peace initiatives in Central America and in the Camp David Accords, and was the first American politician to speak live on Soviet television. A Democrat representing Texas's twelfth district (Fort Worth), he served in the US House of Representatives from the Eisenhower administration to the presidency of George H.W. Bush, including twelve years as majority leader and speaker—and his long congressional ascension and sudden fall in a highly partisan ethics scandal spearheaded by Newt Gingrich mirrored the evolution of Congress as an institution. Speaker Jim Wright traces the congressman's long life and career in a highly readable narrative grounded in extensive interviews with Wright and access to his personal diaries. A skilled connector who bridged the conservative and liberal wings of the Democratic Party while forging alliances with Republicans to pass legislation, Wright ultimately fell victim to a new era of political infighting, as well as to his own hubris and mistakes. J. Brooks Flippen shows how Wright's career shaped the political culture of Congress, from its internal rules and power structure to its growing partisanship, even as those new dynamics eventually contributed to his political demise. To understand Jim Wright in all his complexity is to understand the story of modern American politics.

PART I

The Rise of a Politician

CHAPTER 1

The Foundations for Success

FAMILY AND CHILDHOOD (1922–1939)

Jim Wright’s roots ran deep into the prairie soil of Texas, his ancestors part of those hardy migrants who ventured westward in the nineteenth century. He had English and Irish DNA—the latter evidenced, perhaps, by his red hair, and, as critics claimed, a quick temper—and descended mostly from men and women who arrived in America in the wake of the Civil War. At that time, Texas was just beginning the transition from the Old West to the New South—from cattle to cars, frontier to finance. It provided both challenges and opportunities, all of which helped to shape Jim Wright’s large family, and ultimately, the foundations of his own life.¹

Although it surely impressed few in Texas, Jim Wright’s mother, Marie Louella Lyster, could trace her lineage back to the seventeenth-century English baron Sir Toby Caufield. She was also related to the famous Lee and Byrd families of Virginia.² Marie’s mother, Lena Crowder, Jim Wright’s maternal grandmother, was part of a large family that had settled in Weatherford, a town rising out of the prairie forty miles west of the booming cattle stockyards in Fort Worth and surrounded by peach orchards and melon fields. The extended family had no pretensions of wealth: Lena’s father was the only teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in the Parker County community of Dicey. Nevertheless, Lena’s family lived comfortably, displaying a degree of education and refinement uncommon in an area not long removed from the Wild West. In Weatherford Lena met and married Harry Lyster, Jim Wright’s maternal grandfather. No common ranch hand himself, Harry had been born in Australia of English and Irish parents and had been educated as a civil engineer at the prestigious University of Heidelberg. He had come to Texas to join his uncle, who was a former surveyor general of Australia. The uncle’s inventions had won him a considerable endowment from the crown, which had allowed him to buy a ranch in Parker County. Harry hoped to find work as an engineer on the railroads then crossing the West. It was a fateful decision; his uncle’s ranch was immediately adjacent to the Crowder homestead.³

Finding employment with the Southern Pacific Railroad, Harry took his young bride to New Mexico Territory, where he began surveying a new rail route just above the Mexican border. Harry and Lena stayed in Eddy, now Carlsbad, for the duration of the project, and there, on September 11, 1894, Lena gave birth to Marie, Jim Wright’s mother. Life was difficult without even Weatherford’s basic amenities, and Harry suddenly died of a fever, leaving twenty-year-old Lena alone with an infant. Demonstrating a degree of self-reliance belied by her refinement but cultivated by her frontier experience, Lena employed her bilingual skills to land a job running the company store. Hawking necessaries to Hispanic laborers was arguably beneath her station, but the vicissitudes of life had already taught her important lessons. She valued education, hard work, persistence, and empathy for those less fortunate, all traits that eventually would manifest in her progeny.⁴

After carefully saving every cent, Lena was finally able to return to Weatherford. Disembarking from the train, she and Marie, still a toddler, appeared quite bedraggled. Fortunately they had a place to stay, as Lena’s great aunt, Lenora Lisk Womak, and her husband, a former Confederate officer, owned the Victorian Terminal Hotel.⁵ The railroad had arrived in 1880, and Weatherford had prospered. It now boasted an ornate 1884 French Second Empire–style courthouse. Covered wagons sold their wares on the grassy square while political events brought crowds from the surrounding communities. It was a good place to raise a daughter, even if vestiges of the frontier were still visible in the marketing of cattle and the occasional drunken brawl. It had, after all, been less than two decades since the city had proudly proclaimed freedom from “the incursions of hostile Indians.”⁶

The bustling hotel, where Lena worked as a bookkeeper, was an exciting place for a child. Traveling salesmen known as “drummers” would come and go while the nearby Haynes Opera House ensured a constant influx of people from all walks of life. The transient actors, amused by the doting little girl with the big brown eyes, let Marie try on their costumes. Not surprisingly, Marie announced her intention to join the profession. In time, always good at mathematics, Marie expressed an interest in becoming an “Expert Accountant,” and, later still, a pharmacist. Marie, it appeared, had quite the ambition.⁷

The Victorian-minded Lena, however, had other expectations. If women had to work as she did, they should seek employment in the “women’s sphere,” respectable female professions such as teaching. Marie, Lena insisted, would learn to be a proper lady. Accordingly, for two hours each day, Marie had to practice the piano and learn the feminine arts of poetry, literature, and painting. It was a cultured but strict environment.⁸

Lena, still relatively young, was an obvious object of attention for the city’s male gentry. While she still treasured the broad-banded wedding ring that Harry had given her—Harry, her life’s true love—society expected her to remarry. In 1902, Lena settled on William Dee Walker, a tall, dark-haired, and imposing man, the son of a land-wealthy Brazos River family who met her strict expectations. In true frontier fashion, the young Willie Dee, as he was known to friends, had been a hard-drinking gambler, reportedly lighting cigars with $5 bills.⁹ In marrying Lena, however, he had sworn off such ungentlemanly ways. He would reinforce Lena’s Victorian admonishments to Marie. “I really don’t believe I have ever heard of a lady Expert Accountant,” he told her.¹⁰

By the second decade of the twentieth century, Marie had grown into an attractive five-foot-six brunette absorbed in her mother’s traits and training. As Jim Wright would later recall of his mother, her dignity was always paramount. She once refused to chase her large-brimmed hat blown off by the wind. Her sense of ambition was still intact, however, and she became a teacher—of drama, understandably, and “expression,” as poetry was then known. She also enjoyed teaching English literature. One does not have to look far to see where Wright’s famous ambition and oratory had its genesis. For a brief period Marie taught in Duncan, Oklahoma, a new state where additional relatives resided.¹¹

At the Parker County Fair, Marie met James Claude Wright, a strapping, fair-skinned blond of just under six feet who was five years her senior. Jim Wright’s father seemed energetic and gregarious but was an odd choice for the young teacher. While he, too, had English and Irish blood, and his family had also migrated to Texas from Virginia, albeit via Tennessee, he lacked refinement and education. The youngest of four siblings born to John Wright and Elizabeth Amanda Johnson, James Wright had suffered early like his wife-to-be. His father had died young, and polio, the most feared scourge of the day, had left his mother in a wheelchair. Without a broader clan to help raise him, James had quit school after the fourth grade and gone to work.¹²

As determined in spirit as his future mother-in-law, Lena, James took what opportunities were available for a poor, uneducated young man. After chopping cotton and laboring at a brick kiln, he became a boxer. It was the heyday of the black fighter Jack Johnson—the “Galveston Giant”—and the public searched for the next great “white hope.”¹³ Traveling to Detroit, New York, and Chicago, James learned the value of hard work and persistence, finding some success but quite literally taking his lumps. Never idle, he apprenticed as a tailor to learn a trade he could practice after his boxing days were over. On a trip home to Weatherford, James met Marie and was smitten immediately. After learning that she would not date a boxer, he opened a tailor and dry cleaning business in town and, surely to impress her, began to read more. In time, Jim Wright later recalled, his father became an “ecumenist,” a Renaissance man interested in learning and challenging the status quo.¹⁴

James enlisted in the National Guard around 1910, and his Weatherford infantry company elected him a captain under an anachronistic policy that was soon ended. When Woodrow Wilson federalized the force in 1916 to combat Mexican revolutionaries such as Pancho Villa, James was sent south to the Rio Grande. Perhaps motivated by the separation, he and Marie married during James’s deployment in the small Big Bend border town of Valentine, Texas. With the outbreak of World War I, James received a commission as a captain. After a period stationed in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in which his bride joined him, he won a decoration in the famous French Argonne Forest offensive, where shrapnel dimpled his face. Marie, meanwhile, stayed on New York’s Long Island with the family of one of James’s colleagues. It was an eye-opening experience. Her hosts were Catholic, and Marie, raised a Southern Baptist, had known only Hispanic Catholics.¹⁵ “Mother,” Jim Wright later recalled, “learned how hideously untrue the things said of the Catholic faith by rural fundamentalists with whom she had grown up.”¹⁶ In fact, with James a Methodist, the young couple developed rather tolerant religious views, eventually settling on Presbyterianism while later sending their daughters to Catholic schools. “The only prejudice we had was against Baptists who didn’t drink, dance, smoke, or play cards,” Jim Wright’s sister, Mary Nelle, jokingly recalled. When the Scopes Trial made national headlines just after Jim Wright’s birth, James and Marie did not share their community’s dominant condemnation of evolutionary theory.¹⁷

Sharing the trenches with men from across the globe solidified James’s egalitarian spirit. All men, he later told his famous son, “wanted the same things, felt the same hurts, and bled the same color.”¹⁸ The nativism that flourished after the war repulsed him. From 1900 to 1930, over 600,000 Mexicans immigrated to the Southwest, many of whom, the University of Texas warned in 1920, were not assimilating. With Texas’s own African American population growing by a quarter million over the same period, James fought a courageous battle against the Ku Klux Klan. When the Klan “branded” an African American bellhop with acid in Dallas, James signed letters to the Weatherford Daily Herald criticizing the organization.¹⁹

James and Marie were a bit iconoclastic, maintaining their Progressive sense of optimism despite the fact that Wilson’s promise of a world safe for democracy had fallen flat. They supported the League of Nations, while many Texans questioned the Treaty of Versailles. They rejected their peers’ isolationism, but were patriotic and had faith in government. When a friend remarked that she had not raised her son to become a soldier, Marie quipped, “Well, neither did I, but I will not raise him to be a slacker.” Years later, despite his fifty-one years, James protested his rejection for service in World War II. “I’ve already been to war and I know how to fight,” Jim’s sister, Betty Lee, remembered her father complaining.²⁰ Unlike their fundamentalist neighbors, James and Marie resisted Prohibition, and, although Marie held no driver’s license and was hardly a feminist, both supported women’s suffrage. James once angered a school superintendent by arguing that girls should be allowed to wear blue jeans. While hardly quiet about their beliefs, neither were they quick to judge others publicly. The courage of their convictions was tempered by their innate tolerance. It was not always easy. James had a temper and a growing fondness for alcohol. Admired by his friends, if not by Marie, as a man who “could hold his liquor,” James regularly had an African American employee drive him across county lines to purchase whiskey, though when they returned, he would drink by himself. James and Marie Wright were forceful characters hard to miss.²¹

Living with Lena and William Walker in Fort Worth, James and Marie gave birth to their first son, James Claude Wright Jr., on December 22, 1922. Given his strong work ethic, James had become the southwest regional sales manager for the US Chamber of Commerce, selling municipal memberships and the organization’s journal Nation’s Business. It was a great job, but the constant moving it required was hard on a young family. Before young Jim was even in school, the family had lived both in large cities, such as Lubbock and San Antonio, Texas, and in small towns, including some locations in Arkansas and Louisiana. This semi-transient lifestyle defined Jim Wright’s boyhood well into his high school years. Although each successive year became more difficult for Jim, the constant moving developed skills that served him a lifetime. No natural extrovert, Jim learned to be flexible and gregarious, to feel comfortable in public and to read cues from his peers, and to ingratiate himself with new groups.

After Jim finished first grade in Houston in 1929, the family moved to Dallas. Like its sister city, Fort Worth, to which it was connected by a new interurban rail line, Dallas was in the midst of an oil boom. With a population exceeding 150,000, it was a center for the redistribution of eastern goods to southwestern markets. It boasted a major university, a federal reserve bank, an insurance center, a developed transportation network, a symphony orchestra, and over two dozen theaters.²² Optimistic and prospering like the city itself, the Wright family rented a large two-room house in the Oak Cliff section of town. James traded his Dodge automobile for a Hudson, a status symbol. Of course, as Jim started second grade that fall, his parents—like everyone else—had no idea that the “New Economic Era” of the 1920s was about to end.²³

The stock market crash of October 1929 changed everything. Slow to realize the magnitude of the eme...