Balance of Power

...The Sandinistas agreed to negotiate with the contras through an intermediary...

...Everyone talks about what's wrong with the American family...

...During the period from September 1986, when Wright was majority leader, to February 1987, shortly after he became Speaker, he intervened with the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to bring about favorable decisions for thrift owners who were major contributors to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee...

...I find no fault with Taylor, as executive director of the Nixon Library, in defending Nixon...

...He assails Phelan as having been motivated by his own political ambitions, but never squares this theory with the fact that Phelan was a politically active Democrat...

...P. that they accused him of doing to Shuler...

...Now that would be news...

...Mack served less than two-and-a-half years for the crime before being released...

...But this season of Rosty's downfall coincides with the publication of Wright's second autobiographical book since his resignation—the latest effort in his improbable campaign to polish his place in history...

...Thus, beginning in early 1986, the Reagan administration sought authority for the FSLIC to issue $15 billion in bonds (to be repaid by member institutions, not the Treasury) to "recapitalize" the reserves...

...It is strange that Wright's best-known ethics violation remains his bulk book sales, which netted him the comparatively minor take of just over $54,000...

...In addition, Wright tried to have two employees of the Bank Board fired: H. Joe Selby, executive vice-president and director of regulatory affairs at the General Colin Powell hails The American Family: A terrific read that will leave a glow and restore your faith in the power of the human spirit...

...Gingrich really had been trying to get at Wright by promoting various ethics charges, some of which never panned out...

...The reader looking for pained mea culpas will not find them here...

...Although he denounces savings and loan deregulation as part of "a movement to dismember government," and purports to be aggrieved by charges that he had improperly intervened with regulators, the truth is that the very obscurity of the issues in the savings and loan debacle effectively gave Wright a free pass that he doesn't deserve...

...if they're [sic] a non-Christian, being a good non-Christian...

...The solution is to cut DPI employment— something Governor Thompson should be able to pull off...

...then, please ask him what a "good atheist" (i.e., one who denies God exists) is...

...He adds, "That happened before I even knew the young man...

...A stronger source of discipline, that of themarket itself, was entirely absent, thanks to changes in deposit insurance...

...Among mainstream media leaders, he says, there has been an abdication of social responsibility that theoretically makes the news business different from the fast food or automotive industries...

...By limiting what Nixon said to the protesters at the Lincoln Memorial to remarks about football, Stone paints Nixon as a boor who made inane small talk at a grave moment...

...According to Barry, Wright had told Shultz that Obando and the Sandinistas "want me to have people assist them in the negotiations, probably oversee them...

...The key revisionism of Balance of Power, though, lies in Wright's role in the fleecing of the savings and loan system...

...Nevertheless, although Nixon (along with President Reagan) deserves a Nobel Peace Prize more than anyone else since 1950 for winning the Cold War, conservatives should remember that he abandoned the domestic conservative agenda and let his supporters down with his duplicity...

...Wrightg also talks lovl ingly of the67 goods he brought home to his district from his perch on the House Public Works Committee: this post office, that water project, this airport...

...The day after the aid passed the House, Wright traveled to Managua and obtained guarantees from the Sandinistas—or so he thought—that the junta would respect civil liberties and private property and would soon hold elections...

...Instead, DPI sent a team of employees to spend four hours one day and seven another to inspect Brother Bob's school...

...In the mid-198o's, in the wake of deregulation measures under Carter and Reagan (which had bipartisan support), the seriousness of problems in the industry became acutely apparent to federal examiners...

...The track record of Wright's earlier involvement in Nicaragua was not exactly auspicious...

...If so, that's reason enough to forgive Wright's literary muse all her sins...

...David Bonior, met again with Ortega the next morning...

...When four members of the contra leadership met with Wright later that afternoon, Wright more than lived up to Ortega's hopes...

...Wright met personally with "Comandante" Daniel Ortega at the Capitol—on Veterans Day...

...It seems to me that all three of them engaged in the same type of ad hominem attacks on Mr...

...We need more than moral condemnation...

...MITCHELL E. AYER Houston, Texas The most shocking thing about "The Trial of Brother Bob" was not that the ACLU and others opposed having a Catholic school's students declared eligible for vouchers...

...Wright doesn't refer to his strong-arming of the contras, but writer John M. Barry, who was present, recounts it in The Ambition and the Power, his generally sympathetic volume about Wright: 68 June 1996 • The American Spectator They talked for an hour about cease fire technicalities — defensible boundaries, supply routes...

...A more obscure form of intervention was Wright's fiscal strangulation of the FSLIC (Federal Savings & Loan Insurance Corporation) reserves for the purpose of leaving the FSLIC without the substantial funds necessary to pay off depositors or to allow for the rescue of troubled thrifts by solvent institutions...

...Someone in New York might come to understand that what happens in Russia, or China, or Japan, may have more bearing on the lives of ordinary Americans than whether O.J...

...Oifi Correspondence (Continued from page 12) administration to prosecute Hiss...

...Though he lacked any college education or Hill experience, Wright immediately hired him and eventually promoted him to the top job...

...Pleszczynski in your April issue...

...If DPI had a question on whetherMessmer was a sectarian school, DPI could have called up Brother Bob and asked him for an explanation...

...No, the most notable was the following statement from "Brother Bob": "We hope that any student we touch leaves our building being a good Christian, if they're [sic] Christian...

...ww.harpercollins.com The American Spectator • June 1996 69 Dallas branch of the Bank Board, based on spurious rumors that Selby was sending the bank's outside legal work to a ring of sadistic homosexual lawyers, and William Black, on the staff of Board's San Francisco branch, apparently because Wright learned that Black was passing unfavorable information to journalists about Wright's interventions...

...Then they will become isolated in the world," Wright replied...

...He was also Wright's daughter's brother-in-law...

...The aide was John Paul Mack, Wright's top staffer and his hand-picked executive director of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee...

...Wright's pattern of myth-making repeats itself wherever he deals with an unflattering subject...

...He refrains from mentioning the results of the ethics committee's preliminary inquiry, in which the group of six Republicans and six Democrats unanimously found "reason to believe" that Wright was guilty of numerous ethics offenses, including his use of bulk book sales to circumvent honoraria limits...

...Both "good behavior" and "noblesse oblige," after all, would surely have been applauded by Henry Luce, a conservative of strong convictions who founded Time and proclaimed ours to be "the American century...

...Brother Bob" says his school's exclusion from the Wisconsin vouchers program is a commentary on the state of society...

...That afternoon, when Secretary of State George Shultz visited Wright, Shultz was perturbed to find that Wright intended to stay involved and unsuccessfully tried to persuade him to back off...

...Although Wright was forced to resign as Speaker of the House, he pooh-poohed the charges against him, as Rostenkowski has, and magnanimously offered that he DAVID ANDREW PRICE is national issues reporter in the Washington bureau of Investor's Business Daily...

...He resigned before the committee could finish its work...

...Does he have in mind the predictable, "government-knows-best" approach of the New York Times op-ed page, or something more bracing—say the notion that journalism requires intellectual integrity anddisciplined detachment more than anything else, especially more than well-meaning sentimentalism...

...He sidesteps his role in tying down federal regulators who were struggling to close insolvent savings and loans...

...Liberal and conservative, Christian and non-Christian, black, white, and of mixed race, they all speak frankly and movingly about the irreplaceable power of family to build a secure and prosperous future for our communities and our nation...

...That Gingrich succeeded was due, in turn, to the work of another villain, Richard Phelan, the outside counsel hired by the House Ethics Committee to investigate the allegations against him...

...Functioning essentially as a second State Department, Wright inserted himself further into the execution of foreign policy than any speaker since Henry Clay got the U.S...

...HarperCollinsPublishers http://w...

...In the end, with the possibility of renewed contra aid lurking in the background, Obando was able to obtain the Sandinistas' agreement to the 1990 elections that ultimately sent them packing...

...Still, the fact remains that the violations leading to Wright's fall weren't Gingrich's creations—they were his own...

...PAUL WINDELS III New York, New York Bothering Brother Bob Daniel McGroarty's "The Trial of Brother Bob" (TAS, March 1996) shows more than the hostility of Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction toward Christianity and DPI's total indifference toward the students it is supposed to serve...

...Obando politely rejected Wright's offer of assistance from his own "technical advisers...

...My opinion is there will not be support again for military aid...

...Wright's mythological view of his fall has a few problems, which he deals with by ignoring...

...Yet, like many myths, Wright's has a wisp of truth behind it...

...Those familiar with Nixon's sharp tours de force can imagine the full conversation...

...The American Spectator • June 199 6 Balance of Power mostly dishes out vapid observations and bland anecdotes about political figures that Wright encountered ("Lyndon Johnson was bigger than life...

...But along the way, he lays the foundation for his case against his accusers, extolling earlier days under Sam Rayburn when nonpartisanship was the norm and the work of the House was based on a "mutual assumption of honor...

...This from a Capuchin monk...

...government who could "paralyze and defy the authority of the President...

...Instead, the debacles of 1974 and 1976 and the removal of integrity from the image of conservatism remain central parts of his legacy...

...What if the Sandinistas were not serious...

...Thus, for instance, Wright complains of having been victimized by "the sensationalized treatment in the Washington Post of an assault upon a young woman by a congressional aide of mine sixteen years ago, when he was nineteen years of age...

...I'll excuse Dr...

...But by the end of the summer, the Sandinistas would postpone elections until 1985, ban all political activities by the opposition, and impose a regime of censorship on the press...

...Even Wright managed to discern that this would be beyond the pale, and declined...

...By 1985, the $5.6 billion level of FSLIC reserves was clearly too low to handle the seventy-one institutions that were already known to be insolvent...

...Despite its promising start, Ortega's plan unraveled when, at the next morning's meeting, Cardinal Obando faced down Wright, Bonior, and Ortega...

...If that sentiment takes root at any point among mainstream media, then the deterioration in the quality of foreign reporting may be reversed...

...That "parallel power" was Jim Wright...

...into the War of 1812...

...The room grew cold and still...

...The only reason the team could do that is that they did not have enough productive work to do...

...In his 1993 book Worth It All, Wright offered a revisionist account of his involveBalance of Power: Presidents and Congress From the Era of McCarthy to the Age of Gingrich Jim Wright Turner Publishing / 528 pages / $25.95 REVIEWED BY David Andrew Price Dan Rostenkowski's defiant reaction to his sentencing last April 9 for mail fraud recalled Jim Wright's similar defiance seven years earlier...

...As in the case of Vietnam," Ortega assured the Directorate, "we will win this war in Washington...

...KEVIN R. GUTZMAN Charlottesville, Virginia Heathgate A huge jeer to correspondents Mark Anderson, James Wilkins, and Mark Eiben for their attacks on Mr...

...In recounting the years before his speakership, Rosty Jim Wright was "not a bitter man"—as if the public servant caught with his hand in the cookie jar had cause to be bitter in the first place...

...Og ment in the struggle for Nicaragua...

...You mean," Wright said gravely, driving his message home, "when will the Sandinistas become so unpalatable that we will resume military aid...

...Soon afterward, the junta clumsily tipped its hand, twice asking Wright to serve in the role of intermediary himself...

...Simpson broke the speed limit in his white Bronco...

...Now, at last, somebody is talking about what's right: Former Vice President Dan Quayle is joined by psychologist Diane Medved in this inspiring in-depth report, based on face-to-face interviews with families from Virginia to Hawaii...

...P. happens to be dead-right about Heath Shuler and his marginal abilities as an NFL quarterback...

...Nixon could have admitted what his campaign had done, pointed out that this was nothing new in American politics (he assumed that President Johnson had bugged his campaign in 1968), acknowledged that both parties stood in the wrong, and probably emerged unscathed...

...In Balance of Power, Wright now surveys his 34-year career in the House and returns to the scene of his ouster...

...The standards of the press have been overwhelmingly sustained in this country by the noblesse oblige of a few families and firms...

...Wright's enterprise, rather, is to revise the record, laying the groundwork for a future mythology starring himself: an honorable man forced out of office, as he put it in his farewell speech, by "mindless cannibalism...

...Industry lobbyists opposed the effort to build up the insurance fund...

...Wright had informed the court at the time of Mack's sentencing that he was welcome to take a job in Wright's office...

...Castro has lived isolated for many years," Adolfo Calero observed...

...It shows that DPI is grossly overstaffed...

...Which raises the question: If the book sales had never happened, would Wright still be Speaker of the House today...

...as long as the fund stayed bare, the high-flyers in the industry didn't have to worry about being shut down...

...Better he should ruminate on what his own example says about contemporary Roman Catholicism...

...James Ring Adams reported in TAS in March 1989 that during the year-and-a-half while Wright kept the spigot closed, the cost of the crisis doubled...

...Anderson...

...It was no accident that Senator Goldwater persuaded Nixon to resign in August 1974 (Senator Buckley had called for resignation in March...

...That is how people typically handle questions when there is a lot more important work to be done...

...As Robert Kagan recently reported in A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 19771990, Daniel Ortega told the rest of the Sandinista Directorate in August 1987 of a "parallel power" in the U.S...

...One of them, Tom Gaubert, was national finance chairman for the DCCC and had raised $ioo,000 from the industry for the party's candidate in a 1985 special election for an open House seat...

...In January of 1987, as the savings and loans continued to hemorrhage, President Reagan urged passage of the bill in his State of the Union address...

...The "assault"-Wright's total description of the incident—consisted of Mack ordering a female college student to lie down on the floor of a storeroom, then repeatedly smashing her skull with a hammer and slashing her torso and neck with a knife...

...The constitutional and legal preferments of the press are not based on good behavior, but it helps...

...Wisconsin society came, and it will go...

...Then the contras talked of good faith...

...And it's only barely true that the crime happened before Wright and Mack knew each other...

...The evasions are transparent to the reader who already knows the story—but that isn't the audience Wright is addressing...

...Ortega then moved to plan B; he agreed to the naming of Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, whose selection was supported by Arias and the U.S., but he counted on Wright to tilt the negotiating table...

...if they're [sic] an atheist, being a good atheist...

...He's from Knoxville and has obviously been brain70 June 1996 • The American Spectator...

...Wright, however, staved off the recapitalization bill until August 1987, when Congress approved only two-thirds of the amount the administration had requested...

...In that context, the football reference comes off as an attempt to connect on a personal basis, a request that the protesters give him the same respect that he was giving them...

...That reference actually followed Nixon's explanation that he understood the protesters' concerns and that he had sympathized with Neville Chamberlain's vain efforts to avert World War II, but learned from Winston Churchill that nations sometimes must fight...

...Wright is obviously assuming that his readers will have forgotten what the fuss was all about...

...As majority leader, Wright supported Carter's 198o aid package for the new Nicaraguan regime in hopes that democracy would prevail over Cuban and Soviet influences...

...Nonetheless, for reasons that Wright never makes clear, he repeatedly placed total confidence in his favorable instincts regarding the Sandinistas in the late 1980's...

...In October and November, Wright's involvement reached its apogee...

...Wright, along with Rep...

...They clearly imply that some values—and, indeed, some cultures—may be more admirable than others when Americans take a close look at the globe on which they are living...

...I thought then, and I still think today, that Mack was a very lucky man that she survived...

...With deposit insurance funds at risk, regulators sought to tighten supervision, to place some troubled thrifts under different management, and to close some entirely...

...Wright also skews the picture when he recounts his involvement in Nicaraguan diplomacy, portraying his role in foreign policy during his speakership as just normal operating procedure, rather than the extraordinary power grab that it was...

...It was a hairsbreadth away from murder," recalls Fairfax Commonwealth's Attorney Robert Horan, who prosecuted Mack...

...In 1989, one might have assumed that Wright would slink offstage and take his congressional pension in grateful silence...

...As it turned out, Wright's part in the looting of the deposit insurance funds did not amount to an ethics violation in the view of the ethics committee...

...Pray, ask "Brother Bob" what his order teaches a "good non-Christian" (i.e., person who denies the divinity of Christ) is...

...Coming from a member of the Brookings Institution, perhaps the most staid of Washington's liberal think tanks, that is an intriguing comment...

...Wright presents himself as a victim—not of his own wrongdoing, but of a fiercely partisan Republican cabal led by Newt Gingrich...