Wright Fights Back

By MARGARET CARLSON

The ritual is eerily familiar. A public figure under fire for wrongdoing rises to defend himself, proclaiming his honesty, years of service and adherence to the rules. Last Thursday it was Jim Wright's turn before the TV cameras. The House Speaker's passionate statement was reminiscent of other notable political apologias: Richard Nixon's I-am-not-a-crook, Ed Meese's They-did-not-indict-me and, most recently, John Tower's I-am-a-man-of-some- discipline. Like the others, Wright's performance only emphasized how much trouble he was in.

Vowing to "fight to the last ounce of conviction and energy," Wright offered a point-by-point rebuttal of the three main charges against him. What made the nightly news, however, was his tearful defense of his wife Betty, whose salary from a Fort Worth developer is alleged to have been a way of funneling cash to the Speaker. Chin trembling, he declared, "I will damn well fight to protect her honor and integrity from any challenge, from any source, whatever the cost."

With that statement, Wright raised the stakes of this in-House scandal for the Democrats assembled around him. It is said that Dwight Eisenhower snapped a pencil in half when his embattled vice-presidential nominee, the younger Richard Nixon, came to the part of his Checkers speech about Pat and the cloth coat. Eisenhower knew then that Nixon was not going to go away but would fight to the death to hold on to his nomination. No one heard any No. 2 lead pencils breaking when Wright said, "There are some things worth fighting for." But it is far from clear that his colleagues were prepared to battle to the last with him.

Wright's dramatic statement came as the House Ethics Committee was preparing to vote on whether there is "reason to believe" the Speaker has violated congressional rules. After the vote, the committee will publish a report of some 500 pages detailing the alleged violations. The committee will release raw data compiled by counsel Richard Phelan -- the kind of unsubstantiated innuendos that Republicans succeeded in keeping out of the public domain / during the Tower investigation. Wright will have 21 days in which to respond in writing. The committee will then decide if the case requires any action. If it recommends a fine, reprimand, censure or expulsion, the full House will vote.

By the time Wright took to the podium, he knew that the vote of the committee, evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, was likely to be 8 to 4 in favor of finding some violations. The defection of two Democrats is not a mortal wound, but if the same percentage abandons Wright when the entire House votes, his hold on the speakership would be in peril. Democrats had been urging Wright to launch a pre-emptive defense. Says a House leadership aide: "We were being procedural nerds with our pants drawn up to the armpits saying, 'We have to wait for the report, we have to wait for the report.' Meanwhile the leaks were hurting. We needed something to rally around." History is on Wright's side: Congressmen have been reprimanded and censured before and several Speakers mildly investigated, but no Speaker has ever been ousted.

Already the Republicans, who resent Wright's high-handed manner, have achieved a major goal with the ten-month investigation: removing the scarlet S of sleaze from their coattails and pinning it, for the moment at least, on Wright. Democrats must now decide whether to stick with the Speaker and risk being tainted or dump him in hopes that a show of rectitude will improve their image.

A dump-the-Speaker move could be dangerous: the political life expectancy of a member who wounds but does not fell the leader will be very short. Wright rules the House with an iron hand, and has a hair-trigger temper and a long memory. He holds power over committee assignments, the legislation that makes it to the floor, and funds from his own copious campaign chest.

Wright's thin veneer of good-ole-boy conviviality and attention to detail won him the majority leader position in a three-man race in 1976, paving the way for his unanimous election to succeed Tip O'Neill as Speaker in 1987, but it has never been enough to inspire deep loyalty. Wright has done well procedurally, pushing a raft of legislation through Congress last session. But he has also blundered, most recently in January, when he enraged his colleagues by recommending a pay increase of 30%, not 51%, and then called for a public vote after promising he would take the heat alone. Despite some improvement, this pre-television-age politician still comes off more like Joe Isuzu than Jimmy Stewart.

Although Wright's Thursday speech was marked by his usual stilted delivery and forced smiles at inappropriate places, it helped rally some Democrats to the Speaker's side. Wright argued that his former partner, Fort Worth businessman George Mallick, had no direct interest in the savings and loan bailout being pushed by Wright and many other Congressmen. Mallick had bank debts and Mallick's two sons held a $2.2 million loan that had been foreclosed by a troubled Texas thrift, Wright acknowledged, but plenty of other Texans were in similar straits. Therefore, the Speaker argued, the thousands of dollars that found their way from Mallick to the Wrights were not impermissible gifts, since they were disclosed.

Wright also said that the reason for peddling his book, Reflections of a Public Man, to trade associations, universities and the Teamsters was an excess of pride of authorship, not a way to get around limits on honorariums. Wright complained he was being held to revisionist interpretations of the rules governing Congress, so that what was undertaken in good faith is now distorted in a "rearview mirror."

Wright's emotional defense of his wife's right to work may garner him strong support from congressional wives who are quietly shunted to a "spousal track" in Washington. The wives who can find jobs when they arrive in town often have a conflict: even work outside the Federal Government in some way lives off it.

Many observers trace Wright's messy financial dealings to his divorce from his wife of 30 years, Mary, and his marriage to his former aide in 1972. Wright, who calls his stylish wife a "financial whiz" and is like a schoolboy when he has her on his arm, was broke in the 1960s. But in the '70s he began to care about appearances: he built a wing onto his house in McLean, Va., for entertaining; he donned aviator glasses and better-cut suits; he stopped tinting his hair. In 1981 the Wrights came up with $58,000 in stock to go into business with the Mallicks; Betty kept the job with Mallick she had started in 1979, which came with an apartment and a Cadillac. In 1984 Wright spliced together his collection of speeches, which has earned him about $55,000 in royalties so far.

The window that the Wright investigation opens on the way members of Congress operate may in the end hurt all of them, throwing more light on the fact that gifts -- cash, cars, apartments -- are not automatically illegal, that paid vacations from lobbyists are allowed if the trip is in connection with giving a speech for which the member is also paid an honorarium, and that outside income, with a few exceptions, is allowed. It wasn't until members offered to give up honorariums as ill-disguised bribes in exchange for a pay raise in January that the public became widely aware of their existence.

The public knows enough to want some changes, and the President, who pledged himself to clean up the ethical mess in Washington, unveiled proposals last week that would reform campaign-finance laws, require greater financial disclosures and restrict lobbying by former Government employees. But for the most part he gave Congress a break, passing up the opportunity to ban honorariums or extend conflict-of-interest laws to them.

That standards are relatively low for everyone is not a persuasive defense for Wright. Indeed, enforcement may be on the increase: Wright's main tormentor, minority whip Newt Gingrich, is about to be investigated for a suspicious book deal, and majority whip Tony Coelho was embarrassed by the disclosure of a $100,000 investment in Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bonds.

Congress is often compared to a small town, but it actually operates much more like a small high school, with its cliques, customs, rivalries and need at times to please the teacher. Like the class that squeals on one student who copied his homework to show it can be trusted, Congress may have to sacrifice one of its own to establish that it does have standards. The question many members of Congress may be asking now is whether they really want to be held to those higher standards themselves.

With reporting by Hays Gorey/Washington