In My Time - Dick Cheney [69]
I WAS OFTEN ASKED by people why in the world I wanted to be a freshman member of the House, serving in the minority party, after I’d already been White House chief of staff. I used to explain that there was something very special about having your name on the ballot and convincing thousands of voters to support you. That running and winning the right to cast your state’s vote in the U.S. House of Representatives was politics at its best. That being elected in accordance with our Constitution meant you had earned the right to cast that vote and no one could take it away except by defeating you at the polls. Your political fate didn’t depend upon someone else’s success in an election.
It would also be accurate to say that I was heavily influenced by my experience with men such as Jerry Ford, Don Rumsfeld, and Bill Steiger. An institution that could attract men like these had to be one that I could be proud to be part of. The fact is I loved the House of Representatives and had every intention of spending the rest of my career as a “Man of the House.”
Every new class of House members arrives in Washington with the conviction that they are going to “clean out the stables” or “drain the swamp”; that at long last they are going to be the “reformers” the Congress so badly needs. Most of the time this phase passes, and the new members become established senior members with all the privileges and opportunities that entails. But every once in a while, a class does have an extraordinary impact. It may be because the class is especially large or they affect a particular issue or they stick around longer than most, thus gaining seniority, or because they have an unusual degree of cohesion and vote as a block larger than most. The 1974 Democratic class of “Watergate Babies” is often cited as an example.
The 1978 class of which I was a part produced leaders who would shape Washington for decades: Jerry Lewis, who would become chairman of the Appropriations Committee; Bill Thomas, future chairman of the Ways and Means Committee; and Jim Sensenbrenner, who would one day chair the Judiciary Committee. On the Democratic side were Geraldine Ferraro, who would be the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1984, and Phil Gramm, who would become a Republican and a United States senator from Texas. Another Texan in the class of 1978, Democrat Kent Hance, had won his seat by defeating a future president, thirty-two-year-old George W. Bush.
But no one in our class stands out in memory as much as Newt Gingrich of Georgia. An academic with a Ph.D. in history from Tulane, Newt decided in 1974 to run for Congress in Georgia against the incumbent Jack Flynt, a longtime member of the House Appropriations Committee. Nineteen seventy-four, of course, was the Watergate election, not a good time to begin a career in elective office as a Republican, and Newt was defeated.
Two years later Newt again ran against Flynt and lost again. Nineteen seventy-six, it turned out, was a tough year to win in Georgia as a Republican, because the state’s own Jimmy Carter was running as the Democratic candidate for president. When Newt announced that in 1978 he would be running a third time against Jack Flynt, Flynt quit. It was said he just couldn’t take any more. Newt was nothing if not tenacious.
I first met Newt at the orientation session for freshman Republicans in 1978, and he was fascinating to watch. He had tremendous energy, a head full of ideas, and an absolute, unwavering conviction that we Republicans could once again become the majority in the House. But to do it,