The Gingrich Speakership

    Mr. OLESZEK. This conference now turns to an examination of the 
Gingrich speakership. I am delighted to introduce our moderator for this 
panel--Don Wolfensberger. As many of you know, Don is a 30-year House 
veteran who was staff director of the Rules Committee during the 
chairmanship of the late Gerald Solomon of New York. Currently, Mr. 
Wolfensberger is the director of The Congress Project at the Woodrow 
Wilson Center for International Scholars. He is also the author of an 
award-winning book titled Congress and the People: Deliberative 
Democracy on Trial. Don, the podium is yours.
    Mr. WOLFENSBERGER. Thank you, Walter. I want to add my thanks to the 
Carl Albert Center and to the McCormick Tribune Foundation for 
sponsoring this event. I also want to add my kudos to the Congressional 
Research Service, Dan Mulhollan, Walter Oleszek and their whole team, 
for putting together just a marvelous all-day conference. Please join me 
in thanking them. What I'll do is introduce Newt Gingrich first and then 
I'll have introductions for each of our two discussants, Leon Panetta 
and Bob Walker, when it's their turn to speak.
    I vividly recall a day in early October 1994--I think it was after a 
Republican leadership meeting--and Newt Gingrich made me a bet, or tried 
to. He said, ``Wolfie--I'll bet you 50 cents that we take control of the 
House in the next month's elections.'' Well, I kind of brushed it off 
and I said, ``I'm not really a betting man, but I sure hope you're 
right.'' But I remember thinking to myself--does he really believe 
that's going to happen? You know, all the pundits, the political pros, 
the prognosticators at the time were saying, in effect, that the 
Republicans might pick up 20, maybe even 30, seats in the 1994 elections 
for the House.
    Well, as you know, the rest is history. On November 8, 1994, the 
tsunami happened and Republicans picked up not just the 40 seats that 
they needed for a bare 218 majority, but 52 seats and brought in 74 
freshmen Republican Members. I think, to his credit, Newt Gingrich had 
prepared his party for the takeover. Not only was the ``Contract with 
America'' unveiled in September, the product of a year-long development 
effort by the Republican conference, but he had also tasked each of the 
ranking minority members on the committees and their staff to put 
together an organizational plan, a game plan, for how they would run 
their committees for the first year once we won the majority. And this 
was done early in 1994.
    I was really grateful, as the appointed staff director of the Rules 
Committee, that we had that document in our hands when we awakened on 
the morning of November 9. Everyone was plugged in to Newt's planning 
model--``vision, strategy, projects, tactics.'' And everyone also knew 
the leadership model of ``listen, learn, help, and lead.'' So we were 
trained for this, but we had no idea, really, of what we were getting 
into.
    The Rules Committee, where I was working for Jerry Solomon, was at 
the center of the action in processing the Contract bills. You may 
recall that the Contract with America was a 10-plank legislative 
program. But that really translated into about two dozen bills when it 
was broken down. And most of these, if not all of them, were coming 
through the Rules Committee where we were busily still trying to find 
out where the bathrooms were. I remember thinking in the middle of the 
100-day Contract period that I wish Newt Gingrich had been a little more 
like Joe Cannon in one respect. Joe Cannon once said, ``We don't need 
any new legislation. Everything is just fine back in Danville.''
    But for me, the high point really of the whole experience was the 
opening day of 104th Congress when we worked all day and well into the 
night debating and voting on a package of House reforms that had been 
developed over the years. Not only did the Contract have an 8-point plan 
for various House reforms such as banning proxy voting, putting term 
limits on committee chairmen and so on, but there were 24 other reforms 
that had evolved over a 3-decade period that I had had the pleasure and 
the honor to work with our leadership in developing. Most of these were 
put into effect in just 1 day. You can imagine how that would be the 
highlight of a career for someone like me.
    As I mentioned in my book about this whole experience, I did leave 
the Congress after the first 2 years of the Republican takeover. I had 
my 30 years of government service and was ready to do something new. But 
I looked back on it and I said that this was a very interesting 2 years. 
It was like a roller coaster ride when you consider all of the ups and 
downs of the 104th Congress. But I would not have missed it for the 
world. So with that, I probably for the first time want to thank you for 
quite a ride, Newt. And with that, I give you Speaker Newt Gingrich.
    Speaker GINGRICH. Thank you, Don. It's very good to be here with two 
of the friends I served with for years. Bob Walker, who helped found the 
Conservative Opportunity Society--we did so many different projects 
together--and Leon Panetta, with whom I served in the House and got to 
know even more when he became Chief of Staff for President Clinton. I 
also want to acknowledge Chairman Rostenkowski--it's great to see you 
back. We were over just now in Speaker Hastert's office reminiscing with 
four Speakers, which I think is the only time I know of that you've had 
four Speakers at one place. Many of you who are true students of the 
House will appreciate the speed with which we arrived on the topic of 
the Senate and found a bipartisan, non-ideological passion and 
agreement, which I'm not going to go into today because of my interest 
in comity.
    I thought about this chance to talk, and I want to try to keep it 
fairly brief. I want to give you an overview of my understanding of what 
happened to us when we won control of the House. And I want to suggest 
to everyone--if you get a chance--please read Kings of the Hill by Dick 
and Lynne Cheney, both the first edition, which came out in 1983, and 
the second edition, which came out after I had become Speaker.
    The first point I want to make is that they captured two things in 
their works. First, if you look at page 194, they said, ``Today's House 
has neither strong leadership nor any other well-developed centralized 
power. Authority is dispersed among a few elected leaders, many 
committee chairmen, and a multitude, or so it sometimes seems, of 
subcommittee chairmen (there are currently 137).'' They then go on to 
describe the kind of leadership that might be needed in the information 
age, arguing that it would be a party leader who could combine debates 
on the floor with grassroots activism in real time--a synergistic 
network. They wrote this in 1983 and I think it's a very good forerunner 
for what we actually did in the intervening period. Again, I would 
encourage everyone to look at the two editions of Kings of the Hill, 
they are very revealing each in their own right.
    To a degree that it's almost impossible to get this city to think 
about, the Republican capture of the House was an intellectual effort. I 
think that has been very hard for people to appreciate. It was a long 
march in the sense that there are some fundamental things that I had 
learned early on. I always recommend Peter Drucker's The Effective 
Executive to groups, which I first read in the late sixties. If you read 
books like that, you begin to think about how much we had to aggregate 
resources and how many things we had to do right, because 1994 was not 
an accidental campaign. It was a campaign which required some help from 
our opponents and which we would not have won under other circumstances. 
We could have gained 25 seats and probably would have but not without 
all of the previous 16 years of work. And so I start with that.
    Additionally, I would say that House GOP campaign chairman Guy 
Vander Jagt was the unsung hero, both because Vander Jagt insisted on 
supporting my candidacy when I had lost twice, and because when I became 
a freshman, even before I was even sworn in, he asked me to chair the 
long-range planning committee to look at how to become a majority. I 
always point out to people--we failed in 1980, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1988, 
1990, and 1992 before we won in 1994. So first of all, it wasn't like 
there was this sudden magic moment. I mean we had a lot of things that 
didn't work right. It's a sign that if you can persevere, that can be a 
very important component of victory over time. In that context, I think 
you have to look at a series of stages.
    However, I just want to cite another book for 1 more minute. The 
1994 election was essentially based upon Norman Nie's The Changing 
American Voter, and Robert Remini's The Election of Andrew Jackson, and 
it is actually worth your time to read these two books if you are a 
serious student of how this business works. We were looking for models 
of how do you get very large-scale change? Remember, the point Don made 
wasn't unusual. I think only a small number of chairmen, including Bob 
Walker, thought we could win a majority. If you look at the news media 
prediction outtakes during the weekend before the election, they are 
almost funny in retrospect because it was inconceivable that we could 
create a majority--it had been so long. What people failed to understand 
is the hardest election was going to be in 1996. Republicans had become 
a majority in 1946 and we had become a majority in 1952, but we had not 
won a second consecutive election since 1928.
    September 17, 1994, was the day that Joe Gaylord briefed the GOP 
team. We had a team that was going on a campaign swing on September 17--
Dan Meyer, Steve Hanser, Kerry Knott, Joe Gaylord, and myself. 
Literally, as we were taking off at National, I asked both Kerry Knott, 
who headed up our planning operation, and Dan Meyer, what were we 
planning on the night after the election? At that time, I was still the 
minority whip and Bob Michel was still the GOP leader. I said, ``On 
election night, are we planning for me to be minority leader or to be 
Speaker?'' And Gaylord broke in and said, ``Well, you better be planning 
to be Speaker, because you're going to be.'' Dan Meyer then turned to 
him and said, ``OK, before we do anything else, explain this 
prediction.'' Gaylord started in Maine and, by memory, went through 
every congressional seat in the country and came up with a 52-seat gain. 
I think we gained 53, so he was off by 1.
    From that date on, my entire goal was to be able to maintain the 
momentum of doing what we had pledged while winning a second election in 
1996. And I would argue the second election was much harder. Leon 
Panetta may want to comment on that. Democrats did a brilliant job of 
orchestrating resources, designing images, and really taking it to us. 
By our count, there were 125,000 negative ads around the country that 
had me in it. We made a conscious decision not to defend me, and we made 
a decision that our historic goal was to keep control. We also decided 
to balance the budget and we knew that meant you had to reform Medicare. 
We were close enough to AARP and Horace Deets, its executive director, 
who had the nerve to stay with us long enough that we ran seven points 
ahead of Bob Dole among senior citizens and that was the margin of 
victory. Very briefly, I think that there are six stages that are worth 
looking at. First, how did we grow the majority? You have to look at Bob 
Walker, Vin Weber, Connie Mack, Duncan Hunter and the entire GOP team 
that created the Conservative Opportunity Society as well as GOPAC and 
the extraordinary work of people like Bo Callaway and Gay Gaines in 
creating a nation-wide network of literally, at its peak, 50,000 
activist Republican candidates and incumbents receiving audio tapes and 
training.
    Second, how did we implement the revolution? And there you have to 
look at what was really an extraordinary team in a specific moment as 
the loyal opposition. Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, Bob Walker, Bill Paxon and 
I sat down and said, ``OK, can we be a single team? Because if we're a 
single team, we can amass the energy to win the election, but if we are 
five independent egos competing with each other, we probably can't win a 
majority.'' And to his credit Dick Armey, who was clearly the decisive 
person at that point, said, ``This is really hard for me. I've always 
flown solo. You're asking me to fly in formation. I really have to go 
home and talk to my wife and pray about it.'' And within a week, he came 
back and said, ``We are one team.'' We operated, from that point on, as 
one single unified team, and it was an amazing accomplishment.
    The other person you have to recognize is the new Governor of 
Mississippi, Haley Barbour, and it concerned a key moment in Annapolis, 
Maryland, where the Republican Senators had gone to decide what to do 
about Hillary Clinton's health care plan. Over a drink at the tavern 
right across from the State Capitol, I said to Haley Barbour, then the 
chairman of the Republican National Committee [RNC], ``If you will help 
us, we will do a contract with America and we'll include tort reform.'' 
And he said, ``By George, if you'll include that, I'll pay for the ad.'' 
It was at that point that his assistant said he would never again go out 
for a drink, because it was the most expensive single trip he had ever 
made.
    All this became a process. We now had a commitment from the RNC to 
run a two-page ad in TV Guide, so you could now go back to Members and 
say, ``Gee, we've got to get a contract, because we've got the ad to 
fill.'' We began a dialog where ``listen, learn, help, lead'' came in 
because you had to get 350 independent entrepreneurs called Republican 
candidates to sign a contract. Remember: this is the only time in 
American history that candidates didn't have a platform which says, ``We 
believe in such and so.'' Instead, we had a contract which said, ``We 
will vote on specifications,'' which is a much higher standard.
    There were only three incumbents, to the best of my knowledge, who 
did not sign the contract. Everyone else signed the contract. The 
contract, in my mind, was a management document which enabled me to 
pivot and turn to Bob Walker, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay and say, ``You 
guys get this through.'' Armey literally had total control of the floor 
in a way I don't think any Speaker normally has delegated that 
responsibility. From day one, I turned over control of the floor so I 
could then focus on figuring out with Bob Livingston, Bill Archer, and 
John Kasich how we were going to balance the budget, because you 
couldn't have done both in the same setting. You had to have different 
leadership operating both projects. So everything that was driving Don 
crazy on the floor was being driven by Armey based on what was in the 
contract we had signed before the election. By the way, we wouldn't have 
gotten it signed after the election. Once these guys got to be chairmen, 
there was no hope they were going to sign a contract because it gave 
away too much power. We then had a pretty serious effort to centralize 
authority in the speakership, something, which is fair to say, has 
continued to this day.
    The next phase after that was winning the crucial election of 1996. 
And there the key, as Don was saying, was an enormous effort. I have a 
tremendous respect for Dan Miller of Florida, because he trained every 
single one of our Members with very few exceptions. They could then all 
go home and answer Medicare questions and win the Medicare argument, 
because we thought that was the crisis of the campaign on our side. The 
other two things I'd say is we had a very close working relationship 
with Scott Reed, Dole's 1996 Presidential campaign manager, a guy named 
Don Rumsfeld over at the Dole campaign, and a very close relationship 
with Haley Barbour. Frankly, if we had not had the foreign campaign 
contribution scandal of the last 10 days, I think we might have lost 
control of the House. But the combination of winning Medicare, having 
raised enough resources with the aid of Bill Paxon, and then having the 
ability to focus a lot of energy on the question about foreign 
contributions got us through winning reelection for the first time since 
1928.
    Fourth, we had a phase of working with Bill Clinton. And the fact 
is, if you look at welfare reform, which was signed; you look at the 
balanced budget, which was negotiated out and signed; you look at a 
number of other issues, including creating the Hart-Rudman Commission; 
there were a whole series of things working in 1996 and then 
particularly in 1997, where I thought there was a real momentum of 
cooperation. This is a period that you have to look at as genuine 
bipartisan cooperation. We were actually passing bills and routinely 
getting about half of the Democratic Caucus to vote with us.
    Part five of this in my mind is that perjury drowned out the 
bipartisanship. The question of what was happening with the Presidency 
just shattered party cooperation, and the President couldn't risk any of 
his left so we were pinned into being in a fight with him. All of 1998 
was, in a sense, a great lost opportunity. If that had not happened, if 
that particular scandal had not broken out, my hunch in retrospect is 
you would have seen a much different 1998. We would have passed an 
amazing amount of very positive legislation on a bipartisan basis. I 
think that's where President Clinton was headed, and I think that all 
went down the tubes in December and January.
    Finally, the sixth and last stage for me was when it was clearly 
time for a new Speaker and there were a lot of different factors there. 
One was my exhaustion. A second was the fact that the ethics war against 
me had taken its toll. A third was the fact the House is really not 
designed to have an entrepreneurial dominating figure in the speakership 
position. Henry Clay pulled it off in a very different world in very 
different settings. But it's very difficult to do because the House 
really is a collection of equally-elected people who have real authority 
and real power. Far more than the Senate, the House really delegates 
authority to its committees, and its committee chairmen really acquire 
mastery of their topic. The idea that there might be some guy at the 
center who is going to run over them is anathema to the way the House 
has been structured--except for a very brief period, I would argue, 
under Cannon and a very brief period earlier than that under Speaker 
Reed from Maine and under Clay in a very different world. It's very hard 
to go back and imagine the House of Representatives when Clay was 
Speaker because it was so much smaller and so very different.
    I basically had burned out the centralizing process. Losing seats in 
November 1998 sealed that and, in my judgment, made it appropriate for 
me to leave and to permit a different kind of speakership to emerge. I 
also think that Speaker Hastert has actually carried out a more 
conciliatory, more managerial speakership with extraordinary skill and 
has gotten an amazing amount done, given the size of his majorities.
    In retrospect, I'll just close by saying there are four big things I 
would do differently. The first, looking back on September 17, 1994, I 
should have understood that the jump from the minority whip's job to the 
leader of a national movement at the center of the national news media 
and chief organizer of the House was an enormous jump. We should have 
brought in a number of very senior people with Presidential and 
gubernatorial experience, because we needed to upgrade our operations. 
This is not a bad comment about anyone on the team, nor is it a bad 
comment about any of our staffs, who are fabulous. It is simply an 
objective fact. We were suddenly on a different playingfield and we were 
going to get overmatched by reality, even though I think we accomplished 
an amazing amount.
    The second is I should have had much more media discipline. I say 
this not because of the times when I would say things that would get me 
in trouble, when I was just being a partisan Speaker, but because I 
would get confused about my role. There's a side of me that's 
permanently analytical, that likes coming and giving the speech, and 
that side of me should not have been allowed out of the box for the 
entire time I was Speaker. If I really had to say something, I should 
have said it into a tape recorder for the archives and brought it out as 
a book 20 years later. Instead, I would go and say something 
controversial. You go back and look at the whole Air Force One example 
where I just handed Leon Panetta and his boss an opportunity to just 
beat me around the head and shoulders for no good reason.
    If you actually go and look at the text of my comments at a Sperling 
breakfast [sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor], they were 
analytical comments about the difficulty of understanding how to 
negotiate with Clinton. I wasn't complaining about what happened except 
to say, ``I don't know how you read him.'' Within an hour, my 
observation was immediately turned to ``Gingrich was whining,'' which 
then got turned into a picture of me as a crybaby on the front page of 
the New York Daily News. That story led some of my colleagues to think 
I'd lost my mind. Well, I will tell you in retrospect, they were right. 
A fully professional Speaker would have understood that it was somebody 
else's job to comment on Clinton, that that wasn't my job. I have the 
greatest respect for President George W. Bush and the later phase of 
President Clinton's term, when he got much more disciplined, and for 
President Reagan, who understood that this is who I have to be in this 
context to play this game, captured brilliantly by John Keegan in a book 
called The Mask of Command.
    Third, the ethics charges have never been actually looked at. I 
really recommend, if you want to understand my speakership, that you 
read the volume published by the Ethics Committee. It includes all of my 
planning documents. You'll understand how intellectual this process 
really was, because it's all been published. It's all available for 
students of how you do these things. In retrospect, I underestimated the 
degree to which there was a legal strategy. Frankly, we should have 
gotten an attorney who was prepared for that kind of litigation-style 
strategy. Early on we didn't and if you go back and look at the 83 
charges, no serious charge was ever judged to be true. What I got 
hammered on was having signed a letter which was inaccurate, which was 
written not by my attorney nor by a partner in his firm, but by a new 
hire who was an assistant. Now, that's still my responsibility. I still 
failed, but in retrospect, it was a combination of bad litigation and 
not taking the entire fight seriously enough. That was an erosive 
process and the truth is, without Randy Evans having come in and having 
fired my prior attorney, I probably wouldn't have survived. The entire 
process just eroded my authority substantially.
    Last, I would say in retrospect, we should have insisted on 
celebrating. We did so many things so rapidly that we never slowed down. 
I'll give you an example: the Medicare fight. Because we never stopped 
and celebrated being the first reelected majority since 1928, the only 
majority ever elected to the House as Republicans with a Democratic 
President in American history, we never had 1 day of stopping and 
saying--this is amazing. So nobody figured out that we had won the 
argument over Medicare, and that we had run seven points ahead of Dole 
in the November 1996 elections, and that, in fact, senior citizens were 
our margin of victory. And so people felt like you lost because you're 
so badly bruised and you're so tired. That was sort of the mood that we 
had throughout a good bit of late 1996 and early 1997. Those are the 
things I would have changed. I look forward to my colleagues' comments. 
Don, as you said, it was a pretty wild ride.
    Mr. WOLFENSBERGER. Our first discussant on the Gingrich speakership 
is Leon Panetta, who is the co-director with his wife Sylvia of the 
Panetta Institute in Monterey, California. It's a non-partisan center 
dedicated to the advancement of public policy. Mr. Panetta served from 
1977 to 1993 as a Representative from the Monterey area in California. 
And then beginning in 1993, Mr. Panetta served 4 years in the Clinton 
administration, first as OMB Director, and then as White House Chief of 
Staff. On the one hand, he was spared serving in the House under a 
Republican majority; on the other hand, he was fated to deal with that 
same majority during 2 of the most turbulent years in the history of 
Presidential-congressional relations. In the House, he was known as the 
top budget expert on the Government's budget. In the White House, he 
became known as the top expert on how to keep the Government running 
without a budget. I give you Leon Panetta.
    Mr. PANETTA. Thank you very much. I also want to extend my thanks to 
the Congressional Research Service, and to the Carl Albert Center for 
having this forum on the changing nature of the speakership. There are 
obviously differences as we look at each of the Speakers who are 
reviewed today in terms of their personal relationships with Members, as 
well as their leadership styles. And I think it helps us define the 
place in history for each of them. When it comes to my friend Newt 
Gingrich, I don't think there's any question that, of the four Speakers, 
he represents the more controversial figure, because of both the 
personal and leadership styles that he brought to the speakership.
    Let me preface my remarks by saying that I had the opportunity to 
serve with Newt as a colleague in the House, and developed a friendship 
with him during that time. I then had the opportunity, obviously, to 
work with him when I became Chief of Staff to President Clinton. We 
began a series of efforts to try to negotiate various issues.
    Incidentally, if you all want to feel insignificant, you want to sit 
in a room where Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton are having a 
conversation. These are two individuals who are extremely bright, well-
read, full of ideas, and full of enthusiasm about how to resolve issues. 
If you listened to the both of them, there was no question in your mind 
that they could solve any issue in the world. What was interesting is 
that they came to basically oppose each other on most issues that they 
dealt with. But it was interesting.
    Part of the reason I term his speakership controversial is because 
it became a conflict between the role of the Speaker as leader of his 
party, and the role of the Speaker as leader of the House dealing with 
individual Members and also the Speaker as leader of the Nation. I think 
he was without question a successful leader of his party. His ability to 
be able to pull the party together, to consolidate the political power 
that was important to obtain the majority, and the fact that he put 
together a very effective agenda that became the platform for the 
Republican Party--this was an exceptional achievement. He, in effect, 
created a revolution in politics. But the challenge was also how to 
convert that revolution into effective policymaking on a continuing 
basis to help govern the Nation. And that's where I think the 
distinction has to be made.
    In academic terms, for those of you who are academics, let me refer 
you to James MacGregor Burns' book on leadership, in which he talks 
about transformational leadership, and what's called transactional 
leadership. Transformational leadership is leadership that tries to 
attract people by offering a higher purpose, a higher calling. It goes 
beyond simply cutting deals. On the other hand, the transactional leader 
is a person who provides rewards or penalties for compliance. And 
generally, if you want to be Speaker, it probably involves using both of 
those capabilities. There was no question that Newt Gingrich wanted to 
be a transformational leader. He wanted to be a Disraeli, a Wellington, 
a Churchill, a Jack Welch. He tried to inspire Members and push them to 
a higher calling, to a higher standard, that went beyond just simply 
cutting deals, and basically serving their own interests. He tried to 
rise to a higher calling with regards to the party and the agenda of the 
party. But the problem is that a Speaker is not a CEO. A Speaker is not 
a general. And a Speaker is not a Prime Minister. You can't take the 
parliamentary model and try to apply it to a branch of government that 
is based on the separation-of-powers approach to governing.
    The House of Representatives, as has been pointed out time and time 
again during this forum, is a unique legislative body. It's a unique 
institution in which each Member is autonomous and independent; in which 
Members basically try to ensure their survival through their own 
election and through responding to their constituency. That's the nature 
of a House of Representatives. So, you're not going to get Members to 
take the hill unless they're convinced that in the end it's in their 
interests to take the hill. The point is, if you're going to be a 
visionary or a transformational leader in the House, and if you really 
want to transform both the House and the country, which I believe Newt 
Gingrich was trying to do, then you damn well had better make the right 
decisions. And beyond that, you had better be able to adapt to changing 
circumstances, or else you're going to lose the support of your Members. 
The force of your personality is simply not enough in itself. There has 
to be a pragmatic side to that leadership as well.
    There's no question that Newt had great successes as the leader of 
his party--the first GOP majority in 40 years. That is a significant 
achievement for an individual, to nationalize the congressional 
elections. This is really one of the first times, instead of every 
Member fighting on his own in his district, where Newt broadly 
nationalized elections with the Contract with America. Moreover, he 
brought all of those items in the Contract with America to a vote within 
the first 100 days, which is also a significant achievement. He did 
implement reforms. He cut the number of committees. He implemented term 
limits. He got rid of proxy voting. He also accomplished some 
significant legislation like welfare reform, the freedom to farm bill, 
the telecommunications bill, and the line item veto. He pushed for a 
balanced budget. Which leads one to ask, ``Where the hell are you now, 
when we need you, Newt?'' [Laughter.]
    So he clearly achieved some successes. But if you're going to have a 
high profile, if you're going to be a high-profile charismatic leader, 
the transformational-type of leader in a legislative body, you have to 
be careful that you don't make some big mistakes. I think the problem 
was that he made some mistakes that began to erode the support that he 
needed from his own Members.
    What were some of those mistakes? I guess they're obvious to all of 
us. First of all were the shutdowns that took place in 1995 and 1996. I 
mean, clearly, when you're going to impact the citizens of this country, 
either through an inconvenience or through a reduction or a temporary 
loss of benefits, you're going to suffer a blow. I remember Bob Dole, 
when we were sitting in the Oval Office, talking about the fact that we 
really shouldn't be in a shutdown. Bob Dole said, ``You know, in my 
experience, you can probably shut the Government down over the weekend, 
but if you shut it down for any longer period of time, people are going 
to come looking for you.'' And he was right. I think Bob Dole understood 
that it would be a mistake to do that. Frankly, my own view, I think 
Newt Gingrich understood this point as well. But the problem was that he 
had created a revolution within his own Members, with the sense they 
would wholeheartedly fight for everything they were trying to achieve. 
And that led to an almost impossible situation in that the strong 
ideological constituency that he had created in the House made it 
impossible for him to be able to compromise. We were probably very close 
to compromising at one point. But for whatever reason, it just could not 
happen. And that, of course, led to the shutdown.
    In addition, I think the disaster relief he asked for--disaster 
relief, flood relief, for the Midwest--was important, but it had a 
couple of amendments attached to it by the Republicans, and was 
ultimately vetoed by the President. I think the Republicans were 
basically blamed again for preventing disaster relief because of those 
amendments. I think that was a tactical mistake.
    Obviously, the handling of President Clinton's impeachment, which 
created the impression of being more partisan than balanced, and the 
Speaker's own ethics violation, continued to erode his status. 
Ultimately what happened is that he became in a very real way a campaign 
liability. He was polling badly in the country as a result of that. If 
you're a charismatic leader you can't afford to poll badly in the 
country. So the consequence was like all revolutions: in the end, 
Members turned on their own leader and moved him out of the speakership.
    Let me just reiterate that the speakership of Newt Gingrich, as I 
defined it, was controversial and it perhaps may go down in history as 
one of those that was the most controversial. As a result, there is a 
profound lesson, I think, to be gained from that speakership. There is 
no question that you can be a strong charismatic leader of the party, 
and there have been strong charismatic leaders within the House of 
Representatives. But at the same time, if you're going to be a leader of 
the House, you have to stay in touch with your Members. You have to 
respond to their needs. You've got to listen to them. You've got to 
compromise when necessary in order to govern. And you always have to be 
willing to change with the needs of the Nation, to adapt to changing 
circumstances, even if that involves compromising an ideology. I think 
that's the difference between success and failure; and I think that is 
perhaps the profound lesson of the Gingrich speakership. Thank you.
    Mr. WOLFENSBERGER. Our second discussant on the Gingrich speakership 
is Bob Walker, who is chairman of Wexler and Walker Public Policy 
Associates here in Washington. Many of you remember him, though, as a 
10-term Pennsylvania Congressman from 1977 to 1997, a ubiquitous floor 
presence in the House, and a top Republican strategist, tactician, and 
parliamentary guru over most of those years. As someone who worked 
closely with Bob Walker and the Republican leadership on various 
procedural matters, I often wondered where he got his kinetic energy. I 
stopped wondering after I once sat down with him for breakfast in the 
Rayburn cafeteria, and his breakfast of chocolate milk, a chocolate-
covered donut, and a half-grapefruit covered with sugar. Now you know 
the secret of what it is that makes the ``Energizer Walker'' run. 
Congressman Bob Walker.
    Mr. WALKER. My staff always said they knew it was going to be a bad 
day when I had two chocolate donuts. Newt has done a pretty good job of 
walking through how we got to where we were in 1994 when we took over 
the House. But it seems to me that when we got there, we discovered a 
few things about ourselves that speak to the issues that Newt faced 
inside his speakership.
    The main lesson that we learned very quickly was that governing is 
hard. When we had been in the minority, we never had any responsibility 
to do any governing. We had fought the good fights, we had charged up 
the hill every day, we had gotten bloody fighting with our flags flying, 
and so on. We would come down off the hill if we lost, but we felt 
really good about it because we had fought glorious battles. All of a 
sudden, we found ourselves in a position where we actually had to 
govern, where it did require compromise, where it did require a lot of 
work with individual Members. And at the end of the day you got part way 
to where you wanted to go. You won, but you didn't feel really good 
about it.
    It was going through that transition in the majority that for 
everybody was a huge learning experience. And Newt was in the position 
of having to work through that. He was in the position of having to work 
with a number of things that we had set up in advance very consciously. 
The Contract with America was a political document and a governing 
document. How much of a governing document became very clear to us on 
one of the opening days when we had come back to Washington after the 
elections were over. We were faced with all of the freshmen who had been 
elected, who came in and said very clearly to the people who were going 
to be in the leadership, ``We're going to do the Contract, right?''
    You know, they had internalized this to the point that there was no 
changing anything that was in the document. They were determined to 
ensure that it was the direction that the leadership was going to go. 
And that was a positive thing from the standpoint of our being able to 
do an agenda right at the beginning of the 104th Congress. Remember, we 
had also committed to do that agenda within 100 days. While the 100 days 
was an arbitrary figure that we thought had great political saliency, 
when it came to actually accomplishing it, it was a major slog through 
the legislative process, because you had the rules of the House to 
contend with, such as layover requirements and a number of different 
procedural things that you had to be aware of.
    What it meant was that you had to have a lot of direction from the 
top. And Newt did use his leadership to help implement the agenda. The 
fact is that committee chairmen learned from the very earliest days of 
the Gingrich speakership that they were taking orders from the Speaker's 
Office, and that we were going to go through this agenda. It was going 
to get done in a way that reflected exactly what we had put in the 
Contract with America. That seems to me to be something that then played 
itself out in a variety of ways throughout the speakership.
    From then on, people who ended up with problems inside their 
committee structure as they dealt with issues felt that they could come 
to the Speaker because, after all, the Speaker had in the earliest days 
forced the agenda through. So we were constantly in some of those 
committee battles. The chairmen were also faced with a new situation 
where we had term-limited them. They did not have long-term prospects in 
the job. Their power was somewhat diminished by the fact that they were 
only going to be there a short period of time. It seems to me that the 
100-day agenda was a very important part of shaping the way the 
speakership evolved in the years ahead.
    There's another thing that has not been discussed here that I think 
needs to be recognized about Newt's speakership. There was a great 
technology focus in it. Dr. Billington made mention here a little while 
ago of the fact that Newt in the earliest days, as a personal crusade, 
created the THOMAS computer system for the House of Representatives. For 
the first time, it brought online all of the documents of the House of 
Representatives for the public to have easy access to and to learn what 
was actually going on inside the Congress. It was Gingrich's recognition 
that we had entered a new technological era in this country, and that 
Congress needed to be a part of it. I believe that it is a technology 
revolution that continues today.
    It has certainly changed the shape of those of us who are lobbying 
in town. It used to be that one of the things that a lobbyist could 
produce was the documents out of the House of Representatives. Only 
lobbyists could easily get them because they went to the House document 
rooms for their clients out across the country. Now the clients can get 
the documents simply by going online.
    Speaker Gingrich also was focused on science and technology as a 
broad general subject. The whole business of doubling the budgets of NIH 
grew out of a relationship between Newt and John Porter on the need to 
have amounts of money flowing into some of these technology areas that 
were so important. Technology also was frustrating for him because that 
was a part of the agenda for which the Republican conference was not 
completely on board.
    I remember going out to the Xerox center outside of town just after 
we had completed the 100-day agenda, and Newt was determined to have us 
adopt a new agenda to move forward. Part of that agenda was to make the 
Republican Party into the leadership party of the information age. Newt 
had drafted some concepts for the conference to consider and ultimately 
adopt that would move us in that direction. When we got to the Xerox 
center and broke into groups to discuss these various agenda items, 
Members took a look at some of the things that were supposed to take us 
into the information age. I remember one committee chairman--where I 
walked into the room to listen--who described the discussion as 
``psychobabble.'' That was probably one of the kindest things that was 
said about these discussions. By the time we got back into the general 
session, this was a portion of the agenda that was just written off. I 
remember Newt, following the meeting, being very discouraged because it 
was clear that the conference participants simply didn't understand 
where we were headed at that point in the economy and how we could be 
leaders in that arena.
    Another thing, as I reflect on this, that seemed to me to be a 
shaper of the Gingrich speakership was the fact that we had a number of 
people in the freshman class who arrived in 1994 who were ``self'' term-
limited. They had decided on their own that they were only going to be 
here for a short period of time. Those folks became people inside the 
conference who resisted whenever we attempted to make long-term deals 
and look down the road a long way. They were there for a very short 
period of time. They wanted to get things done now, or they wanted to 
stop things from being done now. Interestingly enough, it was a number 
of those people who ended up being at the base of the revolt that took 
place against Newt's leadership later on.
    Newt's operational style was often not understood by a lot of 
people. It was to empower folks to go out and do things with regard to 
issues that came up. If a young Member of Congress came to the Speaker 
and said, ``You know, I'd like to do something about this issue.'' 
Newt's tendency was to say ``yes'' and empower them to go do it. The 
problem with that was, for a number of us who were part of his 
leadership team, we almost immediately got a call from a committee 
chairman or a subcommittee chairman who didn't realize that this 
responsibility had now been given to some freshman Member of Congress. 
The chairman was outraged by the fact that this person had seemingly 
been empowered by the Speaker. So there were a number of us in the 
leadership team and on Newt's staff who would have to go to the freshman 
and say, ``You may not have understood exactly what the Speaker was 
saying.'' We would try to work out some of these arrangements.
    Certainly, part of the problem that Newt ultimately ran into were 
the dozens of ethics charges that were filed against him. The ongoing 
issues there stem from the fact that many people in the opposition 
party, in the Democratic Party, never really got over their anger about 
the confrontational tactics that had been used in order to take the 
majority. That made it very difficult to work with the Democratic 
leadership. And it may have been partially work that we didn't do very 
well. Additionally, many in the Democratic leadership didn't work very 
hard at forging a relationship. That reality really led to much of the 
decision of the Republicans that we had to go it alone. No matter how 
narrow our majority we had to do it on our own, and it was a way of 
shaping policy throughout the Gingrich speakership.
    I must say that working with President Clinton was different, and 
Leon Panetta has somewhat characterized this relationship. Newt and 
President Clinton did have this ability to talk to each other, because 
they were both policy wonks. Yet there was no end of frustration on our 
end of Pennsylvania Avenue when Newt and the President would get 
together and talk about something, and Newt would come up to explain 
this great deal he had just cut. Somebody in the leadership would say, 
``Newt, we can't do that!'' And then there would have to be more 
discussions that followed our meetings. I believe that there was an 
understanding that we could, through that relationship, forge some 
legislative packages. As has been mentioned, there were some things that 
were done, such as the welfare reform package that ultimately was a 
major change of direction in American policy.
    I have a somewhat different view of the Government shutdown than 
Leon's. I think that most of us felt as though that was very successful. 
It would have been a disaster had it led to us not being able to retain 
the majority in 1996. The fact was that we were able to retain our 
majority despite having gone through the shutdowns. Many of us have felt 
that the shutdowns convinced a lot of the markets that there was a 
serious effort under way to balance the budget. It wasn't just rhetoric 
anymore. There was, in fact, a serious effort under way. A lot of the 
growth that happened in the economy after that really resulted from the 
willingness of the Republicans to take the political heat that came with 
the government shutdowns.
    Let me just sum up here. There are a half a dozen things that I 
would say are probably the legacy of the Gingrich speakership. First, it 
seems to me that his speakership affirmed the national Republican 
political ascendancy. Up until then there had been a lot of feeling that 
the Republican Party was basically a party where a personality, Ronald 
Reagan, had managed to bring us to a status that gave us a fighting 
chance in politics. With the speakership of Newt, and the ability to win 
successive elections after 1994, it certainly affirmed our political 
ascendancy.
    Second, his legacy should certainly include that he moved the House 
of Representatives into the modern technology era. Third, it seems to me 
that his speakership also changed the relationship between the Speaker 
and committee chairmen. Clearly, there is a much different relationship 
that continues to this day. Fourth, the speakership of Newt Gingrich and 
the way in which the Republican majority approached legislation assured 
the long-term vibrancy of Reaganism. We took much of the Reagan agenda 
and assured that it was what we were enacting as a result of our work in 
the Congress. Fifth, it seems to me that the Gingrich speakership 
created a positive visionary platform for dealing with national issues 
from a conservative base. In large part, that kind of visionary outlook 
resulted in our ability to keep a majority in the House over a long 
term.
    Finally, sixth, it seems to me that what the Gingrich speakership 
also did was change the nature of the political dialog in the country. 
Up until then we had debated the issues largely from the standpoint of 
liberal rhetoric. We changed a lot of that rhetoric. Just the idea that 
we went from discussing how long we were going to have large deficits to 
the fact that we could actually have a balanced budget was a tremendous 
change in rhetoric. Despite the fact that we're having trouble keeping 
those balanced budgets today, we still talk in terms of balanced budgets 
in ways different than we did before. That's my view. Thanks.
    Mr. WOLFENSBERGER. Because we did get a late start, I've been 
authorized by the organizers to go a little late in this, so we can 
allow for some questions. But what I'd like to do is first of all give 
Newt a couple of minutes to make some comments on what was said since he 
last spoke, and also if Mr. Panetta would like to do so as well. Mr. 
Panetta will probably have to leave before our question period is over 
to catch a plane. So I want to make sure he has an opportunity for a 
last word as well. Newt.
    Speaker GINGRICH. First of all, just a couple of quick observations. 
I think there are two grounds for focusing on my speakership. The first 
is that it was actually a team effort all the way through. You can't 
describe my rise without talking about the Congressional Campaign 
Committee, Guy Vander Jagt, Joe Gaylord, and others. You can't describe 
our rise in the House without mentioning the Conservative Opportunity 
Society and people like Bob Walker and Vin Weber and Connie Mack and 
others. You can't describe how we ran the Contract with America without 
looking at the extraordinary role Dick Armey played. And you can't look 
at how we ran the House in the first couple of months without looking at 
Armey and Walker and DeLay. Finally, you can't describe balancing the 
budget without including Kasich and Livingston and Archer. So there was 
an extensive team process. I was the central executor and I had very 
substantial power, but it was as the leader of a collectivity. It wasn't 
just me and then you drop down 100 feet to the next person. The team 
concept was a very conscious design.
    Second, because of the separation of powers that Leon pointed out, I 
believe it is a mistake to see 1994 in isolation, and Bob Walker came 
closer to the right model--which is, Reagan in 1980 brings us back from 
a distinct minority party status to being competitive. We, I think, 
helped get ourselves to parity, recognizing that much of the Contract 
was in fact standing on Ronald Reagan's shoulders. Bush now has to see 
whether or not he can move beyond parity to majority.
    You can go back to earlier studies of American politics in the 19th 
century. There are three things to think about in terms of what I tried 
to accomplish: the political, the policy, and the personal. The first 
thing, and I wrote down what Leon said because I thought he caught it 
right, although he and I probably will disagree on it. He said, 
``effective policymaking on a continuing basis to help govern.'' This is 
the 9th year of a Republican majority in the House. The last time we 
were in the 9th year of a Republican majority in the House was 1927. So 
at a political level, it's pretty hard to argue that we weren't 
successful. Just as a fact.
    Second, on policy grounds, look at welfare reform, balancing the 
budget, reforming the FDA, strengthening the National Institutes of 
Health, increasing the Central Intelligence Agency's budget, cutting 
taxes. It's hard not to say that those 4 years were fairly substantial 
at a policy level.
    And the third is personal. Here I'm quite happy to have people 
decide that I failed in the end because I left the House. But it's a 
little hard for me to look back and not feel success as a former Army 
brat who had no great personal wealth, no ties, and I arrived in Georgia 
courtesy of the U.S. Army at a time when it was segregated and 
Democratic. Georgia is now a State that has a Republican Governor, a 
Republican Senator, I think a soon-to-be Republican second Senate seat, 
and a majority of Republicans in the House. I arrived in Washington when 
we were in our 24th year of being in the minority. We're now in our 9th 
year of being in the majority. I got to have a dinosaur in the Dinosaur 
Room, as Denny Hastert reminded me today. What's to feel bad about? This 
was an enormously successful run that changed the House, changed the 
Republican Party, and marginally changed the country.
    In the end, I don't think you can be that aggressively 
entrepreneurial in Washington in the speakership and sustain it very 
long. So you either have to decide, ``I really want to get all of these 
things done and then I'll have to go do something else for a while,'' or 
you have to decide, ``I'd rather stay around here and get a lot less 
done.'' I don't think there's a game in the middle between those two 
styles. Most successful Speakers don't try to do as many different 
things, and they're right. But we had a very unique brief window to 
really change things.
    Last, I agree totally with Leon about the disaster relief fiasco in 
1997. That was one of the reasons we ended up with my leadership in 
rebellion. I thought it was crazy for us to be in the fight. It was a 
moment of saying, ``You know how good Bill Clinton is at this stuff, why 
are you putting your head up so he can just beat on you for three 
hours?'' I couldn't agree more. That's one of the places I failed. I 
failed in part because by then there were too many things going on and 
too many moving parts, which is the weakness of a centralized leadership 
in the House.
    The shutdown, though, is really important for sophisticated people 
to look at for a long time. Livingston and Kasich have both told me in 
the last year they are absolutely convinced we wouldn't have gotten to a 
balanced budget without the shutdown. They see it as shock therapy. But 
there's a key mantra, which is, ``We lost.'' I want all of you to think 
about this. We were the first reelected majority since 1928. We are the 
only majority ever reelected with a Democratic President winning the 
national election in 1996. What is it we lost? People say, ``Oh, that 
was a terrible period, and we lost.'' But what did we lose? We had a 
running brawl 9 months before the election. We proved that we were 
really deadly serious about solving our Nation's problems. Leon has his 
version, and mine is a totally different discussion. We have to get Bob 
Livingston to come in some time and do an entire session on whether the 
shutdown was a mistake. I think you would have Leon on one side and you 
would have Kasich and Livingston on the other side.
    I would just say that as a professional designer of campaigns, the 
shutdown did not cost us anything except in the press corps and in this 
city and at cocktail parties. It didn't cost us anything in the country. 
In the end, we were able to win election in a way that nobody had done 
since 1928. We didn't feel good about it, so people tend to undervalue 
the sheer fact that it's still Speaker Hastert.
    Mr. PANETTA. Well, I guess I would just caution that the fact of 
simply holding power in and of itself is not necessarily an indication 
that you're governing the country. Democrats made the mistake of 
basically assuming that because we held power, that somehow we didn't 
have to deliver in terms of governing the country. I've often said that 
we govern in our democracy either through leadership or crisis. 
Leadership that's willing to compromise and willing to find solutions is 
the most effective way of governing this country, in order to avoid 
crisis. But I think if you look at the last few years, we are a Nation 
that more and more governs by crisis, as opposed to leadership. Crisis 
drives policy. It drives energy policy. You've got to have the lights 
shut down in order for the country to respond to the energy problem. On 
budget issues, there's always the threat of some kind of shutdown or 
forcing Members to stay beyond an adjournment date to pass 
appropriations bills in this place. The same thing is true on health 
care. The same thing is true for Social Security. The same thing is true 
for Medicare. Ultimately, we are doing more and more as a result of 
crisis driving policy. Now, whether we're Democrats or Republicans, I 
think that's a reality. And let me add, the public may for a period of 
time basically allow that kind of gridlock to proceed. But, as the 
California example demonstrates, there is a point at which angry and 
frustrated people are going to take their vote out on leaders who are in 
office. If there's any lesson you should take away from the California 
recall experience, it's that incumbents ought not to feel too 
comfortable about where they are at the present time. I think there is 
an angry and frustrated public out there, that at some point may do 
exactly what happened in 1994, which is to change the leadership because 
they are frustrated with the fact that we are doing more by crisis than 
by leadership.
    Mr. WOLFENSBERGER. I think we have time for one question.
    Question. In what way did your view of the speakership change during 
your tenure?
    Speaker GINGRICH. Virtually none. My view was that we had to be very 
different than traditional speakerships. My assumption was that we would 
be faced with overwhelming resources against us from the White House, 
large parts of the media, and the capacity to raise money from interest 
groups who would be threatened by changing government and changing 
priorities. Leon mentioned Wellington, and Wellington is one of the 
leaders I looked at because I expected to be in a peninsular kind of 
campaign where the other side had more resources. We had to be very sure 
we were focused on what it took to win. And my models were actually not 
so much prior speakerships, although I understood a fair amount about 
people like Tom Reed and Henry Clay and Cannon and Rayburn. My models 
were much more how do you organize people to be effective in a situation 
of enormous pressure where you're trying to get things done? In that 
sense, I do accept Leon's point that I tended to take as models Alfred 
Sloan of General Motors or George Catlett Marshall in the Second World 
War or a Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I was trying to find ways to be able 
to rally our people to do the things we wanted to do.
    Mr. WOLFENSBERGER. I'm now going to call on CRS Director Dan 
Mulhollan to make a few closing remarks, but please join me in thanking 
our panel for doing an outstanding job.
    Mr. MULHOLLAN. This closes our session. I want to thank everyone who 
participated in this important conference and everyone who attended the 
various sessions. One of the things it underscores is that each one of 
you being here indicates an interest, a caring about the institution of 
the U.S. Congress, and for that we are quite grateful. I must also add 
that, in order for this event to take place, a lot of people worked very 
hard. I wanted to mention Justin Paulhamus, Karen Wirt, Jill Ziegler, 
and Robert Newlen of CRS who worked to make the conference a success. 
Another CRS person merits special mention because he had the idea for 
the conference and carried it out in a highly successful manner. He is 
Walter Oleszek, my colleague and friend for over three decades, and we 
should thank him for his initiative and efforts.