The House of Representatives last Wednesday was part theater, part courtroom and part confessional. As his wife Betty wept in the visitors' gallery, Speaker Jim Wright played defense attorney, arguing away each charge against him; thespian, wiping his brow and lowering his voice to a whisper; and penitent: "Are there things I would do differently? Oh, boy." As the minutes ticked away -- Wright took more than an hour -- some began to wonder whether he was giving a resignation speech or making another plea for forgiveness. Finally the words that had caught in his throat for so long passed his lips: "Let me give you back this job you gave to me."
While that was the announcement the House had been anticipating for days, the packed chamber saved its applause for the moment when the Speaker, the first ever to be forced from office by allegations of misconduct, begged for an end to the hostilities in Congress. Fist clenched, he thundered, "Both political parties must resolve to bring this period of mindless cannibalism to an end."
The atmosphere in Congress had truly turned poisonous in the week since Wright's position crumbled and majority whip Tony Coelho resigned rather than face similar investigations into his advantageous insider acquisition of a $100,000 junk bond. Republican Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who first leveled the charges against Wright, crowed over his victory and declared that at least ten other Democrats were guilty of similar violations.
Was ethics becoming a tool for character assassination? Pennsylvania Congressman William Gray, the leading candidate to replace Coelho, had to ask Attorney General Dick Thornburgh to investigate the source of an apparently unfounded rumor that the FBI was looking into whether he had a no-show employee on his payroll. Majority leader Tom Foley, the likely successor to Wright, was asked to assure a group of conservative Democrats that nothing in his background would embarrass them.
Voices in Congress and around Washington denounced an ethics reign of terror that is destroying reputations and perhaps driving good people from government. "It's genuinely frightening -- worrisome," says Thomas Mann, a congressional observer for the Brookings Institution. "The intensive moralizing has painted the House as utterly corrupt. It damages the institution and the environment of the Washington community."
The spasm of mudslinging was painful and messy, and certainly contained a measure of revenge for the earlier Democratic assaults on such Republicans as John Tower and Ronald Reagan's Attorney General Ed Meese. The atmosphere also suffered from the fact that minority whip Gingrich was leading the ethics charge. Gingrich early on admitted that an investigation of the Speaker was the G.O.P.'s chance to undo three decades of Democratic dominance in Congress.