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Republicans are counting on Hyde's good sense to bolster their credibility in news cycle after news cycle. Until now, neither Hyde nor the Young Turks have had much use for each other. "He does feel as if he has been saddled with a bunch of yahoos," says an old friend. "It's hard to be a serious gentleman and have this crowd around you." But while Hyde is wary of revolutionaries who want to tear down the institutions he reveres, he recognizes that "they turned the lights on." He would still be in the minority and without a chairmanship were it not for the zealous Gingrich. "I served in this House many long years in the minority," he says. "And we were told that we were in the minority, and we were treated as a minority." As a sign of gratitude to Gingrich, Hyde zipped the Contract with America through his committee--even the portions he didn't like.
Now the same rebels are nudging Hyde out front, to put a kinder face on the brutal process about to get under way. "You're going to be seeing a lot more of Henry Hyde," says a Gingrich aide. Hyde cringes when Gingrich storms the stage. The Speaker, says Hyde wryly, "is not averse to expressing his strong views, which he does intermittently, in between spells of 'Leave it all to Henry.'" And Hyde is not shy about standing up to Gingrich. When he aired plans last spring to put Hyde in charge of a select committee to handle impeachment questions, Hyde resisted, threatening not to serve on the hybrid creation and demanding that Judiciary be allowed to play its historic role. Gingrich had little choice but to accommodate him.
Hyde's stubbornness and common sense spring partly from his hometown. His suburban Chicago district is just a few miles from the Howard Street apartment where he grew up. One flight up from a saloon, the flat was all the family could afford during the Depression, as his father barely held on to his job collecting nickels from pay phones. His parents were Democrats by default. "If you lived in Chicago in the '30s, you were a Democrat," says longtime friend Philip Corboy. The stronger influence in Hyde's life was Catholicism. Coaxed by his mother, he attended St. George, a Catholic high school run by the Christian Brothers, who, Hyde says, "did not eschew corporal punishment when called for, which was often." As a 6-ft. 1-in. eighth-grader, Hyde was a presence in the hallways for more reasons than just his talent for magic tricks. "He was always a raconteur," remembers Corboy. "He talked like an adult when he was a kid."
Hyde's build made him a natural for center on the school basketball team and landed him an athletic scholarship to Jesuit- run Georgetown University, 22 years before Bill Clinton arrived there from Arkansas. Friends learned then not to think Hyde's usual civility meant he lacked a fighting spirit. Corboy recalls Hyde getting mad at him during a game of two-on-two basketball. Says Corboy: "He threw the ball either at me or against the wall in an expression of complete rage. I said, 'It's only a basketball game.' And he replied, 'What else is there?'"
--With reporting by Wendy Cole/Chicago and Elaine Shannon/Washington