Wright, ex-congressman, U.S. House speaker, dies

Jim Wright of Texas (left), the House speaker, talks to reporters with House Minority Leader Robert Michel outside the White House on Aug. 5, 1987. Wright, who died Wednesday at 92, served in the House from 1955 until his resignation in 1989.
Jim Wright of Texas (left), the House speaker, talks to reporters with House Minority Leader Robert Michel outside the White House on Aug. 5, 1987. Wright, who died Wednesday at 92, served in the House from 1955 until his resignation in 1989.

WASHINGTON -- Jim Wright, a Texas Democrat who spent three decades rising to speaker of the U.S. House only to lose his seat in a bitter debate over his ethics, has died. He was 92.

He died Wednesday at a nursing facility in Fort Worth, according to Javier Majera of Thompson's Harveson & Cole Funeral Home. No cause was given.

Wright, who served from 1955-89, was the first House speaker to resign under a cloud of misconduct. His ouster was a milestone in the ascendancy of political warfare in Congress.

The House ethics committee investigated Wright after a complaint by Newt Gingrich of Georgia, then a little-known but outspoken Republican congressman. While clearing Wright of several allegations, the committee cited him for five violations involving gifts and income from bulk sales of his 1984 book, Reflections of a Public Man.

The panel ruled that Fort Worth businessman George Mallick, a friend and business partner of Wright, and his wife, Betty, had an interest in legislation before Congress. Therefore, the panel ruled, Mallick shouldn't have provided housing to the couple, and the company co-owned by the Mallicks and Wrights shouldn't have provided Betty with an $18,000-a-year salary and use of a car.

Also, the committee said Wright had sold his book in bulk on several occasions as a way to evade limits on honoraria and other outside income.

In an emotional hour-long resignation speech on the House floor on May 31, 1989, Wright called the charges petty and painted himself as the victim of a political assault.

"All of us, in both political parties, must resolve to bring this period of mindless cannibalism to an end," Wright said in his speech. "There has been enough of it."

He insisted that his work for peace in Nicaragua and other nations in Central America -- a role that had raised complaints from President Ronald Reagan's administration -- had made him the target of "vicious attacks."

"I probably paid too little attention to my personal affairs while driving, perhaps too persistently, to prod Congress into a more dynamic role in both domestic and foreign policy," he wrote in Worth It All, his 1993 memoir. "For whatever errors of judgment may be laid to me, I assume full responsibility."

The partisan anger that overflowed during the Wright affair would bedevil future House speakers -- including Gingrich. After becoming speaker in 1995, Gingrich became a top target of Democratic attacks and resigned under pressure after his party lost five House seats in the 1998 elections.

After leaving Congress, Wright taught at Texas Christian University and wrote a column for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

James Claude Wright Jr. was born Dec. 22, 1922, in Fort Worth and grew up in Weatherford, a small town 20 miles to the west. His father, James Sr., led a National Guard unit that had been sent to the Rio Grande in 1916 to stop raids by Pancho Villa's forces.

An amateur boxer, the younger Wright attended high school in Dallas and then returned with his family to Weatherford, where he coached boxers. At Weatherford College, Wright edited the student newspaper.

Wright was studying at the University of Texas when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. He enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps and served as a bombardier in the South Pacific, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross.

After two years in the Texas Legislature and four as Weatherford mayor, Wright in 1954 started a campaign for Congress, upending four-term Rep. Wingate Lucas in the Democratic primary.

Wright spent 34 years in the U.S. House. A conservative Democrat by national standards -- he favored a larger military budget and opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a vote he later regretted -- Wright nonetheless was considered the most liberal member of Texas' delegation.

He was known mostly as a defender of his district's local interests, including Texas' oil and gas producers.

By a single vote, Wright's Democratic colleagues elected him House majority leader in 1976. Wright served in the post for 10 years, working closely with Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill and ultimately succeeding him in 1987.

As speaker, Wright asserted himself as a force in U.S. Central American policy in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan administration's secret effort to aid guerrillas fighting Nicaragua's leftist government.

Wright said he made himself a target of Reagan loyalists when he attended a November 1987 meeting between Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and a Roman Catholic cardinal who agreed to carry a peace proposal to the Contras.

But, he said a day after announcing his resignation in 1989, "If I've made any contribution to peace in the world, then that's the thing of which I'd be proudest."

Wright married his college sweetheart, Mary Ethelyn Lemons, in 1942, and they had five children, four of whom survive. The marriage ended in 1970, and Mary died in 1986. Wright married Betty Hay, a longtime member of his congressional staff, in 1972.

A Section on 05/07/2015

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