Speaker Jim Wright: Power, Scandal, and the Birth of Modern Politics by J. Brooks Flippen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Speaker Jim Wright: Power, Scandal, and the Birth of Modern Politics by J. Brooks Flippen Nancy Beck Young Speaker Jim Wright: Power, Scandal, and the Birth of Modern Politics. By J. Brooks Flippen. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Pp. 527. Notes, index.) Few would dispute the claim that Texas has produced an inordinate number of skilled national political leaders, especially in the twentieth [End Page 486] century and early twenty-first. The best known of course are the three presidents who hailed from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, but a score or more of House and Senate members have also played critical roles in the public policy formation process. Three of those rose to the speakership in the House of Representatives, John Nance Garner, Sam Rayburn, and Jim Wright. Only Wright has attracted a full scholarly biography, despite the fact Garner and Rayburn had more substantive political careers and played outsized roles in national governance from the 1900s through the 1960s. J. Brooks Flippen has undertaken thorough research in Jim Wright’s papers and benefitted from access to Wright’s diaries, which are otherwise not available to researchers, and he conducted multiple interviews with the former speaker before his death. Flippen has used this material to form the corpus of Speaker Jim Wright, a narrative biography that moves chronologically through Wright’s life. The narrative is clearly written and provides a helpful account of Wright’s rise in national politics. Wright, who was first elected to Congress in 1954, appeared as a man on the make, looking for the best opportunities to advance his career while also bringing economic development projects to his district. We learn, through brief but cogent descriptions about his support for General Dynamics, his central role in the construction of DFW Airport, and his efforts to advance the Trinity River project, an ambitious but failed effort to canalize the river from Fort Worth to the Gulf of Mexico. He thrived on building relationships in Congress, which explains his rise in the leadership in the 1970s and 1980s. With this material, Flippen is quite strong, showing how Wright cultivated the mentorships of Johnson and Rayburn and how he managed rivalries with other ambitious Democratic members of Congress, including Richard Bolling of Missouri and Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois. The subtitle to the book—Power, Scandal, and the Birth of Modern Politics—telescopes Flippen’s argument, but the book would have been improved by more forceful analysis. That said, the narrative does show just how much Congress changed from the mid 1950s when Wright was first elected and the late 1980s, when he resigned in disgrace over charges by the House Ethics Committee over improper financial dealings. While Flippen is correct that Wright deserves to be remembered for more than the scandal that ended his career, Wright remains less significant than this book contends. The Fort Worth Democrat never transcended his own ambition. This problem comes through in the many discussions of how Wright compromised his political conscience for the sake of reelection and political advance. Two ultimately related aspects of the book raise concerns and limit what could have been a truly great book. Numerous small errors of fact punctuate the manuscript. Examples include the following: Joseph Cannon, not Joseph Conrad, was the unseated Speaker of the House in the early twentieth [End Page 487] century. Although Speaker Sam Rayburn maintained bipartisan alliances, he did not play a regular golf game with Republican House Minority Leader Joseph W. Martin. Wright did defeat a conservative Democrat in 1954 to gain election to Congress, but that individual, Wingate Lucas, was not identified with the Boll Weevil faction, namely because conservative Democrats did not widely employ that moniker until the 1980s. Finally, Wright Patman was not a prolific campaign fundraiser because he did not need to be. Had Flippen engaged a wider array of research sources, the results could have been very different. The best congressional biographies draw from multiple archival sources. The careful student of congressional history and Texas political history will notice glaring archival absences from the footnotes, including the LBJ Presidential Library, the Carl Albert Center, the Ronald...