Volume 37, Number 8 · May 17, 1990
The Fall of Jim Wright
By Nicholas Lemann
The Ambition and the Power
by John M. Barry
Viking, 768 pp., $22.95
Reflections of a Public Man
by Jim Wright
Madison Publishing Company, (out of print)
To Kill a King: The True Story of the Political Murder of Speaker Jim Wright, the Most Powerful Man in Congress
by George Mair
Potomac-Pacific Press, 352 pp., $9.95 (paper)
The resignation of Jim Wright as speaker of the House last May has had surprisingly few reverberations. The speaker is officially 'second in line for the presidency,' but that understates the importance of the position Wright held: he was the leading figure in what is still, at least officially, the majority political party in this country, and, because of the relative passivity of Robert Byrd, the majority leader of the Senate during most of Wright's speakership, he was the active head of the legislative branch of the federal government. Among elected officials, only the President outranked him. The job put Wright constantly on public view even in normal circumstances, and his protracted fall made him front-page news for the better part of a year. And yet now he has entered the same blurred region of the mind that Edwin Meese and Robert McFarlane occupy—one remembers that there was a great scandal, but the details have become hard to recall.
Review, 4928 words
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