It’s hard to know what to say about former Republican Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, whose death at the age of 84 was reported this morning. Few if any political leaders in modern American history have experienced a fall quite so ignominious and total. The obvious point of comparison is Richard Nixon. But post-Watergate Nixon was never without his defenders and supporters. All but his most adamant critics granted significant successes of his presidency. And by the time of his death in 1994, he’d made significant progress in being treated by many as a sage elder statesman, albeit a greatly tarnished one. Hastert remains almost a test case of a top political leader whose fall was immediate and absolute. He came as close as one can come to have to having zero public defenders (though a significant number of former colleagues wrote leniency letters on his behalf at sentencing in 2016).
What stands out in my mind are two moments, one from his moment of ascent to power and another at the denouement but certainly not the nadir of career. Go back to 1998. The so-called Lewinsky scandal had been trundling forward for most of the year. Republicans are giddy about the Red Tsunami that was about to supercharge the existing GOP majority. Predictions of a 30- or 40-seat pick up were common and assumed. (I was one of few people I knew to basically predict no wave at all; it was simply a matter of watching the polls rather than the bipartisan hype.) When Democrats ended up gaining five seats, House Speaker New Gingrich was summarily tossed overboard — a mix of the failure of his wild overpromising and slowly building frustrations with his erratic and high drama leadership style.
After Newt’s defenestration, Rep. Bob Livingston of Louisiana quickly emerged as his successor. But a problem soon emerged: Livingston himself had been carrying on an affair. He soon bowed to the inevitable and pulled himself out of the running. At the time, I was about a year into my first journalism job working at The American Prospect, then located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But I was covering the drama for Salon as a freelancer. Before we get to any of that, it’s important to understand the context of this moment.
As noted above, basically the whole year had been a drip, drip, drip about Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. With today’s high octane politics in mind, it’s hard to capture just how wild, chaotic and disruptive this was. A 24/7 news cycle, the beginnings of upstart online news, all with a daily feed of subject matter that had never been this explicit in American politics. What presaged the 1998 electoral outcome was that Republicans had wildly overplayed their hand from the beginning, focusing attention on their hypocrisy and the fact that people were generally pretty happy with how the country was doing. Inexplicably but also predictably in this context, Clinton’s approval ratings didn’t sink but rather shot up and stayed in the 60s throughout the year. In this climate, there was a deep hunger among angry Democrats to uncover Republican affairs. And Salon in September had published a story that then-senior Republican Rep. Henry Hyde, who was 74 years old at the time, had carried on an affair in the 1960s. What wouldn’t come out until the following year was that Gingrich himself had been carrying on an affair with then-staffer, now-wife Callista Bisek, all through the scandal and for years before.
So the point is that when Livingston stepped aside, it was in this context of Republican affairs seemingly popping up all over the place, the background of the ever-present Lewinsky scandal, what had been experienced as a massive electoral upset and two consecutive House Speakers getting tossed in a matter of weeks. Both Gingrich and Livingston announced they’d also be leaving Congress entirely. (Livingston never actually became Speaker. But that was kind of a technicality.) On top of all this, after first suffering a electoral rebuke over the Lewinsky scandal, Republicans had steadied themselves and were now rushing as fast as possible to impeach Clinton — election verdict notwithstanding. Livingston announced his departure on the morning of the impeachment vote. This all came together in one concentrated day of almost unimaginable drama on Capitol Hill when Republicans absolutely more than anything else wanted calm and some sense of predictability, regularity and trust. And in this climate, out of the blue, all eyes turned to an all-but-unknown congressman from Illinois named Denny Hastert.
Now, to be clear, Hastert wasn’t unknown on Capitol Hill. He was a known commodity, chief deputy whip for the Republican majority. To most of the public, though, he seemed like someone very much from the back bench, not someone at all who seemed primed to ascend to the speakership.
That day was Dec. 18, 1998, and on that particular day I was busily phone reporting from Somerville, trying to make sense of it all for a piece for Salon. It’s difficult to overstate the degree to which everyone rushed to endorse Hastert within hours of Livingston’s departure because he seemed like the one person who could absolutely relied upon to be normal, no scandal, no skeletons, a return to steady, uncontroversial and calm leadership. “It’s really the power structure putting him forward. It’s a consensus day in the capital,” one GOP staffer told me that afternoon.
The irony of this has always remained with me. Because that was absolutely the calculus. It’s wild how close to the sun some people will fly.
But there was another key moment which looks very different in retrospect.
Fast forward eight years to 2006. There was a lot of talk coming out of the 2004 presidential election that the GOP had constructed permanent Republican congressional majorities. This wasn’t simply about public opinion or gerrymandering or the small state advantage. It was also about creating a kind of iron system of campaign contributions and regulatory and legal returns on that investment to corporate America. Because of that conventional wisdom, there was well into 2006 doubt that Democrats could really retake Congress, despite how much evidence there was that that would happen. The so-called Foley scandal, which broke out in September, helped catalyze shifting expectations.
For those who don’t remember it, Mark Foley was a very lightly closeted gay congressman from Florida. I’m not even sure it’s right to say he was closeted. It emerged that Foley had sent a series of sexually suggestive emails and instant messages to former teenaged male pages who had worked on Capitol Hill. When the messages were released, Foley resigned. But then the scandal quickly moved to what leadership had known about Foley’s behavior. Hastert, of course, remained Speaker of the House.
In retrospect, it is clear this scandal must have filled Hastert with fears that his past would be exposed. (In fairness to Foley, who was never charged with a crime, his wrongdoing paled in comparison to Hastert’s.) This was another period of chaos on Capitol Hill. There were lots of end-of-the-majority vibes, changing of the guard. In a different role, I was working phones much as I had eight years earlier. What was clear at the time was Hastert was taking a very passive and kind of MIA role toward the whole unfolding drama. One potential theory was that Hastert had either warnings or knowledge about Foley’s behavior. And that was probably true to at least some extent. There were also rumors or I guess what you’d call chattered suggestions that there was a kind of “gay mafia” of staffers around Hastert that wanted to keep the whole story under wraps, or prevent further investigations.
Accusations like that have a long and dark history. I mention them now — 20 years on — not to suggest they were true but to give you a sense of the climate of that moment, the kinds of rumors and accusations that were flying — a mix of homophobia and some legitimate bafflement about Hastert’s hands-off role. Of course we can’t know what Hastert was thinking in September 2006 while all this was happening. But it seems all but impossible not to conclude that Hastert feared that this was a climate in which his own secrets would be revealed. It’s a bit like kryptonite being casually brought into the office of a dark-side Superman.
Subsequent House investigations and news reports found that there was a history of inappropriate emails, overtures and more from Foley, and that many of these had come to the attention of House officials and been briefed to Hastert. Hastert said almost nothing publicly and relied on his office to in most cases deny testimony or claims that he’d been briefed on different incidents months or years before.
Everything eventually came pouring out into the open in 2015. Hastert had left the House soon after the Republicans’ 2006 defeat and had transitioned into a high-flying D.C. lobbyist. Hastert’s undoing actually began with FBI scrutiny of what they suspected was more typical D.C. lobbyist corruption as far back as 2012. Hastert had been paying hush money to one of his then-teen victims. And it was his efforts to hide those payments that led to charges of “structuring”, lying to federal agents and more. The statutes of limitations on the actual sex abuse had run out decades earlier. The payments themselves weren’t necessarily illegal, though perhaps they could have led to blackmail charges.
Hastert served just over a year in federal prison and lived another nine years after his release.