Looking back over a long career of public service, Bob Michel’s most vivid memory was of war-the one he fought in and the one he sent others to fight.
Two wars, separated by five decades, were the seminal events of his public life. With his eyes welling up, he recalled the 1991 debate he led on the Persian Gulf War, when he nearly cried on the House floor. It was then, he said, that centermost in his mind was the conflict in which he fought: World War II.
“Here I had come full circle from being just a little ol’ infantry dogface out there years ago with no control over my life, following orders as a soldier,” he said. “And then finding myself in exactly the opposite position of really charting a course, the overall course, that authorized the president to use force and ultimately reach down again to another generation of young men and women who would then be subject to the dangers that I was.”
Those were the events that framed Michel’s service to his country. Though his position as the House minority leader was destined to last beyond 1991, already by then many of the more conservative Republicans in the House, led by Rep. Newt Gingrich, were chafing under Michel’s go-along style that had long characterized their minority status in the House.
Michel tried to pay attention to the newer GOP members pressing for more confrontation, said Rick Santorum, an abrasive Republican who rode his contrarian views in the House to a victory in a bid for a Senate seat from Pennsylvania. But while Michel attempted to change with the times, Santorum said, “I’m not sure Bob was the right guy to be our leader.”
With rumblings that a challenge to his leadership was possible and admittedly uncomfortable in the confrontational pose he would have to take in order to maintain his position, Michel decided in October 1993, not to seek re-election.
“My style of leadership, my sense of values, my whole thinking process . . . is giving way to a new generation and I accept that. It’s probably the way it ought to be,” he said at the press conference announcing his departure. “I was really more comfortable operating under the methodology that we did when I first came here.”
On election night in November, he watched the returns in Peoria with slight pangs of regret as he realized that Gingrich would become speaker of the House, a position Michel had only dreamed of reaching.
“He’s a man that history passed by,” said David Mason, director of the U.S. Congress Assessment Project for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “Had Bob Michel remained as Republican leader and not allowed Gingrich to become de facto leader a year ago, it’s hard to make the case that Republican campaigns would have been as successful as they were, so in that sense, he’s right, the time for that cooperative style of politics has simply passed by.”
As Gingrich officially comes to power Wednesday, challenging Democrats at every turn, it may be hard to remember the different era that gave rise to Michel’s congeniality, an era of clubby friendships and days that began in partisan debate and ended with the debaters on the golf course, around the card table or in a Capitol office for some liquid refreshment.
So as the more strident activism of Gingrich and the new Republicans take over in the House, Michel, 71, is leaving his post-38 years in the House, the last 14 as minority leader-with a touch of sadness, a bit of nostalgia tempered with a practical look forward, a few parting shots at his successor and a herd of elephants.
Gesturing to shelves full of the Republican Party symbol in the ornate Capitol office with its stunning view of Washington’s monuments across the grassy Mall (which he has since vacated for Gingrich), he remarked that the collection is “not even half” of what he has accumulated. “In my study back home I’ve got a whole panel of just elephants, I’ve got some in the Peoria office-not only just out of wood, some out of florentine glass, musical boxes, some with steel and marble, you name it.”
But more impressive about his office was what was not there-decades of “grip-and-grin” pictures of Michel posed with America’s presidents and leaders.
Memories of those encounters are there, in the stories he’s willing to tell going back to the first presidential inauguration he witnessed-Harry Truman’s in 1948-to the first speaker he knew, the legendary Sam Rayburn. But the pictures are relegated to an attic and his other ancillary offices in Washington and Peoria. Eventually, they will become part of a Michel collection at the Everett McKinley Dirksen Center in Pekin, a center he helped create in memory of his mentor, the late Senate minority leader from Illinois.
Remembering good times
As he packed up a lifetime of memories, it was time for reminiscing. He kept a few treasured items of memorabilia at hand, like the letter he wrote to Dwight Eisenhower, for instance.
The letter was written in 1949, and in it the young Michel, then a congressional aide, attempted to persuade Eisenhower to run for president on the GOP ticket.
“We of the Midwest look to you, general, as the man best qualified and suited to represent the Republican Party and sell its platform,” Michel wrote then.
He chuckled at the audacity of the infantryman writing the former Allied commander: “Little old Bob telling the general what the hell to do.”
But Eisenhower, then a retired general, wrote back: “It’s always nice to hear from an old soldier, particularly one who served in the infantry. . . . I have earnestly and honestly tried to make my own position clear about these matters.”
“Of course,” Michel recalled, “it was his way of saying, no, I’m not a candidate.”
A few years later in 1956, Eisenhower was the president, running for a second term, and Michel was running for his first term in Congress, attempting to succeed his boss, Rep. Harold Velde (R-Ill.). He remembers a favorite bumper sticker (he’s saved copies of all his campaign paraphernalia): “Vote for Mike, a friend of Ike.”
Having served as a congressional aide, Michel already was well versed in the personalities on the Hill. In his 38 years as a member, he’s known only Democrats as speakers, which makes the elevation of Gingrich, the Georgia Republican, to the top spot all the more bittersweet for Michel.
“The low point (of my career) is just having been perpetually in the minority,” he recalled with a shrug.
Learning from a master
There were his introductory years under Rayburn, the Texas powerhouse. “Those were very good years of tutelage to see how a real, bona fide fair speaker operated. That was a real education for me,” he said.
Then there were John McCormack of Massachusetts and Carl Albert of Oklahoma, whom he described respectively as “icy” and “cut and slash and burn” as majority leaders, but both mellowed when they became speakers.
“As a matter of fact, that’s what I said about Newt,” Michel said about conversations he’s had with the incoming speaker. “I said, `Newt, it’s one thing being whip. Then when you become speaker, you’ve got to recognize you’re speaker of the whole House.”
Gingrich has mouthed nearly those same words, but it remains to be seen whether he has taken them to heart. He has shown no sign of mellowing his fiery rhetoric.
When Michel became the Republican leader in 1981, his old pal Tip O’Neill already had been the speaker since 1977. They shared a camaraderie that would be hard to imagine today between the name-calling Gingrich and the all-business new Democratic leader, Richard Gephardt of Missouri.
“Now, Tip and I just happened to be good friends because we played gin togther and we played golf together and there was just a friendliness there from the other side of the aisle,” Michel said wistfully.
That camaraderie did not carry over to Texan Jim Wright, more sharply partisan than O’Neill when he became speaker in 1987, who made foreign policy, especially attacking the Reagan administration’s policies in Central America, a rare cause for a congressional leader.
Sympathy for Foley
Michel feels particularly bad about that outgoing speaker, Tom Foley, was turned out by the people of Washington State in the November election. Michel’s announced departure allowed him and his wife, Corinne, a year to enjoy farewell tributes and testimonials that Foley will never get to hear for himself.
“We’ve had a nice, cordial relationship. Never one bitter, ill word between us. I’ve always respected Tom, and I guess that’s what made it all the tougher,” sighed Michel, who said he’s ever mindful of people’s feelings when they suffer political blows. “I don’t mind if he’s going to get dumped as speaker with a Republican majority, but then when he actually lost his seat. Gee whiz, when I think of all the nice things that have happened to me the way I’m bowing out, you know, and Tom is not enjoying that.”
Their mutual respect was evident on the late November night when the House was meeting for its final session of the year and Foley let Michel briefly take the chair and the gavel and preside over the body he never had the chance to lead.
Michel’s been close to presidents from the very beginning of his career. Chosen president of his freshman class in Congress, Michel was taken under the wing of Illinois’ Les Arends, then the House minority leader, who took him up to the White House “for a little toddy up at the second floor” with Eisenhower. “And then I got to play golf a couple times with Ike out at Burning Tree,” an exclusive suburban Maryland golf club.
He never got to know President Kennedy very well. But Lyndon Johnson was a different story. Thanks to the sponsorship of Dirksen, who hailed from just across the Peoria River in Pekin, Michel had gotten to know Johnson in his years as Senate majority leader. Dirksen “kind of had an open house after 5 (p.m.). Everett would say (and here Michel affected Dirksen’s mellifluous bass voice), `Well, Bob, I’ll have three fingers.’ That meant, he’d like bourbon on the rocks.”
A Nixon supporter to the end
His feelings about Richard Nixon he summed up thus: “I really loved Dick Nixon. I just thought the world of him.”
He appreciated the order and discipline Nixon brought to his public life, Michel said, but he also remembers Nixon playing the piano with the Chowder and Marching Club (a social group whose only qualifications are to have served as a House Republican and be voted in by secret ballot), allowing Michel to raise his strong, baritone voice and sing along.
“We’d have a lot of fun,” Michel said, words that have not frequently been uttered about the late president.
Michel was in the Cabinet room next to the Oval Office when Nixon announced his resignation in 1974, one of the few Republicans “who hung out there till the last,” until the “smoking gun” tape revealing Nixon’s complicity in the Watergate coverup was released.
As Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, who also had been a minority leader in the House, “was the man for the time” after Watergate, Michel believes. Though “pleasant and cordial,” Jimmy Carter’s “weakness (was) that he didn’t delegate more authority and then be presidential more of the time because the guy was was basically quite knowledgable and had good character.”
Ronald Reagan, Michel’s close friend, provided him “some of my more enjoyable years because then I was in a position of being influential.” Michel rose to the leadership the same year Reagan took office. Though officially the minority leader, he led the majority coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats in implementing the Reagan agenda.
While people “really didn’t hold Reagan accountable” for not cutting the budget, George Bush “sure as heck did not articulate to the American public the underlying strength of the economy,” Michel said.
“George, rightly or wrongly, projected an image of not being in the true Reagan mold but more moderate,” he said.
Baffled by Clinton
As leader, Michel chaired three Republican conventions, usually an honor but in 1992 a dubious one. From the podium in Houston, he saw the party splinter, with Reagan, “your best communicator ever,” scheduled out of prime time while “folks out there who were trying to exclude people from participating in the party”-alluding to Pat Buchanan’s divisive speech-took center stage.
That splintering and Bush’s inability to connect with voters led to the election of President Clinton, whose style Michel doesn’t appear to quite understand.
“Well, it’s a different generation,” Michel said, when asked about Clinton’s manner. “Let’s face it, he likes to be more informal than presidential.”
Clinton, Michel suggested, is cheapening the presidency a bit with his relaxed style, his catering to young people and his glibness. Gingrich, too, Michel insists, must learn to be circumspect in his speech and not “pop off” on every topic.
Michel learned this lesson the hard way. Normally, his folksy style masks well thought-out ideas, but it got him into trouble in 1988, while discussing his love of singing and how he got started in music. On a television show, he fondly recalled old minstrel shows that are now generally viewed as racist, imitating characters on the old “Amos ‘n Andy” shows and remarking that he would like to still sing the original lyrics to “Old Man River” which includes a racial epithet.
Several days later, he apologized, saying the remarks were “wrong, insensitive-although unintended in motivation-and unacceptable.”
He never got in similar trouble again, and it is a measure of the respect he had built up over the years in Washington that no price was extracted from him beyond an apology.
Final thoughts
After all these years, Michel said, he and Corinne have as many friends in Washington as in Peoria. He would like to stay tied to the capital in some fashion, and wants a small office to “hang my hat and putter around.” He will keep, at least for now, his two homes, in Washington and Peoria, and continue to tend his gardens in both places (his federal pension alone will bring him $110,538 a year).
He wants to keep attending Republican conventions as a delegate and has been given carte blanche by Gingrich to participate in House Republican caucuses and meetings in Washington.
As the debate gets hotter and the partisan rhetoric nastier-as it is sure to do under the new GOP leaders like Gingrich and his firebrand lieutenants-Michel’s attendance at these meetings might provide some sense of history and graciousness. No time in the House was more moving for Michel than when the members considered the Persian Gulf resolution in 1991. Michel teamed up with a liberal Democrat from New York, Stephen Solarz, to lead the debate.
