All the Wright moves - House speaker Jim Wright's staff

WASHINGTON, D.C.-"How was it that this young man could work so long on Capitol Hill for such a prominent member as Jim Wright and attract so little attention, having committed such a crime?"Paul Duke, host of PBS's Washington Week in Review, on May 12.

By now, almost everyone has heard of John Mack, Speaker Wright's top legislative and political aide, who resigned on May 11 after details of his near-fatal 1973 hammer-and-knife attack on a young woman surfaced. The Mack case raises the question: Exactly what kind of people does Jim Wright surround himself with? The answer is a rogues' gallery of sleaze and strangeness.

As a convicted felon Mack could not vote or obtain a security clearance, and yet for the last two and a half years he was the single most important staffer in the House. He earned a congressman's salary of $89,500 a year and was generally conceded to -have had more power than 95 per cent of congressmen. He was released from jail after only 27 months because Speaker Wright, to whose daughter his brother was married, wrote a judge on Mack's behalf offering Mack a job.

Even after his resignation, another Mack attack tumbled out of the closet. A caller to a Washington radio station said his present wife was attacked and raped by Mack in a 1972 lover's quarrel. The woman confirmed the story in an interview with the Washington Post, saying that she had dropped charges because she felt no one would believe her.

Mr. Mack is not the only past or present Wright aide with an unusual background. The Speaker's $65,000-ayear chief press aide,George Mair, is the author of a curious 1982 work called The Sex Book Digest: A Peek Between the Covers of 113 of the Most Erotic, Exotic, and Edifying Sex Books. Among its chapter headings are "Paedophilia: The Radical Case" and "The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe." The main lawyer the Speaker has hired to defend himself before the ethics committee, William Oldaker, was suspended from his federal job in the 1970s for falsifying government records.

In 1975, the Speaker wrote the judge who was about to sentence his aide Carlos Moore for income-tax evasion in the 1970s. Despite Wright's plea for leniency, Mr. Moore went to prison anyway. Wright's office then hired Mr. Moore's wife as a secretary, and later switched office printing jobs from Congress's normal printer to a firm owned by Mr. and Mrs. Moore. It was Mr. Moore who founded Madison Publishing Company in 1984 for the sole purpose of publishing the Speaker's now famous non-book Reflections of a Public Man.

In his testimony to the ethics committee, former aide Matthew Cossoloto described how he helped compile Reflections. He noted that after Wright's office learned he would be testifying, he received a phone call from office manager Barbara Roark. After telling him that "Everyone hates you in the office," Miss Roark suggested he not talk to the committee. "You are in Washington, and where are you going to get another job?"

Most of these stories were known to several reporters in Washington, but only the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Washington Times pursued them. [R. Cort Kirkwood wrote of Mack's past in NR, January 22, 1988, "Playing King of the Hill."] Washington Post ombudsman Richard Harwood wrote this month that the whole John Mack story "had been ignored-is 'suppressed' too strong a word?-for more than two years by leading journalists in the congressional press galleries." The Post's own story ran only over the objections of its congressional reporters, who called it a "non-story."

The explanation for this kid-glove treatment is found partly in the generally favorable press coverage that Congress received while it became the major obstacle to the Reagan agenda during the 1980s. But, more concretely, congressional staffers have become prime sources for many journalists. As Robert Novak says, congressional reporters will "seldom bite the hand that feeds them."

The complete lack of attention paid to the powerful role congressional staff plays in Washington today raises serious issues of governance. If a college dropout like John Mack can earn $89,500 a year while wielding more power than all but a handful of members of Congress, it's about time that the role staffers play in shaping policy becomes a matter of public debate and record.

COPYRIGHT 1989 National Review, Inc.
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