How an Unheralded Reporter Wrote the Quiet Beginnings to Wright Case

No plaques or prizes hang on his office walls commemorating the work. Mostly, Dave Montgomery of the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram has pictures of his kids in Brownie outfits and football jerseys and one jokingly naming him an admiral in the Texas Navy.

But in the last two years, ever since questions arose about the ethics of House Speaker Jim Wright, reporters from most of the major news organizations have paraded through Montgomery’s office in Washington to sit by his haphazardly organized one-drawer file and read his clippings.

For it was not the national newspapers that unearthed the findings now threatening to topple Wright, the nation’s highest Democrat. Nor was it a special investigating team of Congress.

Served as a Blueprint

Largely, it was the work of a few unheralded reporters working for Texas papers, particularly Montgomery, whose stories formed something of a blueprint for the House Ethics Committee report on Wright’s activities.

In a sense, Jim Wright’s troubles have at least partly to do with the change in the once-cozy relationship between politicians and their hometown newspapers, a change some say Wright never fully understood.

The Wright case shows, too, that in journalism as in metaphysics a tree falling in the forest really makes no sound unless someone hears it. Much of the work Montgomery did went largely unnoticed until 1987, when Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), armed mostly with clippings from Texas papers, held press conferences to attack Wright’s ethics.

Even a widely read Washington Post story early this month about John P. Mack, a key Wright staff member who served a jail sentence for attempted murder, was broken by Montgomery two years ago, after he had a four-hour interview with the victim of the assault.

May Prove Devastating

Mack resigned Thursday, and some on Capitol Hill think the Post story, which The Times printed in its View section, could prove devastating to Wright, because voters may feel more strongly about his aiding a young felon with whom he had a personal connection than about charges of questionable financial arrangements.

But when Montgomery wrote his version of the Mack story in August, 1987, reporters from other papers not only decided not to pursue it, many criticized Montgomery for reporting it.

Montgomery similarly broke most of the first stories about Wright’s business relationship with Ft. Worth businessman George A. Mallick Jr., which now makes up a central part of the House committee’s charges against Wright.

But, again, when the stories first appeared in the mid-1980s, “there wasn’t a peep,” Montgomery said. Even the Ethics Committee seemed unperturbed: When Montgomery wrote a story about Wright living in a Mallick family condo in Ft. Worth, Montgomery quoted then-committee counsel Ralph Lotkin as saying the arrangement did not appear improper.

There were similarly few ripples when Montgomery and others on his paper came up with such disclosures as the help Wright extended to Texas savings and loan organizations or Mallick’s investment in a federally funded stockyards project.

Questions about Wright’s financial affairs first drew local press attention as early as 1980, when the Dallas Times-Herald wrote about his investment in gas well ventures with a powerful Ft. Worth family--including Wright’s personal appeal to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on behalf of the family.

But then, too, after briefly becoming an issue in Wright’s reelection campaign in 1980, questions about gas deals soon “settled down,” said Richard Fly, one of the Dallas Times-Herald reporters involved at the time.

“No national paper or outlet was paying attention” before 1987, said Wall Street Journal reporter Brooks Jackson, who has broken several of the more recent Wright stories.

Magazine Recounts Stories

Jackson himself first learned of Wright’s questionable financial activities, he said, when a New Republic magazine story recounted many of the old Texas newspaper stories shortly before Wright ascended to the Speaker’s job. It was written by Baltimore Sun reporter Paul West, who had been one of the Dallas Times-Herald reporters involved in the gas well coverage in 1980.

Gingrich’s staff argues that the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram did not have more impact because it failed to turn its revelations into a crusade, a technique other papers employ for higher visibility. But whether they promoted the work or not, the fact that the Times-Herald and Star-Telegram were investigating Wright represented a stark change from the relationship the hometown papers and the Speaker once enjoyed.

In his first campaign in 1954, Wright ran as a left-liberal Democrat in opposition to the Star-Telegram. But by the 1970s, Wright’s relationship with it was so close that its late publisher, Amon G. Carter Jr., was chairman of Wright’s Congressional Club, a hometown reelection and booster committee.

“Most papers . . . were not terribly vigilant about anything that might be perceived as negative,” Mike Blackman, the present editor of the Star-Telegram, concedes. “In hindsight, that may be an indictment of (these local) papers, but an awful lot of them were that way for a long time.”

Others are more blunt: “For a long time there was simply no critical coverage whatsoever,” said one former Star-Telegram political reporter.

That began to change starting in the late 1970s when new managers took over at the Dallas and Ft. Worth papers. In Wright’s case, a few reporters began taking a harder look when he became majority leader in 1977. Amon Carter Jr. died in 1982, a year after Montgomery came to Washington.

And those who know him argue that part of Wright’s problem was that he never fully grasped the changes.

“Maybe the central accusation” best describing Wright, said one Capitol Hill aide who knows Wright’s organization, “is that he didn’t keep up with the times.” It was true of what he considered permissible financially, the aide said, and it was true of the kind of organization he ran. And it was true of his relations with the media.

“The Speaker still has difficulty understanding the new and modern press,” said a Wright insider, “and he doesn’t particularly like them.” And “I think that comes from the early days of understanding the Texas papers.”

While all politicians do their best to manipulate the press, and while Wright is generally as accessible as most, the methods he uses to deal with the hometown media often struck reporters as naively old-fashioned--harking back to a style of pre-television Texas politics more suited to the era of Sam Rayburn or Lyndon B. Johnson.

Reporters who have covered him for years say Wright still seems shocked and unaccustomed to being criticized by a paper on his own turf.

“You’re my hometown paper,” one reporter recalls Wright calling to protest after the reporter had quoted White House officials’ criticism of a Wright budget proposal.

Another recalls Wright telephoning him, angry with one story, and singing verses from the song “Accentuate The Positive.”

Others describe Wright and his staff, during interviews, pulling stories that had been marked up out of their drawers to complain about the placement of quotes and who was quoted.

“For awhile he behaved as if he were my editor,” Montgomery said.

Dallas Morning News reporter William Choyke, formerly with the Ft. Worth paper, recalls once trying to explain to Wright: “Sir, we’re just trying to give you a little more scrutiny than perhaps you’re used to.”

Answered Wright, according to Choyke: “Son, you’re not trying to scrutinize me; you’re trying to screw me.”

Montgomery also remembers how angry Wright became in the early 1980s over the amount of coverage the Ft. Worth paper was giving to one of his most nettlesome rivals, then Texas Rep. Phil Gramm, now in the Senate. In one failed effort to limit Gramm’s coverage, Montgomery said, Wright even “tried to use his influence to get the Legislature to redraw Phil Gramm’s congressional district out of Tarrant County,” thinking that the Star-Telegram would cover him less if Gramm were outside its circulation area. That was another story Montgomery broke.

Repeated attempts to get a response from Wright and his staff for this story were unsuccessful.

Although Wright and his aides have had meetings with top management at the Star-Telegram to discuss the coverage, editors such as Blackman and national/foreign editor James Peipert deny feeling any particular pressure from Wright.

More pressure, they argue, comes from those in Texas.

“I think by and large you can say most (local) people aren’t very happy with us,” Blackman said. “And I think underlying this is a fear that if Wright should some way lose power in Washington that it will hurt us economically.”

Concedes one Wright insider privately: “I thought Montgomery has been brave in all this because it wasn’t easy, and his paper deserves credit for standing behind him.”

Montgomery says simply that his Wright coverage “just sort of evolved. I sort of decided I would cover Wright like the courthouse, drop by each day to see what’s going on,” try to know more about him than any other reporter.

He first noticed the Mallick connection because “I just saw Mallick around occasionally.”

The story Montgomery broke about Mack, the Wright aide convicted of attempted murder, began with anonymous letters that he and others got. Montgomery tracked down the court records, the victim and the investigating officers--one who was in Las Vegas and another who was living without a phone in Virginia.

“I think the thing that made me decide to go with the story is that I saw pictures of her after the beating,” he says of the crime victim. “So we sort of let the story run.”

His biggest challenge, to hear Montgomery tell it, was resources: How to cover stories that in some cases took months, involved trips to Texas to hunt records and required hiring researchers to go through federal archives, while still covering Washington in what initially was a two-person Washington bureau.

There are now five in the bureau and, with Wright’s problems being a major national story, four staffers are covering him full-time. But with so much competition now, there are stories the paper doesn’t break. One was the charge that Wright used his staff to help compile a book, the sale of which is now part of the ethics report.

Montgomery had been working on the story for some time, but he had not persuaded his source to allow him to print it. Then one evening Montgomery heard that the Washington Post was breaking the same story the next day. He rushed back to work and compiled his own version--at least he could say he had “matched” the Post.

And to do so he did something that says much about politics and journalism old and new. He called Wright and woke him--at 2 a.m.--for a comment.

Typically, Montgomery doesn’t muse much over the implications: “Wright,” he said simply, “was pretty pissed.”