Wright and Wrongs : THE AMBITION AND THE POWER <i> (Viking: $22.95; 768 pp.</i> )

Jim Wright, the disgraced former speaker of the house, blossoms in this exhaustive account of his rise and fall more splendidly than he ever seemed to do while in power. John M. Barry, a veteran Washington journalist, spent more than two years with the Texas congressman and his colleagues in the Democratic leadership, nestled as close to the spine of raw political power as any outsider could be. He attended scores of private meetings in Democratic inner sancta, including some, apparently, where Wright made the very enemies who helped bring him down. He was with Wright during all the high points of the 100th Congress in 1987-88, taking time out to visit the Republican side to talk to Rep. Newt Gingrich, who “sat . . . like Madame Defarge, knitting together his file of press clippings” about his elaborate plans for laying Wright low by manipulating the media. These glimpses at what powerful men were thinking as they acted gives the book the same immediacy as a photograph of the Titanic the second it hit the iceberg.

Barry’s accomplishment is far more than a product of the good fortune of being on the inside when things started to pop. Other books have shown the warts-and-all workings of Congress, notably Bernard Asdell Muskie’s “The Senate Nobody Knows.” Books about the last two presidential elections by special Newsweek teams have given us the best politique verite since the late Teddy White’s “Making of the President” series. But no study of congressional life in all its tawdry splendor has ever combined access with execution as well as “The Ambition and the Power.” It is a Herculean effort and a magnificent achievement.

In telling Wright’s story, Barry conveys all the intricacy, bombast, grandeur and villainy of what occurs on the dark side of representative democracy. The reader often knows more than the participants and thus sees the seeds of misunderstanding and resentment as they are planted in the minds of people who do not listen as closely as we read. Climactic scenes on the House floor dance on the page as though they had been blocked out by Frank Capra. Barry uses all of Tom Wolfe’s tricks--the capital letters, exclamation points, and interior-monologue italics--to excellent effect. Striking details, such as a Republican leader smashing a lectern with his fist in frustration at one of Wright’s tactics, propel the reader through complicated accounts of legislative maneuvering that would drag in the work of a lesser writer.

Barry began the book after writing a newspaper profile about Wright in 1986, soon before he was elected Speaker. Learning that Wright planned to use the office to galvanize Democratic power in the House as no modern-day Speaker ever had, the author won from Wright the privilege of attending virtually every meeting where staff members were present, and also some where they were not. He conducted hundreds of interviews as well. “Most of the events related in this book,” he writes in a note on methodology, “I personally observed.” This is refreshing in an era of proliferating anonymous, unexaminable sources, and indeed the quality of Barry’s reporting makes most newspaper work seem like the funny papers. In exchange for access, Barry agreed, among other things, to clear negative quotations with their authors and to withhold publication of anything he observed until this year.

Wright struck this deal on the eve of his greatest political triumph. One wonders whether, as things started to turn sour, the perpetually dieting Speaker ever looked up at Barry from the raisin bran and skim milk he had every morning in his ornate offices and muttered: “You still here?” If so, it was good he listened to his better angels and let Barry stay because this book will inaugurate Wright’s revisionist period a lot earlier than most of our internal political exiles get one. While he has not written an apologia, Barry was obviously sympathetic to his subject, so much so that he devotes far more space to criticizing the sloppy coverage of Wright by the national media than was perhaps politic. He puts the ethics charges against Wright in perspective without fully exonerating him. “Wright had a sense that rules did not apply to him,” Barry writes. After running unsuccessfully for the Senate in the early 1960s, in an impulsive moment, he paid off his campaign deficit himself and soon found himself wallowing in personal debt, a situation this Texas populist found intensely humiliating. As he scampered back to solvency, he became blind to the perception of impropriety--”(a)nd to a politician,” writes Barry, “perception was virtually reality.” Wright’s rule was simple: “My position now is if the law says it’s all right, I’ll take the money.” Indeed, he did not ever break the law, but he also did not behave with the prudence Americans have the right to expect from the speaker of the house--and in the end, he seemed to realize it. One of the many moving passages about his personal anguish comes soon before his resignation, when he says to his daughter, Ginger Brown: “We were just greedy. Damn it.”

Wright’s undeniable lapses end up appearing not as capital crimes but merely Capitol ones--levers to be used against him by adversaries who, had these levers not been available, might well have contrived others. “Jim Wright is the symbol of Democratic control of the House,” Gingrich said. “I don’t think he’s a Mafia don. He’s a symbol of the machine.” While Wright is hardly blameless, few people in the book look much better.

For example, the excellent statesmen on the House ethics committee who claimed Wright had committed 69 violations of House rules had in 1987 refused to take any disciplinary action against a millionaire Rhode Island congressman, Democrat Fernand J. St. Germain, even though he had allegedly violated those highly malleable House rules and federal law as well. His district’s voters called him home instead last year. Stinging from charges it had gone too easy in that case, the committee went outside Congress and hired an ambitious Chicago lawyer, Richard Phelan, to investigate Wright. Phelan dug into Wright with a vengeance. According to Barry, whose case is compelling, the investigator “misled the committee repeatedly” and in the wake of Wright’s resignation was already hinting coyly about running for governor of Illinois.

So when Barry picked “The Ambition and the Power” for his title, he clearly didn’t mean just Wright’s. This was not a morality play about an unethical man being brought to account by his better. It was a classic power struggle that Wright lost and his ambitious antagonists won. One reason he was a target to begin with was that, had he prevailed, he would probably have been a force to reckon with in Washington for a generation. “If he survives this ethical thing,” said Gingrich, in the midst of working virtually around the clock to ensure that Wright would not, “he may become the greatest Speaker since Clay.”

This statement would be nonsensical only to the reader who did not understand that Gingrich seemed to personify all the rage of a Republican minority that had not known real power in the House of Representatives for more than three decades and that, during the 100th Congress, sweated under a Democratic speaker’s lash more than they ever had under Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill, Carl Albert, or John McCormack. Being in the minority under them was never fun, though one Republican, California’s Jerry Lewis, was honest enough to concede that “We have just enough votes to be irresponsible.” But being in the minority under Wright was something else again.

As a result of Wright’s vision and Reagan’s Iran-contra-induced weakness, the 100th Congress was, in the estimation of Barry and many liberally inclined pundits, “the most productive in decades.” It produced dramatic overrides of two Reagan vetoes. It produced major domestic legislation in an era when the budget deficit had seemed to have finally put Democrats out of the domestic legislation business. It produced the spark that led to the Arias peace plan in Central America. And it also produced many, many congressmen who were mad as hell at Wright for the blood and sweat he squeezed from them while making it all happen.

Everyone knows how Wright’s handling of the congressional pay raise early last year--the one they wanted without having actually to ask for it--helped forge one of the nails for his coffin. But pay raises aren’t the only things our representatives don’t care to vote on. When Wright scheduled a vote on a pro-labor bill, at a meeting “(o)ne member jumped to his feet, waved a doughnut in the air, and complained, ‘. . . My (state’s) two senators go into the AFL-CIO convention and get a standing ovation. Then they walk across the street to the Chamber of Commerce convention and get a standing ovation. And the reason they do this is that the Senate is smart enough not to schedule any damn labor bills for a vote! Why are we scheduling one for a vote?’ ” Snapped Wright in another context, “That’s the trouble with this place. Too many here who shouldn’t be in Congress. No guts. That’s what leadership is. If you don’t have it, you shouldn’t be in government.”

Wright had the gall to articulate a vision of the national interest and expect members to help advance it. Whether one happens to agree with it doesn’t much matter. If Wright had been a Republican speaker forcing his will by means of a Republican majority, he would have engendered the same resentments on both sides of the aisle. The principal business of the House is neither policy nor ideology but rather protecting each member’s individual political interests. O’Neill himself said: “Jim doesn’t have the ability to put his arm around a member and just listen to his problems.” So in the closing weeks of Wright’s political career, “the Democrats did not rally to him. No Democrat on the (ethics) committee worked his colleagues in the off-hours, talked to them on the floor, took them to dinner, called Phelan a liar . . . . (They) did not so much kill him as let him die.”

Even the reader who feels respect and compassion for Wright and anger at the cynicism of some of those who helped bring him down may wonder whether he was quite the man for the job. For one thing, his judgment was severely lacking at times. The shrewd legislator who refused to intervene in the Iran-contra investigation because “entangling himself in areas beyond his control was a fool’s errand” failed to understand that he was doing precisely that in the way he conducted his personal affairs. One also wonders about a man who “wanted to elevate the Speakership to a new level of power, almost equivalent to the Presidency.” In late 1987, when he and Reagan appeared together at the White House to announce a compromise on the budget, the President “shuffled about the stage uncertain where to stand” while Wright fielded reporters’ questions about income taxes. “Wright had become his clear rival,” writes Barry, and it is fair to ask: Who, besides a few hundred thousand voters in Ft. Worth, elected him as pretender to the throne?

By pushing so hard, in a way, Wright was asking for precisely the treatment he got. If he had sought less power, he would have run less risk. Conversely, to pull off the institutional realignment he contemplated, to propel himself to a position in American political life on a virtual par with the President, he would have had to be as clean as Snow White. And even then, Gingrich might have been able to nail him for copyright violations.