The Wrongs of Mr. Wright : POLITICS : BALANCE OF POWER: Presidents and Congress From the Era of McCarthy to the Age of Gingrich,<i> By Jim Wright (Turner Publishing; $25.95, 528 pp.)</i>

When Jim Wright was elected speaker of the House of Representatives in 1987, almost everyone in that chamber anticipated that the Democrats would continue to be in the majority for the foreseeable future, as they had since the Eisenhower administration.

Newt Gingrich was the exception. Although a virtual unknown at the time, he aspired to be speaker himself and hatched a plan that would allow him to achieve his goal by January 1995. The ambitious first step was to drive Wright from office, which he succeeded at doing in 1989.

The story of Gingrich and Wright is one of the most intriguing sagas that Washington has ever witnessed. It was one of those rare instances in human history when power proved to be weakness.

The secret of Gingrich’s success in bringing down Wright was that he refused to accept the rules and traditions of the Congress that held Wright and the Democrats in power. He was undaunted by such firmly ingrained notions as seniority and bipartisanship. Wright was helpless to defend himself against someone who played by different rules.

Thus it is not surprising that in his memoir, Wright repeatedly laments the demise of the traditions that kept him in office: civility, seniority and respect for power in the Congress.

Wright’s model as speaker was his early mentor, Sam Rayburn. Under Rayburn, he recalls, “the speaker’s office functioned in old-fashioned simplicity. Rayburn operated no ‘robotypers,’ sent out no newsletters, maintained no card files. His longtime assistant, Miss Alla Clary, told me Rayburn never allowed one of his staff, on answering the telephone, to ask ‘who’s calling?’ Every caller, high or low, was put directly through.”

As speaker, Wright seemed to be striving to re-create the stately simplicity of that bygone era, to turn back the clock. He realized too late that the rules of the game were changing rapidly. Even now, as he writes here about the tragic ending of his 40-year political career, Wright seems to find virtue in his inability to change with the times.

His indignation is plainly revealed in remarks such as this one: “It was as though I had been learning to handle a football well--to kick it, throw it, carry it--only now, in place of footballs, they were using hand grenades.”

Unfortunately, while Wright’s idealized view of Rayburn-style, traditional politics may help him to accept the humiliation that Gingrich brought on him, it does not make for a particularly interesting memoir. He brings no new insights to his reminiscences about Rayburn and others with whom he dealt closely, such as Presidents Johnson and Carter--and he never really faces up to his own mistakes.

His book lacks the honest self-analysis that we expect from a public person who has had seven years to privately lick his wounds. Time and again, he glosses over the painful moments of his career that would have made for a compelling memoir.

There is a hint of wistfulness in Wright’s account of his downfall, but nothing like real candor. “I erred on the side of activism--too sure of my rightness, too hard-driving, to intent,” he writes, once again trying to cast his weaknesses as virtues. “Maybe I tried to get too much done too quickly.”

At a time when the current president is being investigated by an independent counsel for a failed investment he made with his friend Jim McDougal in a resort community known as Whitewater, Wright still cannot see why critics questioned his own profitable joint investments with his friend George Mallick.

Imagine how Hillary Rodham Clinton would be vilified today had she been provided a car and salary by the Whitewater development company. Yet Wright asserts in his book that he sees nothing wrong with the salary and car that his wife, Betty, received from the Wright-Mallick investment firm.

Nor does Wright recognize that he provided Gingrich and his other enemies with raw meat for scandal by arranging bulk sales of his books to people seeking his favor. There is no question these purchasers saw it as a clever way of putting money directly into Wright’s pocket. The Teamsters Union, not noted for its literary acumen, bought thousands of these books. Wright’s explanation: “I wanted everyone to read my book!”

Ironically, in his reminiscences of the ‘70s, Wright writes that former President Nixon’s biggest flaw was his belief in his innocence. But he fails to see the similarity between his downfall and Nixon’s. And while failing to recognize the parallel between himself and Nixon, he nevertheless compares the tactics of his tormentor, Gingrich, to those of the red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Wright also leaves out some important details. He fails to even mention that his Democratic colleagues finally abandoned him when he forced them to cast an embarrassing vote in favor of a pay raise that they otherwise would have received automatically.

Instead, he suggests that Republicans attacked him in retaliation for the Democratic rejection of former Texas Sen. John Tower as defense secretary. In this case, his revisionism is breathtaking.

But Wright’s biggest blind spot has nothing to do with the petty partisan bickering that finally forced him to resign from the House in 1989. It is clear from his account that he spent much too much time trying to be a statesman by negotiating peace in Central America and far too little dealing with the changing dynamics of political life in Washington after the arrival of President Reagan.

He tried to be secretary of state instead of House speaker. He underestimated the Reagan phenomenon. He underestimated Gingrich.

Nevertheless, every reader can sympathize with Wright when he writes about his frustrations during the final days of his 40-year career in public life. In a heartbreaking moment of rare candor, Wright acknowledges: “In the middle of the night, I would wake up, tossing and turning, outraged by the indignities heaped on my name and frustrated by my inability, for the first time in my life, to cope effectively with a personal crisis. The harder I tried to satisfy the media, the more impossible that task seemed. My blood pressure went up and would not respond to medication.”

Perhaps it is too much to ask a man who experienced such a fall in public life to write honestly about it. But clearly, Wright did not suffer defeat with the same grace as his old friend Jimmy Carter. While Carter, as a writer, has used his experiences of political loss to illuminate life for his readers, Wright is still making excuses.

* JIM WRIGHT will participate in the panel “Power in America: Can the Establishment Hold?” at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Saturday, April 20, at noon.