Tom DeLay Part I: The whole public story-the sad tale of a family gone wrong, the hard-right extremist that Bush had to rein in for the sake of the campaign, the impeachment jihad, the anti-environment crusader(wants to bring back DDT)who is apparently also a liar, tax cheat, bully and hypocrite. Its a big bite. Chew slowly.
Washington Post
May 13, 2001
Absolute Truth
Tom DeLay is certain that Christian family values will solve America's problems. But he's uncertain how to face his own family
Author: Peter Perl
Edition: F
Section: Magazine
Page: W12
Tom DeLay is feeling pretty fine on a sunny spring morning as he slides behind the wheel of a rented Cadillac and pulls away from his spacious Mediterranean-style home. Life is good for him here in a picturesque, prosperous place in suburban Houston called Sugar Land. He loves golf, and his handsome new house is nestled overlooking the beautiful 12th hole of the Sweetwater Country Club. He loves his wife of 34 years, Christine, and his daughter, Danielle, who is 29 and runs his political campaigns and lives only a few miles away. All this in Sugar Land, a place where most folks love Tom DeLay.
And why shouldn't DeLay feel pretty good? He is, after all, one of the most powerful politicians in America. By title, he is House majority whip, or the third-ranking House Republican, although inside the Capitol he is widely considered the most dominant force in Congress and the de facto leader of the right.
Life is especially good for him these days because the Republicans are finally in charge. DeLay has lived for this moment. He was in the minority for much of his 25-year political career and he is reveling in a dream come true of controlling not only the White House and the Congress, but the nation's agenda.
Yet DeLay wants more. Much more. As this day progresses, he tells me "I am still trying to drive the president," George W. Bush, toward a more conservative agenda. Toward a "permanent realignment" that will eternally discredit Democratic Party policies that DeLay considers "socialist." And, most important, toward building a more "God-centered" nation whose government will promote prayer and worship and the teaching of values.
"Our entire system is built on the Judeo-Christian ethic, but it fell apart when we started denying God," he says. "If you stand up today and acknowledge God, they will try to destroy you." His main mission, he says, is "to bring us back to the Constitution and to Absolute Truth that has been manipulated and destroyed by a liberal worldview."
DeLay is particularly joyful today because it is Sunday and the Cadillac is headed toward the First Baptist Church of Sugar Land, where he will pray to God, as he does every day. He and Christine will warmly greet many church friends. He will call out "Amen" repeatedly when Pastor Scott Rambo delivers a bloody, fervent sermon on the agonies of Jesus on the cross. DeLay will sing vigorously and pray quietly and then when the spirit moves him will kneel down at the altar, eyes closed in silent prayer, as he has so often in a life sometimes troubled by self-doubt and by the pain of alcoholism and dysfunction in his family.
After services, he and Christine will stay to attend an assembly for devoted members to pray for one another's illnesses and families. Then, the DeLays will participate in an hour-long Bible study class. Later that night, DeLay will return to church to teach his weekly adult class based on the writings of former Watergate figure Charles Colson, whose best-selling book How Now Shall We Live? asserts that only Christianity can truly explain the human condition and reform America's government and culture.
As we leave First Baptist, I ask DeLay about the many citizens who would be quite uncomfortable with the idea that he would mold the government in the belief that his religion -- fundamentalist Christianity -- had the only answers to society's problems.
DeLay looks me squarely in the eye and shakes his head sadly. "When faced with the truth, the truth hurts. It is human nature not to face that . . . People hate the messenger. That's why they killed Christ."
And so Tom DeLay makes it perfectly clear that his personal mission is to reshape the moral fabric of the nation, to remake it more in his likeness. But who, exactly, is Tom DeLay and what does he really believe America should look like?
Tom DeLay, 54, dates the start of his rebirth as a Christian to a traumatic insight in his freshman year in Congress, 1985, when he was caught up in the whirl of Washington. A Republican House colleague, Frank Wolf of Virginia, warned DeLay, then 38, about the personal stress of politics and urged him to watch a religious video about Christian fatherhood.
By his own estimate, DeLay was then drinking "8, 10, 12 martinis a night at receptions and fundraisers" and he was beginning to hurt. DeLay watched the video -- in which James Dobson, a child psychologist and noted Christian family guru, preached on the damage done by fathers too busy to love their children -- and "I started crying because I had missed my daughter's whole childhood," he says. "It was awful. My daughter in third grade asked her mother 'if somebody adopted Daddy,' because he was never around."
The truth revealed that day was that "I was totally self-centered. It was me, me, me, me, me. It was golf or my business or politics that came first. It told me what a jerk I really was," he says. "You cannot throw off your self-centeredness. That's the problem of our culture. You can't love someone unless you are loved, and being loved by the Lord changes that."
It is a jarring statement, coming from the man known inside the Beltway as "the Hammer," "the Exterminator" and "the Meanest Man in Congress." When Republicans took over the House in 1994, DeLay was the man who brazenly strong-armed corporate lobbyists for big donations, telling them, "If you want to play in our revolution, you have to live by our rules." He is the financial godfather of congressional Republicans, overseeing collection of nearly $30 million in campaign funds in 1999 alone, according to the GOP. The whip -- enforcer of party discipline among 221 House Republicans -- is, in fact, a former pest exterminator who has used his relentless energy, formidable political skill, charm, intelligence and cunning to rise to power.
DeLay, a scrappy man about 5-foot-7 with a dark helmet of lustrous hair, privately enjoys the Hammer nickname. He keeps two large leather bullwhips on display in his Capitol office, occasionally demonstrating his prowess in whip-cracking. He completes the power-themed office decor with a handsome stone replica of the Ten Commandments.
The Hammer-and-whip imagery has served him quite well. "Perception does become reality, and the perception is that he is the 'Dirty Harry' of Capitol Hill, the bad cop," says Marshall Wittman, former legislative director of the Christian Coalition. "Every K Street lobbyist is shaking in their boots because K Street lives on access, and DeLay can shut off their oxygen."
DeLay's agenda has broadened dramatically since he came to Congress, a fresh-faced warrior in the Reagan revolution. As a Texas pest-control man, he was infuriated at the heavy hand of the Environmental Protection Agency, which he still calls "the Gestapo of government." An unabashed champion of business, he has fought hard to hold down the minimum wage, repeal clean-air and clean-water legislation, scrap occupational health measures, protect corporations from consumer lawsuits and otherwise liberate corporate America from government.
But over time the Hammer has come to see the Washington battles in a new light, in a way that seeks to reconcile the brutal business of partisan politics with the gentle teachings of Christ. Now, at the height of his power, DeLay's faith has solidified his political base and fundraising with the Christian Coalition and other religious and socially conservative groups. They love him, because DeLay's America would stop gun control, outlaw abortion, limit the rights of homosexuals, curb contraception, end the constitutional separation of church and state, and adopt the Ten Commandments as guiding principles for public schools.
So the 2000 presidential election was not mere politics to DeLay, but an apocalyptic "battle for souls." In this struggle between good and evil, virtually all man-made government programs, philosophies and "-isms" favored by Democrats and liberals are doomed utopian dreams because they are not inspired by God. As he described the coming 2000 vote in a red-meat speech to the Christian Coalition last fall: "Will this country accept the worldviews of humanism, materialism, sexism, naturalism, postmodernism or any of the other -isms? Or will we march forward with a biblical worldview, a worldview that says God is our creator, that man is a sinner, and that we will save this country by changing the hearts and minds of Americans? . . . We have the House and the Senate. All we need is the presidency!"
The Bush campaign, however, saw DeLay's views as dangerously extreme and quietly insisted he lower his profile, lest the whole GOP ticket be seen as too right wing. DeLay cooperated, but nonetheless continued giving forceful speeches on "cultural renewal." He expounded his view that the proliferation of day care and other influences of liberal culture had devalued the lives of children and eroded the American family -- and this, rather than guns, was actually responsible for horrors such as school shootings. If the Republicans won in 2000, he promised a "very aggressive counterattack" against "fashionable elites" in media and entertainment who, he said, had staged a "cultural coup d'etat" to eliminate religion and moral values from American life.
In the wake of the November election, how does DeLay reconcile his claim of a strong Republican-religious mandate for change with the fact that Democrat Al Gore actually got some 500,000 more votes than Bush? His explanation is not political but theological: A majority of Americans clearly favored Bush, but because people are fundamentally wicked, millions of them sinned by not voting. As he ruefully put it: "Nonvoters. Nonvoters not taking responsibility. We are, by nature, greedy and lazy and sinful."
DeLay, despite his high profile in public, rarely talks about his private life, and he and his staff guard his privacy vigorously. But away from Washington in his home environment, he agrees to talk about his personal struggle to curb his meaner political instincts while trying to emulate the godly life he seeks. These personal conversations -- and interviews with dozens of his colleagues, friends and adversaries -- reveal a much more complex version of the Hammer.
This version is the DeLay who, at his wife's instigation, took in three foster teenagers in recent years and has become an ardent advocate for abused and neglected kids. This is the DeLay who personally intervened to help a Jewish refusenik family escape the Soviet Union, and remains a good friend two decades later. And this is the Hammer whose wife and daughter tease him because at movies like "Titanic," it is not they but he who cries.
For all of Tom DeLay's public espousal of Christian values, particularly his deep commitment to family, he privately has nursed a terrible estrangement from his own mother and three siblings. After the 1988 death of his father and the rise of his career in Washington, DeLay cut off contact with all three siblings, and seven years ago he stopped attending DeLay family gatherings. He has not seen or talked to his mother, Maxine, in two years, even though she lives about 10 miles away from Sugar Land; nor did he invite any of them to his daughter's 1999 wedding or even mention his mother in the published wedding announcement.
All through his roomy home are many photographs of his wife, his daughter and his in-laws -- but not a single one of the DeLays. Throughout our conversations, this rift is the only subject that he adamantly will not discuss.
Tom DeLay grew up in a family dominated by a father who loomed large. Charlie Ray DeLay was a big, tough, gregarious, generous oil-field wildcatter, and an alcoholic. Charlie was raised a staunch Baptist in a teetotaling Texas family, but he took up booze with a vengeance and routinely drank a fifth of Chivas Regal scotch in a night, according to his children.
Tom says he "learned very little" from his father, except the value of hard work. When Tommy was 9 and the family was in financial straits, Charlie hauled them all to Venezuela for a job in the oil fields. Five years later, he moved them back to Texas and eventually built himself a multimillion-dollar business called Storm Drilling, where young Tom learned about hard, dangerous work on offshore oil rigs.
DeLay's older and younger brothers are both alcoholics, as well. Ray DeLay, three years older than Tom, served two years in a South Dakota penitentiary on a second felony conviction in 1993-94 for grand theft. Tom was quoted in 1999 as describing his brother as a "real skid-row type" whose whereabouts were unknown, even though Ray was then listed in the Houston phone book. Ray became an evangelical minister in the Houston jail system and later ran a ministry on the Internet. He was convicted last year of assaulting his girlfriend and served a 60-day jail term in Houston. He currently works for a Christian missionary group in Texas but could not be reached for this story. Randy DeLay, three years younger than Tom, gave up drinking about 20 years ago and is a lawyer and lobbyist in Houston. He had been fairly close to Tom, he says, until 1996, when his lobbying prompted a complaint to the House ethics committee -- later dismissed -- that Tom DeLay might have colluded with him on behalf of clients. Randy DeLay says he never directly lobbied his brother, but the appearance was too unsavory. "Tom said, 'I can't afford you as a brother right now. You chose lobbying over me,' " Randy recalls. Tom then cut him off cold, and has not spoken to him since.
While Tom and his siblings were growing up, their mother, Maxine, was a quiet and attentive housewife who "loved us unconditionally," Randy says. Charlie's love, however, was "conditional" because it depended in part on his drinking and on the children making him proud rather than disappointing him, Randy says. Charlie, for example, assigned career goals to his three sons: Ray would be a veterinarian, Randy a lawyer, and Tom a doctor. Failing at those roles, as two of them did, would be letting him down.
Randy and sister Tena DeLay Neislar both say that their mother was consistently supportive of Tom and that their father, despite his volatility, frequently bailed Tom out of youthful trouble. But DeLay, in his only comments on the topic, remembers it differently and minimizes his parents' role: "I pretty much raised myself. My parents didn't participate in much of what I did . . . I think I've been an adult all my life."
Tom DeLay was always a top student, an athlete and popular with his peers, but also did his share of drinking and carousing. After two years as a pre-med student, DeLay was asked to leave Baylor University for behavior that was partly fueled by booze and that thwarted his chance of fulfilling his father's ambition for him. (He eventually got a degree in biology at the University of Houston.) Later, as a Texas state legislator from 1978 to 1984, DeLay had a reputation in Austin less as a lawmaker than as a partyer and playboy known as "Hot Tub Tom." He roomed with other fun-loving male legislators at a condo they dubbed "Macho Manor."
When DeLay first got to Congress, he says, "I would stay out all night drinking till the bars closed . . . I just did it, and then I got up sober and went to work." He swore off hard liquor a decade ago, DeLay says, and now drinks only wine in moderation.
Tobacco has been his other affliction. DeLay says his daddy caught him smoking at age 6. Charlie made the boy smoke most of a carton of cigarettes, but when little Tommy didn't get sick and kept on smoking, DeLay recalls, he got a whipping. From years of cigarettes, Tom graduated to cigars, which, to his wife's chagrin, he inhaled. Then he moved to years of chewing snuff, a highly potent powdered tobacco that DeLay says he has just given up in the last few months. "A nasty, nasty habit," his wife says. While DeLay was trying to quit, his latest nemesis became cookies and other temptations that recently caused his weight to swell to his all-time high of 194 pounds.
From his first cigarette, it seems, DeLay has always been driven by strong compulsions. Fiercely competitive, he played offensive line on the Calallen High School football team in suburban Corpus Christi even though he then weighed only 140. "I outweighed him by 30 to 40 pounds," recalls friend and teammate Gary Slusher, "but that's when I learned my lesson about underestimating Tommy." DeLay not only knocked down the bigger boys in sports, but brought a killer instinct to high school politics, when his posters and slogans blew away the competition, including him, Slusher says.
It was at Calallen High that Tommy DeLay met Christine Furrh, an attractive cheerleader who came from a hardscrabble south Texas background and rode horses in the rodeo. "It was very sexy," Christine recalls of the first time she saw him. "He had on bluejeans, and a big cowboy belt with a silver buckle, and a western shirt -- a black shirt with blue roses -- sleeves rolled up." She smiles. "Tommy was just about the cutest thing I ever saw. He looked like a smart aleck, stuck up, full of himself," she says. "He acted cocky, but it was because he was nervous."
Christine DeLay lives full time in Sugar Land and hates the culture of Washington, which she calls "a mean town" that has made her fiercely protective of her husband. A former high school teacher, she often verbally tweaks her husband and finishes his sentences. Good friends who've known them a long time say that for all Tom's fearsome reputation, Christine DeLay actually seems the tougher of the two. "If he is the Hammer," says one, "she is the Sledgehammer."
Tom DeLay will be the first one to tell you that there is something about him that just looks downright mean. That is the self-assessment he offers over a lunch of liver and onions with Christine after church at a Luby's Cafeteria in Sugar Land.
"I look mean because I have squinty eyes," he says, "and I get passionate . . . but it comes across as mean" on camera.
Christine chimes in, "It's because when he smiles, his eyes get squintier."
"Yeah, here, see?" DeLay says, and he flashes me a big smile across the table. They're right; it's a mean smile. DeLay's mouth curls toward smiling, but his eyes somehow won't follow. His blue eyes seem cold and almost lifeless.
DeLay says he doesn't enjoy seeming malevolent. Over the years, he has occasionally used a speech consultant to try to make his delivery smoother and more palatable. He also has tried to tone down his rhetoric in line with President Bush's "compassionate conservatism."
"I try to be a little less outrageous," he says. But he adds, "I'm a very passionate guy about what I believe in, and the press catches me in the height of my passion, and I can say anything."
DeLay's critics say he appears mean because he is mean. That was most evident to them when DeLay led his holy war to impeach President Clinton. When other Republican leaders wavered, DeLay attacked relentlessly and sometimes viciously -- on talk radio, on television, in lengthy position papers, in the halls and back rooms of Congress -- calling the president a lying, cheating, sexually immoral disgrace to the office, and even a cheater at golf. He seemed driven by a biblical, visceral hatred of Clinton.
"It's hard for me not to hate Bill Clinton," he says, during an outing in the Cadillac, "and I've had to work hard on it." When Clinton's name comes up, DeLay gets so agitated that both hands briefly leave the steering wheel as he gestures and shakes his head vigorously. "The hardest thing for me is to love my enemies."
As he says this, DeLay seems a man struggling with himself. The political Tom DeLay, the hard-core vituperative partisan, would revel in the humiliation of his detested adversary. The religious Tom DeLay, however, the man he would like to be and is working to be, would be forgiving even of Clinton and would never tolerate vindictiveness.
When DeLay launched his impeachment jihad, he convened about 20 of his staff and had them join hands, heads bowed, in an emotional prayer session, according to The Breach by Washington Post reporter Peter Baker. "We need to pray for strength," DeLay said then, tears streaming down his cheeks. "Please know that we're not happy about doing this. We see this as our responsibility."
But the book documents an altogether different attitude behind the scenes in a contemporaneous e-mail exchange about impeachment between two top DeLay staffers: "This whole thing about not kicking someone when they are down is BS -- Not only do you kick him -- you kick him until he passes out -- then beat him over the head with a baseball bat -- then roll him up in an old rug -- and throw him off a cliff into the pound[ing] surf below!!!!!"
When I ask DeLay about this memo, he smiles. "It's not from me," he says of the staffer's e-mail. "That's his philosophy. That's not Tom DeLay. You'd have a hard time proving that I have done anything to destroy people personally." He is correct about that. Because DeLay the politician long ago learned the art of not leaving fingerprints.
Another Saturday morning at First Baptist of Sugar Land: Tom DeLay and four other middle-aged family men sit facing one another in comfortable chairs in the office of Pastor Rambo. There is the pastor, a physician, two small-business owners and the congressman, gathering as they have for more than two years for their "men's accountability group." It is here that DeLay often tries to reconcile the contradictions between the gut-punching political fighter and the man of God and family that he aspires to be.
In often-emotional sessions, the five men ask and explore deeply personal questions. Have you followed the teachings of Christ? Are you spending enough time with your family? Are you behaving honorably toward your wife? Have you been honest in all your financial dealings? Are there problems you want to share? Have you looked at a woman in an improper way? Have you been an effective minister in spreading the Gospel? And finally -- have you lied to us in answering any of these questions?
"It keeps me honest," DeLay says of the hour-long talks, which were inspired by the Promise Keepers evangelical movement. "You can't lie. You can't look your brother-in-Christ in the eye and lie to him . . . and you go through the week and think about having to face them on Saturday, and it makes you reassess." The sessions occasionally get heated, but DeLay won't discuss any further details because they are confidential, except to joke about one of his brethren who can't kick his addiction to HBO's "Sex and the City."
Peacemaker and compromiser, the roles that his faith would most encourage, have not always been DeLay's strengths. Now, he is feeling his way toward a new relationship with George W. Bush, who has never been an ally. As leader of the conservatives, DeLay could hurt Bush's efforts to appeal to the middle. DeLay in 1990 led a bitter attack on Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, for backing down on a pledge not to raise taxes. And last year during the campaign, when the younger Bush had harsh words for House Republicans, DeLay publicly dismissed it as a reflection of Bush not understanding Congress.
Yet DeLay now says he thinks he and the president are actually close, ideologically. "George W. is really saying the same things we are," DeLay says, "only we are saying them differently."
"Yeah -- W. doesn't use words like 'Gestapo,' " says Christine, arching her eyebrows and frowning at her husband. His infamous Gestapo comment was not an isolated incident. Sometimes, Christine notes of Tom, "he does pop off without thinking, but not as much as he used to. The thing is, he was not used to people paying attention to what he said," because he was usually in the political minority.
When the new president addressed a joint session of Congress in February, some television viewers were quick to note that while Republicans repeatedly jumped to their feet to applaud Bush's speech, DeLay alone several times remained seated. Some Republicans said it appeared disloyal. DeLay says he stood up when he was moved by the president's words, and sat it out at other moments. "Some of this jumping up and down, it's just silly. It's childish. All the standing, up and down, and bouncing around. It is a silly political exercise."
DeLay says he is comfortable with the fact that Bush, not he, sets the agenda and leads the party. But then he adds, "I am still trying to drive the president. I am not gonna sit back and let things happen."
"You really don't mean 'drive the president,' " Christine says, frowning.
"Not in a confrontational way," DeLay adds, with a sort of half smile that doesn't seem mean, but only mischievous. "I just hope that he hears us more than other people."
In a more expansive moment, Tom DeLay once proclaimed himself "the best weasel killer in Houston" and described his pest-control company as "the Cadillac" of exterminators. DeLay no longer advertises that -- his official biographies describe him only as former owner of an unspecified small business.
Indeed, a closer examination of his company, Albo Pest Control, suggests it was at best a struggling operation, and the public record raises questions about DeLay's business ethics, truthfulness and the lengths to which he will go when someone crosses him.
His first job out of college was at a pesticide company, mixing, among other things, large batches of rat poison. He went solo in 1973 and purchased Albo, which quickly ran into problems in Houston's boom-bust economy, says Christine DeLay, who helped run it then. "He was borrowing money to make payroll, which was a stupid business decision. Tommy said [his five technicians] were loyal, honest men and should not be laid off, so he borrowed money to keep from layoffs," she says. "So he got behind on payroll taxes."
DeLay was hit with tax liens three times by the Internal Revenue Service, in 1979, 1980 and 1983, because he was not paying payroll and income taxes. In addition, he paid court settlements twice to business associates who claimed he'd cheated them.
DeLay, while still in the state legislature, had signed a deal to buy out a small exterminator, Robert Bartnett, for about $40,000, but only paid him an initial $8,000, Bartnett recalls. DeLay claimed he stopped paying because Bartnett sold him a failing business. "When I was able to go look at his records," Bartnett says, "I learned that a great number of customers had quit because they didn't feel they were being serviced properly." The court ordered DeLay to pay Bartnett the $32,000 he was owed.
Says Bartnett, a lifelong Republican and a conservative: "I didn't like his tactics. But as a person I'd thought he was okay. I'd probably vote for him, but I just wouldn't loan him money."
DeLay was also sued by another lifelong Republican, Bob Blankenship, who in 1986 had agreed to DeLay's offer to merge his exterminating company with Albo. Blankenship sued in 1994, asserting that DeLay and a third partner, Darrell Hutto, were trying to sell Albo without his knowledge and that company funds were being used to pay off personal debts of DeLay and Hutto. Blankenship regrets merging, saying he learned too late that Albo was a poorly run "Mickey Mouse operation." Albo could not afford to buy trucks, he says, so technicians used their own vehicles and therefore were rarely fired.
On February 5, 1994, DeLay gave a sworn deposition under questioning by Blankenship's lawyer, Gerald DeNisco. It included this exchange:
"Are you presently still an officer or director" of Albo?
"I don't think so. No."
"You're still an officer, are you not?"
"I don't think I am."
"Did you resign as an officer?"
"Not written. It was sort of an agreement . . . Two, three years ago. It wasn't anything formal. I haven't had much to do with the company since I got elected to Congress."
What Blankenship and DeNisco did not know then was that DeLay, as a House member, had filed financial disclosure forms for 1991, 1992 and 1993 identifying himself as Albo's "chairman of the board." The 1993 form was dated May 10, 1994, three months after DeLay's sworn testimony.
"He unequivocally lied in my deposition," says DeNisco, who is also a lifelong Republican.
Blankenship received a cash settlement from DeLay, but both sides are under court order not to divulge the amount. DeNisco says, however, that if he had known of DeLay's disclosure form, he would have demanded a much larger settlement and also would have sought a perjury charge against DeLay. Says DeNisco of Albo's treatment of his client: "They told him they couldn't pay him. They canceled his health insurance without telling him. They were really slimy people."
When I ask DeLay about the Albo saga, he says, "I did not have much to do with the company except for large, major decisions. I have to admit my service in the state legislature had a detrimental effect on my ability to run the company. I took too much time away."
I then ask him about the allegation that he was evasive or even dishonest in sworn testimony -- misleading his questioners in much the same way as DeLay had accused Clinton of misleading. DeLay says, "I may have seemed evasive, but it's the truth. I didn't remember if I was president or chairman or secretary of the board. I didn't know which, and it was hard for me to answer. I had nothing to do with the company" by the time of the deposition. (DeLay later filed a formal statement with the court in Houston to clarify his position.)
Hutto backs up DeLay's version of events. "Tom DeLay is a good and honorable man," Hutto says. "I can't say the same about Mr. Blankenship," whom Hutto and DeLay accused of stealing, although they never pressed charges. DeNisco calls this charge "bogus nonsense." |
