Tom DeLay Part II::
After the settlement, DeLay convened a special meeting of Fort Bend County Republican officials and played a videotape of Bob Blankenship's deposition, which had been taped at DeLay's request. In the tape, Blankenship acknowledged that he sometimes used Albo equipment to do small outside jobs, as a favor to a few old friends. DeLay says now he publicly showed the video to document this "stealing" and to combat "gossip and innuendo and backstabbing."
DeLay's main target, though, was Blankenship's wife, Jacqueline, a prominent local Republican, whom DeLay blamed for instigating the lawsuit. DeLay's message to the Fort Bend County Republicans was essentially that the Blankenships were thieves and liars who should be purged. Soon after, Jacqueline Blankenship, who for years had been a GOP precinct chairman, phone-bank organizer, election judge, poll watcher and officer in Republican women's clubs, was dropped from her party posts.
Jacqueline Blankenship, who had previously campaigned for DeLay, also was a paid political campaign consultant. A DeLay staffer called the incumbent Fort Bend County Sheriff Milton Wright to demand that he dismiss Blankenship from his reelection campaign -- or face DeLay's opposition.
Sheriff Wright, a former Texas Ranger, refused and conveyed this message to DeLay: "He can kiss my ass." When the news later broke locally that DeLay had not only tried to get Blankenship fired but had also poured $70,000 into a Republican primary to defeat Wright, the sheriff called DeLay a small man, "5-foot-7, if he's wearing high heels." The sheriff, in an interview, says he does not want to stir up anger by discussing the DeLay-Blankenship dispute, except to say of Blankenship, "I have always known her as a truthful person. I believe what she says is all documented."
Jacqueline Blankenship, a mediator and administrative assistant, says she has lost both paid and volunteer political jobs in Fort Bend because of DeLay's clout. In an interview, she begins to sob, and laugh. "I am the poster child for 'Victims of Tom DeLay' . . . He is like a street bully, and he can do stuff under cover, or does it where people are so afraid of him, they won't admit it. And it makes me sound paranoid."
When DeLay is asked about his effort to get her fired, he says, "Nobody did that." Told that the sheriff said otherwise, DeLay says, "I didn't talk to the sheriff." Asked whether his staff did, he says, "Not from my direction." His only interest, DeLay says, was to elect a better candidate in the GOP sheriff's primary.
When I ask several prominent Fort Bend County Republicans about the entire DeLay-Blankenship episode, they privately describe it as one of the most bizarre affairs they've ever witnessed and voice support for Blankenship, while declining comment about DeLay. Except for Beverly Carter, a Republican who publishes the local weekly, the Fort Bend Star. Carter hired Jacqueline Blankenship when nobody else would, and she says of DeLay, "He is one of the reasons why I am ashamed to be a Republican anymore. I don't buy a lot of his hypocrisy and I can only categorize it as hypocrisy. He talks to the Christian Coalition one week about the need to elect faith-based politicians, and intimating that he is one, by virtue of his being there. And he has just returned from a fun-filled trip to Las Vegas with a planeload of lobbyists."
Carter is referring to news reports last year that DeLay sponsored a Las Vegas trip in which his daughter, Danielle, who earned $60,000 in consulting fees through DeLay-backed PAC, was partying with a group of lobbyists, one of whom poured champagne on her while she soaked in a hot tub in a bathing suit. Says Carter, "The hypocrisy, to me, reeks."
"I wanted to be speaker. My ego did," Tom DeLay says. "And God did not want me to. It took me three or four days of praying and really thinking."
After a decade in Congress, his driving ambition brought DeLay to the brink of becoming speaker of the House in December 1998, when the office was virtually his for the taking. Newt Gingrich had stepped down, and Gingrich's designated successor, Rep. Bob Livingston of Louisiana, abruptly resigned over the disclosure of marital infidelities.
As majority whip -- responsible for piloting an impressive winning streak of key House votes -- DeLay had built a formidable organization of 67 loyal deputies and assistants -- nearly one-third of the entire GOP House membership. DeLay presided over the most effective congressional vote-counting and patronage machine in recent memory. He had an uncanny knack for winning every vote, even by the smallest of margins, and knowing when to call off a vote on the rare occasions where it seemed he might lose.
After Livingston's demise, DeLay could have easily activated the powerful whip machinery for his own benefit. But he says he realized his impeachment crusade made him too polarizing, "too nuclear." He decided the best alternative was his deputy whip, Dennis J. Hastert, the amiable former wrestling coach from Illinois.
"And so I pulled Denny aside and told him that he had to run for speaker," DeLay recalls. "And he turned white as a sheet."
DeLay understands and uses power so well that he really doesn't have to be speaker to reach his goals. He also doesn't always have to be the bad cop either. His money, large staff and legions of supporters can see to that. The core of his congressional clout lies primarily in DeLay Inc., as his vast fundraising operation is informally known. This is a network of intertwined direct-mail and phone-bank operations run by DeLay allies that includes Americans for a Republican Majority, (ARMPAC), the U.S. Family Network, Americans for Economic Growth and the Republican Majority Issues Committee.
"The appearance he has created is that he can raise as much money as he has to -- either for you or against you. And he has access to Christian talk radio and the grass roots of the party. If you take him on, you will have the whole machine turned against you," says Rep. Peter King, a Republican moderate from New York who refused to follow DeLay on impeachment. The Hammer never openly lifted a finger or showed a mean streak, King says. Instead, one of DeLay's staffers ominously warned King that "the next two years will be the longest of your life." King says he later learned that DeLay had tried, unsuccessfully, to strip him of a subcommittee chair on the Banking and Financial Services Committee.
Democrats are so outraged by DeLay's financial activities that they took the unprecedented step last year of suing him in federal court, charging him with rack-eteering, extortion and money laundering. That suit was settled in a political cease-fire last month, and DeLay remains eager to lead the battle against the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill because he sees money as the "lifeblood" of his struggle to change America.
DeLay's influence, despite the tough-guy reputation, is not based on hammering and whipping balky Republicans to toe the line. Rather, he and his many minions use a close personal touch -- helping members with pet projects, with family problems, even with jobs if they are defeated. DeLay is a full-service whip for House members, acting as their friend, their concierge, pastor or travel agent. He counsels them on their marriages, their affairs, prays with some of them, puts them in touch with clergy or a good lawyer when needed, or, in a pinch, hooks them up with a corporate jet for a plane ride home.
"These are not people you can strong-arm. These are people you cajole and coax, and Tom knows how far you can push them. This is not a job for a sledgehammer approach. It takes sophistication," says former Republican representative Bill Paxon, a close friend. "He really understands how you move people." And DeLay cements the relationships with his constant attention to their care and feeding. On virtually every night when House members must stay for late votes, DeLay's office is the gathering place for spreads of pizza, barbecue, fried chicken or Chinese food. This servicing of members reached its most excessive level during the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia when DeLay arranged for corporate limos for each GOP House member, along with a relentless business-sponsored smorgasbord of lavish food, drink and nights on the town.
Those who know DeLay best say the Hammer image is an effective camouflage for a man who is by nature warm and softhearted. "Tom would hate that I say this," says former Republican representative Susan Molinari, Paxon's wife and also a close friend, "but he is a sensitive guy, a very sensitive guy."
Another of DeLay's close friends is Michael Feinberg, a former math professor whose Jewish refusenik family was trapped in the Soviet Union for a decade until DeLay personally intervened in 1987 at the urging of Jewish activists in Houston. The DeLays and the Feinbergs, now living near Boston, keep in touch and have stayed at each other's homes, says Feinberg, vice president of a high-tech firm. "I have heard all about the negative side of him," Feinberg says, "but my experience is purely personal and I know him as a very warm person . . . [With Tom and Christine] once someone's pain gets to them, they do everything they can."
DeLay shows this compassionate side most on the issue of abused children. His involvement began after Christine became a court-appointed volunteer in 1994. When Christine, after repeated efforts, could not find a home for a 16-year-old abused girl who was a chronic runaway, she convinced Tom that they should become foster parents. The DeLays took a mandatory parenting class and welcomed the girl -- against the advice of several friends, who warned about damaging political gossip that could flow from housing an unstable teenage girl. The girl stayed about five months, reacted poorly to their discipline and ran away again.
Despite that difficult experience, the DeLays took in two more wayward teens, a sister and brother, who stayed nearly two years. Both are now in nearby public colleges and keep in touch with Christine. The burden of foster parenting fell more on her, since Tom spends half his week in Washington, but her husband remains powerfully committed to helping troubled children, in fundraising, in legislation and in strong public advocacy.
"Her passion became his passion," says Linda Shultz, executive director of Child Advocates of Fort Bend County. "He talks from his heart," says Shultz, who has become a family friend. "When I thank him, his eyes tear up."
Last month, DeLay and his wife hosted their first golf tournament to benefit the DeLay Foundation for Kids, an event that netted $417,172 toward Christine's dream of creating a $5 million model community for foster parenting. DeLay, who hits up the same big-time lobbyists who make political gifts, had already raised more than $1.5 million for Fort Bend County children's programs with annual golf outings costing up to $10,000 for each foursome.
Christine talks excitedly about building a new "values-based" foster community in which "families" of up to six abused kids would live with a pair of foster parents in a new home, part of a cluster of homes on a 50-acre site in nearby Richmond that is already being donated by a local foundation.
The goal is to do it with no government funding. "I think the community will support this," she says. "We have to do this. Abused kids don't have -- or give -- money. They don't have a lobby." Faith-based programs are better than government because "it's biblical. It is one-on-one," says Tom. "If you become dependent on government, a child becomes a number and not a name."
Regarding abused children, "he is the real thing," says Kimberley Shellman, executive director of the D.C. Children's Advocacy Center. "And I was skeptical of him because of what I'd heard of him and the Republicans in general, that they'd be inclined to take money away from us." Her organization coordinates investigations of child sex abuse cases, but faced closure last year because it could not get District government funding. Says Shellman, "If it were not for Tom DeLay," who quickly pushed through federal funds, "we would have closed."
DeLay has inserted himself further into District affairs, pushing for a revamping of the child welfare system and for formation of a Family Court. But unlike other members of Congress, he is not angering city officials who are highly sensitive to such intrusions, says D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton. "His commitment is sincere, and it's deep, and he has special credibility because he and his wife have had foster children," Norton says. She calls him "impatient" for change, but says he has respected the principle of home rule.
DeLay is particularly stirred by reports of child abuse and has shown up at several hearings into the D.C. government's mishandling of Brianna Blackmond, the 23-month-old toddler killed last year after being returned from a foster home to her mother. Shellman remembers one vivid confrontation at a hearing between DeLay and city bureaucrats: "Tom DeLay sat up there and matter-of-factly said that 'children are beaten, battered, burned, sodomized and bruised! I would like for us to treat each of you like that and not respond to you for a while, and see how you feel.' It was such a powerful statement," Shellman says. "There is no leader in the District of Columbia who would step up and talk like that, but he is not afraid . . . I wish we had a District leader like him. He is a true advocate."
Coming out of DeLay's home, we spot several small mounds of dirt in the center of his driveway and a swarming colony of ants. I suggest the DeLays need a good exterminator. "Fire ants!" DeLay exclaims, disgustedly. "You can thank the EPA for those!" Christine and I dig our heels into the tiny mounds but DeLay says, "Nothing you can do. The EPA banned Mirex and now there's not an effective product!"
DeLay asserts the EPA never had sufficient evidence to label Mirex a suspected carcinogen. He broadens his standard EPA tirade to include Rachel Carson and her 1962 Silent Spring, which he believes was a wildly exaggerated indictment of pollution, and to the Nobel Prize committee that has on occasion honored environmentalists. "The Nobel Prize is liberal, and extremist, to the extent that these people are super-liberal and have a political agenda."
After church, as we are waiting in line at the Luby's Cafeteria, DeLay is eager to rejoin the attack, saying America should not need an EPA. The Bible "charges us to be good stewards of the Earth and to have clean air and clean water," he says, and while some government intervention occasionally may be necessary, EPA has been criminally excessive.
He says the historic 1972 banning of DDT -- a pesticide blamed for killing massive numbers of fish and birds -- "was a political thing, not scientific." He says the DDT ban has also caused a great increase in Third World malaria because it was the best killer of the mosquitoes that carry the disease.
"That's not the way I've heard it," says a middle-aged bespectacled man standing behind us. He introduces himself as Carl Albers, a chemical engineer who lives in Sugar Land. He says banning DDT has saved eagles, hawks and other animal species that have made dramatic comebacks, and says he's never heard it proved that the ban increased malaria.
"Well, you should check your science," says DeLay. He says most people don't know the full story of such issues. "That's why they think I'm crazy."
Albers, 52, a mild-mannered fellow with a wife and two kids, spars briefly with DeLay: "I use pesticides. I'm not a tree hugger. I'm in the petrochemical industry." But Albers says he's never heard of DeLay's claims.
"Check it out," DeLay says, growing slightly more perturbed by the challenge.
Then Albers, a Republican who has voted for DeLay, asks the congressman if it is true that he wants to stop teaching evolution in the public schools. Albers, who calls himself an observant Lutheran, says he is concerned about teaching "religious theories" instead of science.
"I don't want to teach religion. I just want good science," DeLay says, emphatically. He tells Albers that recent discoveries about DNA suggest that its infinite complexity shows "intelligent design . . . and if you have that, you must have a designer . . . God."
Albers is shaking his head. "What about the Big Bang?" he asks.
DeLay shakes his head vigorously. "Give me one example that proves evolution. One example! You can't."
The tone is getting decidedly sharper as DeLay continues, "God is perfect, so He would not make something imperfect" that needed to change via evolution.
"You don't believe in natural selection?" Albers asks.
"Study your science!" DeLay says, by now a bit flushed. "It is proving intelligent design."
Albers shrugs. He gives up.
As we go to sit down with our cafeteria trays, Christine DeLay lets her husband have it: "Tommy!" she says sharply. "You violated your own teachings! You were supposed to ask him questions and not just talk at him."
DeLay sighs. "Yes. Yes. You're right," he says, shaking his head and looking disappointed with himself. "You're right."
Every week DeLay has been reminding his adult-education church class that the way to evangelize and spread the Christian gospel is to ask probing questions, but never be heavy-handed.
That evening, he stands in front of his class of 18 adults at First Baptist. "Heavenly Father, we thank You for this day. Heavenly Father, we ask You to help us understand . . ." Then DeLay opens with a confession: "Today at Luby's, I did exactly what I've told you guys not to do." He explains the evolution argument and says, "I did exactly the wrong thing. I told him he was wrong."
The class laughs at him, supportively.
DeLay grins sheepishly. "I did it in a loving way. I didn't tear his head off," he says, but his expression shows his regret.
Still, local Republicans worry that DeLay's heavy-handedness and perceived extremism may have started to chip away a bit at his support here, as his home county is becoming more diverse. In the 2000 election, his Democratic opponent was an 80-year-old political novice who said she ran because God spoke to her at a traffic light. She nonetheless won 40 percent of the vote.
Curious about Albers's reaction to DeLay, I called him the next day. "I'm afraid he oversimplifies the heck out of everything. His world is black and white," he says. "I can't understand his orientation, other than he is a fundamentalist Chris-tian. My God is not that small. I don't have to believe that Hebrew poetry has to be interpreted literally. Genesis is a poem."
"He was somewhat friendly, but you could tell he is pretty closed-minded," Albers says. After initially supporting him, Albers says, he recently voted against him. Now, he adds, he is quite concerned about the mixture of government and fundamentalism, and would like to become more active in local politics, to unseat DeLay.
When I first asked Tom DeLay about his rift with the DeLay family, he simply shook his head and pursed his lips, suggesting no words would be forthcoming. Then, he said, "It's never pleasant. You would like to have a family. But my family is Dani and Christine, and that is enough for me." He was visibly uncomfortable, and when I asked his reason for not speaking to his mother, he looked at Christine and said, "Am I supposed to answer that?" He started saying something about his parents, then stopped and said, "Strike that."
After my first visit to Sugar Land, DeLay and his staff knew I'd been unsuccessful in trying to interview his brothers. When I located his sister, Tena DeLay Neislar, a registered nurse in Michigan now married with three children, she had never given an interview about her brother. Now she spoke extensively about her love and sadness for him.
She dates the unraveling of her family to the 1988 death of Charlie DeLay, who was killed when a hillside tram that he designed and built himself at his south Texas ranch lost its brakes and plunged off the track. After his death, "I expected Tommy to be the backbone of the family, and he wasn't," says Neislar, whose first husband was then dying of cancer.
Neislar says she still does not understand why Tom broke off contact. "I can't touch him. I can't get to him. The family has tried," she says. "It's a shame. We miss him. We miss the family we had before. We try to respect his decision. We don't know what else to do."
The next evening, I got a phone call at home from DeLay's press secretary, Emily Miller, who burst into a scathing tirade. "You lied! . . . You betrayed him! You twisted his words! . . . We don't know you. You don't exist . . . You are dead to us . . ." I grabbed for a pencil to take notes, but she was speaking faster than I could transcribe. I was being shunned and cut off, with a sort of biblical finality. It was also the only time that Miller neglected to specify that her comments were for my background information, not for publication.
It turned out that Tena Neislar had been so stirred by her conversation with me that she called her brother at the Capitol to speak to him for the first time in six years -- in an unsuccessful attempt to patch things up. After his sister's call, DeLay had hit the ceiling. "Tommy got very upset," Christine DeLay tells me several days later, "but he has calmed down a lot." As to the DeLay family rift, Christine says, "It's about me. They think I have Tommy brainwashed . . . It's a very dysfunctional family. It's very sad. I still would love to see them reconcile."
So would Tena Neislar. When I contact her again, she agrees that Christine is an obstacle and says her brother will not speak to his mother unless Christine is present. "My mother doesn't want to come between them, and if she has to sacrifice her relationship with her son, for his happiness, she will do that. It is pitiful and it is sad . . . Hopefully, someday, Tommy will forgive. Life is too short and maybe his heart will soften."
A week later, Randy DeLay contacted me, saying he had prayed on the subject and decided he wanted to talk about his brother in the hope it could end the split. He had initially refused several requests to discuss the family unless Tom DeLay approved, which he would not.
"All of us love Tommy tremendously and we don't want to create more trouble for him. He has enough," Randy says when we meet in Washington. He looks remarkably like Tom, with the helmet of naturally black hair, even at age 50. His eyes well up with tears three times during a lengthy interview. Randy says that during his own lengthy struggle with alcoholism, he has come to believe alcoholic behavior was the root of all the family tensions and conflicts. But Randy believes his brother is still angry at his parents, instead of at the disease.
"Dad would say and do things that he didn't mean. Demeaning things. Manipulative things," Randy says. "That wasn't him talking, it was the disease. That was not the real Charles DeLay. And in the same way that Charles was a deep, loving, caring man, Tom DeLay is, too -- but just don't be his enemy."
He believes his brother's fiery aggressive side is driven largely by unresolved anger. "Tom's compulsive behavior, it's a way of life," he says. All four of the DeLay siblings have become deeply religious, and Randy thinks that is not a coincidence. "Through alcoholism, I believe God has made us dependent on Him. I believe the pain of alcoholism brought us all to Christ. That's the way God works."
Randy says it's sad that his brother doesn't really know his nieces and nephews, but he is particularly saddened about his mother, who is 77. "Eventually, I know Tom will be sorry for this, what he is doing to Mom," Randy says. "Mom watches C-SPAN just to see him walk across the floor. She'll say, 'Did you see him?' and I'll say, 'No.' " Randy says his mother describes her shunning from her granddaughter's wedding and the announcement as "like a dagger in my heart. It was like I never existed."
Tena believes her brother decided to throw himself even more into his career after his father's death. "He got involved in politics. The power these people have or think they have," she says. "I think they get screwed up and paranoid, and their priorities get messed up. He's so busy. His immediate family and his politics are the most important things to him."
In my last talk with Tom DeLay, I tell him I am still puzzled about why, given his faith that includes a strong emphasis on family, peace and forgiveness, he cannot reconcile with his own family. At first, he again just shakes his head, indicating he won't respond. DeLay betrays no emotion, but Christine, later that day, tells me, "Tommy was very upset you brought that up again."
DeLay, though, finally ventures an explanation: "The family thing is, is, uh, 54 years now, developing and, and at some point in time when you have a dysfunctional family, you either succumb to that dysfunction or you decide -- it's not alcoholism; it's, it's a whole bunch of stuff -- and you decide that you need to be doing something else. I, you, you can, uh, and what I have reconciled what I believe in, and I am constantly maturing and certainly nowhere near where I would like to be in my walk. But at some point in time you just move on and, uh, try to create those relationships with other people, and keep moving forward. It's the way it goes."
My last conversation is with Maxine DeLay, Tom's mother. She is home alone and has to stop for a minute to take her lunch off the stove before talking. She has a firm policy of not giving interviews to the media, she explains in a warm, thick Texas twang. But she doesn't mind talking just a bit about her family, particularly her four children. From oldest to youngest, from wayward to famous, she makes it clear that they are all equally precious to her. "I'm proud of all of them, and love every one of them," she says.
As for the family's long rift with Tom, she has often shared her pain and regret with her other children. But she always tries hard not to dwell on it. She says she is not entirely cut off from her celebrated son. "I get to see him. I see him on TV, and it helps," she says. "I keep all the tapes."
Copyright 2001 The Washington Post
Record Number: 051301XW12Ab5787 |
