Foley was not comfortable with what would soon be called the sound-bite generation. He felt complex questions deserved complex answers, and most of his responses involved an excursion in history. Before the reforms of the 1970s, he began, the power of committee chairmen used to be the clearest abuse of the seniority system. In the post-reform Congress those powers were greatly diminished because members of the majority party caucus selected committee chairmen by secret ballot. House Majority Whip Thomas Foley then took the audience back to the days of the bullying chairmen in the closed Congress of the 1960s. He recalled that a powerful old pork barreler from Ohio, Rep. Mike Kirwan, had admonished the freshmen in 1965 of the greatest mistake they could make at the start of a career in Congress. "That great danger, above all else, is . . . thinking for yourselves," Kirwan declared.

Before the congressional reforms of the 1970s, Foley said, committee chairmen were almost autocratic. "One committee chairman I served with, I believe it was Cooley of Agriculture, once described a junior member as being dead. He said, 'You can come and sit in your chair. You can attend the meetings, but I'm not going to recognize you to speak. And you won't be able to amend any bills in the committee. On the floor you won't be given any time to speak in general debate, and I'll oppose any amendment you offer. And you won't be allowed to travel anywhere. And nothing you want to do for your district will come out of this committee. Soon as I find out it's you who want it, it will be stopped. Let me give you some advice. Get off the committee. You're a zombie on this committee. You're a walking, living, deadman.' Well, later on, he reluctantly brought the member back to life after suitable apologies were made." Just as it had once been considered the right of the crown to cut off the heads of those who were denounced as treasonous, it was the right of a committee chairman in the 1960s to make the life of any member of the committee, particularly any junior member, either productive and useful and profitable, or the opposite.

On leave from the Foreign Service in 1985, I had found an assignment in the House Majority Whip's office as an American Political Science Association (APSA) Congressional Fellow and had accompanied Representative Foley on a visit to the Fifth Congressional District of eastern Washington. Walla Walla was simply one in a series of town meetings that frequently went late into the night because he was invariably the last person to leave after the last question was asked. At each stop, Foley's self-deprecating humor lessened the tension in the frequently Republican-leaning audiences and reflected his understanding of legislative history and respect for the institution of the Congress. I thought at the time that someone should be recording or documenting Foley's anecdotes.

It took a decade to move from the thought to the reality. At the end of the fellowship, I returned to my nineteen-year Foreign Service career for a two-year posting as DCM (Deputy Chief of Mission) in La Paz, Bolivia. At the conclusion of the assignment, my family and I returned to Washington, D.C., where I took up a permanent position with Majority Leader Foley as his press secretary/spokesman. I stayed seven years until his reelection defeat in 1994. In the two years before he left as U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo, he and I collaborated on a book to capture his thirty years in elective politics. It was a new experience for both of us.

I should make clear at this point that while Honor in the House: Speaker Tom Foley (Washington State University Press, 1999) was a collaborative effort, this essay is not. Ambassador Foley has enough on his mind in Tokyo and, for better or worse, he generously acceded to my own organizational ideas for the book when we embarked on the project.

As far as I know, Foley never kept a diary or a journal, and generally didn't even write many marginal notes on speech drafts. Some Foley staff members took a few notes during leadership meetings. Other than his occasional closing debate comments recorded in The Congressional Record or transcripts from his appearances on radio or network television, the only regular source material on Foley's political thinking was in the transcripts of the Speaker's daily press conferences in the Capitol. These had a somewhat deceptive quality. It wasn't that he ducked tough questions, dissembled, or failed to deliver a reasonably candid response.

It was more that while Foley frequently relished the give-and-take with reporters, he seldom went into the exercise with the objective of making news. Starting with Speaker O'Neill, reporters had covered a Speaker's press conference with pad and pencil. Reporters took their own notes. The introduction of an on-the-record transcript recognized that Foley was very careful with his words, and if any misstatement were going to be made, better that it was his and we could correct it. It seemed preferable than relying on the note-taking accuracy of two or three dozen reporters regardless of how careful they were.

If there were to be a book on Foley's life, the source material would be in his head and not on paper or some tape of his personal reminiscences. Although as Speaker he became a highly visible public figure, Foley kept a large chunk of his thinking private. He would accept the presence of a reporter and photographer while he worked out at Washington, D.C.'s University Club gym, but he would be circumspect if he were asked how much political damage he thought he might suffer by becoming a plaintiff with the League of Women Voters against the Washington State passed term limits referendum. Why had he voluntarily set himself up for an opponent's campaign slogan that he, unlike Foley, would never sue his constituents? Yet these were the types of question that anyone conversant with congressional politics would expect to be addressed and answered in a book about Foley.

Foley observed,

I think some publication during my reelection campaign, maybe Time magazine, called the suit decision 'Foley's Folly.' I felt profoundly that this was an unconstitutional act. . . . Just as I voted on issues in the House when I thought members shouldn't be asked to do it if I didn't do it, I didn't think I could be an opponent of term limits and then be shy about joining the suit. . . . Throughout my career one of my own unspoken standards was that if I didn't take at least one vote a term that jeopardized my job, then I was maybe going down a slippery slide. If I went through a term never having felt that there was an issue of importance where my opinion was such that I hadn't taken an unpopular or dangerous vote then I ought to start a really serious debate with myself about whether I was becoming addicted to the office to the extent that I was compromising my views. The test was not my opinion. The test was the risk. In a conservative district there were generally a variety of risks and perils. . . .

For a congressional autobiography or biography to attract any large readership in today's culture, trade book lore suggests that it has to have a certain outrageous quality, create a minimum level of controversy, or convey a degree of looking through the keyhole at other notable political figures. Almost by definition there would be none of these characteristics in a Foley book. While I couldn't read his mind, I never heard Foley publicly utter a mean aspersion about anyone. He had a slow boiling point. If done well, a book on Foley could provide insight, clarity, humor, even inspiration, but it would not be titillating or gossipy. Democratic Representative from Michigan John Dingell had put it in his own telling reflection on Speaker Foley. "He's a gentleman - perhaps too much so for the circumstances he finds himself in."

The third-person biographic narrative and first-person Foley autobiographic reflections of Honor in the House were the hybrid solution for providing the reader with the greatest degree of authenticity under the circumstances. Foley has a near photographic memory for recent events, right down to the color of a shirt, the time of day, the number of people in the room, or someone's tone of voice. Not surprisingly, the further back in time you go, the more context is required for his recall. What seemed important was providing him with a sufficiently full and accurate context of the time for his reflections to have real resonance for a reader. Honor in the House, as a documentary of Foley's thirty years in elective politics, concentrates on the period from his electoral victory over a twenty-two-year Republican incumbent in 1964 to his reelection defeat in 1994.

I conducted a number of trial interviews with Foley contemporaries on events that I had personally observed - about meetings I had attended, decisions that had been made, and reactions that had been voiced. I quickly discovered that some of the comments about Foley, possibly out of friendship now that he was out of office, were far more flattering than I recalled or the press at the time had reported. Other interviews, related to a small group negotiation meeting, for example, resulted in each of the people in the room at the time reporting a somewhat different recollection as to whose argument was pivotal or whose compromise suggestion carried their colleagues on that particular decision. Instead of interviews, we decided to rely on contemporary journalistic treatments of the issues, personalities, even characterizations of Foley, throughout his career, which the average well-read person would have encountered at the time. Using press accounts also avoided putting the burden on Foley of having to make his own judgment as to which accolades or criticisms of him should be included.

It was against this backdrop of the contemporary wisdom over the course of his career that, through countless one-on-one interviews with Foley, I drew out his reactions and reflections. Did he feel that the press accounts of his involvement in a particular event, such as the House bank scandal, had been portrayed accurately? Were the speculations of what went on behind the closed negotiating doors during the 1990 budget summit close to the mark? How was President Bush persuaded to forsake his "Read my lips, no new taxes" pledge? Was the skepticism of his colleagues in the press that maybe he wasn't tough enough to handle the Speaker's role, unfounded? Where did he really stand on campaign finance reform? Did he take the rule on the 1994 crime bill to the floor knowing the Democrats would lose? If so, why? Did he underestimate the reaction of his National Rifle Association constituents when he ended up supporting the 1994 ban on assault weapons? How divisive was the Democratic leadership split over the North American Free Trade Agreement? How did he assess the performance of his successor, Newt Gingrich, in the speakership after 1994?

Foley:

. . . . When the Speaker, as Mr. Gingrich has done, raises himself to a press figure of sufficient weight, then he can issue press releases and be pretty much guaranteed to be covered. That's not automatic with the Speakership. His notoriety as Speaker, if I can use that word, has been exceptional, receiving enormous publicity, both in coming into office with a new Republican majority and even to the point of his own personal difficulties guaranteeing daily coverage. He's been in the position to command press attention. How often it's been used to defend the institution of the House of Representatives is another question. I think the point is that there are times when the Speaker has to be able to speak for the House, for the institution of Congress, because without him, or somebody like him, nobody else is likely to do it. . . .

Not surprising, I found myself, as a former APSA Congressional Fellow, relying on the more empirical studies of Congress. Many of these authors had themselves had participated in the program or worked on congressional staffs in some other capacity: Stanley Bach and Steven S. Smith (Managing Uncertainty in the House of Representatives, 1988), Timothy Cook (Governing with the News, 1998 and Making Laws and Making News, 1989), C. Lawrence Evans and Walter J. Oleszek (Congress Under Fire, 1997), Richard Fenno (Home Style, 1978), Ronald Peters (The American Speakership, 1990), Barbara Sinclair (Legislators, Leaders, and Lawmaking, 1995, and Majority Leadership in the U.S. House, 1983) or Steven Smith and Christopher Deering (Committees in Congress, 1984).

The third-person narrative background and the interview questions posed to Foley were intended to accomplish three things - to provide the reader with an understandable assessment of the time, both the issues and the man; to elicit as much autobiographic flavor from Foley as possible; and to provide a vehicle for his almost legendary anecdotal talents.

As we worked through the process, it became clear that this was more than a story of Thomas S. Foley's thirty-year political career, it was also a description of the changing institution of the U.S. House of Representatives as seen through one key political actor's life. Foley was, however, something of a rarity in that context. Unlike more recent Speakers, he had climbed up every rung of what most observers characterized as the leadership ladder. He had served as a subcommittee and committee chair, as a member of the Democratic Study Group during the era of reform, chairman of the Democratic Caucus, majority whip, majority leader, and finally Speaker of the House. He had, in addition, represented a marginal Republican congressional district for thirty years, which contributed to his reputation and skill for finding bipartisan solutions to thorny legislative problems. There could be few better members through which to appreciate the full institutional sweep of the House of Representatives over his nearly four decades in office.

As seen through Foley's life, Honor in the House was clearly portraying a Congress that depended on such political qualities as compromise, civility, and comity. The book described the institution of Congress as functioning best when it could rely on a minimum level of mutual trust and civility. As I read the page proofs, I found myself with an increasing uneasy feeling that the book almost sounded old-fashioned. Had we written a book with a potential readership limited to the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)? Were compromise and civility of importance only to readers over age fifty who remembered politics from a better day? A less parochial reaction is no. It is, in fact, biographies which help put flesh and bones as a supplement to the more quantitative studies of politics which, for newcomers to the subject, might appear to be somewhat sterile, analytical descriptions of political institutions that emerge more recognizably to members of the academy than to the public.

Common sense would suggest that there may well be a dozen alternative ways of assessing why the Democratic Party lost its forty-year majority in the House of Representatives in 1994, or why the Speaker of the House lost a reelection campaign for the first time since the Civil War. However, one of those alternatives would clearly be to see the political events through the eyes of the major participants. Biography helps provide that grist because, by its nature, biography deals with life events that are understandable by a broad base of the public. A political biography is all but required to deal not just with the governance responsibilities of federally-elected officials, but also with the electoral side. Most of the public has not had any working experience in Congress, so a discussion of the inner workings of the legislative process requires a good deal of explanation. However, the public generally brings some personal experience to a description of an election campaign. They hear and see the campaign ads, attend the town meetings, watch the candidate's parade from the curb, read the newsletters from Washington, D.C., and measure the relevancy of pending legislation to their own daily lives. Political biography can contribute some of the same perspective of members of Congress that Richard Fenno brought to political science in 1978 with Home Style.

Methodology seems ideally determined by which provides the best explanation of the subject at hand. Because it frequently focuses on the personal experience of individuals in the senior levels of government, political biography speaks to the broad interests encompassed by the "politics" half of the discipline. Political biography is one way to re-engage an increasingly cynical public. It tends to describe the political process in a manner with which the public can identify. As many within the discipline of political science have noted, there is a decline on college campuses of declared political science majors. A 1998 survey of college freshmen indicated that only 14% reported discussing politics in the past year. Making politics interesting and providing a positive message of public service might help. Most political biographies are not written about thoroughgoing scoundrels but individuals who dedicated most of their life to public service. In a cynical age, maybe the discipline and the public could use a few good messages - that there are good people who still run for office and that politics and public service tend to coexist best when the politics most closely approximates public service.