Boehner’s Alleged Affair – and Gingrich’s Confirmed One – Go Unmentioned by the New Yorker – Yes, the New Yorker

Peter Boyer’s nearly 9,000 word profile of Speaker John Boehner in the New Yorker last month filled in a few gaps in what is commonly known about Boehner’s biography, but there was a notable item missing — the fact that just four months ago the Capitol was aswirl with rumors that Boehner was having an extramarital affair with a (female) lobbyist.

Similarly, in describing events that led to the ouster in 1998 of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Boyer omitted one of the central reasons — some would say the real reason — Gingrich was forced out: At the same time he was driving efforts to impeach Pres. Bill Clinton over a perjurious cover-up of an affair with a staffer, Gingrich was himself engaged in an affair with a congressional staffer, his current wife, Callista Bisek.

The tone of Boyer’s piece is mostly positive. We learn that Boehner pulled himself up from a hardscrabble childhood — his parents were Catholic, had umpteen children and ran a bar in Reading, Ohio. After a stint in the Navy, he worked his way through college and eventually landed a job in industrial sales, made big bucks and then entered politics.

Boyer notes in passing that Boehner likes to golf, drink wine — although Boyer did not address Boehner’s occasional, apparently drunken performances on the House floor — and that he smokes two packs a day. (After the profile came out, there was a report that, as speaker, Boehner will ignore rules about where smoking is allowed in the Capitol, because, you know, rules are for little people.)

Boehner was elected to Congress in 1990 and quickly became cozy with lobbyists, so cozy that five years later — the year Gingrich became speaker — Boehner made a little news when he was caught red-handed handing out bribes campaign donations from the Big Tobacco lobby to Republican members of Congress on the House floor. (Turns out that while it may be unseemly to hand out checks from political benefactors on the floor of the House while Congress is in session, it is not illegal.)

In 1998, Boehner was part of an attempted coup against Gingrich. The speaker survived the plot only to resign abruptly a few months later, after the midterms in November. Here’s how Boyer described events leading up to Gingrich’s resignation:

The top members of the Gingrich leadership team—Dick Armey, the Majority Leader [now a highly paid corporate tea-party organizer]; Tom DeLay, the Majority Whip [who was recently found guilty on corruption charges]; Bill Paxon, the leadership chairman; and Boehner—met to discuss what one person close to the situation at the time describes as “Newt’s disconnect from the conference, and his disconnect from being Speaker.” The leadership circle, aware of gathering unrest among some of the conference’s younger members, considered whether Gingrich’s assets were enough to warrant his continuing as Speaker. This person went on, “The discussion was ‘How can we support Newt, and all the good that he has—he’s an idea machine, he’s inspirational, we love him on the stump, he raises money—but insulate ourselves from the craziness of, back in 1997, Newt talking about what 2012 would look like? The upsetting of the daily apple cart?’ ” Events resolved themselves when Armey, after meeting with the young conspirators, had second thoughts and informed Gingrich of the rebellion. Paxon resigned from his leadership position the next day. Boehner insisted that he was not an instigator of the attempted putsch, although some close to Gingrich still count him a conspirator. “It was all of them,” Frank Luntz, one of Gingrich’s most loyal admirers, and one of the shapers of the Contract with America, says. “It was DeLay, it was Boehner, it was Paxon, and it was Armey—all four of them. And the beginning of the blow-apart, the real explosion, was when that effort failed, when Newt was informed of it—then it became every man for himself.”

After the 1998 election, in which the Republicans lost five House seats, Gingrich called his leadership team and announced that he was leaving Congress. “I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals,” he told them.

Not a peep about Gingrich’s affair with a staffer, which, had it been revealed during the campaign that fall, would have jeopardized the Republicans’ impeachment of Clinton, not to mention their majority in the House.

During the investigation into Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, it had also come to light that two GOP House leaders who’d been instrumental in the inquisition, Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde of Illinois and Oversight Chairman Dan Burton of Indiana, had had extramarital affairs of their own. Voter disgust with Republican hypocrisy on adultery was already near the tipping point. If Gingrich’s affair with Bisek had been revealed in, say, October 1998, the revelation could well have cost Republicans control of the House in November.

We know now that the GOP leadership was well aware that Gingrich’s affair had put the election — and their grasp on power — at risk. In the run-up to the impeachment, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt had grown so disgusted with Republicans’ hypocritical moralizing that he’d set up a $1 million reward fund, offering cash prizes to anyone who could provide documentary proof that a “family values” Republican had engaged in an extramarital affair. Flynt’s reward took down Gingrich’s would-be replacement as speaker — Rep. Bob Livingston, R-La., who was apparently quite a naughty boy — before Livingston could even be sworn in.

Flynt was aware of Gingrich’s affair, which had been whispered about in Washington as far back as 1995, Gingrich’s first year as speaker, according to “Peepshow: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal,” by Larry J. Sabato, Mark Stencel, S. Robert Lichter:

[At the time of investigations into Clinton, the press] ignored House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s romance with a House committee aide. The relationship with Callista Bisek only received widespread attention in the summer of 1999, seven months after Gingrich left office, when a supermarket tabloid [the Star] staked out the couple’s comings and goings in Washington and a Georgia judge ordered the Hill staffer deposed as part of the former speaker’s divorce proceedings. Rumors of the Gingrich-Bisek affair circulated before then. Bisek was identified in a 1995 profile of Gingrich as the speaker’s “favorite breakfast companion,” a reference that was repeated at the time in a London newspaper and by Time magazine columnist Margaret Carlson. During the impeachment debate … the muckraking online magazine online magazine Salon mentioned “persistent (though unproven) rumors” about a Gingrich affair in a September 1998 article. A few months later, [Flynt] alluded vaguely to Bisek in the “Flynt Report,” his glossy report about congressional misdeeds, identifying her at the end of a two-page spread on the speaker as a former congressman’s aide.

Republicans had timed the Clinton impeachment to play out during the 1998 election, hoping that moral outrage would energize voters. But even without the revelation that Gingrich, the man driving the impeachment, was having an affair with a staffer himself, their naked politicization of the impeachment — a classic Republican over-reach — backfired. Voters rallied around the president instead, and Clinton’s approval ratings rose above 60 percent and stayed there for the rest of his term. The impeachment trial started in the House on Dec. 19, 1998, during the lame duck session. The president was acquitted by the Senate on Feb. 12, 1999.

The allegations about Boehner’s affair surfaced after Labor Day last year:

Mike Stark, an activist and blogger, intercepted Leader Boehner after his highly publicized “Pledge to America” unveiling to ask him about the accusation:

“Speaker Boehner, have you been cheating with Lisbeth Lyons, the lobbyist for the American Printing Association?” Stark asks. Boehner did not respond.

Stark later contacted Lyons, the vice president of Government Affairs at Printing Industries of America, to get a comment on the allegations. She didn’t provide any.

But a purported expose in the New York Times failed to materialize, apparently because the Times’ investigation was attacked as being politically motivated by — get this — the New York Post, a Republican propaganda daily that is a vanity project of Fox channel owner Rupert Murdoch. (The Post loses as much as $30 million per year, according to recent estimates, and so operates entirely on subsidies from Murdoch’s GOP-Fox television channel.)

In an item under the headline, “Liberal media goes on attack against GOP’s Boehner,” the Republican tabloid’s gossip writers asserted:

Liberal media outlets are trying to smear the highest-ranking Republican in the House just weeks before the midterm elections with a deal-breaking scandal before he has a chance to take the speaker’s chair from Nancy Pelosi…

Insiders on Capitol Hill are buzzing about an upcoming New York Times exposé that will detail an alleged Boehner affair. Sources say the Times is looking for the right time to drop the story in October to sway the election, similar to how the Times reported during the 2008 presidential campaign on an alleged John McCain affair that supposedly had taken place many years before and that was flatly denied by the woman in question.

Lyons later told the GOP tabloid that the rumors were “unfounded.” The Post also got a statement from a spokesman in Boehner’s office in Washington, who used the opportunity to insert Republican pre-election talking points attacking Democrats on jobs into the narrative:

A rep for Boehner’s office said, “This is bullshit. The American people oppose Washington Democrats’ job killing, so their desperate liberal allies are resorting to outright lies. It’s low, and it’s dirty.”

So why would Peter Boyer ignore this possible chink in the new speaker’s armor? Was the New Yorker spooked by the GOP-Post’s attack on the New York Times? Was overlooking the alleged affair part of a deal Boyer struck with Boehner or his people to get their cooperation? (If so, it’s depressing to think that Mr. Shawn’s magazine would stoop to crony journalism.)

Or perhaps Boyer looked into the allegations and found that they were indeed “bullshit.” But if so, why not mention that fact and clear Boehner in the article?

More likely, Boyer and the New Yorker, along with their peers and colleagues in the establishment media, have reached a groupthink consensus that it’s best to ignore Boehner’s alleged affair — just as elite journos chose not to report on Gingrich’s affair with staffer Callista Bisek in the 1990s, even though, given Gingrich’s lead role in politicizing (and thereby publicizing) Clinton’s peccadilloes, his own workplace dalliance would seem to have been fair game.

Whatever the reason, New Yorker readers have certainly come to expect more from the magazine, which has set the bar for excellence in journalism since 1925.