WEST CHESTER, Ohio—He swings the golf club like a right-hander, which he is, but putts as a southpaw. Maybe it’s a metaphor for a conservative politician who often turned to liberals in crunch time, but I’m too busy losing $20 on this hole to appreciate it. We’re on the green now, surveying his 10-foot par attempt, a modest breeze transporting his tobacco cologne. With a posture as unique as his personality—back hunched over nearly parallel to the turf, left shoulder dipped well below the right, fingers interlocked around a grip of blue rubber—he gazes downward and shuffles his feet. The veins are still dancing in his muscular, leathery legs as the blade retreats from the ball, and it’s apparent within moments of their reunion that something isn’t right. As the Titleist Pro V1 finds its resting place, several feet shy and slightly west of its final destination, he can’t mask his frustration. “Nice one, Boner,” he mutters.
To play golf with John Boehner is to learn there are unwritten rules governing the use of the word Boner. When spoken by his close friends—“Thatta boy, Boner!”—it’s almost always to congratulate him on a good shot. When the former U.S. House speaker uses it—“Aww, Jee-sus, Boner!”—it’s almost always to rebuke himself for a bad one. Today he is saying it with ruinous frequency.
We’re on Boehner’s home course, the Wetherington Golf and Country Club, on a Monday afternoon in early June. Tucked away in West Chester, Ohio—an affluent enclave of suburban Cincinnati, part of his old district—the club is hosting a charity fundraiser, dubbed the “Boehner Classic,” benefiting a nearby Boys & Girls Club. The former speaker is one of two star attractions; the other is his friend, the professional golfer Fuzzy Zoeller, a character known more for his off-color jokes than his two major championships. With wealthy donors ponying up to play alongside them—but some of his old buddies also in town—Boehner decides to form a group of nine players, myself and Zoeller included, and creates a team scramble that pits five golfers against the other four.
But something isn’t right with the former speaker’s game. Long considered one of Washington’s finest golfers, he is spraying shots left and right with choppy, self-doubting swings. Sensing my surprise, Boehner says his handicap has skyrocketed since leaving Congress two years ago. After he misses that 10-foot putt, and we climb into our cart, I ask why. “You have to concentrate while you hit the ball,” he tells me. “That’s my biggest problem in golf these days. I just can’t concentrate. I could always concentrate on what I had to do. But these days … ” Boehner pauses for several seconds, then pulls hard on the Camel 99 wedged between his knuckles. “I just can’t concentrate.”
***
To outsiders, Boehner might just be the happiest man alive, a liberated retiree who spends his days swirling merlot and cackling at Speaker Paul Ryan’s misfortune. The truth is more complicated. At 67, Boehner is liberated—to say what he spent many years trying not to say; to smoke his two packs a day without undue stress; to chuckle at the latest crisis in Washington and whisper to himself those three magic words: “Not my problem.” And yet he is struggling—with the lingering perception that he was run out of Congress; with his alarm about the country’s future; and with the question of what he’s supposed to do next. After leaving office, Boehner says a longtime family friend approached him. “You’ve always had a purpose—your business, your family, politics,” the friend said. “What’s your purpose now?” Boehner says the question gnaws at him every day.
Boehner-Secondary1-ByMarkPeterson.jpg
BOEHNER BACK HOME Retired in Ohio, the former speaker spends much of his time these days manicuring his lawn, golfing and fiddling around at his workbench. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine
We met three times over the summer, his most candid and revealing series of interviews since a third attempted coup on his speakership led him to say to hell with it and retire early. The first interview was in June at Wetherington; the second in July at Burning Tree Club, a private, all-male establishment in Bethesda, Maryland; the third in September following a joint fundraiser with Ryan at the Bengals vs. Packers game in Green Bay, Wisconsin. In the whole of our conversations, he asked only five or six times for something to remain off the record. In those instances, I agreed. Everything else was fair game—and he did not disappoint. From his text messages with George W. Bush, to his scathing critiques of conservative media and his former antagonists on Capitol Hill, to his disgust at America’s being stuck with a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the former speaker held little back.
What I discovered from 18 hours on the record with him, and dozens more with his friends, is that for all the talk of Boehner living the dream in retirement—mowing and manicuring his lawn, fiddling around at his workbench, spending time with his grandson—he is lacking a certain peace. It’s the type of tranquility that accompanies the knowledge that your life’s work won’t be remembered as a failure; that the party and the institution you gave everything to aren’t collapsing because of mistakes you might have made.
Boehner is a fascinating and paradoxical figure in his own right. He was the brilliant salesman who couldn’t get his own members to buy. The back-slapping creature of K Street who never took a single earmark. The gruff chain-smoker who weeps at the mere mention of schoolchildren. The Midwestern everyman who won’t be seen in public without a clean shave and an ironed shirt. The bartender’s son who became speaker of the House.
But the story of Boehner’s 25 years in Washington is also the story of the Republican Party, the Congress and American politics in the post-Ronald Reagan era: an account of corruption and crusading, enormous promises and underwhelming results, growing ideological polarization and declining faith in government. The same centrifugal forces that made Boehner’s job impossible have bedeviled his successor, Ryan, and kept the GOP majorities in Congress from passing any landmark legislation in 2017. Now, as the revolutionary fervor that swept Boehner into the speakership degenerates into a fratricidal conflict centered around Trump, the former speaker’s frontline view of the Republican civil war is essential to understanding what went wrong.
***
On the eve of his golf outing, I find myself on Boehner’s back patio. He’s hosting a barbecue for friends who came to Ohio for the fundraiser, and we get acquainted as Boehner works several outdoor grills, Camel in his left hand and tongs in his right. Among others seated around the table, sipping Maker’s Mark 46 from blue plastic cups and smoking cigars, are Dick, who owns a winter home near Boehner’s on Florida’s Marco Island; Ed, who also spends winters on Marco Island but still runs a business out of western Ohio; and Mick, the longtime chief of staff in Boehner’s personal office who lives nearby. All three promise that I’m in for a treat. They aren’t lying: Boehner has prepared a feast of teriyaki-marinated flank steaks, his specialty; chunks of seared beef tenderloin; grilled chicken breasts; a salad of avocado, tomatoes and fresh mozzarella; au gratin potatoes; a sweet corn skillet; and baked crescent rolls. As we eat, someone jokes that the only thing missing are hot dogs. Boehner looks up from his plate. “I’ve never had a hot dog for dinner in my life,” he says, stone-faced.
After we eat, Boehner sits across from me, reaches for a lighter and indicates he’s ready to talk. Boehner smokes two packs a day and has a habit of pinching off the smoldering end of his cigarette, rolling the butt into a ball and shoving it into his pocket. (On the back nine a day later, Boehner stops at a receptacle and scoops from his pocket some two dozen smoke-stained balls.) Of his 11 siblings, one has passed away. It was lung cancer. Boehner says this doesn’t concern him—“If I was going to die from smoking cigarettes, I’d already be dead”—but I notice that his laughs, which come often and easy, are almost always accompanied by coughs. Ah-heh. Ah-heh.
Breaking the ice, I mention some news of the day—that Trey Gowdy appears likely to become chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The previous chairman, Jason Chaffetz, had abruptly announced his resignation from Congress; House conservatives had hoped that Jim Jordan, a senior member on the committee, might pursue the chairmanship. Boehner grins. “Gowdy—that’s my guy, even though he doesn’t know how to dress,” he says. Then Boehner leans back in his chair. “Fuck Jordan. Fuck Chaffetz. They’re both assholes.”
And away we go.
Boehner-Secondary10-ByMarkPeterson.jpg
Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine
Boehner’s beef with Chaffetz, who would later join Fox News as a paid contributor, is not personal—just that he’s a “total phony” who possessed legislative talent but focused mostly on self-promotion. “With Chaffetz,” Boehner says, “it’s always about Chaffetz.”
His problems with Jordan, the founding chairman of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, run much deeper. To Boehner and his allies, Jordan was the antagonist in the story of his speakership—an embodiment of the brinkmanship and betrayal that roiled the House Republican majority and made Boehner’s life miserable. Although he would tell me in later conversations that he holds no grudges against anyone, today Boehner unloads on his fellow Ohioan. “Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate,” Boehner says. “A terrorist. A legislative terrorist.”
If he sounds exasperated, it’s because this is the central irony of his career: A quarter-century before the conservative insurgency stormed Washington and derailed his speakership, John Boehner was the conservative insurgency.
***
ACT I
Boehner’s pursuit of national office was his first rebellion against the establishment.
When the news broke in 1989 that Ohio Congressman Donald “Buz” Lukens, a Republican, had paid a 16-year-old for sex—and was trying to get her mother a government job—the party bosses tried pushing him out. Lukens wouldn’t budge. So they coalesced around a challenger: former GOP Congressman Tom Kindness, who had held the seat prior to Lukens. Months went by before Boehner, a state representative who had made himself wealthy selling corrugated boxes and injection-molded plastics, jumped into the race—much to the displeasure of party leaders. Boehner didn’t have insider connections or family favors to cash in; one of a dozen kids who grew up in a two-bedroom home and cleaned floors in his father’s shot-and-a-beer saloon, he worked as a janitor to pay for college and first took elected office as a township trustee before later winning a statehouse seat.
Armed with little name recognition and even less support, Boehner poured his own money into the race—nearly emptying his family’s bank account by spending $150,000 on the campaign. “It was too much money,” Debbie Boehner, his wife, tells me. Her husband nods. “I put it all on the line.” Money wasn’t Boehner’s problem; it was his name. Almost everyone in the district pronounced it Boner. “Think about this,” Mick tells me on the patio, laughing so hard he can barely finish. “You had a guy named Kindness running against a guy named Boner.” Defying expectations, Boehner won the primary and gained the party’s support. That included help from Paul Ryan, a local college Republican who volunteered that fall. “I didn’t know him,” Ryan says. “I thought his name was Boner.”
BOEHNER ON ... CONGRESS
“We’ve got some of the smartest people in America who serve in the Congress, and we’ve got some of the dumbest. We have some of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet, and some that are Nazis. Congress is nothing more than a slice of America.”
By then, the Democrats’ post-Watergate zeal for reform had long since faded, and the House was widely seen as the oozing center of the Washington swamp—an out-of-control legislative slum that invited malfeasance and vice. It was against this backdrop that Boehner, a newcomer, made it his mission to clean up Congress. “He indicated he wanted to be very aggressive and very much involved in reform efforts, and he brought a lot of energy to it,” Newt Gingrich, who was then the second-ranking House Republican, remembers of the freshman lawmaker.
Almost from the day he arrived on Capitol Hill in January 1991, Boehner found himself arguing with employees of the House Bank—a financial institution for members of Congress only—who explained that his paycheck could be deposited only with them. These rules vexed the rookie legislator. Months later, he spotted a statistic from the Government Accountability Office audit of the House Bank: more than 8,000 of its checks had bounced. “They needed all of us to keep our money in those accounts so they could have a big enough float to keep the bank alive,” Boehner recalls. After discussing this realization with six of his fellow freshman Republicans, they agreed to expose the rot. As they did so, in the form of a privileged resolution, Boehner tells me, Speaker Tom Foley and Majority Leader Dick Gephardt—both Democrats—approached him on the House floor, as did Bob Michel, the Republican minority leader. “All three of them said essentially the same thing,” Boehner remembers. “‘We didn’t do anything wrong, and we won’t do it again.’” As Boehner and Co. dug deeper, probing the bank’s finances and pushing for the disclosure of members whose accounts were overdrawn, they earned a nickname: the Gang of Seven. Less than a year into his first term, as Americans seethed over the improprieties exposed by these freshman renegades—with Democrats, the majority party, shouldering the blame—the House Bank was closed. And Boehner’s star was born.
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The Gang’s work wasn’t finished. Over the next several years they turned their attention to other targets, including the scandal-plagued House Post Office, leading to the indictment and imprisonment of House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, a powerful Illinois Democrat. Sensing an opportunity to seize Washington’s moral high ground and win back the House after 40 years in the minority—President Bill Clinton’s own troubles would be icing on the cake—Gingrich enlisted Boehner to help draft the “Contract with America,” a list of promises to voters.
As he helped guide the party’s midterm strategy, Boehner’s high-profile role made him a hero to reform-minded conservatives seeking office across the country in part of what would later be dubbed the “Republican Revolution” of 1994. Richard Burr, who today is the senior senator from North Carolina, was campaigning for a House seat that year and remembers hearing about Boehner. “I think John was probably the first one that actually intended to drain the swamp. He was a radical,” Burr says. “The closest example would be a Freedom Caucus guy today.” Jordan, running his first race for the statehouse that year, recalls fawning over his future nemesis. “Here’s a guy who’s fighting to clean things up in Washington.”
Boehner-Secondary4-ByMarkPeterson.jpg
BOEHNER MEMORABILIA Some of the Congress-themed knick-knacks in the former speaker’s home. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine
Republicans won the majority, and Boehner, leveraging his newfound celebrity, ran for the No. 4 spot in House leadership: conference chairman. Gingrich had become speaker with Michel’s retirement, and he had a different person in mind for conference chair. But Boehner won anyway, cashing in on favors he had accumulated by virtue of his status as a prodigious young fundraiser.
At freshman orientation following the 1994 midterms, Boehner, now a four-year veteran of the House, sat with three incoming members—Burr, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Tom Latham of Iowa—and discovered they had much in common. The four would become inseparable. “There’s a very small cadre of things that makes John Boehner like you,” Burr says. “We all liked red wine. At the time most of us used tobacco products. … John had his, let’s say, peculiarities about him. He was not shy to be critical of one’s hair or one’s dress if in fact he found it to be outside of what he perceived to be appropriate or the norm. And I think we were the only three people that were willing to put up with his crap. So, we became his best friends.”
Boehner’s fastidiousness would become legendary among colleagues. Friends say he would iron virtually every piece of clothing—shirts, undershirts, boxer shorts, pants, suit jackets, ties. Patrick McHenry, currently the chief deputy whip, recalls how, on his first day in Congress in 2005, Boehner walked into the cloakroom and spotted him eating an ice cream sandwich. They had never met. Boehner lit a cigarette and scowled at him. “Don’t do that,” he said, pointing to the frozen snack. “Why?” McHenry replied. “You’re gonna be a fatass,” Boehner told him.
BOEHNER ON ... THE HOUSE FREEDOM CAUCUS
“They can’t tell you what they’re for. They can tell you everything they’re against. They’re anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over. That’s where their mindset is.”
This is Boehner’s way of showing affection; after he calls me “shithead” for the umpteenth time on the golf course, his buddy Dick leans over. “You know that means he likes you, right?” (His buddies have the same towel-snapping style. At one point, I hit a low, screaming drive. “You know what your problem is?” Fuzzy Zoeller asks me. “L.O.F.T.” I nod, saying I should tee my ball higher. “No,” he shakes his head. “Lack of fucking talent.” Boehner howls with approval.)
Having watched Gingrich stalk the halls of Congress, rarely making eye contact with colleagues—much less greeting them—Boehner knew he needed to engage members while still being himself. “You grow up in a bar and you learn to mix it up with people,” Boehner says. “It was a way of building relationships, as goofy as it sounds. And if you’ve got a relationship with people, you’ve got a chance to move them.”
Those relationships failed to save him from what looked like a political death sentence.
***
The year 1994 didn’t just usher in new leadership to the House and the GOP; it marked a profound shift in Washington’s partisan relations. Gingrich, a master messenger with a zero-sum approach to ideological warfare, perfected the art of launching poll-tested attacks on Democrats as “radicals” who threatened liberty. With a penchant for turning personal disagreement into political Armageddon, Gingrich weaponized the speakership as never before.
“The beginning of the scorched-earth policy really began with Gingrich winning in the mid-’90s, the Gingrich revolution, and the enormous pressure put on moderate Republicans to walk away from anything remotely approaching a compromise,” says former Vice President Joe Biden, who was then a senator from Delaware.
Another change, one that would later inform some of the opposition to Boehner’s speakership, was the consolidation of power at the expense of committee chairmen and rank-and-file members. “Gingrich basically created a process where the speaker was the epicenter of the House,” says Joshua Huder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute.
To play golf with John Boehner is to learn there are unwritten rules governing the use of the word Boner. When spoken by his close friends—“Thatta boy, Boner!”—it’s almost always to congratulate him on a good shot. When the former U.S. House speaker uses it—“Aww, Jee-sus, Boner!”—it’s almost always to rebuke himself for a bad one. Today he is saying it with ruinous frequency.
We’re on Boehner’s home course, the Wetherington Golf and Country Club, on a Monday afternoon in early June. Tucked away in West Chester, Ohio—an affluent enclave of suburban Cincinnati, part of his old district—the club is hosting a charity fundraiser, dubbed the “Boehner Classic,” benefiting a nearby Boys & Girls Club. The former speaker is one of two star attractions; the other is his friend, the professional golfer Fuzzy Zoeller, a character known more for his off-color jokes than his two major championships. With wealthy donors ponying up to play alongside them—but some of his old buddies also in town—Boehner decides to form a group of nine players, myself and Zoeller included, and creates a team scramble that pits five golfers against the other four.
But something isn’t right with the former speaker’s game. Long considered one of Washington’s finest golfers, he is spraying shots left and right with choppy, self-doubting swings. Sensing my surprise, Boehner says his handicap has skyrocketed since leaving Congress two years ago. After he misses that 10-foot putt, and we climb into our cart, I ask why. “You have to concentrate while you hit the ball,” he tells me. “That’s my biggest problem in golf these days. I just can’t concentrate. I could always concentrate on what I had to do. But these days … ” Boehner pauses for several seconds, then pulls hard on the Camel 99 wedged between his knuckles. “I just can’t concentrate.”
***
To outsiders, Boehner might just be the happiest man alive, a liberated retiree who spends his days swirling merlot and cackling at Speaker Paul Ryan’s misfortune. The truth is more complicated. At 67, Boehner is liberated—to say what he spent many years trying not to say; to smoke his two packs a day without undue stress; to chuckle at the latest crisis in Washington and whisper to himself those three magic words: “Not my problem.” And yet he is struggling—with the lingering perception that he was run out of Congress; with his alarm about the country’s future; and with the question of what he’s supposed to do next. After leaving office, Boehner says a longtime family friend approached him. “You’ve always had a purpose—your business, your family, politics,” the friend said. “What’s your purpose now?” Boehner says the question gnaws at him every day.
Boehner-Secondary1-ByMarkPeterson.jpg
BOEHNER BACK HOME Retired in Ohio, the former speaker spends much of his time these days manicuring his lawn, golfing and fiddling around at his workbench. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine
We met three times over the summer, his most candid and revealing series of interviews since a third attempted coup on his speakership led him to say to hell with it and retire early. The first interview was in June at Wetherington; the second in July at Burning Tree Club, a private, all-male establishment in Bethesda, Maryland; the third in September following a joint fundraiser with Ryan at the Bengals vs. Packers game in Green Bay, Wisconsin. In the whole of our conversations, he asked only five or six times for something to remain off the record. In those instances, I agreed. Everything else was fair game—and he did not disappoint. From his text messages with George W. Bush, to his scathing critiques of conservative media and his former antagonists on Capitol Hill, to his disgust at America’s being stuck with a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the former speaker held little back.
What I discovered from 18 hours on the record with him, and dozens more with his friends, is that for all the talk of Boehner living the dream in retirement—mowing and manicuring his lawn, fiddling around at his workbench, spending time with his grandson—he is lacking a certain peace. It’s the type of tranquility that accompanies the knowledge that your life’s work won’t be remembered as a failure; that the party and the institution you gave everything to aren’t collapsing because of mistakes you might have made.
Boehner is a fascinating and paradoxical figure in his own right. He was the brilliant salesman who couldn’t get his own members to buy. The back-slapping creature of K Street who never took a single earmark. The gruff chain-smoker who weeps at the mere mention of schoolchildren. The Midwestern everyman who won’t be seen in public without a clean shave and an ironed shirt. The bartender’s son who became speaker of the House.
But the story of Boehner’s 25 years in Washington is also the story of the Republican Party, the Congress and American politics in the post-Ronald Reagan era: an account of corruption and crusading, enormous promises and underwhelming results, growing ideological polarization and declining faith in government. The same centrifugal forces that made Boehner’s job impossible have bedeviled his successor, Ryan, and kept the GOP majorities in Congress from passing any landmark legislation in 2017. Now, as the revolutionary fervor that swept Boehner into the speakership degenerates into a fratricidal conflict centered around Trump, the former speaker’s frontline view of the Republican civil war is essential to understanding what went wrong.
***
On the eve of his golf outing, I find myself on Boehner’s back patio. He’s hosting a barbecue for friends who came to Ohio for the fundraiser, and we get acquainted as Boehner works several outdoor grills, Camel in his left hand and tongs in his right. Among others seated around the table, sipping Maker’s Mark 46 from blue plastic cups and smoking cigars, are Dick, who owns a winter home near Boehner’s on Florida’s Marco Island; Ed, who also spends winters on Marco Island but still runs a business out of western Ohio; and Mick, the longtime chief of staff in Boehner’s personal office who lives nearby. All three promise that I’m in for a treat. They aren’t lying: Boehner has prepared a feast of teriyaki-marinated flank steaks, his specialty; chunks of seared beef tenderloin; grilled chicken breasts; a salad of avocado, tomatoes and fresh mozzarella; au gratin potatoes; a sweet corn skillet; and baked crescent rolls. As we eat, someone jokes that the only thing missing are hot dogs. Boehner looks up from his plate. “I’ve never had a hot dog for dinner in my life,” he says, stone-faced.
After we eat, Boehner sits across from me, reaches for a lighter and indicates he’s ready to talk. Boehner smokes two packs a day and has a habit of pinching off the smoldering end of his cigarette, rolling the butt into a ball and shoving it into his pocket. (On the back nine a day later, Boehner stops at a receptacle and scoops from his pocket some two dozen smoke-stained balls.) Of his 11 siblings, one has passed away. It was lung cancer. Boehner says this doesn’t concern him—“If I was going to die from smoking cigarettes, I’d already be dead”—but I notice that his laughs, which come often and easy, are almost always accompanied by coughs. Ah-heh. Ah-heh.
Breaking the ice, I mention some news of the day—that Trey Gowdy appears likely to become chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The previous chairman, Jason Chaffetz, had abruptly announced his resignation from Congress; House conservatives had hoped that Jim Jordan, a senior member on the committee, might pursue the chairmanship. Boehner grins. “Gowdy—that’s my guy, even though he doesn’t know how to dress,” he says. Then Boehner leans back in his chair. “Fuck Jordan. Fuck Chaffetz. They’re both assholes.”
And away we go.
Boehner-Secondary10-ByMarkPeterson.jpg
Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine
Boehner’s beef with Chaffetz, who would later join Fox News as a paid contributor, is not personal—just that he’s a “total phony” who possessed legislative talent but focused mostly on self-promotion. “With Chaffetz,” Boehner says, “it’s always about Chaffetz.”
His problems with Jordan, the founding chairman of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, run much deeper. To Boehner and his allies, Jordan was the antagonist in the story of his speakership—an embodiment of the brinkmanship and betrayal that roiled the House Republican majority and made Boehner’s life miserable. Although he would tell me in later conversations that he holds no grudges against anyone, today Boehner unloads on his fellow Ohioan. “Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate,” Boehner says. “A terrorist. A legislative terrorist.”
If he sounds exasperated, it’s because this is the central irony of his career: A quarter-century before the conservative insurgency stormed Washington and derailed his speakership, John Boehner was the conservative insurgency.
***
ACT I
Boehner’s pursuit of national office was his first rebellion against the establishment.
When the news broke in 1989 that Ohio Congressman Donald “Buz” Lukens, a Republican, had paid a 16-year-old for sex—and was trying to get her mother a government job—the party bosses tried pushing him out. Lukens wouldn’t budge. So they coalesced around a challenger: former GOP Congressman Tom Kindness, who had held the seat prior to Lukens. Months went by before Boehner, a state representative who had made himself wealthy selling corrugated boxes and injection-molded plastics, jumped into the race—much to the displeasure of party leaders. Boehner didn’t have insider connections or family favors to cash in; one of a dozen kids who grew up in a two-bedroom home and cleaned floors in his father’s shot-and-a-beer saloon, he worked as a janitor to pay for college and first took elected office as a township trustee before later winning a statehouse seat.
Armed with little name recognition and even less support, Boehner poured his own money into the race—nearly emptying his family’s bank account by spending $150,000 on the campaign. “It was too much money,” Debbie Boehner, his wife, tells me. Her husband nods. “I put it all on the line.” Money wasn’t Boehner’s problem; it was his name. Almost everyone in the district pronounced it Boner. “Think about this,” Mick tells me on the patio, laughing so hard he can barely finish. “You had a guy named Kindness running against a guy named Boner.” Defying expectations, Boehner won the primary and gained the party’s support. That included help from Paul Ryan, a local college Republican who volunteered that fall. “I didn’t know him,” Ryan says. “I thought his name was Boner.”
BOEHNER ON ... CONGRESS
“We’ve got some of the smartest people in America who serve in the Congress, and we’ve got some of the dumbest. We have some of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet, and some that are Nazis. Congress is nothing more than a slice of America.”
By then, the Democrats’ post-Watergate zeal for reform had long since faded, and the House was widely seen as the oozing center of the Washington swamp—an out-of-control legislative slum that invited malfeasance and vice. It was against this backdrop that Boehner, a newcomer, made it his mission to clean up Congress. “He indicated he wanted to be very aggressive and very much involved in reform efforts, and he brought a lot of energy to it,” Newt Gingrich, who was then the second-ranking House Republican, remembers of the freshman lawmaker.
Almost from the day he arrived on Capitol Hill in January 1991, Boehner found himself arguing with employees of the House Bank—a financial institution for members of Congress only—who explained that his paycheck could be deposited only with them. These rules vexed the rookie legislator. Months later, he spotted a statistic from the Government Accountability Office audit of the House Bank: more than 8,000 of its checks had bounced. “They needed all of us to keep our money in those accounts so they could have a big enough float to keep the bank alive,” Boehner recalls. After discussing this realization with six of his fellow freshman Republicans, they agreed to expose the rot. As they did so, in the form of a privileged resolution, Boehner tells me, Speaker Tom Foley and Majority Leader Dick Gephardt—both Democrats—approached him on the House floor, as did Bob Michel, the Republican minority leader. “All three of them said essentially the same thing,” Boehner remembers. “‘We didn’t do anything wrong, and we won’t do it again.’” As Boehner and Co. dug deeper, probing the bank’s finances and pushing for the disclosure of members whose accounts were overdrawn, they earned a nickname: the Gang of Seven. Less than a year into his first term, as Americans seethed over the improprieties exposed by these freshman renegades—with Democrats, the majority party, shouldering the blame—the House Bank was closed. And Boehner’s star was born.
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The Gang’s work wasn’t finished. Over the next several years they turned their attention to other targets, including the scandal-plagued House Post Office, leading to the indictment and imprisonment of House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, a powerful Illinois Democrat. Sensing an opportunity to seize Washington’s moral high ground and win back the House after 40 years in the minority—President Bill Clinton’s own troubles would be icing on the cake—Gingrich enlisted Boehner to help draft the “Contract with America,” a list of promises to voters.
As he helped guide the party’s midterm strategy, Boehner’s high-profile role made him a hero to reform-minded conservatives seeking office across the country in part of what would later be dubbed the “Republican Revolution” of 1994. Richard Burr, who today is the senior senator from North Carolina, was campaigning for a House seat that year and remembers hearing about Boehner. “I think John was probably the first one that actually intended to drain the swamp. He was a radical,” Burr says. “The closest example would be a Freedom Caucus guy today.” Jordan, running his first race for the statehouse that year, recalls fawning over his future nemesis. “Here’s a guy who’s fighting to clean things up in Washington.”
Boehner-Secondary4-ByMarkPeterson.jpg
BOEHNER MEMORABILIA Some of the Congress-themed knick-knacks in the former speaker’s home. | Mark Peterson for Politico Magazine
Republicans won the majority, and Boehner, leveraging his newfound celebrity, ran for the No. 4 spot in House leadership: conference chairman. Gingrich had become speaker with Michel’s retirement, and he had a different person in mind for conference chair. But Boehner won anyway, cashing in on favors he had accumulated by virtue of his status as a prodigious young fundraiser.
At freshman orientation following the 1994 midterms, Boehner, now a four-year veteran of the House, sat with three incoming members—Burr, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Tom Latham of Iowa—and discovered they had much in common. The four would become inseparable. “There’s a very small cadre of things that makes John Boehner like you,” Burr says. “We all liked red wine. At the time most of us used tobacco products. … John had his, let’s say, peculiarities about him. He was not shy to be critical of one’s hair or one’s dress if in fact he found it to be outside of what he perceived to be appropriate or the norm. And I think we were the only three people that were willing to put up with his crap. So, we became his best friends.”
Boehner’s fastidiousness would become legendary among colleagues. Friends say he would iron virtually every piece of clothing—shirts, undershirts, boxer shorts, pants, suit jackets, ties. Patrick McHenry, currently the chief deputy whip, recalls how, on his first day in Congress in 2005, Boehner walked into the cloakroom and spotted him eating an ice cream sandwich. They had never met. Boehner lit a cigarette and scowled at him. “Don’t do that,” he said, pointing to the frozen snack. “Why?” McHenry replied. “You’re gonna be a fatass,” Boehner told him.
BOEHNER ON ... THE HOUSE FREEDOM CAUCUS
“They can’t tell you what they’re for. They can tell you everything they’re against. They’re anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over. That’s where their mindset is.”
This is Boehner’s way of showing affection; after he calls me “shithead” for the umpteenth time on the golf course, his buddy Dick leans over. “You know that means he likes you, right?” (His buddies have the same towel-snapping style. At one point, I hit a low, screaming drive. “You know what your problem is?” Fuzzy Zoeller asks me. “L.O.F.T.” I nod, saying I should tee my ball higher. “No,” he shakes his head. “Lack of fucking talent.” Boehner howls with approval.)
Having watched Gingrich stalk the halls of Congress, rarely making eye contact with colleagues—much less greeting them—Boehner knew he needed to engage members while still being himself. “You grow up in a bar and you learn to mix it up with people,” Boehner says. “It was a way of building relationships, as goofy as it sounds. And if you’ve got a relationship with people, you’ve got a chance to move them.”
Those relationships failed to save him from what looked like a political death sentence.
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The year 1994 didn’t just usher in new leadership to the House and the GOP; it marked a profound shift in Washington’s partisan relations. Gingrich, a master messenger with a zero-sum approach to ideological warfare, perfected the art of launching poll-tested attacks on Democrats as “radicals” who threatened liberty. With a penchant for turning personal disagreement into political Armageddon, Gingrich weaponized the speakership as never before.
“The beginning of the scorched-earth policy really began with Gingrich winning in the mid-’90s, the Gingrich revolution, and the enormous pressure put on moderate Republicans to walk away from anything remotely approaching a compromise,” says former Vice President Joe Biden, who was then a senator from Delaware.
Another change, one that would later inform some of the opposition to Boehner’s speakership, was the consolidation of power at the expense of committee chairmen and rank-and-file members. “Gingrich basically created a process where the speaker was the epicenter of the House,” says Joshua Huder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute.
I always thought the other you was smarter than this clown....... My bad.....