Wright Fights Back

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Many observers trace Wright's messy financial dealings to his divorce from his wife of 30 years, Mary, and his marriage to his former aide in 1972. Wright, who calls his stylish wife a "financial whiz" and is like a schoolboy when he has her on his arm, was broke in the 1960s. But in the '70s he began to care about appearances: he built a wing onto his house in McLean, Va., for entertaining; he donned aviator glasses and better-cut suits; he stopped tinting his hair. In 1981 the Wrights came up with $58,000 in stock to go into business with the Mallicks; Betty kept the job with Mallick she had started in 1979, which came with an apartment and a Cadillac. In 1984 Wright spliced together his collection of speeches, which has earned him about $55,000 in royalties so far.

The window that the Wright investigation opens on the way members of Congress operate may in the end hurt all of them, throwing more light on the fact that gifts -- cash, cars, apartments -- are not automatically illegal, that paid vacations from lobbyists are allowed if the trip is in connection with giving a speech for which the member is also paid an honorarium, and that outside income, with a few exceptions, is allowed. It wasn't until members offered to give up honorariums as ill-disguised bribes in exchange for a pay raise in January that the public became widely aware of their existence.

The public knows enough to want some changes, and the President, who pledged himself to clean up the ethical mess in Washington, unveiled proposals last week that would reform campaign-finance laws, require greater financial disclosures and restrict lobbying by former Government employees. But for the most part he gave Congress a break, passing up the opportunity to ban honorariums or extend conflict-of-interest laws to them.

That standards are relatively low for everyone is not a persuasive defense for Wright. Indeed, enforcement may be on the increase: Wright's main tormentor, minority whip Newt Gingrich, is about to be investigated for a suspicious book deal, and majority whip Tony Coelho was embarrassed by the disclosure of a $100,000 investment in Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bonds.

Congress is often compared to a small town, but it actually operates much more like a small high school, with its cliques, customs, rivalries and need at times to please the teacher. Like the class that squeals on one student who copied his homework to show it can be trusted, Congress may have to sacrifice one of its own to establish that it does have standards. The question many members of Congress may be asking now is whether they really want to be held to those higher standards themselves.