Hastert Moves Into History Books as House Speaker

VPM | By David Greene

Published June 1, 2006 at 8:00 PM EDT

Updated July 6, 2023

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I’m Robert Siegel.

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

And I’m Melissa Block.

Today marks a milestone for the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. As of today, Dennis Hastert has served longer than any Republican speaker in history. Still, many Americans aren’t sure who he is. Hastert has long preferred to operate out of the public eye in Washington, leaving the headlines to others. But that may no longer be possible, given recent clashes with the White House, the coming departure of this longtime legislative partner, Tom DeLay, and a tough election coming in November.

NPR’s David Greene reports.

DAVID GREENE reporting:

Few politicians are proud to be described as anonymous, but go to Denny Hastert’s official website, at the top right corner, it says, who is the speaker. Then it displays this quote from the Washington Post’s David Broder – “The most powerful Republican outside the White House is also the most anonymous. Few seem to notice the existence, let alone the large and growing influence of House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert.”

President GEORGE W. BUSH: The best words that I’ve recently heard were these, Denny Hastert is running for office again.

GREENE: That was President Bush on a visit to Hastert’s Illinois district last year. Hastert had decided with some nudging from the White House to run for an 11th term. The president in his first term welcomed Hastert’s service as a loyal caretaker of the administration’s agenda.

Time and time again he carried water for the White House with no sign of an agenda of his own. In November, he took to the floor in a late night debate and defended cuts to Medicaid and other popular domestic programs in the face of Democratic taunts.

Representative DENNIS HASTERT (Republican, Illinois): We could leave our children with a deficit, leave our children with a deficit, and you’re right, you are right. Stand up and clap, because we will leave our children, can I have some order –

GREENE: Hastert was a high school wrestling coach and at 64 he still looks like he’d be happier wearing a sweatshirt and a whistle. Dick Cheney once joked that when he gets together with Hastert, it’s hard to contain all that charisma.

The speakership was the first job Hastert was elected to in the House leadership. He got it almost accidentally back in 1998, after the fall of the fiery Newt Gingrich.

Representative NEWT GINGRICH (Republican, Georgia): To the degree I was too brash, too self-confident, or too pushy, I apologize. To whatever degree in any way that I brought controversy or inappropriate attention to the House, I apologize.

GREENE: With Gingrich gone, the leading Republican figure was Tom DeLay, the House Whip, also known for his hard charging ways. But DeLay stepped aside and promoted his deputy, Denny Hastert. The Republican Gingrich had been highly ambitious, challenging President Bill Clinton for preeminence in the Capitol.

Previous Democratic speakers, like Jim Wright and Tip O’Neill, also cast themselves as counterweights to the President. O’Neill became a kind of sparring partner for President Ronald Reagan and when O’Neill finally retired in 1986, he had this to say to Reagan on the phone –

Representative TIP O’NEILL (Democrat, Massachusetts): Mr. President, how are you? Well, I’ll tell you, we drew down the curtain, I’m walking off the stage, and it’s nice to go to the applause of some of your friends on both sides of the aisle and particularly I want to say thank you to you for helping making me a very important man in the eyes of the American people.

GREENE: Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institutio, said the most memorable speakers, like Democrat Sam Rayburn, the longest serving of all, have been champions for their branch of government.

Mr. THOMAS MANN (Brookings Institution): They asserted Congress’s independence and they became somewhat larger than life. Hastert has – by assuming the role of President Bush’s lieutenant – has abdicated that institutional position and as a consequence, I think the institution has been diminished and its leader has been diminished as well.

GREENE: Indeed, Hastert has mostly been a bystander as the Bush White House has stretched the power of the Executive Branch. That’s why it took many by surprise last week when Hastert got furious over an FBI search of the office of a Democratic Congressman, William Jefferson. The speaker was even hotter after ABC News suggested he was himself under scrutiny. A suggestion he perceived as a warning shot from within the administration.

Representative HASTERT: You know, this is one of the leaks that come out to try to, you know, intimidate people and we’re just not going to be intimidated.

GREENE: Hastert has also openly disagreed with the President on social security and immigration and criticized Mr. Bush’s decision to replace CIA Director Porter Goss. But it took the FBI search and the rage of his rank and file over their prerogatives to push Hastert over the line and into a new visibility in national affairs, whether he likes it or not.

David Greene, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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David Greene

David Greene is an award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author. He is a host of NPR's Morning Edition, the most listened-to radio news program in the United States, and also of NPR's popular morning news podcast, Up First.

Prior to taking on his current role in 2012, Greene was an NPR foreign correspondent based in Moscow covering the region from Ukraine and the Baltics east to Siberia. During that time he brought listeners stories as wide-ranging as Chernobyl 25 years later and Beatles-singing Russian Babushkas. He wrote the best-selling book Midnight in Siberia, capturing Russian life on a journey across the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Greene later won an Edward R. Murrow Award for his interview with two young men badly beaten by authorities in the Russian republic of Chechnya as part of a campaign to target gay men. Greene also spent a month in Libya reporting riveting stories in the most difficult of circumstances as NATO bombs fell on Tripoli. He was honored with the 2011 Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize from WBUR and Boston University for that coverage of the Arab Spring.

Greene's voice became familiar to NPR listeners from his four years covering the White House. To report on former President George W. Bush's second term, he spent hours in NPR's spacious booth in the basement of the West Wing (it's about the size of your average broom closet). He also spent time trekking across five continents, reporting on White House visits to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Rwanda, Uruguay – and, of course, Crawford, Texas.

During the days following Hurricane Katrina, Greene was aboard Air Force One when President Bush flew low over the Gulf Coast and caught his first glimpse of the storm's destruction. On the ground in New Orleans, Greene brought listeners a moving interview with the late Ethel Williams, a then-74-year-old flood victim who got an unexpected visit from the president.

Greene was an integral part of NPR's coverage of the historic 2008 election, reporting on Hillary Clinton's campaign from start to finish, and also focusing on how racial attitudes were playing into voters' decisions. The White House Correspondents' Association took special note of Greene's report on a speech by then-candidate Barack Obama addressing the nation's racial divide. Greene was given the Association's 2008 Merriman Smith Award for deadline coverage of the presidency.

After President Obama took office, Greene kept one eye trained on the White House and the other eye on the road. He spent three months driving across America – with a recorder, camera, and lots of caffeine – to learn how the recession was touching Americans during President Obama's first 100 days in office. The series was called "100 Days: On the Road in Troubled Times."

Before joining NPR in 2005, Greene spent nearly seven years as a newspaper reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He covered the White House during the Bush administration's first term and wrote about an array of other topics for the paper, including why Oklahomans love the sport of cockfighting, why two Amish men in Pennsylvania were caught trafficking methamphetamine, and how one woman brought Christmas back to a small town in Maryland.

Before graduating magna cum laude from Harvard in 1998 with a degree in government, Greene worked as the senior editor on the Harvard Crimson. In 2004, he was named co-volunteer of the year for Coaching for College, a Washington, DC, program offering tutoring to inner-city youth. He lives in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, with his wife, Rose Previte, a restauranteur.

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