Adele Ferguson

I FIRST BEGAN writing about Tom Foley in 1975 when “Scoop” Jackson was running for president and U.S. Rep. Foley was urged to be his replacement in the Senate should Jackson win.

It wasn’t Foley doing the promoting. He loved the House and he loved being chair of the Agriculture Committee which endeared him to his farm country constituents. He early betrayed a patrician streak by using taxpayer funds to buy $2,295.40 of Lenox China for use at coffee breaks because he balked at drinking from chipped Navy issue china. He also was so liked by the Democratic party. It made him chair of the House Democratic caucus, the first man in the history of Congress to be allowed to serve as caucus and a committee chair at the same time.

The reason. state Democratic chair Neale Chaney told me, “is because he’s so damn personable. He’s just a heckuva nice guy. Besides, his votes aren’t all that bad. Even when he does something that should be frowned on by the Republicans, he does it with such style and class he keeps the R’s with him.”

WHEN JACKSON DIED and Dan Evans was named his successor and had to run that fall to keep the seat, Mike Lowry was his Democrat opponent. I wrote that Tom Foley was the only Democrat who could beat Evans. He was tall, dark and handsome like Evans, smart and articulate like Evans, had years of majority in the House where he was whip and would have carried all of eastern Washington. He also didn’t carry the baggage of being anti-defense like Lowry who looked like Yasser Arafat and had the nervous habit of laughing at the wrong time.

But Foley, in line to become the next Speaker, said, “I am a man of the House.”

As Speaker, he handled the flap over hints that he was gay with sensitivity. He denied it but without an undue passion or anger that might have offended friends and acquaintances who were gay and still in the closet. “The issue is closed,” he said.

He married Heather, who became his unpaid chief of staff, and the two proved they were no cheapskates. They had the Speaker’s office merged with a hallway to form a suite and added his own shower room. A wall was built across the public room of the House restaurant to create a second speaker’s dining room which was redecorated with padded walls of blue sheen and $40,000 in new carpeting.

His staff was given a new suite of offices, complete with a full kitchen. He even bought a $72,500 Oriental rug for the Rayburn Room without consulting overseers of spending. He survived the scandal of the House bank loaning money to members who overspent their paychecks and members, including himself, who ran unpaid House restaurant tabs. He survived columnist David Broder labeling him “part of the problem, not the solution” in the glacier-like movement of campaign financing reform.

Oh, I almost forgot. When his first budget was drafted after his election as Speaker in 1989, there was an Air Force One plane in it for use of the Speaker but when word of that got out people were so angry it was eliminated.

Why was he defeated? He committed the greatest sin of his political career when he led the lawsuit that struck down Washington’s term limits law for members of Congress. A people-passed law. When he died last week I noted in news stories and columns about him, the constant use in descriptions of him by peers, even some enemies, were the words “deliberate, thoughtful, fair minded, brainy, articulate, pragmatic, intelligent, honest, humorous.” I wouldn’t argue with a one.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville. Wa., 98349.)