Honor in the House: Speaker Tom Foley

In 1964, thirty-five-year-old Tom Foley drove from his home in Spokane to file as a Democrat against eleven-term Republican U.S. House of Representatives incumbent Walt Horan. He blew out a tire on the way and had to hitchhike to a service station to get it repaired. On the outskirts of town he ran out of gas, pushed his car to the top of a hill, and coasted into Olympia. He reached the election office at 4:45 and filed fifteen minutes before the deadline.

"Don't get carried away and think you can beat Walt Horan, " was the sage advice of the state superintendent of elections as Foley handed over his papers. "He's an institution in eastern Washington. He's got a lot of friends, and you're going to find that a lot of those friends are Democrats who will be nice to you, but they'll vote for Walt."

But Thomas S. Foley filed for Washington's Fifth District congressional seat despite conventional wisdom that he could never win. He defied that conventional wisdom by winning in 1964, and continued to take the largely-Republican district for the next thirty years.

During that time Foley rose through Democratic Party ranks until he became the first Westerner to serve as Speaker of the House, the most powerful person in Congress. He served as Speaker from 1989-1995.

In the 1994 campaign, Foley became only the third person in U.S. history to lose an election while serving as Speaker, in a historic election in which Republicans took control of the House for the first time in decades. After Foley served a short stint in a private law firm, President Bill Clinton nominated him to serve as Ambassador to Japan, a selection the Senate unanimously endorsed.

Upon leaving Congress Foley began acollaboration with his former press secretary, Jeffrey Biggs, to record his reminiscences of public life. Thomas S. Foley is a third-person narrative political biography interspersed throughout with Foley's humorous, reflective, and insightful first-person autobiographical reminiscence.