OCTOBER 7, 2025

By Mary Beth Gahan

In 2002, House Majority Leader Dick Armey was on the fence about allowing American troops to invade Iraq. He’d made his gut instinct known when asked in Iowa about the prospect.

“We Americans don’t make unprovoked attacks against other nations,” he said at the time.

Members of the Bush administration said publicly it was good for Congress to debate the issue. But, behind the scenes, there was a move to sway the high-ranking Republican holdout.

Vice President Dick Cheney pulled Armey into his office for a private chat in late September. Two weeks later, Armey addressed his colleagues on the floor of the House of Representatives.

It was “the most regretful speech I ever gave in my life,” he said as he recalled it 23 years later. “I’m embarrassed about it.”

When Armey arrived at a coffee shop late last month, he apologized on behalf of his wife Susan for his helmet hair and asked that some location details be kept private. Susan worries about his safety and not because he’s an 85-year-old riding a motorcycle throughout north Texas. She has been concerned for years, he said. After a string of political attacks in the U.S., her fear is even higher.

“She has much more anxiety than I do,” he said. “You can't hurt a man who doesn't give a damn.”

During some recollections as we talked, his low, gravelly voice sped up as he got to the punchline — the stories honed over time as he wrote his memoir that was published in 2021.

“That's a damn good story and that was a damn good life. When you can say that to yourself…” he trailed off with a smile.

If local residents have read it, it’s not because it’s on the shelf at the Denton, Lewisville, or Flower Mound Library.

None of the patrons of the coffee shop seemed to know the older gentleman sitting near them had been in the room with multiple presidents and for eight years, oversaw nearly every piece of legislation that came to the House floor.

Armey is used to the anonymity. It’s what got him to Washington. And once there, being a self-described “wall slider” served him well in a city teeming with people shoving each other for the spotlight. Now he looks back on his time with satisfaction. And when he speaks with affection about those he worked with, the names he drops usually aren’t from the Republican Party.

In 1983, Tom Vandergriff was in his first term as congressman representing Texas’s 26th District. A headline in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in August that year ran with the headline, “Vandergriff considered to be hard to beat in ’84.”

The article mentioned one potential challenger: “a largely unknown economics professor at North Texas State University.”

Armey was growing tired of the academic scene. He loved teaching students at what is now the University of North Texas, but he didn’t get along easily with other professors since he was known as openly free-market and a conservative.

“It was the dawning of this wokeness thing” on campuses, he added.

He’d recently switched to a different direction in economics called theory of public choice. And C-SPAN, a new channel that broadcast proceedings from the House and Senate floor, de-mystified Washington for him.

It all culminated in a decision that was made only after he studied the numbers that made up the district. He approached Susan with the idea. She didn’t like it.

“It was a betrayal,” he said. “She took a big hit for that, and our family did too.”

A few days before voters went to the polls, Vandergriff was ahead by just two points. Armey read a statement to the press that included “percent” and “margin of error” and odds that the economist had pored over. He wasn’t surprised, then, when he went to bed on election night in November 1984 knowing he would soon be packing for Washington.

Susan and their five kids stayed in Texas while Armey was in the capital. She got her master's degree and they stayed in touch over the phone. He counted the number of full moons he saw without her.

“It was not easy,” Armey said. “This life is not easy on anybody.”

It may have been a change of scenery for Armey, but he stayed true to his discipline with a desire to “teach economics to Congress.”

The perfect place to start, he thought, was BRAC, or Base Realignment and Closure. He credited Rep. Joe Moakley, a Democrat from south Boston, for helping him with the process of getting legislation through the House. When Moakley asked Armey which base he wanted to shutter, he had no idea. He just wanted to come up with a process that ensured military infrastructure was used in a cost-effective way.

“The only drawback of that was it was thought to be impossible,” he said before he shrugged. “But that's not much of a drawback.”

The endeavor taught him a lot about the legislative process. The bill went through nearly every parliamentary procedure in the House, except for the discharge petition, before it was passed in 1988. The early success had Armey looking to do more of the impossible.

Republicans hadn’t held the majority of the House and Senate since 1955, and the idea of it happening was a pipe dream for the GOP. Then, House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel announced he was retiring after nearly four decades in Congress. The move made room for a younger generation of lawmakers.

“I saw, basically, the old bulls were getting out of the way,” Armey said.

Armey thought a majority was within reach for Republicans. Rep. Newt Gingrich was reluctant after being laughed at for the notion in previous years. But Armey had, once again, studied the numbers.

It was a confidence he showed on a ride back from the White House in October 1993 with Rep. Dick Gephardt, the Democratic House Majority Leader who many expected to be the next Speaker of the House.

“Why did you not put your hat in the ring for the whip position?” Armey recalls Gephardt asking him.

“Dick, I’m running for majority leader,” Armey replied. It garnered a laugh from Gephardt, who told Armey it was “a good line.”

Soon, Armey, Gingrich, and three others made plans to make the majority a reality. The cornerstone was Contract with America, a legislative plan to cut federal taxes, enact welfare reform, and balance the budget. When Republican candidates signed it before the election, they were promising that bills tackling those issues would be taken to the floor of the House, but not guaranteeing they’d vote for them.

Gingrich suggested they put an ad in TV Guide and it have perforated edges so voters could tear it out. The move worked. In November 1994, the GOP picked up 54 seats in the House and eight in the Senate – creating a majority in both chambers. It became known as the Republican Revolution.

When we spoke, the government was on the cusp of the first shutdown since 2018. Armey, with his khaki fishing shirt and no care for how long the interview went on, looked every inch of the retired grandpa he is. But he knew well the hurried discussions that were happening on Capitol Hill.

In 1995, the Republicans wanted to cut federal spending, particularly Medicare. Democrats did not want to touch that program. That led to a stalemate that shut down the government for 21 days.

Armey was in the room for the budget summit that was supposed to be where they’d hash out differences. Armey was there to balance out Gingrich and Vice President Al Gore was there to keep Clinton in his chair. Literally. At one point, Armey remembers Clinton standing up as he got excited about something. Gore pushed him back into his chair with a “Mr. President.”

When a photo from the summit was released to Time Magazine, talks broke down. Gingrich had a profanity-laced phone call with the White House. Sen. Bob Dole, “a crafty little cougar,” laid down the law with Gingrich and planned how to come to a deal.

In the next few years, they’d have welfare reform and a budget surplus. Armey gives Gingrich and Clinton credit for that.

“I was not a big fan of Clinton, that was no secret, but Clinton as president — irrespective of his deviant behavior — was a good president,” Armey said. “He should've been trusted by us more than we did. And I acknowledge that. I acknowledge my personal culpability in that.”

A few days into the current shutdown, Armey texted his thoughts on what was going on.

“Pure political posturing,” he wrote. “Real impact on average citizen is nil.”

By 2001, Armey was working with his fourth president. House Republicans viewed the new vice president still as one of them. They gave Dick Cheney an office on the House side of the Capitol in addition to the one the second in command has on the Senate side by default.

“Dumb thing we did,” Armey said. “Wasted space.”

That office is where Cheney pulled Armey to talk about why going into Iraq was a necessary decision, telling him it was a discussion that was far too secretive to be in public.

“And frankly, I'm sitting here thinking, ‘How can I not believe the guy who is the vice president of the United States, a member of my own party, a person I'd served in Congress with, to my knowledge had never done anything unethical or corrupt in any way? How can I not believe what he's telling me?’”

Cheney’s “really, really scary briefing” on exotic weaponry propelled Armey to stand behind a podium on October 7, 2002 and state to the press that he’d decided to support the invasion of Iraq. A few days later, he voted yes for the resolution authorizing use of military force. He calls that the “biggest mistake I ever made while in office.”

It wasn’t until years later that Armey realized the administration was scared of his dissention.

“When I got my first invitation ever to Camp David by a Bush — neither of them ever liked me one damn minute — I should've thought, ‘Why is he asking me to come to this?’ This is like your neighbor who has never spoken to you for four years and all of a sudden, he invites you to dinner.”

Armey heard theories that the White House was worried about him voting no because they thought it would result in the House voting against the measure to go into Iraq. Again, he studied the numbers. Armey now believes that the House would have passed the resolution, but it might have been rejected in the Senate because some would be able to point to a member of the Republican’s own leadership voting against it.

“Again, I so thoroughly reject as obnoxious and counterproductive the notion of power — powerful this, powerful that, basically powerful B.S. — that I didn't recognize that I was holding a mighty flush hand with the White House. And I should've.”

Armey wrote in his book that he’ll never forgive himself for voting yes for the conflict that led to nearly 4,500 Americans dead. His name is forever recorded as a co-sponsor on the bill, something he doesn’t remember agreeing to be.

It took more than an hour of talking, but Armey eventually became less polished, the stories less practiced as he approached the part he’s still processing. The fallout.

“They lied to me,” he said. “They lied to Colin Powell.”

It’s that second part that bothers Armey most.

In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a speech at the United Nations in which he laid out the plan to invade Iraq and said, over and over again, the words “weapons of mass destruction.” Later, after those weapons were not found, Congress and journalists would point to the speech as evidence that the public was misled. Powell was the one to fall on the sword.

“I didn’t suffer any public humiliation like he did,” he said of the former secretary of state. “How could they do that to another man?”

Armey recently saw the speech replayed on tv.

“It just tears my heart out,” Armey said, sniffling.

He grimaced.

“I never cried over what they did to me.”

His shoulders shook as he lowered his head. It was 10 seconds before he started again.

“As near as I could tell, Colin Powell had been a good and true man. To see him bushwhacked like that,” Armey said, pausing another few seconds to compose himself.

“He deserved better than he got,” Armey said finally.

When Armey left Congress, he interviewed at a law firm in Washington, D.C. He was asked to name his 10 best friends in Congress. To his surprise and theirs, eight of them were Democrats. The interviewers turned the question around and asked who his 10 worst enemies were in Congress.

“The good news was I could only name two people after 18 years in Congress,” Armey said. “They were both Republican.”

Now he’s left all of that behind and has been “fully retired” for years. He’s making up for lost time with his wife and gets to see his 10 grandchildren regularly. He goes fishing every so often and has “a host of motorcycle buddies.”

As recently as last month, he spent the day riding his Honda Gold Wing. His thoughts weren’t on those he served in Congress with or mistakes he made while there. He was thinking of something he’s never gotten over: economics.