Sex Scandal Shakes Up Washington

On Capitol Hill, they were whispering that Washington's sex scandal had the makings of a congressional Watergate. It was hardly that important, but one could find some major similarities. There were incriminating secret tapes, this time recording the libidinous affairs of legislators. A mighty politician was certain to lose the power that he had wielded so arrogantly, and others were likely to cut short their careers. Additional Congressmen and Senators wondered anxiously whether they would be named in the expanding investigation. And again, there were worries of a possible coverup, for potential witnesses knew that if they told all, they would risk losing their congressional jobs.

In a capital where sex is easily available, indiscretions are winked at and power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, the big question was whether a number of Congressmen had put pliant young women on their payrolls purely (or impurely) for personal pleasure. Mere hanky-panky would hardly be criminal, but disclosures of it would be poison at the polls. Worse, sex at taxpayers' expense can lead to charges of fraud.

Election Fears. These were the reverberations from the confession of Elizabeth Ray, 33, a comely if shopworn blonde, that she had been employed as a $14,000-a-year congressional committee clerk by Wayne Hays; the Ohio Democrat, for the sole purpose of being one of his sexual playmates. Hays, 65, and apparently insatiable, admitted the relationship but protested unpersuasively that Ray had done other work too. Few of the many men who had encountered Liz during her four years on Capitol Hill knew of any talents beyond the bedroom. Congressional Democrats pressed for Hays to resign his committee chairmanships, and even the reputation of House Speaker Carl Albert was at stake. Orgies were reported to have taken place in a Capitol Hill office assigned to Albert.

At week's end the beleaguered Albert announced that he will quit at the end of his present term. "During my early years in the House, I decided I should not serve beyond my 70th year," said Albert, 68. "That is long enough."

Top Democrats were alarmed that the sex scandal might hurt their party's congressional candidates in November. Liz had worked for three Congressmen since 1972, all Democrats: Hays, South Carolina's Mendel Davis and Illinois' Kenneth Gray (who retired in 1974). Moreover, Hays is one of the most powerful of Democrats, a man who has signed all the checks flowing to his party's candidates from his Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Said one Republican congressional leader: "I'm not going to help them solve this."

Democrats were hoping that Ray had been sexually bipartisan. Though she did seem to favor the majority party, it was widely reported that one of the Senators with whom she was involved was a prominent Republican. But the Chicago Tribune's sensational report last week that she had tapes of her liaisons with 13 Congressmen and two Senators--recorded on a voice-activated machine secreted under her well-used bed--was incorrect.

She did have some tapes, though there was dispute over whether they were merely her own recollections, or included her partners' voices. Says a congressional source: "No doubt about it, she's been making tapes. She's been telephoning Senators and Congressmen and asking them, 'Honey, do you remember that night when ... ?'" Whatever they said went into her recorders. It's enough to give a public servant cardiac arrest." It was also enough to prompt a number of legislators to deny having ever had anything to do with Ray. "Nonsense, sheer and utter nonsense," said Hubert Humphrey to rumors linking him to her.

Ray was enjoying her long-sought celebrity. She had come a long way from Marshall, N.C., where her mother still lives in a rickety trailer. No longer was she merely the Southern girl who had lost the Miss Asheville contest, then got her nose bobbed and failed to make an acting career in Hollywood. Last week the whir of TV cameras and the pop of flashbulbs echoed in her tacky apartment in Arlington, Va. She was not the second Marilyn Monroe that she had yearned to become, but at least she was guided and comforted by her agent, her psychiatrist, her lawyer and her nurse.

Indignantly she turned down an offer of $25,000 to bare all for Hustler, but before the headlines inflated her price, she had posed, full frontal, for the September Playboy (fee: $250). She gave TV interviews with promiscuous delight, and under a federal grant of immunity from prosecution, she was singing like a mockingbird to the FBI, which was investigating Wayne Hays to see if there was any fraud against the Government.

She has plenty to tell. A former assistant to Hays recalls that when Liz Ray started working in the Congressman's office in the spring of 1974, she was a disaster: unable to type twelve words a minute, forgetting the names of callers, snapping at people. Soon she was eased out of formal duties--but not off the payroll. After that, her contacts with the office were mostly private phone calls to Hays; they were wild, frequent, and insulting to the staff. Typically, she would bark: "Let me talk to him!" The staff knew that the calls were to get the same priority as calls from Henry Kissinger.

Hidden Recorder. About the only time that Liz would show up at the office, according to the former assistant, would be for official receptions. In flashy tight clothes that played up her bosom, she flung herself toward photographers, urging Hays to get her pictured with Congressmen or celebrities. A former Hays staffer says she liked to pose "with lots of suggestion of mouth action." Once, Hays snapped at her: "For Christ's sake, you've been in enough pictures!"

Because Hays was carrying on with his Ohio-based secretary, Pat Peak, whom he visited weekly and finally married last April, many of his staffers did not figure that he was also dallying with Liz. They simply concluded that he was passing her round to his friends in Congress in return for political favors. Yet Hays did not try to give the impression that he was celibate when in the capital. Most mornings, a former aide says, he would brag to his staff of his purported conquests of the night before.

Two years ago, a couple of reporters on Columnist Jack Anderson's staff encountered Liz while investigating the affairs of Hays and his close friend, Congressman Gray. Liz, then working for Gray, phoned one of the reporters, Bob Owens, to arrange a meeting in the National Gallery of Art. At that rendezvous, she carried a hidden tape recorder. On it she recorded Owens asking her to open up Gray's confidential files to him. Later, Anderson said he considered Owens' request to have been improper. But the tape also contains a soft pass from Liz to Owens. Said she: "You know, you're kind of cute. If you weren't a spy, I might go out with you."

In a draft of her forthcoming "novel" (see box next page), Ray tells a similar story. In her account, she sicced Anderson onto a Congressman because she was mad at him for exploiting her. Remorseful, she confessed to the Congressman. Instead of being enraged, he saw this as a way of trapping Anderson. He set Liz up with the recorder, got her to entice the newsman into making compromising statements, then played them back to Anderson. At least in the draft of the book, Anderson called off his investigators. The real Anderson story played out differently: he wrote several items criticizing Gray.

Changing the Lock. In the swirl of last week's scandal, Wayne Hays was struggling to hold on to his chairmanships. Besides the Congressional Democratic Campaign Committee, he also heads the supremely important House Administration Committee. He has used that power to control pay raises for all congressional staff members and Congressmen's allowances for travel, telephone, postage and other items.

Speaker Carl Albert summoned Hays last Wednesday to discuss the chairman's future. "I will handle this," Albert had told party lieutenants. But Albert was in an awkward position. The Speaker himself had often been seen accompanying young women around town. Moreover, his home district back in Oklahoma was in an uproar over TIME'S story (June 7) about reports that Liz Ray and other women had participated in orgies in the "Board of Education," a Capitol hideaway assigned to Albert. Said Albert: "If that's true, I've never heard of it, and I don't believe it."

Late last week, in the midst of an interview with TIME Correspondent Neil MacNeil, Albert summoned a top aide, asked who had keys to the room, and ordered the lock changed. As for his own activities, Albert said: "Me? I haven't been to bed with a girl this year. I'm 68 years old." The following day, Albert had a statement delivered to newsmen announcing his "irreversible" decision to step down after 30 years in Congress and six as Speaker.

In the meeting between Hays and Albert, Hays said that he was working on a plan to resolve his problems until he could "vindicate" himself. He gave no details, but Albert went along. Said the Speaker: "As long as you're doing that, that's fine." Moreover, Albert said that he would advocate no action against Hays by the House Democratic caucus so as not to "prejudice" the case.

Albert's meek stand did not satisfy most Democratic Representatives. Indignant that the honor of Congress had been impugned, worried by waves of quizzical and critical mail pouring in from voters back home, they implored Majority Leader Thomas "Tip" O'Neill of Massachusetts to get Hays to resign his chairmanships. O'Neill is the No. 2 man to Albert and the odds-on choice to become the new Speaker next January now that Albert has decided to retire. An implacable enemy of Hays, O'Neill summoned the Congressman to his private office. There Hays tried to brazen it out: "I have nothing to hide. She [Ray] was an employee who did her work."

Hays offered a deal: he would temporarily leave the chairmanship of the House Administration Committee, but only if he would be succeeded by his close ally, Pennsylvania's John Dent. He would definitely not surrender the job to the committee's most senior member besides himself, New Jersey's Frank Thompson, who has long refused to be bullied by Hays. But O'Neill turned down the deal. Said he: "No way can I buy that. The House won't buy it. You have got to step aside."

He went on to warn Hays that unless he quit both major chairmanships --of the Administration and Democratic Congressional Campaign committees --he would be bounced out of them by an open vote of the party caucus. Hays' final words: "I'll think about it."

Next day, Hays made a statement at a press conference where no questions were allowed. He said that he would temporarily leave the campaign funding committee because he did not want "to have my name on a check which might be used as a campaign issue against any Democratic candidate." But he would delay until this week a decision on his greater power base, the House Administration Committee. If Hays refused to quit, the House Democratic caucus was prepared to vote on the matter on June 16.

At last week's end a weary but determined Tip O'Neill said: "This guy has got to be removed. He either goes on his own or he goes by a vote. I'm trying to protect this House." Indeed, as the FBI investigation went on and Liz Ray kept on talking behind closed doors, nobody knew how many more Congressmen--and their women--might be drawn into the swirl.

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