Dennis Hastert held the Speaker’s gavel longer than any Republican in the history of the House, from January 1999 to January 2007. For eight years he stood third in the line of succession, the man who would have become president had the offices above him fallen vacant. He was the amiable Illinois manager of the Republican majority, the coach who kept the conference in line, the figure Washington treated as institutional furniture. What the country learned nearly a decade after he left the Capitol undid that portrait. In 2015 he was indicted for structuring bank withdrawals to hide hush-money payments. He pleaded guilty. At sentencing, the judge called him a serial child molester. He served roughly thirteen months. No Speaker, and no official of comparable constitutional rank in the modern era, has gone to prison.

The conduct that produced those payments was not a late-life lapse. As a high-school wrestling coach in Yorkville, Illinois, in the 1960s and 1970s, Hastert sexually abused boys placed in his charge. On Capitol Hill he was still called Coach more often than Mr. Speaker, a nickname that now reads as an indictment rather than a courtesy. The abuse was old by the time he reached Washington. It was not known to the public. It was known, at minimum, to the victims and to the intermediaries who later moved the money. Whether it was also known to party leadership, to investigators, or to the permanent bureaucracy is a question the public record has never settled. What the record does settle is uglier in its own way: a man with that history sat for eight years a heartbeat from the presidency, and the institution that elevated him asked no questions it did not wish to answer.

The implication does not require a conspiracy to be disturbing. A serial abuser of minors became the longest-serving Republican Speaker in American history, and the country discovered it only after the gavel had long since passed to other hands. The structuring case was a paperwork crime wrapped around an older and fouler one. The sentence was modest. The silence that preceded it was not. Hastert remains the highest-ranking American official to serve a prison term, a distinction that says as much about what Washington is willing not to see as it does about the man who earned it.

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