If Gingrich becomes speaker of the House in a Republican sweep next week, he’ll be in a powerful position to promote his beliefs. Even if the Republicans fall short, Gingrich will remain a strong goad for his conservative moral agenda, attacking the welfare state and permissive values. So far, Gingrich has largely escaped intensive scrutiny. But a closer look suggests that his own life story. is sometimes at odds with the values he champions.
Gingrich’s personal life might not be so relevant if he hadn’t used such issues against opponents. When Gingrich ran for Congress in 1978, he suggested that his opponent was a bad parent because she planned, if elected, to commute between Washington and her family. In campaign literature, he featured a smiling picture of his wife, Jackie, and their two daughters. “Newt’s family is like your family,” one flier declared.
Those who were sitting in the pews at the First Baptist Church in Carrollton, Ga., a few years later might have disagreed. Jackie went before the congregation as the marriage was disintegrating and said of Newt, “The Devil has taken his heart,” according to Mel Steely, a Gingrich friend and biographer. The 20-year relationship had begun when Gingrich was in high school and Jack-ie was his geometry teacher.
Gingrich’s behavior toward his family is the subject of some debate among friends, but clearly it was an ugly breakup. Lee Howell, a press secretary in Gingrich’s early campaigns (and now a former friend), recalls the day in 1980 when Gingrich told him of the split-up. “It was like a gnawing pain in your neck that you couldn’t get rid of,” he remembers Gingrich saying of Jackie. “In order to get rid of it, cut it out.” Gingrich tried to get Jackie to sign a divorce settlement as she lay in a hospital bed, still groggy from a cancer operation, according to a 1984 article in Mother Jones magazine. Gingrich denies pushing her to sign anything, but admits they talked about the divorce during the visit. In October 1980, as part of the divorce proceedings, Jackie alleged that he had “failed and refused to voluntarily provide reasonable support for herself and their children.” The pastor of the First Baptist Church felt sufficiently concerned that he asked parishioners for donations to help her. Later, Gingrich and his wife reached a financial settlement.
Time apparently has not healed the wounds. Gingrich’s ex-wife went back to court just last year. In court documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, she charged that he had not kept up with payments on a $100,000 life-insurance policy, and “has failed to pay alimony on a timely basis.” Gingrich, who has remarried and stays in close contact with his grown daughters, says he had misunderstood what day of the month he was supposed to make payments, adding that if he had been so negligent, “why do both of the girls end up saying I’m a good father?” Last March, Gingrich fried a motion to increase the payments in exchange for a promise that she wouldn’t drag him into court again.
Over the years, Gingrich has been willing to distance himself from people-or ideas-that no longer seemed useful. So there are often stark inconsistencies between his views and behavior:
Gingrich has assailed Democrats who defend sexually explicit art as subsidizing “obscenity.” But as a grad student at Tulane University, Gingrich led protests after the university blocked the school newspaper from publishing pictures considered obscene by administrators. He threatened the university president with disrupting campus life for weeks if he did not relent. “It is now a question of power,” the brash young man told university president Herbert Longenecker, according to minutes of the meeting that NEWSWEEK discovered in Tulane archives. “We are down to a clash of wills.”
Gingrich has called Bill Clinton soft on defense. “The commander in chief has an obligation to be militarily competent,” Gingrich said. But like Clinton, and most Americans of their age, he did not serve in Vietnam. He already had two kids by the time he could have been drafted. He says it would have been “irrational” to leave his young family, give up his deferment and enter the service.
In 1968, Gingrich was the Louisiana co-coordinator for the presidential campaign of Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican governor of New York loathed by conservatives. But when Gingrich ran for Congress in 1974, his biography omitted any mention of the man. Gingrich says acknowledging his work for Rockefeller would have alienated the conservative rural-Georgia voters he was courting. He even planned to send a telegram to President Ford “stating his objections” to his appointment of Rockefeller as vice president, according to minutes of a campaign advisers’ meeting.
Gingrich has lashed out at political corruption–but helped block campaign-finance and lobbying-reform bills in September. He also has assembled his own controversial fund-raising machine, including a political-action committee that skirts federal disclosure laws by claiming that it mainly trains candidates for local offices. And he has produced a video college lecture series in which he plugs corporations that had given him contributions.
Gingrich has remained steadfast in at least one goal. Lee Howell remembers sitting with him in 1974 drinking Jack Daniels and talking politics. “You’re a pretty smart fellow. Newt.” Howell teased Gingrich, then a college professor in Carrollton. “You want to be president?”
No, Gingrich said seriously, “I want to be speaker of the House.”
Howell was struck by this–how many American boys grow up with the dream of becoming speaker of the House.’? But he is not surprised that Gingrich may reach his goal. The two sides of Gingrich’s personality seem perfectly suited for politics, he says. “There’s the Newt Gingrich who is the intellectual, appealing and fun to be with. Then there’s the Newt who is the bloodthirsty partisan who’d just as soon cut your guts out as look at you. And who, very candidly, is mean, mean as hell.” Gingrich says he isn’t vicious, just “willing to fight for what I believe in.”
