Newt Gingrich

Congressperson

• Born: June 17, 1943
• Birthplace: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

Newt Gingrich has led one of the most astonishing political careers of the late twentieth century. Winning election to the US House of Representatives as a Republican from traditionally Democratic Georgia, the outspoken Gingrich emerged from relative obscurity to lead his party to sweeping victory in the 1994 elections under the banner of the "Contract with America" reform manifesto. Republicans won a majority in the House for the first time in forty years, and most observers expected Gingrich to remain very influential as the new Speaker of the House. But he proved to be more effective as a revolutionary than as a leader, and was eventually forced to step down from his post amidst ethics charges and a backlash against his efforts to impeach President Bill Clinton. However, this exit did not mark a departure from mainstream politics.

Early Life

In September 1942, Kathleen Daugherty married Newton C. McPherson Jr., a nineteen-year-old automobile mechanic. The marriage lasted three days before sixteen-year-old Kathleen returned home, alleging McPherson had hit her.

Newton Leroy Gingrich was born on June 17, 1943, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. His mother remarried in 1946 to Robert Gingrich, a career Army officer, who adopted Newt. His new father was a lieutenant colonel nicknamed "Stoneface," who spoke three languages and served as an intelligence officer.

Gingrich started his political career early in life, when he traveled to Harrisburg at age ten to lobby city and state officials about building a zoo. The zoo was never built, but Gingrich made the local newspapers and decided he was "hooked forever on public life."

The family would spend much of Gingrich's youth in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, but his teenage years were spent following his father's assignments to Orleans, France, and Stuttgart, Germany. At age fifteen, he visited the battle site at Verdun, France, saying it was an "epiphany," which he took as a call to politics in order to prevent such carnage.

In 1960, the family moved to Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, where Gingrich attended Baker High School. He was a debater, a National Merit Scholar semi-finalist, and was voted "most intellectual" by his classmates. He was also secretly dating his geometry teacher, Jackie Battley. The two married in 1962, after Gingrich finished his freshman year at Emory University in Atlanta. Gingrich was nineteen, and his bride was twenty-six. Gingrich's two children, Jackie and Kathy, were born of this marriage, the first in 1963.

Education and Political Career

Gingrich received his bachelor's degree from Emory University in 1965, and went on to earn master's and doctorate degrees in modern European history from Louisiana's Tulane University in 1971. While at Tulane, he served as Louisiana coordinator for Nelson Rockefeller's 1968 campaign. Upon graduation, he took a job at little-known West Georgia College in Carrollton, Georgia, in order to establish residency for his planned campaign to represent Georgia's Sixth Congressional District in the US House of Representatives. Gingrich taught history and environmental studies at the school for eight years.

Gingrich first ran for the House in 1974 at age thirty-one, unsuccessfully challenging the twenty-year incumbent Democratic candidate Jack Flynt. Gingrich lost again to Flynt in 1976, as Democrat Jimmy Carter came to the White House from Georgia. Flynt retired after that term, and Gingrich's new opponent in 1978 was state Senator Virginia Shapard. He ran a more conservative campaign, attacking Shapard as a liberal who was willing to split up her family to travel to Washington, leaving her children behind with a nanny. Gingrich devised the slogan "When elected, Newt will keep his family together."

He won the election on his third time out, and at age thirty-five became the highest ranking elected Republican in Georgia. However, he did not keep his campaign pledge regarding his family. In 1980, a year and a half into his first term, Gingrich filed for divorce from his wife Jackie. Six months later he was remarried to Marianne Ginther, a personnel clerk with the Secret Service.

The New Republicans

Upon his election to the House, Gingrich quickly gained a reputation as a Republican seeking to change the status quo. He attracted the attention of Representative Vander Jagt, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, who in 1979 appointed Gingrich chairman of a task force to plan for a GOP Majority.

In 1983, Gingrich teamed with other young Republican lawmakers to form the Conservative Opportunity Society, whose members quickly became known for their fiery oratory against liberal positions, as well as their use of C-SPAN television coverage to carry their message. The following year, Gingrich published Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future, a nonfiction book that would be the first of many policy-related books he would author or coauthor.

Gingrich gained national prominence in 1987 when he brought ethics charges against House speaker Jim Wright, regarding unusual royalties from the sale of a book. Wright was forced to resign in 1989. Gingrich gained further political influence that year when he was elected the House Minority Whip, a post he would hold until 1994.

In 1990, Gingrich challenged President George H. W. Bush's call for tax increases aimed at reducing the national deficit by $500 billion over five years. A majority of House Republicans sided with Gingrich, but the move did not win him friends among party loyalists. It also cost him votes at home. In 1990, he won reelection by less than 1,000 votes out of 156,000 cast. Sensing he was at risk of losing his seat, he simply moved to a more Republican area in Atlanta's northern suburbs and easily won reelection thereafter.

Breaking the Contract

In 1994, Gingrich coauthored with Representative Dick Armey the book Contract with America, which spelled out a new Republican manifesto calling for cuts in spending; get-tough measures on crime; tax credits for families, seniors, and businesses; a strengthened military; and Congressional term limits. Republicans gained a majority in the house that year, and Gingrich was given much of the credit for the overthrow. He was elected the new Speaker of the House, the first Georgian to hold the position in 102 years. He had become so powerful on the American political scene that he was named Time magazine's "Man of the Year" in 1995.

However, upon reaching his goal of becoming Speaker of the House, Gingrich found himself facing the same type of ethics attacks he had used to unseat rivals. Gingrich's opponents pointed to a $4.5 million advance on a book contract from Harper Collins, which critics saw as a bid for undue influence by publisher Rupert Murdoch. In addition, the Federal Elections Commission charged that political action committee (PAC) funds were illegally used to fund his 1990 election. The House Ethics Committee cleared Gingrich on most charges, but he was reprimanded for the book deal and a special counsel was set up to investigate his use of a tax-exempt foundation to fund political endeavors.

Meanwhile, Gingrich kept his campaign promise to put all of the measures listed in the Contract with America to a vote in the first one hundred days of the new Congress. However, he did not hold sway in the Senate or with President Clinton. Six of the ten measures failed in the Senate. Of the three that eventually became law, two were so altered that Clinton was able to take much of the credit for them—the new laws on welfare reform and balancing the federal budget.

In 1995, Gingrich effectively shut down the government in a standoff with President Clinton over how to balance the budget. An angry public blamed the Republicans. In the 1996 elections, the Republicans held on to the majority in the House, but the Democrats took back eight seats lost in 1994. In January 1997, Gingrich was fined $300,000 by the House Ethics Committee for violating House rules barring use of tax-exempt foundations for political purposes. Regardless of the fine and his weakened leadership position, he was reelected Speaker of the House.

Scandals and Retirement

When the news broke involving an affair between President Clinton and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Gingrich pushed for impeachment and made the scandal the centerpiece of the 1998 Republican campaign. However, instead of the big gains for Republicans predicted by Gingrich, the Democrats took another five seats in the House, narrowing the Republican majority to just eleven seats. Three days after the elections, Gingrich announced that he would not seek reelection to his position as Speaker of the House, and that he would retire from Congress at the end of 1998.

In one final twist to the trail of ethics controversies surrounding Gingrich, he and his second wife Marianne were divorced in April 2000—nine months after Gingrich had acknowledged a seven-year affair with former congressional aide Callista Bisek. In August 2000, at age fifty-seven, he married thirty-four year-old Bisek.

Gingrich has continued to speak out and write on US politics and policies. He served on the Hart/Rudman US Committee on National Security that is often given credit for predicting the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Under the administration of US president George W. Bush, Gingrich regained a measure of his former prominence as a close associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. He also founded the Gingrich Group.

In May 2011, Gingrich announced his candidacy for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination. Even Gingrich’s critics recognized the move as evidence of a spectacular political rebirth. As a candidate, Gingrich touted himself as an experienced conservative leader and legislator. In December 2011, he led many nationwide polls in the GOP presidential primary race. Gingrich placed fourth in the 2012 Iowa Caucus. He placed last in the New Hampshire primary, earning 9.4 percent of the vote. On January 21, 2012, Gingrich won the South Carolina primary by a wide margin, earning over 40 percent of the vote. However, he lost the 2012 Florida Republican Primary on January 31 to GOP colleague Mitt Romney. Romney defeated him again in the 2012 Nevada Republican Primary, earning over 50 percent of the vote. Despite these defeats, Gingrich vowed to continue his campaign for the Republican nomination. However, on Super Tuesday, March 7, 2012, Gingrich won only one of ten states, his home state of Georgia. He officially ended his campaign in May 2012.

Gingrich became a host of the relaunched version of CNN's controversial debate television show Crossfire in 2013. However, the program's resurrection was short-lived as the network cancelled the show once again in 2014. Continuing as a political commentator for CNN, he was an outspoken critic of the United States' response to the infamous hacking incident involving the film and television production studio Sony Pictures in late 2014. With responsibility for the cyber attack eventually placed upon North Korea, Gingrich vehemently claimed that Sony's initial decision to give in to the hackers' demands was an underestimate of the gravity of the assault on American interests.

In 2016, Gingrich consulted on Donald Trump's presidential campaign. After Trump was elected president, Gingrich was thought to be at the forefront of Trump's choices for Secretary of State, Chief of Staff, or as an advisor, however, Gingrich eventually announced that he would not be serving in the cabinet. Instead, he continued to comment on political events from the sidelines, including promoting conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party. In 2020, following that year's presidential election that saw Joe Biden as the victor, Gingrich supported Trump's assertions that there had been rampant voting fraud, going so far as to call for the arrest of poll workers in Pennsylvania. Accusations of voting fraud later proved false. In 2022 Gingrich also called for jail time for members of the January 6 Select Committee, the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 US Capitol riot led by Trump supporters. In a January 2022 opinion essay for Newsweek, Gingrich warned that Democratic "wolves" would turn into "sheep" once Republicans retook the House in the midterm elections slated for November of that year.

Bibliography

Cillizza, Chris. "Newt Gingrich Thinks Members of the January 6 Committee Should Be Threatened with Jail Time." CNN Politics, 24 Jan. 2022, www.cnn.com/2022/01/24/politics/newt-gingrich-jail-time/index.html. Accessed 16 Mar. 2022.

Gillon, Steven M. The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry That Defined a Generation. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Hasan, Mehdi. "Why Are They Rooting for Newt?" New Statesman 30 Jan. 2012: 22–24. Print.

Sanneh, Kelefa. "Bottle Rocket." New Yorker 9 Jan. 2012: 24–28. Print.