The Little-Known, Inside Story About How Newt Became the Man He Is

*The following is excerpted from Max Blumenthal's book, Republican Gomorrah.

When Clinton returned to the White House for a second term, Dob­son redoubled his efforts against the Republican leadership, particularly in undermining Newt Gingrich, whom conservatives within the House Republican Conference and outside it had come to regard as chronically unreliable because of deals he had made with Clinton, despite his shutting down the federal government twice. Dobson and ­DeLay agreed that Gingrich lacked not only the lust for confrontation that they sought in a party leader but also the moral qualities to be “a friend of The Family.” Referring to the Speaker, DeLay later wrote, “Men with such secrets are not likely to sound a high moral tone at a moment of national crisis.” Throughout his career in public life, Gingrich brushed off concerns about his moral fitness as mere distractions, reflecting to journalist Gail Sheehy, “I think you can write a psychological profile of me that says I found a way to immerse my insecurities in a cause large enough to justify whatever I wanted it to.” Newt Gingrich was born Newt McPherson to teenaged parents. Gingrich’s mother divorced his father and married a Marine officer, who adopted him and throughout his childhood savagely beat him and his mother. (Gingrich’s half-sister, Candace, became a lesbian activist. At the moment Newt became Speaker, she became the Human Rights Campaign’s National Coming Out Project Spokesperson.) As a young man, Gingrich, fascinated with zoos and dinosaurs, longed for an illustrious career in academia. He wound up teaching history and environmental studies at West Georgia College.

Gingrich grew his hair long, emulating the style of the counter­culture that he secretly yearned to join. In 1974, as the Vietnam War drew to a close, the ambitious draft dodger entered politics, attempting to win a congressional seat in a suburban Atlanta district populated by conservative whites who fled the city when its public institutions and neighborhoods were desegregated. Appealing to the backlash sensibility of these voters, Gingrich declared the “Great Society countercultural model” his nemesis and their enemy.

Initially, Gingrich proved a lackluster politician, losing his first bid for the House. His campaign scheduler offered a candid assessment of the candidate’s failures: “We would have won if we could have kept him out of the office and screwing [a young campaign staffer] on his desk.” Gingrich was married at the time to his former high school geometry teacher, Jackie Battley, seven years his senior, whom he married when he was nineteen years old. Soon after his first extramarital tryst, Gingrich became involved with another woman, Ann Manning, who was also married. Manning said of her encounters with Gingrich, “We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, ‘I never slept with her.’” In 1978, Gingrich was finally elected to the House of Representatives. A year earlier, he had divorced Battley, serving her papers while she lay in bed recovering from cancer surgery. “She wasn’t pretty enough to be first lady,” he later remarked of his ex-wife. Gingrich refused to pay alimony or offer child support for his two children, forcing Battley’s church to take up a collection for her. In 1981, he married the mistress he had left her for, Marianne Ginther.

Within the Congress, Gingrich immediately fell under the influence of the Republican whip, Dick Cheney. Cheney, who had been President Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff and was granted deference among House Republicans, acted as the hidden hand promoting Gingrich’s rise. Gingrich’s staff soon ginned up a whisper campaign falsely accusing Speaker of the House Tom Foley, a Democrat, of being a closet homosexual. Gingrich stoked yet another manufactured scandal over some House members’ supposed abuse of their credit union, and this attack inadvertently led to the resignation of several Republicans and also tainted the House as a whole as corrupt. Gingrich was willing to sacrifice even close allies in his own party to advance his cause and ambition. The bodies of others were rungs on his ladder.