Will We Really See A New Newt?
Judging House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s ethics case can - and should - await the report from the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct and the public hearings, whenever they take place. But you can begin now to understand the source and the context of the violations which the Georgia Republican has acknowledged. That may help illuminate the challenge the House faces in determining the appropriate punishment for its Speaker.
For Gingrich, the goal always has been power. The struggle began with his boyhood battles with his stepfather. Bob Gingrich said to his adopted son, “I make the rules. You break the rules, you lose a privilege.” He enforced his authority by lifting Newt and pinning him against the wall, his feet inches above the floor, suspended, helpless. But Gingrich fought back, because, as he once told Washington Post interviewers, “If you live your life as a hostage to everybody else’s decision, you either have to live a very narrow life or you have to spend a lot of time in pain.”
His family rebellion climaxed in a classic act of post-adolescent defiance. He decided at 19 that he would ignore his parents’ objections and marry his high school geometry teacher, who was seven years his elder. That marriage ended in divorce.
As a fledgling history teacher at a small Georgia college, when I first met him in the 1970s, Gingrich conceived a more ambitious plot. He would not only get himself elected to Congress but would lead the Republicans to overthrow Democratic control of the House. In a long career of interviewing candidates and congressmen whose imaginations never reached beyond the borders of their own district and the date of the next election, the audacity of Gingrich’s design was stunning.
It quickly became clear that the scale of his ambition was matched by the relentlessness - some would say recklessness - of his tactics. In a 1994 interview with The Washington Post, Gingrich said: “I think I am a transformational figure. I think … I’m so systematically purposeful about changing our world … (that) I’m a much tougher partisan than they’ve seen … much more intense, much more persistent, much more willing to take risks to get it done.”
He has persistently taken risks in the way he has financed his ambitions. It took him three campaigns to win election to the House. After two, he was broke, but he came up with a scheme in which supporters gave him $13,000, ostensibly to write a novel. The novel never got published, but Gingrich was elected and his backers wrote off the “investment” on their taxes.
Seven years later, he got another set of backers to put up $105,000 in an effort to promote his nonfiction book, “Window of Opportunity,” into a best seller. That too flopped and Gingrich said he had been “naive” in soliciting the funds. That is the same word he applied to himself last month in seeking to justify contradictory statements he gave the ethics committee about the financing of his televised college course and his other outside political activities.
The Democrats had run the House for 20 years when Gingrich began his revolutionary efforts. They held it for another 20 years before he succeeded in 1994. All along, he acted on the belief that he had to throw everything at them to have even a slight chance of success. His rhetoric was extreme; Democrats were always “corrupt.” He was consistently hawkish on ethics questions. Former Speaker Jim Wright was only the most famous of the Democrats he targeted. And he was equally energetic in creating vehicles outside the House - often tax- exempt foundations - to spread his revolutionary message to conservative activists and the public at large, all the time insisting that his operations were modeled on “how the modern left organizes power.”
Now his tactics have come back to haunt him. A penitent Gingrich has apologized to his colleagues and pledged to mend his ways. But this too is part of a pattern. In a profile written 25 months ago, on the eve of his becoming speaker, Post writers Dan Balz and Serge F. Kovaleski noted that Gingrich “is under enormous pressure, even from his closest friends and family, to modify his behavior. But he has heard the same criticism before, without much evidence of change. Nine years ago (in 1985), he was quoted as saying his emergence as a ‘famous person’ meant that he must ‘change my style. I will be somewhat less confrontational, and somewhat less abrasive in the future.”’
Now it is 12 years later and his colleagues must judge whether this is a man who can ever change his ways and gauge whether this lifelong rebel can learn to play by the rules.