GINGRICH, Newt(on Leroy) 1943-

PERSONAL: Born June 17, 1943, in Harrisburg, PA; son of Robert Bruce and Kathleen (Daugherty) Gingrich; married Jacqueline Battley, 1962 (divorced); married Marianne Ginther, 1981 (divorced, 2000); married Callista Bisek, August 18, 2000; children: Linda Kathleen, Jacqueline Sue. Education: Emory University, B.A., 1965; Tulane University, M.A., 1968, Ph.D., 1971. Religion: Baptist.

ADDRESSES: Home—Virginia. Office—The Gingrich Group, LLC, 1301 K St. NW, Suite 800 W, Washington, DC 20005.

CAREER: West Georgia College, Carrollton, professor of history and environmental studies, 1970-78; U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC, representative from Sixth District of Georgia and member of Administrative Committee and Public Works and Transportation Committee, 1979-89, House Republican Whip, 1989, Speaker of the House, 1995-99; The Gingrich Group (communications and consulting firm), Washington, DC, and Atlanta, GA, currently chief executive officer. Cofounder, Congressional Military Reform Caucus; founder, Center for Health Transformation. Reinhardt College, Waleska, GA, adjunct professor, 1994-95; distinguished visiting scholar and professor, National Defense University; Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, distinguished visiting fellow. Member, U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, the Hart/Rudman Commission, beginning 1999; board member, Juvenile Diabetes Foundation; member, Defense Policy Board; American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, senior fellow; member, Congressional Clearing-house on the Future; member of Terrorism Task Force, Council on Foreign Relations; honorary chair, Nano-Business Alliance; advisory board member, Museum of the Rockies. Has also worked as a news and political analyst for Fox News Channel.

MEMBER: American Academy of Arts and Letters, World Future Society, Conservative Opportunity Society (cofounder), Sierra Club, Georgia Conservancy, Kiwanis Club.

AWARDS, HONORS: Time magazine Man of the Year, 1995; Georgia Citizen of the Year, March of Dimes, 1995; Legislative Conservationist of the Year, Georgia

Wildlife Federation, 1998; Science Pioneer award, Science Coalition, 2001, for outstanding contributions to educating the public about science.

WRITINGS:

(Author of preface) Alfred Balitzer, A Nation of Associations, American Society of Association Executives and American Medical Political Action Committee, 1981.

(With Marianne Gingrich and David Drake) Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future, Tor (New York, NY), 1984.

(Author of foreword) Teresa Donovan, Marcella Donovan, and Joseph Piccione, Voluntary School Prayer: Judicial Dilemma, Proposed Solutions, Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, 1984.

(Author of foreword) David Dean, editor, Low Intensity Conflict and Modern Technology, Air University Press (Washington, DC), 1986.

(Author of introduction) Perry Smith and others, Creating Strategic Vision, National Defense University Press (Washington, DC), 1987.

(Author of foreword) Gordon Jones and John Marini, editors, Imperial Congress, Pharos Books (Jupiter, FL), 1988.

Contract with America: The Bold Plan to Change the Nation, Times Books (New York, NY), 1994.

Quotations from Speaker Newt: The Little Red, White, and Blue Book of the Republican Revolution, Workman (New York, NY), 1995.

(With Bill Tucker) To Renew America, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1995.

Restoring the Dream: The Bold New Plan by House Republicans, Times Books (New York, NY), 1995.

(With William R. Forstchen) 1945 (novel), Baen Publishing Enterprises (New York, NY), 1995.

Newt Gingrich's Renewing American Civilization (sound recording), Audio Renaissance Tapes, 1997.

Lessons Learned the Hard Way: A Personal Report, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1998.

(With William Forstchen) Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2003.

(With Dana Pavey and Anne Woodbury) Saving Lives & Saving Money, Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, 2003.

Contributor to books, including Liberal Cliches/Conservative Solutions, edited by Phil Crane, Green Hill (Ottawa, IL), 1984; Nuclear Arms: Ethics, Strategy, Politics, edited by Jim Woolsey, ICS Press (San Francisco, CA), 1984; and House of Ill Repute, edited by Dan Renberg, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1987. Member of editorial board, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism.

SIDELIGHTS: Whatever one's political viewpoint, politician, writer, and orator Newt Gingrich may go down in history as a symbol of the state of America during the 1990s. Beginning his political career as a Republican congressman from Georgia in a hotly Democratic House of Representatives, Gingrich parlayed both the power of his party and his personal fortitude over the next sixteen years, becoming Speaker of the House in 1995. Working under the shadow of the popular administration of Democratic president Bill Clinton, Gingrich proposed to do battle with the political status quo. His mission, according to Newsweek reporter Howard Fineman, has been clear from the beginning of his career: to fight "corruption, bloated government and a decaying social order." To Gingrich, Fineman explained, "politics really is a matter of life or death, of good or evil, of domination or loss. He has spent a career trying to prove that politics is as tough as war, as important to freedom."

Gingrich was born into the transient world occupied by many military families. As the stepson of a career officer in the U.S. military, young Newt attended five schools over an eight-year period during his childhood, and lived in three states and two countries in the process. In 1956 the thirteen-year-old Gingrich and his family witnessed the Hungarian Uprising while stationed in that area of the Eastern European shatter-zone. The family lived under the constant threat of violence during their stay there. A visit to the battlefield at Verdun the following spring further impressed the young student of the importance of history, and of political power. "All that summer I kept thinking to myself, 'This is crazy,'" Gingrich revealed to Fineman. "'People really do bad things to each other.'" The realization that politics was the vehicle for such evil, and that political power in the hands of those dedicated to "right" could make a positive difference for society, would remain his guiding principle, fueling his interest in military history and setting his later course in U.S. politics.

While making his views clear to members of his Georgia constituency during his early tenure as congressman, Gingrich enlightened U.S. readers as to his vision for a "very different, more optimistic, decentralized, growth-oriented, safer American future" in Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future, published in 1985 by science-fiction publisher Tor Books and promoted through funding by various special interest groups. Written while Gingrich was a member of the executive committee of the Clearing-house of the Future and was actively involved in the formation of the Congressional Space Caucus, Window of Opportunity presents ways in which U.S. social and political ills can be solved by technology. Addressing such diverse issues as social security, space exploration, and traditional values, the volume also contains the conservative back-slapping and antiwelfare-state rhetoric that have since become characteristic of its author. The book was hailed as "offering a hopeful political and social strategy to realize the American dream" by fellow congressman Jack Kemp in the American Spectator.

The year 1995 found Gingrich an almost ubiquitous presence in the media—from the cover of Time, where he was pronounced 1995's Man of the Year, to CNN, C-SPAN, and the nightly news, Gingrich's leadership of the Republican freshman congress in its efforts to balance the federal budget received constant coverage. Gingrich's visibility on television was matched by his appearance on bookstore shelves, smiling from the dust jacket of his second book, titled To Renew America, written with Bill Tucker.

A manifesto of Gingrich's beliefs, the book is divided into five parts: "Visions and Strategies," "The Six Challenges," "The Contract with America," "The Ongoing Revolution," and the forward-looking "A New Beginning: The America We Will Create." While praising Gingrich for addressing the issue of spending reforms with regard to both the Senate and the House of Representatives, Kevin Philips noted that, like Window of Opportunity, To Renew America "is stuffed with Pollyannaish views of how technology will uplift politics, culture and public policy." Reviewing the work in the Washington Post Book World, Philips also stated that while Gingrich "has his strong points as a historian … he didn't get tenure in his years [teaching] at West Georgia College, and his book is sure to inspire a competition among snickering history professors to scalp the speaker in professional journals." Michael Lind made a similar observation in the New York Times Book Review, calling Gingrich's philosophical underpinnings "the antiseptic high-tech future familiar to those of us who grew up between the 1939 World's Fair and the Apollo missions," and questioning the speaker's use of "Reader's Digest and The Saturday Evening Post from around 1955" as a realistic baseline from which to judge the failure of modern society.

The fictional work 1945, also published in 1995, takes another futuristic look at contemporary society, this time from a viewpoint created through an alternate history of World War II. In the novel, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler is severely injured in a plane crash in late 1941, the day before the actual Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, leaving others to orchestrate the war. Under the leadership of Nazis such as Albert Speer, war is never declared on the United States, nor is Russia invaded. Instead, Germany focuses on the conquest of Western Europe, while the United States is left to quickly defeat Japan. By 1943 most of Europe is in the hands of the Germans. The States, with no threat of a Communist menace, take arms development—including the atomic bomb—at a more leisurely pace, leaving themselves open to German attack. While noting that the scenario is a credible one, New York Times Book Review contributor Donald E. Westlake criticized the lack of setting and character development, noting, "There isn't a scene in the book in which the characters aren't in uniform." He went on to add, "There is no discernible theme and scant literary ambition" in the book, "though some of the descriptions of military equipment have a certain poetry about them." In the Times Literary Supplement, however, Tom Shippey observed that Gingrich and coauthor William R. Fortschen skillfully employ the conventions of the alternative-history genre. The point of such novels, according to Shippey, is not just to show what went wrong about a particular event but to "create a sense of the fragility of the real world we too often accept as inevitable." In this, the reviewer felt, the authors succeeded very well.

Although some reviewers felt that Gingrich's forte might not be fiction, his accomplishments as a politician loom large. "A tough operator, a master of the workings of modern representative politics, a man of ideas and a subversively high level of culture" was how David Frum characterized Gingrich in a review of To Renew America in the Times Literary Supplement. Unlike other U.S. politicians, Frum observed, "he is not a man to confuse feeling with doing. Which is why," the critic noted, "unlike the soon to be forgotten Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich … is poised to dominate American politics for a decade."

Frum's prediction, however, did not pan out. Gingrich barely won reelection in 1995 and was soon plagued by federal investigators who suspected him of tax violations. Of the seventy-five charges filed against him, he was exonerated of all but one, which he admitted to. The result was a $300,000 fine, and the scandal resulted in Gingrich being attacked by many members of his own party. The Republicans became divided, but with no clear leader among their ranks to replace Gingrich, the speaker retained his position in the House. Although he was reelected again in 1998, Gingrich had lost his taste for politics and in 1999 he resigned (some say he was pressured to do so) not only as Speaker of the House but as a congressman. He describes some of his travails in Congress in his 1998 book, Lessons Learned the Hard Way: A Personal Report. Gingrich subsequently became a political commentator for Fox News, and he founded his own communications and consulting firm, The Gingrich Group.

Now active as a teacher at the National Defense University, a lecturer, consultant, and advisor, Gingrich has continued to write. In the spirit of his earlier novel, 1945, Gingrich cowrote another alternate-history novel with William Forstchen titled Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War. Published in 2003, the story draws a "what if" scenario in which General Robert E. Lee takes direct charge of the Confederacy's troops at Gettysburg, outflanks the Union's General Meade, and manages to defeat the North at the historic, tide-turning battle. Gettysburg garnered more positive reviews than 1945, even though a Publishers Weekly critic noticed the authors' "certain bias" for the characters on the side of the Confederacy. The reviewer declared the novel a "well-executed" story that will prove to be a "veritable feast" for buffs of historical fiction and Civil War history. A Library Journal contributor similarly noted that Gettysburg "will appeal to Civil War aficionados." Harry Levins, writing for the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service described the book as "interesting" and "well crafted."

Among his many other pursuits and interests, Gingrich has been heavily involved in the currently hot topic of health care, and he serves on the board of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. Consistent with his attitude in Window of Opportunity, in his other 2003 book, Saving Lives & Saving Money, the former speaker believes that technology can go a long way toward resolving the current health crisis in America. The book, which was written with Dana Pavey and Anne Woodbury, also maintains that part of the solution lies in preventive care, innovation, and a focus on the individual. Content not to be holding political office any longer, in a 2002 Time magazine interview with Douglas Waller, Gingrich revealed his continuing optimism in the opportunities technological advances may bring humanity. "If you look at science, technology and entrepreneurship," he insisted, "the twenty-first century ought to be a century of more choices, greater quality and lower cost. I'm trying to take this very simple model and teach companies how to apply it and governments how to change to encourage it."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Andersen, Alfred F., Challenging Newt Gingrich: Chapter by Chapter, Tom Paine Institute (Eugene, OR), 1996.

Bentley, P. F., Newt: Inside the Revolution, Collins (San Francisco, CA), 1995.

Drew, Elizabeth, Showdown: The Struggle between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1996.

Maraniss, David, "Tell Newt to Shut Up!": Prizewinning Washington Post Journalists Reveal How Reality Gagged the Gingrich Revolution, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1996.

Steely, Mel, The Gentleman from Georgia: The Biography of Newt Gingrich, Mercer University Press (Macon, GA), 2000.

Warner, Judith, Newt Gingrich: Speaker to America, Signet (New York, NY), 1995.

Wilson, John K., Newt Gingrich: Capitol Crimes and Misdemeanors, Common Courage (Monroe, ME), 1996.

periodicals

American Spectator, December 1984.

Business Week, June 12, 1995, p. 34; May 20, 1996, p. 32.

Commonweal, October 6, 1995, p. 26.

Economist, July 8, 1995, p. 83; April 5, 1997, "In Defence of Newt," p. 25.

Fortune, March 31, 1997, David Shribman, "Newt Gingrich's Balancing Act," p. 42.

Gentlemen's Quarterly, January, 1996, p. 120.

Harper's, September, 1995, p. 5.

Insight on the News, January 30, 1995, p. 13; July 17, 1995, p. 8; December 2, 1996, Rick Kozak, "Speaker's Long Night Ends in Historic Victory," p. 12; August 25, 1997, David Wagner, "Who Is Newt?," p. 14.

Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, July 9, 2003, Harry Levins, review of Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War, p. K0075.

Ladies Home Journal, November, 1995, p. 144.

Library Journal, June 15, 2003, "Rewriting the Civil War," p. 1000.

Maclean's, January 27, 1997, "Newt Gingrich Gets Fined $300,000," p. 31.

Meet the Press, June 17, 1990, p. 1; December 1, 1991, p. 1.

Nation, August 14, 1995, p. 174.

National Review, October 9, 1995, p. 62; October 23, 1995, p. 62; January 27, 1997, William F. Buckley, Jr., "What Next for Newt?," p. 62.

New Criterion, December, 1998, James Bowman, "The Gingrich Story," p. 64.

New Republic, January 23, 1995, p. 6; August 14, 1995, p. 34; May 6, 1996, David Grann, "The New Newt," p. 10; December 16, 1996, Hanna Rosin, "Newest Newt," p. 12.

New Statesman, November 13, 1998, Andrew Stephen, "Dinosaur Man Slips into Oblivion," p. 30.

Newsweek, January 9, 1995, pp. 28-34; December 11, 1995, Michael Isikoff and Weston Kosova, "The Trouble with Newt: An Ethics Probe May Be Closing In on the Speaker," p. 40; December 18, 1995, Michael Isikoff and Weston Kosova, "Why Newt's in Trouble," p. 36; July 24, 2000, "Newt's New Cyberworld: The Fallen Speaker Starts Over Again in Silicon Valley," p. 36.

New York Review of Books, August 10, 1995, p. 7.

New York Times Book Review, July 9, 1995, p. 10; July 23, 1995, p. 3.

People, August 30, 1999, "Talk of the Town: After Filing for Divorce from Wife, Marianne, Ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich Goes Public with a Not-So-Secret Romance," p. 65; November 29, 1999, "Combat Zone: The Opening Round of Gingrich v. Gingrich Signals the Start of a Long, Bitter Conflict," p. 217.

Publishers Weekly, July 29, 2002, "Newt's New Look at Gettysburg," p. 14; May 12, 2003, review of Gettysburg, p. 44.

Rolling Stone, December 29, 1994, p. 164.

Saturday Review, November, 1984.

Time, December 25, 1995, pp. 4, 48, 84; February 12, 1996, "When the Newt Falls," p. 20; November 18, 1996, Karen Tumulty, "The Man with the Plastic Bucket," p. 56; January 30, 1997, Karen Tumulty, "Julius Speaker: Uh-Oh, Newt Gingrich Is in Trouble Again, and Guess Which 'Friend' Has That Lean and Hungry Look?," p. 33; April 20, 1998, James Carney, "Newt's Secret Plan: To Stay Right Where He Is," p. 28; November 16, 1998, "Fall of the House of Newt," p. 38; November 22, 1999, "Newt: The Health Nut: In This Chapter of His Life, the Former Speaker Has Become Obsessed—with His Fitness and Yours," p. 47; April 15, 2002, Douglas Waller, "10 Questions for Newt Gingrich," p. 17.

Times Literary Supplement, September 22, 1995, p. 7; December 8, 1995, Tom Shippey, "Secret-Weapon School," p. 21.

U.S. News & World Report, April 10, 1995, p. 26; November 10, 1997, Douglas Stanglin, "Newt on Track for a Comeback: Gingrich Hitches His Political Star to Trade Agreement," p. 23; November 16, 1998, "The Speaker's Silence," p. 27; February 7, 2000, Lynn Rosellini, "Starting Over: The New Newt Gingrich," p. 20.

Vanity Fair, September, 1995, p. 147.

Village Voice, November 27, 1984.

Voice of Youth Advocates, April 1985, p. 62.

Washingtonian, July, 1995, p. 37.

Washington Monthly, September, 1995, p. 44.

Washington Post Book World, July 23, 1995, pp. 1, 14.

online

Gingrich Group, http://www.gingrichgroup.com/ (February 24, 2004).*