Burning Down the House

by Julian E. Zelizer

  Such tense moments were not all that young Newt experienced with his dad. On a weekend trip, he was deeply moved by the World War I battlefield at Verdun, where the barbed wire and trenches were still visible; the young American picked up helmets buried in the dirt and saw the bones of 100,000 deceased servicemen stacked behind a glass window. The visit brought home to Gingrich the grim reality of the devastation inflicted by war, as well as the ongoing threats that democracy still faced.11 This was the height of the cold war, and Newt interpreted issues through a moralist lens, viewing politics as an epic struggle between good and evil. Over the course of an entire school year, he wrote a two-hundred-page, single-spaced paper about the balance of global naval power.12 During the family’s more than three years overseas—they spent the last leg of the tour in Stuttgart, Germany—he devoured various armed forces publications and listened to armed forces radio shows. While he admired his stepfather’s continued service, Newt concluded that being a politician “was the most effective thing I could do to ensure that the US would remain free.”13

  The Gingrich family returned to the United States in 1960. Robert was stationed at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, where Newt entered the racially segregated Baker High School as a junior. Gingrich thrived in the classroom and excelled at debating. His high school classmates voted him “Most Intellectual.” The only student carrying around an overflowing briefcase and wearing a pocket protector, Newt was hard to miss. While other teens were eagerly learning to drive, his mother recalled, he preferred to sit in the passenger seat and read.

  At seventeen, Newt returned to Hummelstown, where he spent the summer of 1960 with his extended family. He sought out Paul Walker, the journalist who had written about his impromptu effort at lobbying as a child. Walker agreed to mentor him, even helping him to find work on some radio and television shows that a friend hosted. Gingrich spent most of his time calling to ask local businesses to purchase ads, the paper’s main source of revenue. Walker, a loyal Democrat, introduced Newt to local politicians and lobbyists during their lunches at Davenport’s Restaurant, where Gingrich was invited to listen in on the city’s power brokers.14 Although his father and Walker were both Democrats, Newt was drawn to the small-government philosophy of the GOP.

  Gingrich started to gain a feel for political organization as well as communication. Harrisburg was filled with churches and military installations, a city inhabited by working- and middle-class Republicans who were a central target of national party leaders seeking to broaden their electoral reach. When Gingrich learned that the city planned to temporarily shut down the State Museum for major renovations, he was upset; it was one of his favorite places to spend time. He exhibited his instinctive political skills by sharing the information with Walker, who in turn leaked the news to local reporters. Thanks to the ensuing backlash, the state kept the museum open during the work.15

  Back in Georgia that fall, inspired by his work in Harrisburg, Gingrich volunteered for Richard Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign, sending out mailers, making phone calls, knocking on doors, and organizing school debates to build interest in Nixon’s candidacy. He and his coterie of high school friends—and there were not many southern Republicans in those days—were profoundly disappointed when Nixon lost narrowly to Senator John F. Kennedy. They spent all night drowning their sorrows in intense political conversation. One book that made a big impression during these years was Theodore White’s Making of the President, 1960. Gingrich was fascinated with this gripping account of the 1960 presidential election, particularly White’s discussion of an idea-oriented wing of the Republican Party that dated back to the nineteenth century. White argued that the GOP had become alienated from the “intellectual mainstream” since the end of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency when the “regulars” took control of the party machinery. The GOP paid a long-term price for the decision, White argued in a point that captured Gingrich’s attention, including in 1960 with Richard Nixon, who had not offered voters any vision.16

  In high school, Newt also loved to play football. With a 190-pound frame, he persevered, earning a spot on the starting lineup as a defensive tackle, a position usually filled by more massive figures. He thoroughly enjoyed being on the playing field, tackling or being tackled.17 Although he was not a gifted athlete, Gingrich exhibited an intense level of psychological grit. His coach Foster Watkins, who admired Gingrich’s tenacity, taught him that when he got hit hard, he should get up immediately and play on.18 Newt loved the aggression of the game. The lessons he learned from his coaches, just like the experiences in the war-torn environment of Europe, stuck with him as he developed a combative outlook on politics.19

  In his senior year, at age eighteen, Gingrich fell in love with his high school geometry teacher, Jacqueline Battley, who was twenty-five. They entered into an illicit relationship, which became known to his parents only when Gingrich accidently drove her car into a ditch near the military base. Newt had to call his father to get him out of the jam, and he revealed that he and the teacher were a couple. Robert strongly disapproved and made Newt promise that the romance would end, a promise he soon broke.

  Concerned about their son’s relationship, Kit and Robert persuaded Newt to attend Emory University, which had become coed in 1953, with the hope that Jacqueline and Newt would go their separate ways. Newt thrilled to university life, even on a campus that revered jocks and fraternities. Although his grades were merely above average, his passion for learning and politics intensified. In 1962, Newt founded a local chapter of the Young Republicans on a campus steeped in the traditions of the South, including loyalty to the Democratic Party.

  His parents’ plan to separate their son from Jacqueline did not work. She secured a teaching job near Atlanta, and the couple was married in a Baptist church in 1962. Newt, who had grown up Lutheran, embraced life as a Baptist out of respect for his wife’s family traditions. Robert, still unwilling to accept the relationship, boycotted the wedding. Kit didn’t feel comfortable attending without Robert, so she also stayed away. “It was so hard. I was torn between my husband and my son,” she later recounted.20 Newt was still a college student when Jacqueline gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Kathy.

  After graduating from Emory in 1965, Newt began a doctoral program in history at Tulane University in New Orleans. He had decided in college that he would like to pursue an advanced degree in history to perhaps secure a teaching job. He arrived at the height of the turmoil across college campuses stirred by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. In a community torn between liberal groups like Students for a Democratic Society and the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, Gingrich led a successful protest against censorship when the administration tried to block the publication of graphic nude photographs in a student publication. Generally, though, Gingrich left the protesting to others, feeling pressure to graduate and start earning a living. Jacqueline, who was supporting the family financially through her teaching, gave birth to a second child, Jackie Sue, in 1966. Newt remained singularly focused. He concentrated on writing his dissertation on Belgian colonial policy in the Congo from 1945 to 1960, taking breaks to attend the St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church with his wife.21 He seemed like a stranger to the heady, rebellious atmosphere of campus life in the late 1960s. His friend David Kramer, dismayed that Newt really didn’t understand what the Beatles’ White Album was all about, brought him to see the psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane. Newt was unimpressed. Afterward he asked, “Is there any political value in this?”22

  Politics provided him with much more of a rush than rock ’n’ roll. If anything distracted him from his studies, it was campaigns and elections. Gingrich took some time out of his graduate studies to campaign for the New York governor, Nelson Rockefeller, in the 1968 Republican primaries. Gingrich had a “political philosophy that was unformed” because he was a “Republican out of general feeling, not out of firm ideology,” one friend noted.23 He agree
d with the Republican skepticism about too much government, but he was not a right-wing ideologue. He also believed that the GOP could appeal to African Americans given the support that historically existed in portions of the party for racial equality. In 1968, the pragmatic appeal of a moderate Republican like Rockefeller was even stronger for Gingrich and others in the GOP because of the way that Lyndon Johnson had successfully branded Senator Barry Goldwater as a radical right-wing extremist.

  Rockefeller lost, but Gingrich found himself inspired by Nixon’s 1968 victory and the restoration of Republican power in the White House. He enjoyed Nixon’s pugnacious attitude toward his opponents and his appeals to the kinds of blue-collar conservatives Gingrich had known in Hummelstown. Whereas the moderate Rockefeller had promised to unite liberal northeastern and midwestern Republicans, Nixon was making a bold play for blue-collar Democrats in the North, as well as reaching into Dixie. Nixon seemed to appeal to a wide range of voters, standing as a politician who knew how to reach into the conservative parts of the Republican and southern Democratic electorate while claiming enough of a civil rights record from his time as vice president to retain the center. Nixon wasn’t wedded to any particular issues as much as he was concerned with winning elections. Like Newt’s other hero, Teddy Roosevelt, Nixon struck him as a role model for his own generation of Republicans, a shrewd, pragmatic strategist who was attempting to build a durable governing Republican majority with sizable blue-collar support.24

  His enchantment with populism did not yet extend to the intellectual realm, where he completed a dissertation that offered a sympathetic look at Belgian colonialism. Based on one year that he and Jacqueline spent in Brussels (1969–1970), archival documents, and interviews with Belgian officials (he never traveled to the Congo or interviewed relevant local figures), Gingrich concluded that the colonial government had failed to modernize the local education system or to nurture an elite capable of sustaining economic growth. “The Belgians get very low marks for their efforts to develop a political elite and much of the country’s post-independence chaos is due to this Belgian failure,” Gingrich noted. Though the dissertation was critical of Belgium, his main beef was with the design of its policies rather than the inherent merits of colonialism.25

  Newt did not serve in Vietnam, a war that he publicly supported, as a result of student and marriage deferments. The military wouldn’t take him anyway, because he was nearsighted and flat-footed, which caused him deep embarrassment around his stepfather. With his doctoral degree in hand, Newt obtained a professorship in September 1970 at a small liberal arts institution, West Georgia College, located in the sleepy rural town of Carrollton.

  The quiet campus in the western part of the state, known for its agricultural and textile companies, was dominated by the Baptist church rather than by student rabble-rousers. Newt soon developed a friendship with Steve Hanser, a professor of German history who introduced him to critical concepts from the history of warfare. Gingrich became fascinated with the teachings of the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who argued that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” He earned points with Jackie’s family by volunteering to teach Sunday school at the local Baptist church.

  But academia never satisfied Gingrich. By the time he reached Georgia, Gingrich was already ruminating over the possibility of running for office.26 He didn’t find the time or interest to publish his dissertation, and he lacked the patience for the slow crawl of university life. He couldn’t understand why the administration rejected his application to serve as university president after one year on the job or why the dean didn’t select him as chair of the department a year later.

  To satisfy his ambitions, Gingrich turned to politics. For decades, Democrats had dominated the South without serious Republican opposition. But starting in the 1960s, a younger generation of Republicans felt the moment was ripe to break the Democratic monopoly in Dixie. The South was growing and prospering, resulting in new districts with better-educated suburban voters who wanted to move beyond the racism of the Dixiecrats who had fought tooth and nail against President Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation. Republicans also argued these voters would support an antitax, pro-business agenda that could draw further commerce and growth to the South.

  Gingrich sought to capitalize on these changes. West Georgia College was located in Georgia’s Sixth District, represented since 1954 by the veteran conservative John Flynt, a quintessential Dixiecrat who had strongly opposed civil rights and a silver-haired patrician who had received a Bronze Star Medal for his service in World War II. The district was so rural that it lacked hotels or large public spaces where Flynt could meet with sizable groups of constituents. Republicans suspected that the state’s Democratic assembly had designed the district in this way so that Flynt had a permanent excuse to avoid lengthy encounters with his voters in order to limit the opportunities they had to directly raise complaints with him about any problems with his service.

  Flynt was struggling to keep up with his changing constituency by the 1970s. The district was reapportioned in 1971 to include a few more urban and suburban areas, a result of the Supreme Court’s one-man, one-vote ruling in 1964 expanding voting rights. For decades, thinly populated rural areas, which tended to be overwhelmingly white and conservative, had been given as many if not more representatives as densely populated, racially mixed urban areas. The new Sixth District stretched from Fulton to the outer parts of Muscogee, including the farmland of the west Georgia countryside as well as the booming suburbs of Atlanta, home to one of the busiest international airports in the nation, sleek shopping centers, and fancy new restaurants. Voters in the reconfigured Sixth District were united by an overall hostility to high taxation, by a business-friendly posture, and by an eagerness to reject the stereotypes of old-line southern racism even while racial inequality remained deeply embedded in the residential and educational character of its neighborhoods.27

  In 1974, Gingrich ran against Flynt. The challenger’s operation had the feel of the 1960s counterculture, not buttoned-down, country-club conservatism. Even at the dawn of his political career, Gingrich was all about taking on the establishment, not only pursuing right-wing ideas. This attitude proved helpful for a Republican in a deeply Democratic territory, helping attract a wide variety of Vietnam-era political activists. Gingrich’s ragtag campaign team was composed primarily of disaffected Democrats and devout Republicans who shared a desire to topple the local leadership.

  Without much money to spend, Gingrich’s first campaign was a no-frills operation. Volunteers built their own signs using donated wood and cheap silk screens. After spending hours canvassing voters, they worked late into the evening to make their own campaign materials in an empty warehouse that relied on gas lanterns.28

  Gingrich promised to bring honesty and transparency into office. “The Politicians Had Their Chance. Now You Can Have Yours,” read Gingrich’s brochures.29 He tirelessly worked civic events and went door to door, assuring every voter he met that he would not hole up in Washington like his opponent. He promised to appear in the district at least once a month and to open an office near the Atlanta airport to satisfy Georgians living in Fulton County, the densely populated and well-educated area that bordered the city, whose residents often complained about never seeing Flynt. Tapping into the national rage over Watergate, Gingrich charged that Flynt reflected the brokenness of Washington. “I can no longer sit idly by while my future—and the future of this country—is endangered by political hacks who do not understand what is happening to the people they supposedly represent,” Gingrich said.30

  If anything, Gingrich was the liberal in this particular race. He supported environmentalist policies, earning the endorsement of the League of Conservation Voters. Gingrich also promised to take a more progressive stance on civil rights, hoping to appeal to black residents of west and southwest Atlanta who had been reapportioned into the Sixth District, voters prev
iously represented by the civil rights activist Andrew Young.31 The Democratic campaign consultant Bob Beckel, who was working for the reformist National Committee for an Effective Congress, became one of Gingrich’s first admirers. Beckel, who would chair Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign a decade later, saw Gingrich as a new class of Republican—more cosmopolitan, more educated, and more suburban than rural—who would offer a better option than the conservative Flynt. Respected journalists like The Washington Post’s David Broder paid attention too, identifying Gingrich as the fresh voice southerners needed in the post-civil-rights era. The Atlanta Daily World, the oldest black newspaper in Georgia, whose publisher was a friend of Gingrich’s, offered its endorsement. “Gingrich is only 31 years old,” the editors argued, “but he is a college teacher and is progressive in his views. And he is also fair-minded on racial issues.”32

  From his very first campaign, Gingrich understood that corruption was a powerful theme to deploy against a senior congressional incumbent, a way to turn an opponent’s strength into a weakness. Members of Congress naturally developed close connections with powerful interests in their districts, and they often did things that, at a minimum, looked as though they were taking advantage of their power for their own economic benefit.