E-mail a friendNewt Gingrich
airdate June 9, 2004
Newt Gingrich has been busy since leaving his post as U.S. House Speaker. He founded the Center for Health Transformation and chairs the nonpartisan American Solutions. He's also a Fox News Channel analyst and best-selling author. Gingrich's books include Real Change and Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less. Long involved in various environmental initiatives, he co-wrote A Contract with the Earth. Gingrich has a Ph.D. in history and taught environmental studies before his election to Congress.
Newt Gingrich
Tavis: Let me start with some conversation, obviously before we get to the book, about the news of the day of course, the legacy and the life of one Ronald Wilson Reagan. I don't know where to start this conversation, but let me ask your favorite Reagan story.
Gingrich: Well, I guess I'd have to say in terms of influence in my life, in 1986 a group of the younger conservative activists, members of the House of which I was one, went down to complain to him and tell him that he wasn't doing a good enough job, he wasn't pushing hard enough. And he listened to us for about 45 minutes very patiently, very pleasantly. And then we got done with the meeting and as we were walking out of the room, he turned and put his hand on my shoulder and he said, 'You know, it took us 70 years to get in this mess.' And he said, 'I've led for the first eight years of getting back out and maybe you guys are gonna have to do some heavy lifting on your own after I go back to the ranch.' And I really felt like he was beginning to pass the baton to a younger generation and eight years later when we did the Contract with America and we stood on the Capitol steps, I felt like we were carrying out his legacy. And so I've always felt a personal sense that we were trying to continue the effort for freedom and economic growth and greater prosperity that he has started.
Tavis: There was of course the election of William Jefferson Clinton between the end of the Reagan years and the start of the Gingrich years in Congress, as we well know. But let me ask you what you think the connection is, direct or otherwise, between the Reagan years and what allowed you all to sell America the Contract with America and to take back the Congress for the Republicans after four years of being the minority party?
Gingrich: Well, let me start if I might by pointing out that President Clinton himself campaigned as a different kind of Democrat. He talked about ending welfare as we know it. He talked about a whole series of changes and his focus on balancing the budget for example was much different from traditional liberals. And I think Clinton understood that Reagan had changed America and Thatcher had changed Britain, and that we were in a new policy zone that was different than the big government high tax policy of the past. And I think he takes some pride in having tried to move his party more towards the center. I mean, he and I talked about it on a number of occasions. And at the same time, I take some pride in having tried to move my party into a much more technology-oriented, future-oriented, problem-solving model than maybe the conservatism of the pre-Reagan period.
I would say also that if you take something like welfare reform--the basic principle that everybody ought to work if they're capable of it, if they are not physically or mentally incapable, and that if you don't have a job you ought to either get a job or you ought to go to school--that reform was first proposed by Ronald Reagan as governor back in 1970. We finally passed it in 1996, and President Clinton signed it into law, and it was stunningly successful. It didn't solve the hard-core problem of people who are just not capable of--in the current setting, of being re-educated, being retrained, but it did solve--for about 60% of the people who'd been on welfare, it changed their trajectory, got 'em off welfare, got 'em into a job, got 'em into learning, and I think has clearly improved the lives of that 60%. We have to go back, in my judgment, revisit it, and find a new solution for the other 40% who are not gonna, I think, be helped just by that reform.
Tavis: I was in a fascinating conversation the other day, a conversation where people were comparing George W. Bush, our current president, with Ronald Reagan. The comparison of course being made because, of late, Mr. Bush has talked a lot about Mr. Reagan. And of course, we all know he has tried in many respects to model his presidency after that of Ronald Reagan. Who wouldn't, given Mr. Reagan's popularity, I guess, if you're a Republican?
But having said that, though, the argument was made by one person at this dinner party that George W. Bush is in many respects worse than Ronald Reagan for those of us on the left, because with all that Reagan did or did not do, we didn't see the dismantling of corrective programs like affirmative action then, even, as we see today. Ronald Reagan once called the earned income tax credit the greatest anti-poverty program in America's history. Reagan said that. I can't imagine Mr. Bush saying that. Compare, from your perspective, Mr. Bush--George W., that is--and Mr. Reagan.
Gingrich: Well, I--I think that they are, um, for one thing, a generation apart. President Reagan had grown up in the New Deal. He was an FDR Democrat originally. He had been a Hollywood star. He was turned into a hard-line anti-Communist by his experiences in the Screen Actors Guild back in 1947, dealing with real Communists who really believed in a totalitarian state, and he gradually became sort of a anti-tax, pro-free enterprise, pro-technology kind of conservative. It was a new kind of conservatism; it approached it differently. And Reagan was in many ways a world figure from day one, 'cause that's the nature of being a guy who came out of Illinois through radio stationwho in Des Moines to the movie industry in California. Reagan was a pretty worldwide figure.
I think President George W. Bush is in some ways more of a Texan. There's a difference between Texas and Southern California, and I think that's reflected in the two. I think President Bush believes more deeply in faith-based solutions, in the power of divine intervention, and in the power of groups like Alcoholics Anonymous or church-based and synagogue- and mosque-based groups to help people. So, you see a different approach to how compassion would work.
But I don't think that if you go back and look at some of the arguments over Grove City kind of affirmative action fights and things like that, I think you'd find that probably Reagan is being a little romanticized in retrospect. I think from the standpoint--I want to draw a distinction between liberals in an intellectual sense and, let's say, the African American community or the Hispanic or Asian community. I actually think that President Bush is probably more sensitive to reaching out and to trying to develop a real relationship than was the Reagan White House. I think the Reagan White House was really focused on defeating the Soviet empire and on creating a general prosperity for all Americans. And I think President Bush, maybe because of his governorship, has a little better understanding that there are people we gotta find a way to help pretty directly, and he would have approaches that traditional liberals wouldn't buy, approaches that rely on churches and rely on faith-based activities. But I do think President Bush believes that there are people who need genuine help and that just cutting their taxes won't solve it.
Tavis: You might be right about that, and I want to get to the book here in just a second. Before I do, though, since you mention African Americans, you obviously come out of the South. You represented the South, the state of Georgia, a part of Georgia, of course, in Congress for any number of years. Michael Deaver, Mr. Reagan's guy for many years, wrote in one of his books that he didn't think Reagan had a racist bone in his body but that he was naive--Mr. Deaver's words, not mine--was naive about certain race matters and race issues in this country. I recall very distinctly one survey while Mr. Reagan was president and I was a college student that said very clearly that in the 70th percentile, African Americans thought Mr. Reagan was, in fact, racist. How, then, should African Americans and other people of color view Mr. Reagan's legacy?
Gingrich: Well, let me start by telling you a little bit about my own background. I was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I spent a good bit of my childhood in the U.S. Army. My dad was a career soldier, and I went to U.S. Army schools. It was an enormous shock in 1960, when I was a junior in high school, to have my dad assigned to Fort Benning and realize that I was going to a segregated, all-white school. I--I'd never seen anything like that until I was 16 years old. And anybody who tells you that we didn't have absolute legal prohibitions against African Americans participating fully is either totally ignorant or being dishonest.
So let me start with the fact that, I think, having lived through that and having experienced that and having been an Eisenhower Republican who was in favor of civil rights long before the Goldwater movement, I think that it's probably fair to say that in Reagan's experience in Illinois, in Des Moines, Iowa, and in Hollywood, that he was not aware of the legalized racism which had segregated America and had denied African Americans the opportunities. And I think that in that sense, because of his passivity, people could interpret passivity into hostility, and I think that's part of what happened to him in the 1980s.
Tavis: All right.
Gingrich: But I don't think in fact he was a racist in any form. I think Ronald Reagan... Uh, the problem was the people he knew who were African American were all very successful in Hollywood, and he figured that must be true of everybody.
Tavis: 'Grant Comes East.' It is book number 2 in a trilogy about the Civil War. What are we gonna get in this one?
Gingrich: Well, I think, to stay for a second with the African American experience, I think the most interesting part of this book, which takes up after our volume 'Gettysburg,' where we had Lee win at Gettysburg and asked the question--first asked the question: could the South have won at Gettysburg?
We think he could've defeated the Union army there. We worked with the Army War College. We developed a technically very accurate alternative battle in our version of active history. We then said, 'What would Lee have done after winning at Gettysburg?' And I think one of the most interesting parts of this book, 'Grant Comes East,' is Lee taking Baltimore.
And the question: if you were a free African American living in Baltimore in 1863 and you heard that the army of Northern Virginia was coming your way, what would your attitude be? And what we describe is panic, people who really are afraid they're going to be sold into slavery, people who run to the North as fast as they can to get away from the army of Northern Virginia. And this, by the way, reflects what actually did happen on the Gettysburg campaign, where people were just--African Americans were just terrified.
We then move from there to a real discussion of the practical and moral differences between the North and the South in 1863, and one of the key moments in our novel, 'Grant Comes East,' is an African American regiment coming straight in--the regiment that was in the movie 'Glory' having been brought up from Charleston by steamboat--and helping save the city of Washington. It's both symbolically and emotionally accurate but also reflects a truth that is under-studied, and that is by 1865, there were 180,000 African American soldiers in the Union army and 10,000 African American sailors in the Union navy, and they were a significant part of why the North finally won the war.
Tavis: I could go on, 'cause I'm fascinated. Now you got me interested. I gotta, actually, I gotta take the book home tonight off the set here and read it. Now you've whet my appetite about--about the Civil War. It's still fascinating these many years later, is it not?
Gingrich: It is, and it's because people worshipped the same God, spoke the same language, shared the same history. And there's a romantic tragedy to the Civil War that's not true of any other war we've been in.
Tavis: The book, 'Grant Comes East' by Newt Gingrich. Mr. Speaker, always a delight to have you on the program.
Gingrich: Great to be with you.
Tavis: Thanks for coming on. Take care of yourself.
Gingrich: Take care, Tavis.
Tavis: All right. Up next on this program, now that we've had a chance to talk to Newt Gingrich on this day where we celebrate or at least talk about the life and legacy of Ronald Reagan--we thank Mr. Gingrich for coming on. Now we will talk in a moment here and hear a fascinating story about Act One Personnel Services. It is one of the largest companies in the U.S. run by an African American woman. Meet Janice Bryant Howroyd in a moment.
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