Gregorsky: Kind of a fluke situation. I went to Georgia to resume my college education at age 23 in March of '78. He was teaching there. I didn't know he was teaching there, but I had told another teacher in the biology building that I was a Republican activist. I didn't know what that meant but she said, 'Well, there's some guy here who has run for Congress twice, as a Republican, which was unusual for Georgia in the '70s and he's lost twice, but he's running again. Why don't you go say hi and volunteer?' It took about a week. I had to go home and look in the Almanac of American Politics and I said, 'My God, there is this guy, Newt Gingrich' and he was right down the hall from where I was taking this biology class. So about a week later, I introduced myself and he just grilled me. He said, 'What have you done? What kind of books do you read?' At the end of it he said, 'Why don't you drive me around on Saturdays, my driver needs a break.' It may not have been that first day he said that. I may have to go and do some research or pass some little threshold of literacy or something....But within three weeks, I was his Saturday driver.

Q: Now, as you drove him around and then worked, I assume, in other capacities in the campaign as well, what did you come to think of this guy?

Gregorsky: That this was the opportunity of a lifetime. That he was a committee Republican intellectual, I think, somebody who was in it for the ideas, as well as for winning election victories.

He also started training me as he trains everybody from day one, to think in terms not of ideology or not even so much in terms of philosophy, but what the Republicans needed to do on a professional level, on an economic level, on a tactical management level, to become the stalwarts of American government, to become a majority. That was always a unifying theme--how can we become a majority? How can we do what Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930s, what William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt did in the 1890s and the early part of this century?

Q: So even in the middle of a campaign for Congress in west Georgia, Newt is articulating his long-term broader strategy?

Gregorsky: And recruiting and training and testing and pushing the troops to behave this way, and eventually the great majority of his colleagues either got that message and changed, or they retired or got defeated. Now the whole party reflects parts of that, they're like an army with a strategic focus.

Q: What are some of your strongest memories of that campaign, that first campaign, '78?

Gregorsky: The tax cut bill of Jack Kemp and Senator Robb, now the finance chairman in the Senate. The fact that Republicans were running for the first time in my lifetime, maybe even in Newt's lifetime, as the party of job creation, hope and opportunity -- helping blacks get ahead. Now not all candidates in '78 were familiar with this, but dozens of them were and it was Jack Kemp's tax cut legislation in '77 that allowed the party to start changing its tone, during the Carter years.

People would say, of course, 'Well Reagan won because of Carter' and I agree with that, I mean, Carter had a very bad administration, high inflation, foreign crises.

The Republicans were going to win in 1980 unless they really screwed it up, but the point was, we won in a different way in '78 and '80 in those Congressional races and then in Reagan's landslide in '80 because Jack Kemp had redefined our economic message.

It wasn't just 'shrink the government, get rid of the welfare cheaters and increase defense,' though those things were still there. But Newt and a couple dozen other House candidates were saying, 'Hey, we're for prosperity, we're for a rising time lifting all the boats.' We quoted John Kennedy over and over again in 1978, just as Jack Kemp was doing on a national level. Most of the research came from Kemp's office. It was a change in tone.