The Wright triumph proved to be a clear asset to Gingrich in his campaign for party whip, but, ironically, the position had become vacant only because of a Republican ethics mess --the John Tower affair. When Tower was rejected by the Senate in March, President Bush nominated Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who had just been elected minority whip, for secretary of defense. Gingrich was in his field office in Griffin, Georgia, when he heard the news about Cheney's nomination from a USA Today reporter. He made up his mind instantly.

"It was 3:45 in the afternoon," he says. "I decided by the time I hung up. It was so obvious that, having lost Lott [Trent Lott of Mississippi, who'd been elected to the Senate] and Kemp [who'd moved into Bush's Cabinet] and Cheney, we needed somebody with a good deal of drive and energy to fill the vacuum that those three guys left behind them. And so I decided to try it."

It may have seemed obvious to Gingrich, but not to others. The whip's job (the title does in fact derive from a literal use of the word: the "whipper-in" at a fox hunt is a man who keeps the hounds together in a pack) is the ultimate inside party position, involving the counting of noses, the corralling and delivering of votes, the building of coalitions. Gingrich was the quintessential party outsider, a freelancer with no known expertise in vote gathering, several well-known antagonisms within his own party and, of course, with Democrats, and he was no ally of minority leader Bob Michel's. Michel, in fact, was supporting his fellow Illinoisan Edward R. Madigan, who had the traditional qualifications for the role to a T. But Gingrich once again was prepared to seize his moment.

He had heard about the Cheney appointment on a Saturday, and immediately got on the telephone, rounding up support for his candidacy. He called Marianne into his office to get food and run errands, while he and his allies worked the phones late into the night. By Monday, he'd built a sizable base of support. Madigan didn't get around to announcing until Monday. Gingrich won the election by two votes, 87 to 85, put over top by some of his longtime moderate adversaries in the party. After Gingrich's victory, Wright sent him a copy of his book Reflections of a Public Man , with the inscription, "For Newt --who likes books, too...To be chosen by your peers is a great honor." Gingrich called the Speaker and thanked him --but had second thoughts when it occurred to him that Wright's gesture "was meant as a publicity stunt."

The vote made clear, Michel said, that the G.O.P. members wanted a more activist leadership. As Gingrich sees it, "The party went through a twelve-day introspection trying to decide which was the greater risk, and decided on balance it was less risky to have more risks."

Some, including Gingrich himself, believe that his new party "insider" status will moderate the former bomb thrower, "I have to be more cautious now," he says, "because I no longer just speak for myself." Coelho says that in the early going he has been cooperative, helping to pass the budget through the House without obstruction.

But there are also those in the G.O.P. who say that Gingrich is biding his time, that it is one thing to be conciliatory on the budget, and that when it comes to real "wedge" issues, those gut issues that can be used against Democrats committed to policies outside the moderate-conservative spectrum, the Gingrich strategy will be to raise hell and publicize the divisions.

"You'll see them more energized, more involved in drawing the line to show the difference between Republican and Democratic behavior," Vander Jagt says, "and therefore you'll see more sharply defined confrontational votes that we can play to. One of my frustrations has been you do not change public perception by issuing press releases from the Republican National Committee. You change it by headlines that result from action under that Capitol dome and votes that are taken there."

But far more important than Gingrich's congressional role is his place in the wider campaign to win the House for the Republican Party. There is in this Republican quest a weird factor at play. Polls cited by both parties show that about half of all Americans don't perceive the House as an institution run by Democrats. When Reagan was in the White House, in fact, more people thought that it was a Republican body. Republican strategists believe, perhaps inevitably, that if voters saw the House as a Democratic monolith, they'd make the same values connection they make in presidential races and take it out on their local Democrats. That's what G.O.P. strategists believe occurred in 1980, when, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, people took for granted that the House was democratic and proceeded to go out and vote for Republican congressional candidates.

So Gingrich's role is to drive home the message that the House is a Democratically controlled institution. Or, rather, that it is a "corrupt, left-wing, Democratically controlled institution."

"Exactly," Vander Jagt says, "exactly. We don't have Jimmy Carter to help us anymore. Now we've got Newt Gingrich."

Democrats, naturally, consider that underlying premise --that Americans will vote Republican if they realize the House is Democratic-to be, in the words of Representative Anthony, "poppycock." Still, they do worry about losing seats when congressional districts are reapportioned before the 1992 election. (As many as twenty seats will shift to the West and South, growing Republican strongholds.) And a Gingrich-led campaign to Willie Horton the Democratic Party figures to hurt individual candidates in the South, where many Democratic congressmen already have to out-conservative the Republicans to win elections.

All of this, of course, makes Newt Gingrich a more tempting target for Democrats than ever before, which is why Alexander's ethics complaint against the Georgian should have surprised no one.

Democrats considered it the height of hypocrisy for Gingrich to go after Wright for his peculiar book deal when Gingrich himself had made not one but two unusual book arrangements. The first was in 1977, before he actually won his seat, when he accepted $13,000 from his supporters to write a book that he never completed. The second case, involving Gingrich's 1984 manifesto for the Conservative Opportunity Society, concerned a unique arrangement by which twenty-one "investors" paid $5,000 each to a limited partnership, run by Mrs. Gingrich, to raise money to promote the book.

Gingrich stoutly maintains that his deal is "fundamentally different" from Wright's because the money given for his book by each partner was "an investment, not a gift" --so defined by Gingrich because each partner had a chance to reap a profit if the book became a best-seller. (It didn't.) However, Gingrich's wife didn't recruit just businessmen in forming the partnership, she recruited supporters of Gingrich's, many of them constituents, and at least fifteen of the people who have contributed to his political campaigns. Some of them have said that they had no intention of making money, they just wanted to do something for Gingrich.

Gingrich has taken the assault hard, and was reportedly shaken to the point of tears when he heard that four Democratic colleagues were asking that a special outside counsel pursue the charges. He says he was "surprised and hurt," and spent long, anguished hours wondering if he had in fact done something worthy of investigation.

But Newt Gingrich didn't get this far by indulging in self-doubt. The next day the bomb thrower was back on the attack, accusing the Democrats of "an amateur smear," and bullying the press for refusing to blithely accept his definition of an "investment" (House rules prohibit gifts from individuals in excess of $1,000). He played the annoyed college instructor, hectoring and ridiculing reporters. When he told Andrea Mitchell of NBC News that she was "overreaching" with a question, she expressed the sentiment of many in the room by snapping back, "It's an environment you helped to create."

It's an environment that figures to get muddier. Newt Gingrich has touched off a scandal of truly historic proportion. The various investigations of Wright's personal and business conduct range far beyond Gingrich's original charges, and the ethics committee is now probing allegations of wrongdoing related to Wright's unusual good fortune in an oil well deal (his blind trust turned a nifty $292,000 profit in a month). As the revelations continue, congressional and media scrutiny of the Speaker has intensified.

The Washington Post published a devastating retelling of a brutal stabbing by the man who was Wright's top aide on Capitol Hill. Though the story had been common knowledge in congressional circles, the article was the talk of Washington for several days and resulted in the aide's resignation. It gave vivid, spine-chilling details of John Paul Mack's 1973 assault on a twenty-year old customer of the Virginia store in which he was then working as a clerk. He went berserk, slashing the woman and crushing her skull with a hammer, then left her for dead. After two years in jail, Mack was released on a work program; he had been promised a job in the office of Congressman Jim Wright --whose daughter was then married to Mack's brother.

The sordid allegations and news stories multiply, and it has become clear to members on both sides of the aisle that Wright is unlikely to survive as Speaker of the House. At best, he'll be allowed to resign his post and retain some shred of dignity. Furthermore, one of the likely choices to succeed him, Tony Coelho, may himself be facing an ethics-committee inquiry for failing to make required disclosures about his highly profitable purchase of a Drexel junk bond.

The bottom line is that Gingrich has delivered a crushing blow to the Democratic Party, and he's prepared to escalate the battle if necessary. "There are at least nine cases of documented Democratic scandals that by their standard would require independent counsel," he notes, then goes on to make what sounds very much like a threat. For the Democrats to press the case against him, Newt Gingrich warns, would be "an act of self-immolation that is irrational."

Both Republicans and Democrats agree that this highly partisan ethics war has already inflicted heavy damage. But in the brave new political world personified by Newt Gingrich, a world in which confrontation is an end as well as a means, the bloodletting almost certainly won't stop here.