Callaway: Pete DuPont had been a member of Congress and he'd gone on to be governor of Delaware. A very articulate, bright guy that I think the world of. He formed GOPAC with the idea that millions and millions of dollars have been spent in the last, say, 20 years, to elect Republicans to Congress. But nobody thinks about control and we just sort of wandered around doing our best. We'd gotten an N-R-C-C, National Republican Congressional Committee, doing a great job, raising a lot of money, putting on training programs, making advertisements, doing everything they know how to do. We're not getting anywhere.

So he says, 'We're not going to get there this way.' One of the ways that the Democrats beat the Republicans very badly in those days was when there was a special election or maybe when there were three democrats running. Maybe you'd have a state senator, a pretty good-sized city mayor, and a county commissioner, all of them experienced in politics, and some Republican businessman says, 'Well, I think I'll give it a try.' And you're just plain out-gunned. You don't have anyone. So, the idea was to build a farm team --that's the baseball analogy Pete DuPont used. You don't expect Bo Jackson, one of the greatest athletes any body's ever known--I don't know if you recall, in the minor leagues he couldn't hit the pitching, not even minor league pitching. But after he'd been on the farm team he turned into a very great baseball player, obviously --all-star games and all of that. So you've got these all-stars out there, but they need some seasoning.

And that was the whole idea of the farm team. Basically, Pete DuPont would call around to people he knew. He'd call me, I was chairman of the Colorado Republican party, and say, 'Who are 5 or 6 Republicans running for the state legislature, who, with a little help, not a whole lot, $500, $1000, might make a difference and put 'em over?' And we would know the people there. We'd tell him the 3 or 4 people and he'd give them some money. He did that all over the country. It was extremely helpful. The whole idea was to build a farm team. And there wasn't much ideology to it. It was just who could get elected as a Republican and there wasn't much else to it. Not that there needed to be anything else, because it was a very fine program. But that's what the GOPAC was about.

Then Pete DuPont ran for president and when he was running for president, he said, 'I do not want to use GOPAC to help my presidential ambitions. I want someone else to run it.' And he called Newt and said, 'Newt, would you run it?' and Newt said he would. Very shortly after that, Newt asked me if I would come and sort of run the day-to-day affairs. His title was General Chairman and mine was Chairman. But there's no question who ran it: it was Newt's; I was running it for him and I was trying to make the trains run on time.

Q: Why do you think DuPont, out of all the people he could get, turned to Newt Gingrich, who at that point was still a relatively unknown junior congressman?

Callaway: Well, I don't know. Pete never talked to me about that. But it was a very logical thing if you wanted someone who really had ideas and Pete knew Newt pretty well. And you know, you can't talk to Newt three minutes without getting seven new ideas. And maybe you have to throw out some of them, but you'll get some really good ideas talking to him. And he correctly thought that if he'd given this to any of the other people they wouldn't have contributed the new ideas that Newt brought to GOPAC.

Q: Was there a kind of fire in the belly and real belief there could be a Republican majority? Was that part of it?

Callaway: For Newt? Oh absolutely. Absolutely. Newt never had one minute's doubt. Newt knew we were going to have a Republican majority. He was generally planning toward '92, but '94 would work. Close enough.

Q: What kind of people gave money to GOPAC and how did you approach them when you were soliciting funds?

Callaway: Well, we raised the money with small donors the same way Pete DuPont did. We had the same kind of direct mail that goes out and you prospect and when you get prospects you mail them three or four times a year. So that didn't change. But that was a small amount of the total money. Most of our money was the big money and the big money was a program that Pete DuPont had started called the Charter Program. That's $10,000 a year and that's basically what I spent a large part of my time doing, soliciting $10,000 a year from people, which is still a lot of money even though you have the Team 100s and all of that. $10,000 is a lot of money and nobody's going to give you $10,000 without thinking about it. You've got all of the programs, the Republican party and the Democratic party. In the Republican party you had the Senatorial trust, you have the Eagles, you have the Congressional, I think they call it the Leadership Assembly in Congress. And all of those are ten-now fifteen thousand dollar programs. A large part of what they do to solicit, they of course want you to believe in their cause and people would not give it if they did not believe in the cause, but a large part is glitzy. If you are an 'Eagle,' you go to Jerry Ford's home, you go to Mount Vernon with all the senators and congressman present, governors are there. I mean it's a very glitzy experience.

So, they basically raised their money on the glitz, although you had to believe in the cause, obviously. Not that GOPAC didn't have glitz. But the basic thing about GOPAC is you really believed in the cause. And the people we got were the true believers-- we got them believing that we would control Congress. We are going to control the U.S. House. And we got people believing that because Newt believed in it. I believed in it. Our staff believed in it. It wasn't just some casual, 'I'll wake-up and think I'll believe in controlling the House.' We had plans, how we would get there, how we intended to do it. And opposed to these other committees, when we'd have a GOPAC meeting, people got really involved. We've got a number of those GOPAC charter members who are still extremely involved and take a great deal of pride in saying, 'I had something to do with bringing in a Republican-controlled House,' which was a dream of many people for many, many years.

Q: Team 100 people--it was Republican establishment -- big corporate people for the most part. Was GOPAC different? Were these a different group of business people?

Callaway: Yeah. We did not reject the establishment and we had some establishment, but GOPAC was clearly not the establishment. GOPAC was people who really believed in Newt. People who really wanted to be close to Newt. When Newt ran for the whip, the whole GOPAC people -- this is our race, they were involved in it. This is our candidate. This is us. We're part of it. And not that Newt needed financing for the whip, they didn't need that, but several of the GOPAC members came just to say, 'I want to be on hand- Can I help you running for whip?' And they were just very, very involved and they were people obviously of wealth. You can't give $10,000 unless you have wealth. But they were generally not people of great wealth. They just believed.

Q: Self-made people? Entrepreneurs?

Callaway: Yes. A lot of entrepreneurial self-made people. Certainly not the big business in the sense of General Motors and IBM and the very huge corporations. We've never gotten help from them in any major way.