DuPont: When I began the presidential campaign in 1986, I recognized that GOPAC was helping the Republican Party but if it stayed hooked to me it would die because people would say that's part of Pete DuPont's presidential campaign. So we wanted to save it and we had to give it to somebody. We looked around and said who's got the energy? Who's got the ideas? Who would take this animal called GOPAC and carry on in the spirit that we had begun? Newt Gingrich stood out.

I took him to breakfast one morning and I said, 'Newt, I've got a proposition for you.' He said, 'What? You want to give this to me?' And I said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'I'll call you back.' Half an hour later he was on the phone and it was his. And he did a magnificent job with it.

Q: What sort of changes, if any, did he make in GOPAC, as opposed to your original conception?

DuPont: Our original idea was to help three or four hundred candidates in the first election run for the Ohio State legislature and the California legislature around the country. Newt said, 'We can do that, we can help young people, but why don't we put together some educational material and spread it widely through the country so that people will begin to understand the conservative message, the conservative philosophy?'

He took GOPAC from a somewhat narrowly-focused campaign vehicle to a broader vehicle to explain the Republican ideology and philosophy and he expanded it enormously.

Q: In this period that you were mentioning before, the late 70s, Jimmy Carter was President and the Democrats controlled Congress. It was kind of a bleak time for the Republican Party. Newt Gingrich was elected in 1978. And we know, from talking to many people who knew him at that time, he was already talking about not just the possibility, he believed in the reality of the Republican majority, and not that far in the distant future. Were there many people like him?

DuPont: No. I had finished serving in the Congress in 1976 when I ran for Governor. So, I left two years before Newt came. When I left, I figured in my lifetime I'd never see a Republican Congress which is one of the reasons I said 'Let's go back home and do something a little more constructive.' But Newt has a long-range vision. He has an understanding of what's coming in the world that I think the rest of us lack.

Q: You served in Congress. Newt says that when he first got there, the Republicans were so used to being a minority party that they had to kind of ''go along, get along " compromise on the edges. Describe the mood of the Republican leadership.

DuPont: The moderate Republican Party of the 1970s were basically eighty percenters. They said, 'Democrats, we're for everything you're for--but only 80% of it. Yes, we'd like federal aid education, but not so much. Yes, we can help people on welfare, but not in as expensive a way as you want to do it.' So, as [some wag] once said, 'There wasn't a dime worth of difference between the two parties' and that was true. We were just for a little bit cheaper welfare state.

Newt comes to town and says, 'We're not for the welfare state at all. It's not a question of steering a little to the right, it's a question of turning the whole organization around and going off towards opportunity and individualism as opposed to collective decisions by government.'

Q: Another problem that the Republicans had was that for a long time it was seen by many Americans as a country club party, a party for wealthy people in the United States, Wall Street, whatever, and not a party that would ever have any kind of majority following in the United States. What was your thinking about trying to change that?

DuPont: Well, Ronald Reagan was the person who changed it. There were these wonderful people called Reagan Democrats who are really conservatives like Newt Gingrich is, like I am. And for the first time Ronald Reagan gave our party a bowling alley image as opposed to a country club image. We were suddenly talking to the people who go bowling on Thursday night and they were understanding what we were saying.

One of the tragedies of the Bush administration is that we went back to business as usual, make a deal with the Democrats, let's all be friends in Washington philosophy. So, we needed Newt to come along, to stand up against the Bush tax increase and the Bush budget deal, and to say, 'No we are still for the working people of the country, and I hope that we can keep our focus on representing the people who fight the wars and build the industries and do the work in this country. Because if we do stick with them, we can be a majority party for a long while.'