Du Pont: We did. We had a huge base of direct mail donors and twenty or thirty. He took GOPAC, which was small and effective in its sphere, and tripled the size of it and made it ten times more effective than it was when we started it.

When I came back to GOPAC charter meetings after Newt became the chairman, I was meeting people that I had never seen before. He really broadened the base just as he has broadened the base of the Republican Party

Q: You've been in politics a long time. How often does someone like a Newt Gingrich come along?

Du Pont: Very seldom. In my political lifetime we've had Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich in twenty-five years. Two people who really had a very different vision of the government of the country. Maybe two in twenty-five years is a lot but they don't come along very often.

Q: When Newt Gingrich starts talking about Franklin D. Roosevelt as one of his most impressive heroes, does that make you a little nervous?

Du Pont: No, because Franklin Roosevelt was a President who had to govern at a time of crisis, so was Abraham Lincoln, so was Winston Churchill, the leader of the British, at a time of crisis. And if you're going to make fundamental changes in the way a nation thinks, you have to have the ability to take the crisis of the moment and use it to shape an agenda.

Franklin Roosevelt was very good at that. We don't particularly agree with the way his agenda turned out, though to tell you the truth, I think it was more Lyndon Johnson's fault than Franklin Roosevelt's. Nevertheless, he was a great leader. He saw how to use the levers of power to affect change. No wonder Newt appreciates that because that's what he sees too.

Q: You mentioned Johnson. Newt says we've got a great American history; we're American exceptionalism; we're an extraordinary country. We take the great detour, sometimes with dates like 1965, sometimes about '67 or '68, but in any case, it's Lyndon Johnson where it all went wrong. And now we're trying, as he puts it, to renew American civilization. Would you agree with that?

Du Pont: I would agree with that. American public policy had a nervous break down in the late 1960s and 1970s. We lost our way. Now we're just beginning to find it back again. I think Newt correctly assumes that the American public is beginning to look down the road and at least distinguish the landmarks on either side and know where it wants go. We have a chance to lead it there.

Q: There's some comparisons that can be made between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, not politically but somewhat in their histories, their personal histories,. They're also baby-boomers. They're of a certain generation, a generation that has only newly come into power in the United States. That generation has several things that some people would consider flaws. It has a nature, maybe too much experimentation with whatever back in the 60s and 70s -- the 'I'm not quite yet grown up' generation. Does any of that trouble you? Is Newt fully grown?

Du Pont: Well, everyone matures. I'm sure when I was Newt's age that I thought I had the right answer to things. But as I've gotten older, of course, I continue to change. I think the baby-boomers as political leaders are still on trial by the American people. Politics move very slowly. Bill Clinton's vacillation hasn't helped the image of baby-boomers. But you can't categorize fifty million people as all the same.

So the baby-boomers will lead America in the next few Presidential elections. Bob Dole is the last of the World War II generation. I expect some uneasiness with the baby-boomers is why Bob Dole is doing so well in the Presidential campaign. He's tried and true, we know what he is, and the baby-boomers were still saying, 'Let's wait and see.'

Q: Someone we interviewed said, 'Liberals see Newt as the man who is taking away their cookies from the cookie jar and if they're afraid of him, they have reason to be afraid.' Should moderates be afraid of Newt Gingrich?

Du Pont: No, moderates shouldn't be nervous about Newt because he has a vision, he's laid it forward. If you don't agree with all of it, try and get him to change it a little bit. But he's fundamentally leading us in the way that middle class Americans want to go.

Liberals should be terrified of Newt Gingrich because he has an alternative vision. He's good at selling and he's now got enough of a majority that it's beginning to sell. And we may be seeing the death of liberalism, particularly if Republicans gain in the House and the Senate in '96.

Q: Newt is a master, it seems of getting everyone singing from the same page of the hymn book...

Du Pont: Well, Newt is a history major and he understands the importance of language. When he began the campaign with GOPAC, the serious part of building a majority, he said, 'The first thing we've got to do is, we've all got to use the same language. We've got to start talking about.' Newt said this hundreds of times, 'start talking about a conservative opportunity society replacing the liberal welfare state.' And he'd say, 'Bang that language into you head. Use it every night. Use the same words and pretty soon it will permeate the American people.' And that was the right strategy. Language is important; messages are important; and Newt understands.

Q: And Newt, it seems, is also very adept at identifying new sources of getting to the public through the media, making an end run around The New York Times for example.

Du Pont: Well, talk radio, of course, has made an enormous [end run] around establishment media. But the next one that's coming is the internet. It is making an [end run] around talk radio. Suddenly we're faced with an information age in which you and I as individuals can have access to all the information that only the elite had in the beginning and they would decide how to parcel it out to us.

Newt's on the cutting edge again. I'm sure he'll have an internet strategy before he's done.