Gregorsky: We did radio spots. I wrote and taped local radio spots for her on the local radio. She held over, she presided over basically beans and lemonade supper a Sunday before the election and that was a deliberate contrast to Rosalyn Carter coming in and doing a $50-a-plate dinner for Mrs. Shapard. That was our populist angle.

She sat in the strategy sessions. She didn't meddle but she knew what was going on and she made suggestions very tactfully. She was a skilled political person. I mean she knew the district. She knew the people. She had, I think, a better sense of individuals and personality than Newt did. She was a good balancing force.

Q: Tell me about Newt and the military in your experience with him.

Gregorsky: One of the talks I sometimes give, talks about all the similarities between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, there's lots of similarities which are beyond the point of this interview, but one big difference, the one huge night and day difference, is their attitudes toward the military, toward the armed services generally. Newt has always been enthralled and fascinated and sort of vicariously part of it. Whereas Clinton has sort of loathed it and in '93 had a hard time even getting the salute right as Commander-in-Chief. So there's a big difference between the two and I think, well, first of all it's strategy. Where in civilization is strategy most embodied and tested? In military circumstances. So anybody who was a natural strategist like Newt was at age 10 or 12 is going to gravitate toward battles and doctrine, tanks and soldiers and stuff like that. It may also have been a way to try to earn approval in the eyes of his father and the step-father, so he may have been compensating --psychological behavior to some extent.

Q: Though he himself never seems to have wanted to be a soldier. He never signed up to run off to Vietnam for instance.

Gregorsky: No, and there's no evidence that even early, well, '62, '63 that he considered doing that. It was politics. Newt determined after going through the Verdun battle field and sort of being scarred and inspired by that, that he didn't want to be one of the sacrifices, one of the enlisted men that were sent to die for a stupid military leadership or a political leadership. Neither did he want to be one of the ignorant leaders like the British, the French, and the Germans, you know, 60 years before. So I think you can take a commitment to military excellence and a commitment to strategy insight and take that into politics.

Starting around '80, maybe '81, Newt arranged every year to go out and speak to the graduating officers class at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Sort of like Churchill, Newt was inculcating himself and his ideas in with each successive generation of military commanders, starting from the age of 22 or 25 or whenever you graduate from that institution. And he's done that every year since 1981.

So there are thousands of mid-level, junior-level, maybe even senior level military people in the American establishment that got a dose of Gingrich at a very impressionable time in there lives. If he ever becomes President, even if he doesn't become president, that's an invaluable network, an invaluable set of sources, sounding boards, contacts, people to call him up and tell him if they don't like what Secretary Perry or President Clinton are doing, I'm sure that some of them do call. That showed real commitment to the military as an institution but also as strategic positioning.

He'll go wherever it takes to learn something new at a large level. He once said, 'I don't care who's in the Lebanese government this month. I don't waste parts of my brain memorizing data, information or facts that are going to be irrelevant in two months.' But he said, 'If it's the command culture of the United States military, yes, I'll spend a lot of time studying that and I will remember it and I will use it thirty years from now. That's the way it works.'

Q: On the one hand, he's the maverick, the outsider, a person shaking the establishment. But, he's also proven to be a Speaker of the House --I would argue, in this last year, the ultimate insider. He's bringing these factions together, holding together a coalition to move legislation through Congress.

Gregorsky: And a lot of the old timers, myself among them, never thought, well, we had doubts that he would ever become this kind of skilled manager of a large diverse group. I do maintain, however, that the friends who look at Newt's effectiveness as Speaker and say, 'Well, therefore, he should become President,' are missing a huge fundamental point about this man. What Newt has, having 233 Republican colleagues, is sort of a board of peers, a board of directors who are peers. They went out, they got elected, many of them are in awe of Newt but they have bled just like he has, they've got the same sanction, they took the same oath, they have the same vote on the House floor.

The fact that he has 230 plus of those people around him is a disciplining mechanism, is a way to do what staff never could do and what allies and consultants can't do, which is to keep his own worst enthusiasms from getting out of control. I would like to go on record and say that if this man becomes President, you don't have that anymore. You don't have any peers. Your peers are in Germany and France and they don't know all the details. They can't stop you from going crazy in the Oval Office. Clinton would have been a good legislative leader if he had been speaker of the House. Clinton's style would be good.

By the same token, I'm not at all sure that if Newt became President and was surrounded by two thousand appointed political types, all of whom basically want to kiss his behind, I'm not certain that is the kind of structure that would allow Newt to be effective as a manager.

The Foreign Policy Quote Project was reading into the record dozens of quotes that I found in the Congressional Record and other places, quotes that elected Democratic officials in the Congress and outside the Congress had said about Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua -- places where Communists had taken over, like in Angola, where the rosy scenario didn't turn out to be the reality once the Communists got into power. We simply read all these wrong-headed predictions into the record.

Tip O'Neill viewed it as an attack on his colleagues and as McCarthyism. We read a quote by Ed Bolin in the record from '72 during the harbor mining of Nixon and that personally offended Speaker O'Neill, and then the week after Newt had done this, O'Neill came and said, 'This is the lowest thing I've seen in the 32 years in Congress, you deliberately stood in the well of the House and assaulted their patriotism.'

And then on a point of personal privilege came back and answered the next day, answered the assault of the Speaker and then for three hours, this was May 15th, 1984, from about noon to about three, there was an old fashioned, partisan intellectual and ideological shoot-out. Henry Hyde was involved. Jack Kemp was involved, Jim Wright, then the majority leader, was involved. They all sort of came at Newt and Newt had some defenders, but it was really a hell of a gunfight. I mean he was holding off the big guns of the Democratic Party simultaneously. It was one of his finest hours.