Weber: No, we did not come in together. He came in 1979 and I came in 1981. I don't know if I actually remember my first meeting with him. I can remember my first impressions of him and my first serious conversation with him.

He was, clearly, the most active person in the Republican Conference at a time when we were both very hopeful. We'd just elected a large number of new Republicans with Ronald Reagan in the election of 1980, and, yet, still short of the majority status.

Here was a really very junior member of the party challenging the Republican Party at a time when they thought they were headed for victory. We had the Presidency, we'd taken the Senate for the first time since the 50s, we had made significant gains in the House, and Newt Gingrich was basically saying that we still weren't doing it right. He proved, of course, to be right over the course of the next several years, as we receded in numbers and remained in the minority.

Q: You guys were the Young Turks of the Republican Party in those days.

Weber: That's right. There weren't very many of us to begin with. There had been an operation in the 1960s that were the Young Turks of that time. It was lead by [Don Rumsfeld] who was a Congressman from Illinois and went on to become Secretary of Defense, and then he filled a number of other positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

There was a group of young members in the 60s called [Romney's Raiders] that were sort of the Young Turks of their day. [They were] probably more moderate Republicans at that time because that's where the center of energy was in the Republican Party and the Congress in the late 60's. Between then and the time that we formed the Conservative Opportunity Society, in 1982-1983, there really wasn't much of a Young Turk group.

To be candid, our group started out pretty small to begin with because there was a great fear of offending senior members, offending Democrat members, and what was to be gained by this, after all?

Q: What did you think of Newt Gingrich? Here's this guy who, from day one, is saying and telling everyone in town, 'The Republican Party could be a majority party and that's what I'm here to help accomplish.'

Weber: I certainly believed that. I guess the most important thing that I remember from my early conversations with Newt is that he believed that we could be in the majority. He also understood that the major impediment to becoming a majority was our own mind set, the minority party mind set, as we put it. It was the sense that we couldn't become a majority and since probably a majority of the members in the Republican Party believed that, even if they didn't articulate it, it drove them to behave in ways that hurt the Republicans.

So it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because we're in the minority, we act a certain way that assures that we're going to stay in the minority. That's the first thing I really remembered Newt saying. I thought it precisely fit with what I believed about the Republican Party and what I had been saying back in my home state of Minnesota, which is a Democratic bastion, more so even then than now for some time.

Q: Tell me about the Conservative Opportunity Society. How was it formed and what was the idea?

Weber: He basically came up to me on the floor of the House. It might have been the last day of the session of 1982 or near the last day of the session. He essentially said, 'What are you doing next year and for the next ten years after that?' I thought that was interesting and I said, 'I expect to be back here, but nothing special other than that.'

Then he got serious and said that he wanted to talk to me about, in essence, forming a faction. That was my term, not his. He had a different way of describing it which I don't remember. I could understand immediately what he was saying. What he was saying was that he, as one person, was not being effective. He might be right; I thought he was right. He identified me in the Conference as somebody [who] had been supportive of his point of view and maybe had some ability to organize things.

I understood immediately what he wanted to do. One person is a lonely voice. But, all of a sudden the faction has to be dealt with. That's not the phrase he used, [it was] the phrase I used. We started talking through who we would want to try to bring into a room of people that could challenge the minority mind-set within our own party while challenging the Democrats at the same time.

We didn't actually do anything until after the 1982 election which reduced our numbers rather significantly. But then in 1983 we began sitting down talking and organizing the Conservative Opportunity Society.