Weber: Well, his description of the marriage, he was very candid publicly about that. In the early 1980s his marriage had a hard time jelling, if you will. That's the way I put it because he got married to Marianne and immediately she found out that she was married to somebody who was married to his work in a very serious way. Add to this the problem that any congressional spouse has, looking to your husband and cheering for him and whatever, while people fail to recognize you at all. That puts a stress on every congressional marriage. Members are always in the spotlight and the spouse isn't and that creates some real problems. Add to that somebody who's consumed by his work as much as Newt Gingrich is and it created some rocky days in the early part of their marriage. I think that it's pretty much behind them and I think it did come together. I'm not suggesting that Marianne wouldn't like to pry him away from his work a little more often. It may not have been exactly what she thought she was getting into, but they worked it out pretty well.

Q: He has had a few very intense friendships in his life that have meant a great deal to him. Jim [Tilton] --we talked to [Tilton's] widow and his parents about how close a relationship that was. He doesn't seem to have a whole lot of friends but he seems to have a lot of acquaintances and a lot of political allies.

Weber: Yes. I think that's right. I think there's something in his personality make-up that makes it a little harder to attach to people. To O'Neill's credit, just to use him as a continuing example, he really was an old-fashioned Irish politician who was very comfortable getting very close to people and didn't feel any hesitancy about bonding or brotherhood with folk. That created both intense friendships and some pretty strong opponents as well. But with Newt, there's a little distance there. I don't know if it's generational or in his background. It's a little more difficult for him to attach to somebody.

He values friendships greatly, perhaps because he can't come by them so naturally. He doesn't take friendship for granted. He understands that you have to work at it and when you become friends, that's a special thing to him. He's said many times to me and Bob Walker jokingly, with a little laugh in his voice, 'If we keep at this long enough we may actually become friends.' He laughed, but he meant that very seriously. In his case, it wasn't an automatic thing. You could work with somebody for years and years and unless you spent some time working on actually becoming friends, it wasn't sure to happen. Whereas with a lot of other people it's the opposite. We can become friends, maybe we can work together, I don't know about that but we can surely get along. Newt is the opposite. He can work with anybody but he has to consciously think about making friends with them.

I do emphasize, for that reason, he values friendships a great, great deal, maybe more than some of us that just take them for granted. And you saw that in the death of his closest friend, Jim [Tilton] which really hurt him badly. Not that we all aren't hurt by the loss of a friend. But he suffered that loss a great, great deal.

Q: Would he make a good President?

Weber: I think he would. I think he'd be a very good President. He has a sense of history. He has an understanding of the issues and he's shown himself, both as House Republican [Whip] and now as the Speaker of the House, to be able to manage and construct a system that operates efficiently. He's not just rhetorical. He's not just philosophical. He's also highly practical. I think he'd make a great President, actually.

Q: Some say that Newt has contributed to this phase of nasty politics because in his early days he was an attack dog and a bomb thrower. And he wanted to shake things up and go after the establishment. Do you think that's a fair criticism?

Weber: I'm sure there's substance to that. That's a very difficult question. On the one hand, it certainly is true that he is a genuinely historic figure, the first Republican speaker in forty years, really the first speaker maybe ever, credited for bringing his party to majority status. That makes him an historic figure. And it's also true that part of that helped to [ration] up the level of instability in the political discourse.

On the other hand, he's quite right in saying, if you asked him, the Democratic Party was quite solidified and you almost needed a stick of dynamite to dislodge them. We could still be sitting there in the minority if he had not told us that we had to wake up and shake up the Democratic majority. It's very difficult to draw that fine line exactly in the right place. Be ready to shake up the Republican minority and get them to understand that they must shake off this minority party mind-set, that they must challenge the Democrats in several serious ways without crossing the line into the personal?

I think that if you actually read the things that he said, I can intellectually defend everything that he said. But I understand that the atmospherics were quite poisonous and probably did some damage to the atmosphere in the House of Representatives. Could we have done it differently? Probably not.