From the cauldron of his childhood -- the father who abandoned him, the manic depressive mother who loved him too much, the stepfather whose anger shaped the family -- Newt Gingrich emerged with a heroic need that became his mission. Talking to his inner circle of family, friends, and associates, and to the Speaker himself, GAIL SHEEHY learns the details of Newt's wars, his women, and his contract with himself.

"I think you can write a psychological profile of me that says I found a way to immerse my insecurities in a cause large enough to justify whatever I wanted it to." Newt Gingrich is coaching me on writing about himself. Ten years ago he was arguably the most disliked member of Congress. Today he is holding forth from the veranda of the office of the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, looking down on the Capitol Mall as if it were the great lawn of his own vast estate.

Newt Gingrich is the sonic boom of a presidential election season --a loud noise generated by a media meteor moving at supersonic speed. In June he declared that all presidential candidates would have to adjust to a world in which his Congress is "relatively more important than the White House." True, he has shaken up the jowly House and led the Republicans out of the wilderness, but he remains an untested national commodity. Maybe that explains the big presidential tease, which will continue as long as he can hold the spotlight. "If there were a large enough vacuum, then obviously I'm willing to consider it," he said in July.

No, no, Newt! plead many of his ardent supporters and strategists. But other observers say the G.O.P --a party which, in columnist Joe Klein's words, "can't resist a tent show"-- won't be able to resist "drafting" Newt. Meanwhile, he is honing his evangelical skills on a 25-city P.R campaign bankrolled with a loan from Rupert Murdoch and designed to sell his new book To Renew America --and himself.

But his greatest presidential stumbling block may be right under his nose. At home, Newt's second wife, Marianne Ginther Gingrich, tells me she doesn't see herself in the First Lady's job. "Watching Hillary has just been a horrible experience," commiserates Marianne. "Hillary sticking her neck out is not working."

What happens if Newt runs?, I ask.

"He can't do it without me," she replies. "I told him if I'm not in agreement, fine, it's easy" --she giggles at her naughtiness. "I just go on the air the next day, and I undermine everything...I don't want him to be president and I don't think he should be."

Why not?

"Right now, the presidency is not a single person. It's not so much what he'd be doing. It's what I'd be doing."

On the day of our interview, Newt looks relaxed. It's Sunday, Marianne is far away, and he can sit back, roll up his sleeves, scratch his arms, even let his belly flop over his belt. He has agreed to see me after months of my petitions because he knows I have done 70 interviews with his family, friends, and political operatives. As I told his press secretary, Tony Blankley, there are many conflicting stories about Newt and I wanted the man himself to sort them out. Newt Gingrich is his own creation, and I was fascinated by how this extraordinary person developed.

Newt's friends have told me that his primary references are movies. They have informed his heroic ideal. "When he watches John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart on TV, he lives out these movies," says Melvin Steely, a former colleague at West Georgia College.

So we start with films, namely Rob Roy.

"I liked half of Rob Roy," the Speaker says, "but The Last of the Mohicans is a much more romantic movie...Rob Roy is much too harsh...The best of America is romantic realism. It leads us to be permanently frustrated with ourselves because we set an impossibly high ideal."

It is no small coincidence that the medieval hero Robert the Bruce came to our attention as a character in Braveheart during Newt's big summer. Gingrich has long enshrined the legendary Scot in his pantheon of psychic heroes.

In the whole history of Europe, writes one historian, it would be hard to find a more "lunatic venture" than the Bruce's. For eight solid years, in a quest that Professor G. W. S. Barrow termed "the private revolution of an ambitious man," this weakling son of a tyrant king warred to restore the Scottish monarchy.

"I'm a mythical person," says Newt, no stranger to revolutions. "I had a period of thinking that I would have been called 'Newt the McPherson,' as in Robert the Bruce." He is referring to his childhood, when he strongly identified with his biological father, Newton McPherson.

"Robert the Bruce," Newt continues, "is the guy who would not, could not, avoid fighting...He carried the burden of being Scotland." Like the Bruce, Newt feels he must carry the burden of being his nation.

"What makes me unusually intense is that I personalize the pain of war, the pain of children being killed, the pain of a 16-year-old who has been permanently cheated by his school and cannot read."

"Are you an emotional person?"

"Oh yeah, very emotional," Newt declares.

"Compassionate?" I venture.

"I'm not sure what the word means." Newt frowns. "I'm enraged that a 16-year-old has been cheated their entire life by a system that has paid $7,000 a year to educate them and did nothing for its money. Now, is that compassion, or is it just rage?"

Newt --who once called himself "a psychodrama living out a fantasy"-- is growing interested in our dialogue. He props his hands, as acquisitive and chubby as a baby's, on top of his head as I warily approach the issue of his patrimony.

"Let me back up for a second," he interrupts. "I've never done this before. It's totally dangerous. But I like the way you're approaching this...I think it is fair to say, if you want to write a psychological piece, that part of my life has been trying to live up to a standard of toughness and responsibility...My relatives were either farmers, steelworkers, or industrial laborers. My uncle Cal was a highway-construction foreman who was enormously tough. He was shot and chased the guy...He couldn't catch him because of the bullet in his leg."

He unfurls his life story like a myth.

"My father grew up as a very angry person. When he signed up for the navy, the recruiting officer said, 'Why did you fill out your application wrong?' He said, 'What do you mean?' And he said, 'You put your grandmother's name in where your mother's name should be.' He found out that he had been born out of wedlock. They never told him. Talk about being outraged!"

The saga continues: "Big Newt was physically enormous. Six foot three, and could use a nine-pound sledgehammer with one hand. I'd say from the time he was 16 to 35 he was in bar fights...My mother was very frightened of him. So she decides to file for divorce. He tries to talk her out of it, fails, scares her even more, so she divorces him and then marries Bob Gingrich, who is also adopted...So that's the background, and people assume I'm some right wing, out-of-touch Neanderthal who doesn't get it. I mean, I'm adopted! Both of my fathers are adopted! I mean, give me a break!"

Confusion over his identity was a recurrent theme in Newt's boyhood. "I did not use the word 'stepfather' until I was talking to Marianne in 1982," he says. "I had a very confused blockage in sorting out the relationships."

"A heck of a mess when you think about it," Gingrich's mother, Kit, says reviewing the past. Big Newt, having been abandoned by his real father, Robert Kerstetter, was taken in by Newton and Hattie Belle McPherson and raised in a household where his real mother, Louise Kepner, was passed off as his sister. Bob Gingrich was a foster child, not adopted until he was 16. It sounds like a Faulkner saga. In Pennsylvania.

A painful turn came for Newt at the age of 16, when he and his family returned to the U.S. from Europe, where his stepfather had been stationed in the army.

"Your stepmother remembers you coming back furious," I say. "You went to her and said, 'Why did my father take my name from me?'"

Anger flashes in Newt's face as he takes a sip from his dinosaur mug. "I was furious because I figured out in Europe that my real father had agreed to allow me to be adopted."

Kit Gingrich has already told me the story of Newt's adoption. According to Kit, Big Newt, who made little effort to see the boy, called her when Newt was three years old. "His new wife was pregnant," says Kit. "He said that if I would drop the past four months of child support payments, Bob could adopt Newtie. Isn't it awful, a man willing to sell off his own son?"

Newt's stepmother, Marcella McPherson, recalls that after Newt's return from Europe the tormented adolescent asked, "'Why can't I come live with you?' He didn't want to get out of my husband's sight."

Newt grows pensive as he thinks back to the summer of 1960. He was 17, rebellious, searching. "Wandering around Harrisburg," he says, "I remember thinking that in the Scottish tradition...I would have been mythically called the McPherson. As in Robert the Bruce."

"When did Big Newt decide he wanted to get you back?"

"He never wanted to get me back."