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"Newt Gingrich is playing out a personal agenda in a public forum, and it
threatens the safety, health, and security of our most vulnerable people," says
Mary Kahn. "And that's what frightens me about him. Someday he might be
president." Kahn, a reporter who covered Newt in the mid-70s, also spent time
with him socially until the early 80s as the wife of Chip Kahn, Gingrich's
former campaign manager.
The personal agenda of which Mary Kahn speaks is deeper that any philosophical
or material odyssey. As the Speaker himself said, "I found a way to immerse
my insecurities in a cause large enough to justify whatever I wanted it
to." Inspired by the books and movies that have been his guides, Newt
Gingrich has created a revolution, a mighty quest, and cast himself as hero,
the John Wayne who rescues the nation from economic self-destruction and moral
chaos. His childhood --shaped by the rejection by not just one but two
fathers, and the manic-depressive illness of his mother-- created a psychic
need so great that only the praise that attends a savior can fill the vacuum
inside him. He drives himself monomaniacally, obsessed only with his goal. No
amount of personal deprivation --100-hour workweeks, no vacations, no time with
his wife-- diminishes his narcissistic vision of the global glory that will
ultimately be his prize.
"It's not altruism! It's not altruism!" he proclaimed to The Washington
Post in 1985. "I have an enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the
entire planet. And I'm doing it...Oh, this is just the beginning of a
20-or-30-year movement. I'll get credit for it...As a historian, I understand
how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and
prove I was unimportant. My friends will write histories that glorify me and
prove I was more important than I was. And two generations or three from now,
some serious, sober historian will write a history that sort of implies I was
whoever I was."
Until he reaches his "impossibly high ideal," Newt will remain the
unacknowledged child. Many observers see the child at the center of Newt.
"Newtie is still a kid," admits Kit. Marcella McPherson agrees: "Newtie wants
things Newtie's way...If he wants something, he wants it now. Newtie
was always for Newtie."
One of his first independent acts was to escape the totalitarian regime of his
stepfather's home. He chose a path that women have used for generations: he
made a jailbreak marriage, attaching himself at the tender age of 19 to his
high-school geometry teacher, Jackie Battley --a buxom blonde seven years his
senior. "He was her little boy," says Kit.
Says Mary Kahn, "He saw a nurturing, mothering kind of person that he needed,
and she finished raising him...She certainly seemed to love him. But I don't
think he was capable at the time of loving anybody more than he loved
himself."
"He locked in on her and pursued her relentlessly," says Kip Carter,
Gingrich's campaign treasurer from 1974 to 1978. Jackie moved to Atlanta,
where, coincidentally, Newt was offered a partial scholarship at Emory
University, which was known for its history department. He had decided to
become a professor.
Bob Gingrich boycotted his stepson's wedding, but Newt and Kit remained close.
She remembers visiting the couple at Tulane University, where Newt entered
graduate school. The Gingriches had one daughter, Kathy, who was born nine
months after their marriage. Their second daughter, Jackie Sue, followed in
1966. Kit recalls that the young family's living conditions were spartan.
Their couch was "propped up with a brick," she says. "I mean, Jackie didn't
have any clothes."
Says Bob Gingrich, who seems to have changed his mind about his
daughter-in-law, "She busted her butt for him when he needed her."
Newt, who avoided Vietnam with student and marriage deferments, resisted
taking a job. During his college years, Newt called up his father and
stepmother to ask for financial help. His stepmother, Marcella McPherson, can
still hear his exact words: "I do not want to go to work. I want all my time
for my studies...Bob Gingrich told me he will not help me one bit. So I
wondered, would you people help me?" Big Newt began sending him monthly
checks.
Dolores Adamson, Gingrich's district administrator from 1978 to 1983,
remembers, "Jackie put him all the way through school. All the way through the
P.h.D...He didn't work." Adds Adamson, "Personal funds have never meant
anything to him. He's worse than a six-year-old trying to keep his bank
balance...Jackie did that."
When I ask Marianne if she keeps the checkbook for the man determined to
balance the nation's budget, she laughs quietly: "Yes, I do a lot of our
finances...I pretty much handle the money." She acknowledges that at the time
of their marriage, in 1981, Newt was in great personal debt, "so we had to work
our way out of it," a feat she says was accomplished only last year.
Friends of Newt's from graduate school recall a single-minded,
achievement-oriented workhorse with a Nixonian level of social unease. Newt
was, however, a mesmerizing presence --articulate, highly energized, driven by
his quest, his dream. Yet even as early as Tulane, he seems to
have assessed issues in purely political terms. Neither moralist nor
ideologue, he was from the very beginning a pure pragmatist, an actor in the
political theater, always honing his presentation.
"Looking back on everything, Newt was always focused on his agenda," recalls
Dot Crews, Newt's campaign scheduler through the 70s. "It was not about
political philosophy with Newt --never. If the country today were to move to
the left, Newt would sense it before it started happening and lead the way."
During Newt's early years as an assistant professor at sleepy West Georgia
College, he developed a reputation for a sort of Wagnerian overreaching.
Stephen Hanser, one of Newt's closest intellectual advisors, found himself in
1972 in a contest with Newt over the chairmanship of their department. Hanser
was unfazed by the young, unpublished instructor's chutzpah. "Oh, I think Newt
being Newt saw an opportunity to make some changes in the department, and the
fact that he was 28 or 29 at the time didn't bother him." After only a few
years on campus, he also pushed himself for the presidency of the college.
Newt Gingrich is hardly the first young politician to exhibit relentlessness
or tenacity. But from the beginning there has been an overheated quality to
Gingrich's ambition that has caused remark. It still does. "He's the man
overtaken by his own energy," says Mary Kahn. "He's just all over himself.
It's like 'Take a pill. Calm yourself down.' If he calmed himself and could
be more thoughtful, then perhaps he could be more effective."
Dot Crews calls Newt "a frenetic psyche." Frank Gregorsky, who began working
for Newt in 1978 while still in college and served as his chief of staff in the
early 80s, says, "All of his colleagues have had the rug pulled out from under
them enough to know that Newt's a bright bulb with no dimmer switch. It's
either on or off...either pitch-black or you're blinded by the light...He can't
modulate or nuance or taper."
The legacy of manic-depression stemming from his mother, Kit Gingrich, may be
relevant here, given the fact that the condition is an inherited one in about
80 percent of cases. After Kit acknowledged that she is manic-depressive, I
asked whether Newt had been tested psychologically. She responded, "Smart kids
don't need it...They get mad and they get glad."
After reminding Newt that Churchill and Lincoln are said to have been
afflicted with, respectively, manic-depression and depression, I ask if he
thinks he has anything similar to compensate for. "I don't know," he says. "I
think somebody could go through my childhood and my background and find some
way of describing it."
I wonder whether he believes that great leaders --with their exceptional
endurance and ability to act and think on several planes at once-- are
different from others, even biochemically different?
"I don't know," he tells me. "You have to have a genetic toughness just to
take the beating...Lincoln had long periods of depression. Churchill had what
he called his 'black dog.' F.D.R. had polio at a time when nobody who was in a
wheelchair could be a leader. You go down the list...My point is this: to
what degree is the capacity to lead a function of willpower and discipline?"
Dr. Frederick Goodwin, director of the Center on Neuroscience, Behavior and
Society at the George Washington University Medical Center and a national
authority on manic-depression, made no attempt to diagnose Newt Gingrich but
did provide some illumination on the Speaker's possible genetic inheritance.
"There is interesting new data on first-degree relatives," he says. "It sounds
like he has one first-degree relative with manic-depressive illness, his
mother, and at least one second-degree [his maternal grandmother, who "wiped
out"]. What generally gets transmitted in offspring that don't have the
illness itself is the drive and creativity...the positive aspects without the
negative aspects, the silver lining. First-degree relatives of manic
depressives often become successful...Gingrich's quickness, his ability to pick
things up quickly, are not inconsistent with what the studies of first-degree
relatives of manic-depressives have shown."
Some children of manic depressives exhibit traits of a less severe form of
mania known as hypomania. Another expert, a psychiatrist at New York
Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, elaborates on hypomania, describing it as a
state below mania. "There are people who are close to manic but don't become
flamboyantly manic...You can call it a biochemical imbalance. It is part of
the consideration of manic-depressive illness today. I have seen it in
families." According to this expert, grandiosity is a frequent symptom of this
condition. "And in Gingrich, his upbringing and the hypomanic flair of the
personality might create a double reason for his being grandiose because he's
trying to overcome the feeling of tremendous inferiority."
In Manic Depressive Illness, which Goodwin co-authored with Kay
Redfield Jamison, he describes the usual mood in hypomania as "ebullient,
self-confident, and exalted, but with an irritable underpinning." He goes on
to quote earlier studies that characterizes the thinking of a person in a
hypomanic state as "flighty. He jumps from one subject to another,
and cannot adhere to anything." Another study describes the role of hypomania
and extroversion in some leaders, noting behavior that is "often intolerant and
unyielding...given to impulsive action...full of energy and at the same time
full of strong purpose and burning conviction...the outcry attracts other
extroverts and soon there assembles a group of dominant men who unite in a
common cause."
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