Newt Gingrich is an important man, a man of refined tastes, accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and so when he visits the zoo, he does not merely stand with all the other patrons to look at the tortoises—he goes inside the tank.
The attention would be enough to make a lesser man—say, a sweaty magazine writer who followed his subject into the tortoise tank for reasons that are now escaping him—grow self-conscious. But Gingrich, for whom all of this rather closely approximates a natural habitat, barely seems to notice. A well-known animal fanatic , Gingrich was the one who suggested we meet at the Philadelphia Zoo.
He used to come here as a kid, and has fond memories of family picnics on warm afternoons, gazing up at the giraffes and rhinos and dreaming of one day becoming a zookeeper. Since then, Gingrich has spent much of the day using zoo animals to teach me about politics and human affairs.
The females hunt, and as soon as they find something, the male knocks them over and takes the best portion. But the most important lesson comes as we wander through Monkey Junction. Gingrich tells me about one of his favorite books, Chimpanzee Politics , in which the primatologist Frans de Waal documents the complex rivalries and coalitions that govern communities of chimps.
For several minutes, he lectures me about the perils of failing to understand the animal kingdom. Disney, he says, has done us a disservice with whitewashed movies like The Lion King , in which friendly jungle cats get along with their zebra neighbors instead of attacking them and devouring their carcasses.
As he pauses to catch his breath, I peer out over the sprawling primate reserve. Spider monkeys swing wildly from bar to bar on an elaborate jungle gym, while black-and-white lemurs leap and tumble over one another, and a hulking gorilla grunts in the distance. At a loss for what to say, I start to mutter something about the viciousness of the animal world—but Gingrich cuts me off.
With his immense head and white mop of hair; his cold, boyish grin; and his high, raspy voice, he has the air of a late-empire Roman senator—a walking bundle of appetites and excesses and hubris and wit. Check out the full table of contents and find your next story to read. When I ask him how he views his legacy, Gingrich takes me on a tour of a Western world gripped by crisis.
In Washington, chaos reigns as institutional authority crumbles. Throughout America, right-wing Trumpites and left-wing resisters are treating midterm races like calamitous fronts in a civil war that must be won at all costs. And in Europe, populist revolts are wreaking havoc in capitals across the Continent. Twenty-five years after engineering the Republican Revolution, Gingrich can draw a direct line from his work in Congress to the upheaval now taking place around the globe.
But as he surveys the wreckage of the modern political landscape, he is not regretful. It was a natural audience for him. At 35, he was more youthful-looking than the average congressional candidate, with fashionably robust sideburns and a cool-professor charisma that had made him one of the more popular faculty members at West Georgia College. But Gingrich had not come to deliver an academic lecture to the young activists before him—he had come to foment revolution.
The speech received little attention at the time. Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids.
But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta.
The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself.
Gingrich recruited a cadre of young bomb throwers—a group of 12 congressmen he christened the Conservative Opportunity Society—and together they stalked the halls of Capitol Hill, searching for trouble and TV cameras. Their emergence was not, at first, greeted with enthusiasm by the more moderate Republican leadership. They even looked different—sporting blow-dried pompadours while their more camera-shy elders smeared Brylcreem on their comb-overs. Gingrich and his cohort showed little interest in legislating, a task that had heretofore been seen as the primary responsibility of elected legislators.
Bob Livingston , a Louisiana Republican who had been elected to Congress a year before Gingrich, marveled at the way the hard-charging Georgian rose to prominence by ignoring the traditional path taken by new lawmakers. For revolutionary purposes, the House of Representatives was less a governing body than an arena for conflict and drama.
From these books, Gingrich came to this conclusion: Trump is a practical man who loves to win. Gingrich was so fascinated by the window he believed these books offered into Trump's worldview that he would often discuss the writings in public and even encourage political reporters to read them. In an early January phone interview, Gingrich began the conversation with this advice for a CNN reporter: "First, let me suggest if you haven't done it, that you ought to read 'The Art of the Deal,'" Gingrich said.
In another call at the end of February, just one day before Trump would win big on Super Tuesday, Gingrich offered the reporter the same instruction as the interview was winding down. Relishing role of adviser. Those close to Gingrich say the former speaker has always relished the role of political adviser.
As Trump has struggled in his transition into a general election candidate, suffering from political setbacks and self-inflicted wounds, Gingrich seems to have warmed to the idea of offering his personal guidance.
Gingrich "made the transition from outsider to governing as Speaker, and that's clearly a Trump failing at this point," said former Virginia Congressman Tom Davis, a longtime Gingrich friend.
Trump has acknowledged that he wants to pick a partner with plenty of government experience. Chris Christie and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker took himself out of the running on Wednesday, while Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst also appeared to remove herself from consideration. But if Gingrich were to take on a more formal role in Trump's campaign -- whether as Trump's running mate or in another capacity -- he will also undoubtedly be one of Trump's most blunt advisers.
Indeed, words became his weapons. But Kit says that when Newt attempted to outsmart his stepfather with the things he had read, the colonel would order him to go back to his corner and his books. The fact that young Newt—like Ronald Reagan—could barely see may have exaggerated his tendency to live inside his own imagination. Around this time he had a marvelous awakening, the kind he had read about.
I came out at about four in the afternoon, and next to the movie theater was a sign that said city hall. So I stood there, having been exhilarated by these two African movies—one of which I think was called Trader Horn. I decided that Harrisburg needed a zoo, and this was the right moment to do something.
Skipping adolescence, he accelerated into a pseudo middle age. Too soft. Earlier the Speaker made a point about his fathers that makes me think of Stryker. They both served in the military. They both believe in a very male kind of toughness. Not much difference between them. It was just a fact. He is not. He is rootless, raised on a drifting landscape of army bases here and abroad and in a blue-collar backwater in Pennsylvania called Hummelstown.
His family lived in an apartment which looked out on the town square. During my stay in Pennsylvania, the Gingrich family plans a meeting at a favorite cafe, and I am invited. Kit Gingrich sits surrounded by her three girls: Roberta, 45, brown-haired and maternal, works for the government bureaucracy as a state supervisor for home-economics education. Snow, pretty and girlish at 47, is stuck in a dead-end state job. The family is not reluctant to discuss her calls to Newt to find out what he can do for her.
Kit Gingrich is 69 now, with aqueous eyes and anxiety crocheted between her brows. At times it seems she cannot quite fathom everything that has happened. But life began to shatter her expectations early.
When she was 14, her dad—who worked for the railroad—was killed in a violent accident. My mother had a breakdown. She wiped out. When her mom started dating again, Kit says, she was left to her own devices and took up with brawling Big Newt. On the day of the wedding she and Big Newt sneaked off and tied the knot early in the morning. She wore a dress of gray velvet. After the marriage, Big Newt quickly joined the navy.
Kit had already moved in with the senior McPhersons. Once Newt was born, she filed for divorce. When Bob Gingrich, now suffering from emphysema, enters the cafe he stands back from our table, scowling, working the tobacco wadded inside his cheek. His face is as sharp as a knife blade. He greets no one. It was difficult to disagree with him. But he has really mellowed.
He refused to allow his children to learn to drive. There was a stiff price for breaking his rules. When the family was living in France, in a town on the Loire called Beaugency, about 20 miles from Orleans, curfew in the household was 11 P. One night, the boy and a friend stayed out in town until two a. We were face-to-face. Newt was bug-eyed.
Then I dropped him. There was no need to shout. The Gingrich family does not appear to have been involved in the volunteerism championed by Newt to replace government bureaucracies. Bob Gingrich is a Mason and was an Elk.
Kit had church activities. I ask if Newt volunteered for any sort of social service. That comment brought forth the Baker High School yearbook. Surprisingly, the boy in the bottle-thick glasses with a plaid shirt and plastic pocket protector was only a runner-up as a National Merit Scholar. Bob Gingrich says his stepson never discussed joining the military. But Kit Gingrich is not reluctant to discuss the extraordinary circumstances she has survived. Her life has been defined by unpredictabilities.
As it happens, she is manic-depressive. When she was taken off her medicine, she saw Bob entirely differently, she says. Bob is a tyrant, she admits. No question about it.
Someday he might be president. The personal agenda of which Mary Kahn speaks is deeper than any philosophical or material odyssey. 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 mono-maniacally, obsessed only with his goal.
No amount of personal deprivation—hour workweeks, no vacations, no time with his wife—diminishes his narcissistic vision of the global glory that will ultimately be his prize. I want to shift the entire planet. Oh, this is just the beginning of a or year movement. 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. Many observers see the child at the center of Newt. Newtie was always for Newtie. 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.
She certainly seemed to love him. Jackie moved to Atlanta, where, coincidentally, Newt was offered a partial scholarship at Emory University, which was known for its history department. Meanwhile Paul Krugman thinks he may be the idiot's candidate, but far less so than some of the others currently running:. The Republican base does not want Romney, and they keep on looking for an alternative.
And Newt, although somebody said he's a stupid man's idea of what a smart man sounds like, but he is more plausible than the other guys that they've been pushing up.
For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more.
0コメント