Posted on 08/12/2010 5:17:49 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
Newt Gingrich is a phoenix. He's risen again and again from political ashes and appears to be ascendant once more. Rumored to be running for president in 2012, Gingrich is an icon in the Republican Party, an eminence grise at a time of lost leadership. His fall from grace in the late 1990s seems a blip, rather than a political ending. Thus the cover story in Esquire Magazine, September issue, written by John H. Richardson.
If anyone knows something about Newt Gingrich, it is his former wife, Marianne, and Richardson scored an interview with her. She is someone with a bone to pick, one that stems from the ending of their 18-year marriage with an affair. She knows a lot, and has never before spoken out. Richardson notes she is a "Tea Party" conservative. She believes in what she thought Newt Gingrich believed in, too.
Newt proposed to Marianne (she was 28, he 36) in 1980 while his first wife, Jackie, was in the hospital recovering from treatments for uterine cancer. He hadn't yet even asked her for a divorce. Newt met Jackie in high school. She was his geometry teacher. He was sixteen, she was 25. When he left, Jackie was nearly destitute. Jackie, the Esquire story reports, "had to get a court order just to pay her utility bills." These are among the personal tidbits that Marianne Gingrich (she kept his name, these 10 years since the divorce and subsequent annulment), drops casually into the Esquire writer's lap as she smokes endlessly, each cigarette "down to the filter."
Some of the revelations are small -- Newt hated to be criticized for his weight, more than anything. Some of them challenge the folksy narrative Gingrich has created for himself, about his mother, for example. "She was pretty drugged up for a long time," Marianne tells Richardson.
Some of them are explosive in a town that privileges quiet staffers over mouthy associates. "He's a sociopath, but he's our sociopath," Marianne Gingrich quotes his staffers as saying, during the late 1990s when the House Ethics Committee investigated Gingrich's GOPAC's donations and his charity fundraising came under suspicion. Callista Bisek, Gingrich's current wife, became his mistress first and his wife second (really third, if one is counting wives), while Marianne was home visiting her mother. In 1999, Marianne had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Newt asked Callista to marry him before he and Marianne had agreed to divorce. The affair had been going on for years. Newt compared Marianne to a "Jaguar" and Callista to a "Chevrolet" and said he needed a Chevrolet, not a Jaguar, according to the Esquire story. In 2000 the couple wed.
Even so Gingrich continued to give speeches about family. "How do you give that speech and do what you are doing?" Marianne asked him. They were in the death throes of their relationship. "It doesn't matter what I do," he told her, according to the Esquire story. "People need to hear what I have to say. There's no one else who can say what I say. It doesn't matter what I live."
He recently converted to Catholicism and asked Marianne to agree to an annulment. "It has no meaning," Marianne Gingrich told Richardson. (Amy Sullivan, writing in Time magazine last year, noted that it might be a prep move for a 2012 bid, and also noted that Callista is a lifelong Catholic and sings in the choir.)
The former Mrs. Gingrich believes that Gingrich's do-what-I say, not what I do philosophy will be his undoing. "There's no way," she tells Richardson, of Gingrich becoming president. "He could have been president. But when you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don't like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new...you lose touch with who you really are. You lose your way...He believes that what he says in public and how he lives doesn't have to be connected. If you believe that, then yeah, you can run for president."
Richardson met with Gingrich in his Washington, D.C., K Steet offices. But all of his questions were met with the narrative that Gingrich always offers. His childhood, for example, was all "sugar pies" and "fabulous." (Richardson writes that Gingrich's mother was manic-depressive.) Gingrich says his conversion to Catholicism was for Bisek. "Callista and I kid that I'm four and she's five and therefore she gets to be in charge because the difference between four and five is a lot," he told Richardson, maintaining a cheerful, unruffled air throughout their interview. Marianne Gingrich says the line was hers, not her former husband's.
Sixteen.
I would vote for Newt over the Obaminator but hope he won’t be the nominee since the ‘rats long ago demonized him quite apart from his affairs, thus he would not win.
Newt Gingrich and his Several Evil Ex’s. There might be a movie in there somewhere.
Ohhhh. It’s ok to marry a twice-divorced man because “Callista is a lifelong Catholic and sings in the choir.” There’s indulgences in them thar hills.
Add to his family/marital problems the ethics violations situation.
That would be additional fodder to the flames.
Maybe Newt has forgotten about them, but the MSM and many of us who remember him from the 90s have not forgotten. He was not that stellar of a Representative nor Speaker.
I'd prefer someone who doesn't make mistakes at all, but He has already died on the cross for us!
Wow...sounds familiar. My husband of 16 years left me and moved in with another woman, who he had already discussed marriage with and had been seeing the entire time we were married (his ex-girlfriend), the day after I got home from hip replacement surgery in June. He even called her 3 times while I was in surgery. Now he is begging to come home after she made him move out, but I could never trust a man like that again. That goes for Newt as well. What a scumbag.
Just go away Newt, your 15 minutes are long over.
Actually Sean Hannity has been suggesting Newt for President. And Newt keeps pushing it.
The guy has Newt on his show every week it seems. And they spend half the segment with Sean kissing up to him about how he might run.
Newt is a brilliant thinker but a terrible person.
In Wiki article he married her at 19 (I believe he first dated her at 16). Apparently, she remained 26 years old for about 4 years. LOL!!!
If Newt gets the Republican nomination for President, we can look forward to four more years of Obama. And they know it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich
Gingrich has been married three times. He first married Jackie Battley, his former high school geometry teacher, when he was 19 years old and she was 26.[55][56] They had two daughters. Gingrich left Battley in the spring of 1980 after having an affair with Marianne Ginther[57][58]. According to Battley, Gingrich visited her later that year while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery to discuss the details of their divorce. Six months after it was final, Gingrich wed Ginther in 1981.[59][60]
Gingrich began an affair with Callista Bisek, who is 23 years his junior, in the mid nineties, which continued during the Congressional investigation of Bill Clinton and the Lewinsky scandal.[61] In 2000, Gingrich married Bisek shortly after his divorce with second wife Ginther was finalized. He and Callista currently live in McLean, Virginia.[62]
A Baptist since graduate school, Gingrich converted to Catholicism, his wife’s faith, on March 29, 2009.[63]
If Gnewt were a demoncrat, his past would be admirable.
For me, it requires cognitive dissonance to agree with with what guys like Gingrich and Rove SAY while I’m aware of their marital failures. Yet both men talk a good game and say what we conservatives like to hear.
Speaking of cognitive dissonance, Calista is highly religious yet has no problem with being a homewrecker. Oh, I forgot... the marriage was “over” before she came along. Calista, I hope those yearly checkups never reveal anything less than perfection . . .
As another poster said, Newt is a brilliant thinker but an awful person.
Newt is probably too much of an academician. He is very smart and insightful and devises great strategies. He would make an excellent member of The Cabinet, but he’s blown his chances to be President.
Way back when Newt first “took the stage” nationally, I read that he married her at 16. They ran away together. However, that could have been wrong, or my memory could have been wrong. Subsequent articles focused more on how he left her. In fact, this article is the FIRST that I have ever read that indicates that she is still alive. I wonder how he has kept her quiet over all these years?
He seems to have a problem with illness: abandons his bi-polar mother early; abandons his first wife when she has uterine cancer; abandons his 2nd wife when she is diagnosed with MS.
Calista had better pray to God that she remains healthy.
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