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.
Newt has always been pushing it, but nobody has ever cared. I didn’t know about Sean Hannity, though.
Still, I think it’s odd that the leftist press would publish an article like this (things which most people had probably forgotten about because Gingrich hasn’t been on the national stage for some time) unless they’re afraid of him and want to destroy him.
Maybe they just don’t like the things he says. He has been very critical of Islam lately and of our conciliatory approach to it.
“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”
As I understand it, this is false. I recall this being discussed on the usenet newsgroups alot way back in the 90s. So I looked it up, and sure enough:
From an unfriendly bio by Washington Post reporters:
A friend of Newt’s:
“Jackie looked like Brunhilde without the mask”
“She was overweight, a straight up and down woman, like a Wagnerian opera star.
Another friend:
Jackie was a very fine woman, but she was very domineering of him, treated him like a little boy. There’s a part of Newt which is fairly socially inept, and one of the things he’s always tended to do is talk a little bit too much. And it was quite common for her to say: ‘All right, Newton... — whenever he was in trouble, she’d call him Newton — it’s time to go home.’ Right in the middle of a sentence or whatever.”
Jackie, had been Newt Gingrich’s high school math teacher. He married her two days after reaching the age of nineteen. And she just never could see him as an adult.
“I believe he had worked extremely hard to make that marriage work for eighteen years.... He did stick with her for a long time.”
Gingrich first asked for a divorce in the spring of 1980 on the way to the Atlanta airport after a trip to Carrolton where they visited friends. She put him off. They separated in June. Gingrich went ahead and filed for divorce in July....’[Jackie] was furious. She refused to speak to Newt, refused to discuss the terms of their settlement. The legal proceedings dragged on and on.”
She went before their church congregation and told them “The Devil Has Taken His Heart.
Six months after the divorce, Gingrich remarried.
Newt is a jerk and a serial adulterer, and I have no sympathy for any of the women he married when they were cheating with him while he was still married to another woman.
Just so there is no confusion; Newt has no moral authority to lead anyone or to be president.
guess this doesn't apply to the "family" oriented Newt. only a despicable man leaves not one, but two wives when they become ill. and that doesn't cover the affairs he had. disgusting.
I would have voted for Obama over McCain, but fortunately both Bob Barr and a write in line were on my Presidential ballot.
Okay, perhaps it was hyperbole, but I don’t want my choice to be Romney or Gingrich. Surely we can come up with someone electable!
Obviously, Newt had a complicated adolescence; with a bi-polar mother and a sexual predator teacher; resulting in emotionally immature male/female relationships.
I still admire his intellect and the ability to articulate political issues with clarity.
He will never pass muster with voters seeking a morally principled POTUS. He would be crucified in the primaries and buried in the General.
I started losing faith when he sucked up to Slick at that joint town hall he had at the nursing home.
Spot on it’s why the left oped for someone with a bone to pick they have started the smut machine early.
Sean Hannity sure seems to like Newt
Interesting. I have never been a fan of Newt. It is not something I can put my finger on. It has to do with his attitude and affect.
That being said, I am a fan of his commentary on issues and events. He is interesting and holds my attention. I wonder how he rated as a professor.
Sean’s a tool. LOL
Very good. Newt has TMB. Too Much Baggage. And that is a real bag to his right.
What a sympathetic piece on behalf of a woman who shares fifty percent of the responsibility for breaking up a marriage, and obviously covered for her husband for years knowing he was faking out his fans.
Ick.
His (near)historical novels are great reading. The Civil War series is first among them.
I don’t have a lot of respect for people who feel the need to discuss their personal lives, especially their bitter marriages and divorce, with the general public. Keep it to yourself and your friends and family.
Besides, it appears she had no problem dating a married man so why should we care that she was then cheated on.
“...when the House Ethics Committee investigated Gingrich’s GOPAC’s donations and his charity fundraising came under suspicion...”
They neglect to mention that not only was he cleared of these charges, the IRS went on to explain that Newt’s actions were a text book example of compliance with the governing law.
Newt didn’t fight the charge to keep his Speaker position, because he was threatened with exposing the affair.
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