Newt may be a bastard. But he’s OUR bastard.
from the article
Leonard H. “Kip” Carter, a former close Gingrich friend, backed the contention that it was Newt Gingrich who wanted the divorce.
“He (Gingrich) said, ‘You know and I know that she’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a president,’ “ Carter, who now lives in South Carolina, told CNN recently, relating the conversation he had with Gingrich the day Gingrich revealed he was filing for divorce. Carter served as treasurer of Gingrich’s first congressional campaigns.
Carter, who was a fellow history professor when Gingrich taught at West Georgia College in Carrollton, said he broke off his friendship with Newt Gingrich because of the congressman’s treatment of his wife during the divorce.
Asked in an e-mail whether that conversation in 1980 occurred the way that Carter recounted, Gingrich spokesman Hammond did not respond.
Gerald Johnson, a Georgia state legislator at the time who also was in Gingrich’s Sunday school class, said it was his memory that Jackie Gingrich did not want a divorce. Johnson laughed when told the presidential campaign is now saying she requested the divorce, calling that “surprising.”
When Gingrich filed for divorce, he was already seeing a 28-year-old congressional aide, whom he married six months after his divorce was final in 1981. The second wife, Marianne Ginther Gingrich, told Esquire magazine last year that Gingrich even introduced her to his parents in the summer of 1980, the same time he filed for divorce.
“They were thrilled because they hadn’t wanted Newt to marry (Jackie Battley),” she told Esquire.
Gingrich divorced Marianne Gingrich 19 years later, after an affair with a younger congressional aide whom he married soon after his divorce. The third wife, Callista Bisek Gingrich, is now a major figure in his presidential campaign.