Tornado Alley (PROG)

[arizona1]

Newt Gingrich: The Indispensable Republican

In the twelve years since he resigned in defeat and disgrace, he has been carefully plotting his return to power. As 2012 approaches, he has raised as much money as all of his potential rivals combined and sits atop the polls for the Republican presidential nomination. But just who is Newton Leroy Gingrich, really? An epic and bizarre story of American power in an unsettled age.

The Speaker and Marianne Gingrich, May 1995. She had been with him since he was a maligned backbencher and was his most important adviser. For twelve years, until now, she has maintained her silence.

Published in the September issue of Esquire — on sale soon

She was married to Newt Gingrich for eighteen years, all through his spectacular rise and fall, and here she is in a pair of blue jeans and a paisley shirt, with warm eyes and a big laugh and the kind of chain-smoking habit where the cigarettes burn right down to the filter — but she's quitting, she swears, any day now.

We're having breakfast in a seaside restaurant in a Florida beach town, a place where people line up in sandals and shorts. This is the first time she's talked about what happened, and she has a case of the nerves but also an air of liberation about her. Since he was a teenager, Newt Gingrich has never been without a wife, and his bond with Marianne Gingrich during the most pivotal part of his career made her the most important advisor to one of the most important figures of the late twentieth century. Of their relationship, she says, "We started talking and we never quit until he asked me for a divorce."

She sounds proud, defiant, maybe a little wistful. You might be inclined to think of what she says as the lament of an abandoned wife, but that would be a mistake. There is shockingly little bitterness in her, and she often speaks with great kindness of her former husband. She still believes in his politics. She supports the Tea Parties. She still uses the name Marianne Gingrich instead of going back to Ginther, her maiden name.

But there was something strange and needy about him. "He was impressed easily by position, status, money," she says. "He grew up poor and always wanted to be somebody, to make a difference, to prove himself, you know. He has to be historic to justify his life."

She says she should have seen the red flags. "He asked me to marry him way too early. And he wasn't divorced yet. I should have known there was a problem."

Within weeks or months?

"Within weeks."

That's flattering.

She looks skeptical. "It's not so much a compliment to me. It tells you a little bit about him."

And he did the same thing to her eighteen years later, with Callista Bisek, the young congressional aide who became his third wife. "I know. I asked him. He'd already asked her to marry him before he asked me for a divorce. Before he even asked."

He told you that?

"Yeah, he wanted to — "

But she stops. "Hey, turn off the tape recorder for a second. This is going to go places ..."

Back in the 1990s, she told a reporter she could end her husband's career with a single interview. She held her tongue all through the affair and the divorce and even through the annulment Gingrich requested from the Catholic Church two years later, trying to erase their shared past. Now she sits quietly for a moment, ignoring her eggs, trying to decide how far she wants to go.

(ON THE POLITICS BLOG: Why Marianne Gingrich Finally Spoke Out)

It's been twelve years since his extraordinary political career — the one in which he went from being a bomb-throwing backbencher in the seemingly permanent Republican minority to overthrowing the established order of both parties — collapsed around him. And yet, stunningly, in all that time Newt Gingrich hasn't been replaced as the philosopher king of the conservative movement. And as the summer rolled on, a revivified Gingrich sat atop the early polls of Republican presidential contenders, leading the field in California, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Texas and polling strongly in Illinois and Pennsylvania. This year he has raised as much money as Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee combined. He is in constant motion, traveling all over the country attending rallies and meetings. He writes best sellers, makes movies, appears regularly on Fox News.

And Marianne Gingrich, his closest advisor during his last fit of empire building, sits on the boardwalk chain-smoking her breakfast.

He thinks of himself as president, you tell her. He wants to run for president.

She gives a jaundiced look. "There's no way," she says. She thinks he made a choice long ago between doing the right thing and getting rich, and when you make those choices, you foreclose other ones. "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."

She stops, ashes her cigarette, exhales, searching for the right way to express what she's about to say.

"He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don't have to be connected," she says. "If you believe that, then yeah, you can run for president."

Sitting on a bench, she squints against the light. "He always told me that he's always going to pull the rabbit out of the hat," she says.

Much more
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/newt-gingrich-0910#ixzz0wLt2j1n7