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.
During Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting and prayer that begins Wednesday, Muslims are opening mosques' doors, online and in person, aiming to improve images of Islam.
BY JAWEED KALEEM jkaleem@MiamiHerald.com Posted on Wednesday, 08.11.10
Gesturing at cameras in the room during a recent Friday sermon at his Pembroke Pines mosque, Shafayat Mohamed shared his solution for turning what Muslims are calling a tide of anti-Islamic sentiment: Throw the doors wide open -- online.
The bearded Trinidadian imam shouted with a lilt: "Let the world see we have nothing to hide, nothing evil to say!''
Darul Uloom, a storefront mosque that attracts a mix of West Indian, South Asian and African-American Muslims, has taken to the Web to battle negative images of Islam.
It's among the few mosques nationwide and the only one in South Florida to provide live streaming of its Friday sermons, and part of a growing trend for mosques to open doors during Ramadan, often offline, to non-Muslims to foster understanding.
After all, the imam says, Ramadan is the most spiritual time of year -- in addition to food Muslims abstain from water, sex and impure thoughts during the day -- and when a pious Muslim's lens becomes almost completely focused on God. It's this month, South Florida's 70,000 Muslims believe, that Allah revealed the words of the Koran to their prophet.
The effort comes after months of heated debates about the role of Islam in the United States, including emotional protests against the ``Ground Zero mosque'' and other mosque construction projects from Murfreesboro, Tenn., to Sheboygan, Wis., and Temecula, Calif. In all cases, many opponents have said the mosques could be incubators for radical Islam.
This spring, New York-based ``Stop the Islamization of America'' placed dozens of ads on Miami-Dade buses offering to help Muslims leave the religion. In Gainesville, a church inflamed Muslims with plans for a mass Koran burning on 9/11.
To hundreds gathered at his mosque on a recent Friday and another 1,000 watching online, Mohamed outlined his simple response: ``Just let us spread the message of Islam, let people know the better of the Koran. . .People will learn more, Islam will spread, people will understand,'' he said.
LAUNCHED IN MAY
Mohamed launched his video project in May at www.alhikmatlive.com [ http://www.alhikmatlive.com/ ]. When he's not speaking live Fridays, prerecorded video is streamed, from old sermons to an ongoing womens' segment and documentaries on Islam. He has put $50,000 into equipment and a studio at his Miramar office, where he aims to bring non-Muslim clergy for interviews.
Across South Florida, other mosques also are upping their presence online and in their communities to teach non-Muslims about Islam and to better educate Muslims about the religion.
At Masjid an-Noor in West Kendall, leaders recently floated the idea of streaming their sermons online to reach out to the curious and to Muslims, who often leave work on Friday afternoons to attend mid-day services. The mosque, recovering from two scarring incidents last year -- one in which its empty building was sprayed with bullets and another when neighborhood teens smashed its windows -- started to host open houses every few months, complete with an ask-the-imam segment.
``Some people ask naive questions: Do you support terrorism? Others say `how do you become a Muslim? Why do you fast?' '' says outreach coordinator Nidal Hozien. ``Some people have an animosity against us, but that is built on a lack of knowledge.''
During Ramadan, Muslims typically gather in large groups at home or at mosques for iftars, traditional meals to break the fast that begin with the eating of a date, and the Kendall mosque has invited non-Muslims from the community to join its members during one in August.
At the Islamic Foundation of South Florida in Sunrise, the mosque's imam started a half-hour radio show this year, ``Islam on Faith Avenue,'' that airs Saturdays on WHSR-AM (980). The mosque is also inviting community officials to an open house on Saturday evening as Muslims break the fast.
But perhaps the most political and ambitious project is at Darul Uloom in Pembroke Pines, where Mohamed aims to have a majority of original programming running online all day along with ads.
Viewership reaches as high as 500 across most programming on weekdays and doubles on Fridays for sermons. Many viewers are from the United States and others are from India, Pakistan, Dubai and Trinidad and Tobago.
`A WRONG IMAGE'
``There's a wrong image of Islam, that radical and fundamentalist image, people believing that our khutbahs [sermons] are radical and anti-everything,'' Mohamed says. ``It's important to have a message in the khutbah that is moderate.''
At Ashraf Halal Meat Center in Miami Gardens, nestled atop a display fridge of rainbow-colored sweets and aside a gold-framed verse of Koranic calligraphy, co-owner Aneesiah Hosein has mounted a computer monitor to stream Darul Ulooms programming to shoppers.
``I have a lot of non-Muslim customers. They come, they listen, they sit down and look at it,'' Hosein said. ``There is a lot of misconception but a lot of curiosity.''
Experts say it remains to be seen if efforts such as Darul Uloom's can reach the right audience.
``Its hit and miss for Muslims and non-Muslims whether somebody surfing online is going to take an interest. The viewership is at this point going to be small, mainly Muslims,'' says Ihsan Bagby, a University of Kentucky Islamic studies professor who is familiar with Darul Uloom. ``Radical Muslims have taken much more advantage of technology and videos.
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