Newt Gingrich Recordings

When we think of the Speaker of the House right away we think; Nancy Pelosi, or if you remember Watergate and the time right after Watergate you might think of Carl Albert and Tip O’Neil.  Old timers from almost 100 years ago will remember John Garner who later served as Franklin Roosevelt’s first Vice President.  Interesting fact; Garner was one of two Vice Presidents to serve as Speaker of the House of Representatives and as President of the Senate.  The other was Schuyler Colfax, Ulysses S. Grant’s first Vice President.  But the one Speaker who sticks out most for Generation X has to be Newt Gingrich.

Born Newton LeRoy McPherson in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Gingrich’s parents who were 16 and 19 had a failed marriage from the start.  When he was three, Gingrich’s mother married Robert Gingrich, a career Army officer who did tours in both Korea and Vietnam.  Robert Gingrich adopted the young McPherson.  At age 13, Gingrich and his family lived in Orleans, France and later Stuttgart, Germany.  There are three half-sisters: Candace, Susan, and Roberta.  Candace came out as a lesbian, and people might remember her cameo on the 1990s hit TV show FRIENDS where she played a clergy performing a same sex ceremony for a pair of lesbians.

After graduating from Baker High School in Columbus, GA in 1961, Gingrich went onto Emory University in Atlanta.  Politics had always interested him, even at a young age when living with his family in France where he visited the site of the Battle of Verdun.  It was on this trip that he learned about sacrifice and the importance of political leadership.  Gingrich would graduate from Emory in 1965 moving on to Tulane University where he earned a master’s and then a PhD in European History.  Between 1969 and 1970, Gingrich spent six months in Brussels where he did his dissertation titled BELGIAN EDUCATION POLICY IN THE CONGO 1945 - 1960.  In 1968, Newt Gingrich served as the Southern Regional Director for Nelson Rockefeller in the 1968 Republican Primaries.  Militarily, because he was a student and a father having married his high school math teacher; Jackie Battley in 1962; Gingrich was granted deferments during the Vietnam War.  Years later Gingrich admitted that given everything he believed in, a large part of him thought that he should have gone to Vietnam.

Gingrich’s first teaching job was in 1970 at West Georgia College.  It is reported that he spent very little time teaching in the history department.  He did help create what was called environmental studies program which is a multidisciplinary academic field which systematically studies human interaction with the environment.  This was why he would be removed from the history department.  While at West Georgia, Gingrich did take unpaid leaves of absence three times to run for the House of Representatives where he lost twice.  Gingrich left the college in 1977 because of a rule under the university’s system that sitting professors were prohibited from running for political office.  After being denied tenure, as mentioned Newt Gingrich left West Georgia in 1977.

In 1974, Gingrich tried his hand at running for office.  He decided to go up against Representative Jack Flynt, D-GA6.  This district consisted of the northern suburbs of Atlanta as well as portions of eastern Cobb, northern Fulton, and northern DeKalb Counties.  Having run up huge margins in the suburbs Gingrich was still not able to defeat the 20 year Democratic incumbent.  1974 was not exactly a banner year for Republicans when it came to the Midterms given the fallout of Richard Nixon and Watergate.  Gingrich tried again in 1976, but due to Georgia’s former governor Jimmy Carter running as the Democratic Presidential Nominee, he was able to carry the state of Georgia by two thirds of the vote.  Gingrich however, lost again by 5,100 votes.  But, by 1978, Jack Flynt decided to retire and Newt Gingrich, having defeated his Democratic opponent, Virginia Shapard by 7,500 votes was on his way to Washington, DC.

Over the next 15 years, with momentum from the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, Gingrich rose through the ranks of Republican Party Leadership in the House of Representatives eventually becoming House Minority Whip.  Because of the retirement of House Minority Leader Bob Michael in the 1994 Midterm Election; Gingrich was next in line to leadership in the Republican Party in the House of Representatives.  That meant possibly becoming the next Speaker of the House pending a Republican takeover of the House in 1995.

Because of the unpopularity of the Clinton 1993 tax hike that passed by reconciliation in August 1993, Hillary Clinton’s crusade to bring about universal health care to the American people, and the Clintons’ Whitewater scandal, Newt Gingrich armed with his Contract with America; (a document of ambitious legislation written by Gingrich and Richard Armey, signed by all but two Republican House members, and all nonincumbent Republican candidates running for Congress that was to be passed in the new Congress’ first 100 days) was set.  The Republican Party had taken control of both the House of Representatives and the US Senate making Gingrich the Speaker and Bob Dole the Senate Majority Leader.

For the first four months of 1995, Gingrich seemed to be the King of the Hill with his new found power.  He seemed to have rock star status to the point where the media was declaring Bill Clinton to be irrelevant.  The president held a press conference on the evening of April 18, 1995 letting the media and the country know just how relevant the president was.  Then, the next morning in Oklahoma City, the worst domestic terrorist attack in American history to that time took place when Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols set off a truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building just after nine o’clock in the morning.  168 were killed and 680 were injured.  Bill Clinton, like Ronald Reagan nine years earlier with the Challenger explosion had his presidential moment to bring the country together to heal.

After the shock of the Oklahoma City Bombing wore off, politics as usual between the Democratic President and the Republican Congress resumed.  There was a threat of a government shutdown in late 1995.  The president, Gingrich, and Dole could not reach an agreement by November 15, 1995 and nonessential federal employees were furloughed indefinitely.  Because government still had to run, interns were brought in to do the work.  The most famous of whom was a 22 year old intern from Beverly Hills, California named Monica Lewinsky.  During this shutdown, there was disagreements about funding of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.  Gingrich wanted deep cuts, Bob Dole wanted the whole thing to just be resolved so that he could go out and run for the Republican Nomination for President in the Presidential Election of 1996.  Bill Clinton went to the Speaker and told him that he simply could not go along with what he wanted to do.  I said that he didn’t believe in it and if it cost him re-election then so be it.  With the President and the Speaker staring eyeball to eyeball; Gingrich blinked first giving Clinton a much needed victory to run on in 1996.

On November 5, 1996 the United States had an election.  Bill Clinton went up against Bob Dole and again, Ross Perot.  Clinton won re-election with 49 percent of the vote.  The Republican Party again won a majority in both houses of Congress.  Newt Gingrich was elected Speaker by his colleagues for a second term.

With a bunch of positive change going on in the country and the Whitewater investigation headed by Kenneth Starr going nowhere, a bombshell story broke on the morning of January 20, 1998.  The Saturday before President Clinton was being deposed in a sexual harassment lawsuit by Paula Jones where he was asked about an inappropriate relationship with a list of women, one being a former White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.  Under oath, the President under the definition to which he believed what inappropriate was meant to be said that he did not.  Over the course of 1998 it was impeachment talk all of the time.  Larry Flynt of Hustler was out to expose the hypocrisy of Republicans who too had inappropriate relationships with women other than their wives and oh was it successful.  Gingrich was one of the Republicans who was also cheating on his wife.  The only difference was that unlike Bill Clinton, Gingrich did not allegedly lie under oath about it.

That November in the 1998 Midterms, with a 68% approval rating of the President, the Republicans lost seats in Congress but still maintained a majority.  Being wounded by the exposure of Larry Flynt and losing seats, Newt Gingrich announced days after his re-election that he would resign his Speakership and his seat effective January 3, 1999.

Since his leaving Congress, Newt Gingrich wrote historic novels, taught, he ran for the Republican Nomination in 2012 losing to Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and has become an outspoken supporter for Donald Trump.

See also: Marjorie Taylor Greene