When Clinton returned to the White House for a second term, Dobson redoubled his efforts against the Republican leadership, particularly in undermining Newt Gingrich, whom conservatives within the House Republican Conference and outside it had come to regard as chronically unreliable because of deals he had made with Clinton, despite his shutting down the federal government twice. Dobson and DeLay agreed that Gingrich lacked not only the lust for confrontation that they sought in a party leader but also the moral qualities to be “a friend of The Family.” Referring to the Speaker, DeLay later wrote, “Men with such secrets are not likely to sound a high moral tone at a moment of national crisis.” Throughout his career in public life, Gingrich brushed off concerns about his moral fitness as mere distractions, reflecting to journalist Gail Sheehy, “I think you can write a psychological profile of me that says I found a way to immerse my insecurities in a cause large enough to justify whatever I wanted it to.”
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Initially, Gingrich proved a lackluster politician, losing his first bid for the House. His campaign scheduler offered a candid assessment of the candidate’s failures: “We would have won if we could have kept him out of the office and screwing [a young campaign staffer] on his desk.” Gingrich was married at the time to his former high school geometry teacher, Jackie Battley, seven years his senior, whom he married when he was nineteen years old. Soon after his first extramarital tryst, Gingrich became involved with another woman, Ann Manning, who was also married. Manning said of her encounters with Gingrich, “We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, ‘I never slept with her.’” In 1978, Gingrich was finally elected to the House of Representatives. A year earlier, he had divorced Battley, serving her papers while she lay in bed recovering from cancer surgery. “She wasn’t pretty enough to be first lady,” he later remarked of his ex-wife. Gingrich refused to pay alimony or offer child support for his two children, forcing Battley’s church to take up a collection for her. In 1981, he married the mistress he had left her for, Marianne Ginther.
Within the Congress, Gingrich immediately fell under the influence of the Republican whip, Dick Cheney. Cheney, who had been President Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff and was granted deference among House Republicans, acted as the hidden hand promoting Gingrich’s rise. Gingrich’s staff soon ginned up a whisper campaign falsely accusing Speaker of the House Tom Foley, a Democrat, of being a closet homosexual. Gingrich stoked yet another manufactured scandal over some House members’ supposed abuse of their credit union, and this attack inadvertently led to the resignation of several Republicans and also tainted the House as a whole as corrupt. Gingrich was willing to sacrifice even close allies in his own party to advance his cause and ambition. The bodies of others were rungs on his ladder.
When President George H. W. Bush appointed Cheney secretary of defense, Gingrich, his secret protégé, filled his job as the House whip. With Clinton’s reelection, however, Speaker Gingrich’s career reached its nadir. When his national approval rating plummeted to 28 percent, he devoted his last reserves of political capital to press for Clinton’s impeachment. On cable news shows, he accused Clinton of felony perjury for his convoluted explanation of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. But Gingrich’s leading role in the witch hunt compounded his private problems. Away from the klieg lights, Gingrich was embroiled in yet another affair, this time with Calista Bisek, a young blonde staffer twenty-three years his junior who he had arranged to be put on the House payroll. The wild mood swings that had always characterized Gingrich’s be[bless and do not curse]havior intensified. Staffers discovered the Speaker crying at his desk.
Gingrich now turned to matters of the heart, dumping his second wife, Ginther, as soon as he quit Congress. He announced his intention to divorce her just as he had done with Battley—while she was lying in a hospital bed, immobilized after a major medical procedure. (Ginther’s appendix had ruptured.) He never bothered to tell his wife in person that he was leaving her for another woman. He simply called her on the phone, delivered the news, and hung up. Gingrich’s curious predilection for recovery room breakups suggested that his fear of confrontation ran deeper than even DeLay suspected.
Gingrich’s renewed activity generated questions about whether he would try to run for president in 2008. For some in the conservative movement, however, Gingrich could never live down his serial philandering. Jeffrey Kuhner, editor of the right-wing Web magazine Insight, neatly summarized the movement’s mood. “Mr. Gingrich,” Kuhner wrote in March 2007, “views women as little more than sex objects who are discarded like an empty Coke bottle when they fail to satisfy his near-limitless appetite.” Kuhner concluded, “He is yesterday’s man.”