Source

• Born: 17 June 1943
• Birthplace: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
• Best Known As: Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1995-1999

Name at birth: Newton Leroy McPherson

Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the House of Representatives and one of the key leaders of the so-called Republican Revolution of the 1990s. A former professor of history at West Georgia College, he was elected in 1979 to the U.S. House of Representatives. Ambitious, conservative and outspoken, by 1995 he had become Speaker of the House and the de facto leader of the G.O.P. He was widely considered responsible for gaining a Republican majority in the House of Representatives in the election of 1994. The next year he became Speaker of the House. Never popular with the public at large, Gingrich saw his image further damaged in 1997 when he was fined $300,000 for ethics violations. After a disappointing Republican showing in the 1998 election, Gingrich resigned the Speakership and his seat in Congress. He was succeeded as Speaker by Illinois representative Dennis Hastert.

In 1995 Gingrich was bitten on the chin by a baby cougar during an appearance with TV host and zoologist Jack Hanna.

(Newt Gingrich)

(b. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 17 June 1943) US; Member of the US House of Representatives 1978 –  ; minority whip 1989; Speaker of the House 1994 – Named after his natural father, Newton McPherson, Newt Gingrich was adopted by his stepfather, army lieutenant Robert Gingrich. He graduated BA from Emory University in 1965 and from Tulane University, New Orleans, he graduated MA in 1968 and gained a Ph.D. in European History in 1971. As a temporary stepping-stone to a career in politics he became a history professor at West Georgia College, chosen for what he regarded as its potential as a future political constituency. In 1974 and again in 1976 he unsuccessfully challenged West Georgia's sitting Congressman, Democrat Jack Flynt. He finally gained the seat for the Republicans in 1978 when Flynt retired.

Gingrich soon achieved prominence as an advocate of confrontational politics and emerged as the principal spokesman for the conservative coalition in the House. Involving himself closely in the process of candidate selection, he set about transforming the Republican Party into a more disciplined, cohesive instrument for revolutionizing the American political agenda.

He is attributed with being the architect of the Republican landslide of 1994 which brought the first Republican majority in the lower house for forty years and the speakership to Gingrich himself. Having fought the election on the basis of his programmatic "Contract with America" promising balanced budgets, lower taxes, welfare reform, and a crackdown on crime, Gingrich used his disciplined Republican freshmen to try to deliver his promised revolution in American politics.

Described as ruthless, brilliant, obnoxious, Gingrich transformed the House of Representatives and the speakership into instruments of personal and political power. Gifted propagandist and populist, Gingrich introduced a new style into American politics and succeeded in setting the agenda for the 1990s. But his political future is by no means certain. Having ousted the previous Democratic Speaker on ethics charges, he has himself become the subject of investigation by the House ethics committee. He is the author of To Renew America (1994).

Hailed as "Time'"s "Man of the Year" in 1995 and touted by some historians as this century's most influential Speaker, U. S. Representative Newt Gingrich (born 1943) held on to his Speaker's post by a narrow margin of only three votes in 1997. "For better or worse, he has changed the language and substance of American politics perhaps like no other politician in recent history," said "Time" magazine's editor James Gaines. The man who felled the former Speaker of the House Jim Wright on ethics violations was himself charged and fined for his own violation of House ethics in 1996. His "Contract with America" fell short of its promises and his conservative stance has taken on a liberal hue. The Speaker now faces his greatest challenge from within his own party. The question many are asking is whether he can survive his current tenure as Speaker of the House.

Bomb Thrower or Visionary?

"Our view is that Newt Gingrich is a bomb thrower, " Time reported. A fire-breathing Republican Congressman from Georgia, he is more interested in right-wing grandstanding than in fostering bi-partisanship…. Another view is that Newt Gingrich is a visionary. An impassioned reformer … {who} innovative thinking and respect for deeply felt American values to the House." In any case, Congress has not been quite the same since Gingrich was first elected to represent Georgia's Sixth Congressional District in 1978.

Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to 19-year-old mechanic, Newton C. McPherson, and 16-year-old, Kathleen Daugherty, Newt's life had a rough start. His parents split within days of their marriage. His mother remarried Robert B. Gingrich, a career soldier, three years later. Gingrich maintained his ties to the McPherson family. Even as a political figure, he wore a McPherson tartan tie.

As the stepson of an Army officer, Newt Gingrich moved from town to town attending five schools in eight years both here and abroad. Gingrich recalls how his experience formed his political approach to Howard Fineman in Newsweek. "Politics and war are remarkably similar systems," said Gingrich. "You grow up an Army brat named Newton, and you learn about combat."

In 1960, the Gingrich family moved from Fort Benning, Georgia. Not long after, Gingrich pursued his political career in Columbus. In fact, within a few months in Georgia, he ran a successful campaign for his friend's election to class president. At Emory University in Atlanta, Gingrich established a Young Republicans club.

Fired Up Republicans in Washington

From the time he landed in Washington in 1978, he gained a national reputation for his combative style and his leadership of a collection of young, aggressive, conservative House Republicans. "For his first five years in office," the New York Times said, "Mr. Gingrich, along with a band of young conservative Republicans turned their junior status to advantage and waged guerrilla warfare against democratic House leadership and even their own party's leaders. Under Mr. Gingrich's tutelage, about a dozen of the insurgents formed a group known as the Conservative Opportunity Society (COS) Republicans. Mr. Gingrich maintains, have become so accustomed to their minority status that they need to be prodded to challenge the status quo."

The tenets of Gingrich's philosophy were echoed by the COS - the antithesis of the "liberal welfare state," a state that he regularly criticizes. In 1984, "he turned preliminary sessions of he Republican national convention into a battleground until the Conservative Opportunity Society was inserted into the platform," the Atlantic said.

Gingrich was also well-known for his special taste for colleagues roasted on the moral spit of an ethics committee investigation. In 1979, during his first term, he called for the expulsion of Representative Charles Diggs, a Democrat from Michigan, who had been convicted of embezzlement. In 1983, he called for the expulsion of two representatives who allegedly had sexual relations with teenagers working as pages in the House. And later, of course, Gingrich spear-headed the movement to oust Jim Wright.

Grabbed Public Attention

In the early 1980's, Gingrich launched a new weapon, taking advantage of a rule allowing House members to read items into the record after Congressional sessions. He gave frequent speeches criticizing Democrats for their position on a wide range of issues, from communism to school prayer to Central America - speeches given before an empty House chamber, but broadcast nationwide on the cable network C-SPAN. This tactic was also used by Gingrich's followers - a group of conservative Republicans elected mostly in the 1980s and labeled the party's "young Turks," in contrast to the GOP's less aggressive old guard.

In the spring of 1984, an angry Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, then Speaker of the House, ordered the cable TV cameras to periodically pan the chamber to show that Gingrich was speaking to an empty House. O'Neill called Gingrich's tactics "the lowest thing I have seen in my 32 years in the House." The confrontation resulted in a rare House rebuke to the Speaker and wide coverage for Gingrich - something he valued highly. Newsweek defined what it called Gingrich's Newtonian law: conflict equals exposure equals power. "If you are in the newspaper everyday and on the TV often enough then you must be important."

Gingrich wrote in the Conservative Digest: "The Democratic Party is now controlled by a coalition of liberal activists, corrupt big city machines, labor union bosses and House incumbents who use gerrymandering, rigged election rules and a million dollars from taxpayers per election cycle to buy invulnerability. When Republicans have the courage to point out just how unrepresentative, and even weird, liberal values are, we gain votes…. Fear and corruption now stalk the House of Representatives in a way we've never witnessed before in our history."

Proved Wright Wrong

Gingrich's battle against Jim Wright began in 1987; a one-man crusade which few in Washington took seriously. Before Gingrich was through, however, more than 70 House Republicans signed his letter asking the House's ethics committee to investigate Wright. The accusations were related to Wright's links to a Texas developer, to his favors to savings and loan operators, and the way in which he published and sold a book of his speeches and writings Reflections of a Public Man. Wright received unusually large royalties and sold the book to political contributors - an arrangement seemingly designed to circumvent ceilings on donations.

Gingrich was ruthless on the offensive. His dramatic contentions won him necessary Congressional allies and his rhetorical skills made him eminently quotable, thus a media darling. "I'm so deeply frightened by the nature of the corrupt left-wing machine in the House that it would have been worse to do nothing," he was quoted as saying in the New York Times. "Jim Wright has reached a point psychologically, in his ego, where there are no boundaries left." Following the investigation, the ethics committee said it had reason to believe Wright had violated House rules 69 times. Less than two months later, on June 6, 1989, Wright resigned as Speaker.

In March 1989, in the midst of his war with Wright, Gingrich's Republican colleagues elected him to the post of Minority Whip by a narrow 87-85 margin. The vote signaled "a wake-up call to incumbent GOP leaders from younger members who want a more aggressive, active party," said the Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report. "Gingrich's promotion from backbench bomb thrower to Minority Whip was an expression of seething impatience among House Republicans with their seemingly minority status."

Gingrich's supporters pointed to his energy, communication skills, and commitment to capturing a majority of House seats. "A year ago, no one would have predicted that this enfant terrible of the Republican Party could mount a credible bid for the leadership - let alone snag its No. 2 slot," the Weekly Review said, "But Republicans became particularly frustrated with their decade-old minority status in the House when the Reagan era came to an end: Even the eight year reign of a president as popular as Reagan couldn't deliver them from their plight. Gingrich's call for radical change fell on responsive ears."

Gingrich's high-profile role put his personal moral standards in the spotlight. His opponents resurrected the contradictions between Gingrich's ethics-and-traditional-values stand and his messy divorce from his first wife, who was cancer stricken. Democrats Newsweek said, also point out "his management of a political action committee that raised $200,000 - and gave $900 to candidates." After Gingrich took on Wright, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee publicized a 1977 deal in which Gingrich received $13,000 from a group of friends to write a novel. He wasn't in Congress at the time, although he had run twice unsuccessfully for the seat which he eventually won in 1978. Democrats say the arrangement allowed Gingrich's backers to support him financially and get a tax shelter in the bargain. Gingrich said he did research in Europe and wrote three chapters, but the book was rejected by publishers.

In addition to these charges, two days before Gingrich was elected Minority Whip, the Washington Post reported that he had persuaded 21 supporters to contribute $105,000 to promote Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future, which he co-authored in 1984 with his second wife, Marianne, and science fiction writer David Drake. The book sold only 12,000 hardcover copies; the investors reaped tax benefits and Gingrich and his wife made about $30,000. Gingrich acknowledged that this book deal was "as weird as Wright's," but was on the up and up because "we wrote a real book for a real (publisher) that was sold in real bookstores." The book deal remained a question mark in Gingrich's past that did not stall his political career in the 1990s.

In October of 1990, Gingrich gained headlines again when he opposed - and led 105 fellow Republicans in voting down - a proposed budget package. His defiance and disregard for the presidential endorsement angered Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole, who was quoted in Newsweek: "You pay a price for leadership. If you don't want to pay the penalty, may be you ought to find another line of work." Dole felt Gingrich, fearful of his personal popularity, fought the budget in ignorance of the bi-partisan agreements that had been the fruit of hard work.

Reached Career-Long Dream

In November 1990, despite his growing reputation on the national level, Gingrich had a scare in his home district at the election. He won by a narrow margin of 983 votes of the nearly 156,000 cast in Georgia's Sixth District. The root of Gingrich's trouble at home was his blockage of federal mediation in the 1989 strike at Eastern Airlines. The Atlanta airport is of great importance to the surrounding communities, and 6,000 employees of Eastern lived in his district. Obviously shaken, Gingrich told his constituents that he had received their warning in the close re-election, and would more closely carry out their mandate in his coming term in office.

Gingrich spent the next four years pursuing his goal of achieving a Republican Majority in Congress. He reached his dream in 1994. On September 27, 1994, Gingrich and his associates presented his brainchild - the "Contract with America," a 100-day House Republican plan to revolutionize Congress, spending, and federal government operations. With Gingrich's consistent campaign support for Republican candidates all over the country, they received the partisan majority in the November elections.

As a result, Newt Gingrich took over as Speaker of the House in January of 1995. During his first year, he faced the challenge of living up to the promises detailed in the "Contract" and also once again confronted ethics charges but did not receive any convictions. He published two books in 1995 - the nonfiction To Renew America and the fiction novel 1945.

A Tenuous Second Term

Unlike his first election to the House as Speaker in 1995, Newt Gingrich won his second term by a narrow margin of three votes. Not only was the Speaker under investigation by the ethics committee for allegedly violating House standards by knowingly abusing the tax code in raising tax-deductible funds for a college course he taught, he was also criticized for his book deal with Harper Collins. Gingrich was originally offered a $4.5 million advance for two books, due to very strong criticism, he declined the offer and settled for royalties instead.

While exonerated from 74 of the 75 ethics charges levied against him, the one that he was charged with, admitted to, and levied a $300,000 fine for was enough to tarnish the rising star enough to put his second term as Speaker on shaky ground. Gingrich's greatest challenge was now coming from within his own Party.

Gingrich has come under intense fire from within the Republican Party. Many claim that he has damaged the Party beyond repair and the best thing for him to do is step down. The problem with that scenario is that the Republican Party has no successor that they feel strongly enough about to force a "coup" although there has been much talk of it. Unlike 1995 and 1996 when the Republican majority was united, they are currently a House divided. "The way some Republicans tell it," according to an account in the Economist "their troubles are wrought by Newt Gingrich. Two years ago Mr. Gingrich was celebrated {among those with short memories} as the most powerful Speaker of this century; now a fellow House Republican describes him as 'road kill on the highway of American politics."' Mr. Gingrich is said to be a man with no agenda, who cannot decide if he is conservative or liberal. The lackluster start of the 105th Congress, when compared to the 104th, clearly defines the state of affairs within the Republican Majority-held House and the Party itself. Mr. Gingrich, who has a resilience that few politicians have, has lost his political power base. The question on everyone mind is can he get it back?

Further Reading

Anderson, Alfred F., Challenging Newt Gingrich Chapter by Chapter (1996).

Wilson, John K., Newt Gingrich: Captial Crimes and Misdemeanors (1996).

Warner, Judith, Newt Gingrich: Speaker to America (1995).

Gingrich, Newt, Newt Gingrich's Renewing American Civilization (audio cassette, 1997).

• Born: June 17, 1943, Harrisburg, Pa.
• Political party: Republican
• Education: Emory University, B.A., 1965; Tulane University, M.A., 1968 and Ph.D, 1971
• Representative from Georgia: 1979–99
• House minority whip: 1989–95
• Speaker of the House: 1995–99

The man credited with gaining the majority for House Republicans in the 1994 elections—after 40 years in the minority—was Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich. He aimed to change business as usual in Congress and to “wipe the slate clean” of many liberal programs.

As a brash new member of the House, Gingrich rejected compromise and consensus and adopted a more combative, confrontational position. When House proceedings began to be televised in 1979, Gingrich inaugurated the practice of giving late-afternoon speeches to an almost empty chamber and to a television audience across the country. In 1988, Gingrich brought the ethics charges that caused Speaker Jim Wright to resign.

Gingrich rose to leadership in the House by appealing to the dissatisfaction of Republicans so long in the minority and by offering them a strategy to win the majority. He proposed that Republican candidates for the House in 1994 sign a Contract with America, outlining the reforms they would enact if elected. When Republicans won the election, Gingrich became Speaker of the House.

An often controversial Speaker, Gingrich was widely blamed for shutting down the federal government during a budget impasse with President Bill Clinton in 1995. When the House moved to impeach Clinton in 1998, voters reacted negatively in the congressional elections and narrowed the Republican majority to five votes. Faced with mounting opposition within his own party, Gingrich chose to resign as Speaker and as a member of Congress.

See also Contract with America; Speaker of the House; Wright, Jim

Sources

• Newt Gingrich, To Renew America (New York: HarperCollins, 1995)

(Newton Leroy Gingrich) (gĭng'grĭch), 1943–, U.S. congressman, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (1995–98), b. Harrisburg, Pa., as Newton Leroy McPherson. A history professor, he was first elected as a Republican from Georgia in 1978 and became the leader of those House conservatives who favored using confrontational tactics to challenge the Democrats' long-time control of the House. He helped force Speaker Jim Wright's resignation in 1989 by questioning his financial dealings. That same year Gingrich became House minority whip.

In 1995, after large Republican gains in the 1994 elections (during which, touting a “Contract with America,” he championed a balanced-budget amendment, limitations on welfare benefits, and term limits for members of Congress), he became the first Republican Speaker in 40 years. Often didactic, frequently combative, Gingrich led Republicans in attempts to enact conservative legislation, leading to conflicts with President Bill Clinton, most dramatically over the budget in 1995 and 1996.

The Republicans' program was only partially successful, and Clinton's confrontations with Gingrich and the House helped to restore some of the stature the president had lost after the 1994 elections. In the 1996 House elections, Republicans retained the majority and Gingrich his speakership, but he began to lose favor with the conservative bloc, who saw him as backing away from their principles. In early 1997, the House, after an investigation initiated in 1995, reprimanded Gingrich for campaign funding violations. In the 1998 congressional elections, Democrats made substantial gains in the midst of the Clinton impeachment (see Lewinsky scandal), and Gingrich abruptly resigned his speakership and House seat. In 1999, he joined a Washington think tank and became a television-network political commentator. Gingrich's books include To Renew America (1995), Winning the Future (2005), and Pearl Harbor (2007), an historical novel which he cowrote.

With his election as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in January 1995, Newton Leroy Gingrich (R-Ga.) became a powerful politician. Assuming control of the first Republican majority in the House since 1952, Gingrich ruled that body during his first year with an authority unseen since the nineteenth century. The veteran congressman from Georgia used his new position to proclaim the arrival of an era in which his conservative agenda—including lower taxes, decentralized government, and deep cuts in social programs—would fundamentally alter the fabric of U.S. society.

Since his arrival on the Washington, D.C., scene in 1979 as a brash and combative new member of Congress, Gingrich has shaped and guided Republican efforts on Capitol Hill. With an affinity for both intellectual debate and backroom deal making, this white-haired former professor provided the vision, verve, and ideas that built a Republican majority. His opponents, however, accuse him of a lack of concern for poor and disadvantaged persons as well as an overly optimistic view of technology and the free market. Observers have described his actions in Congress as alternately brilliant and petty, leaving many to wonder whether he will be a passing footnote or a pivotal chapter in U.S. political history.

Gingrich was born June 17, 1943, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. His parents, Newton C. McPherson and Kathleen Daugherty McPherson, were separated after only three days of marriage. Gingrich's mother remarried three years after his birth, and her new husband, Robert Bruce Gingrich, adopted Gingrich. Gingrich's adoptive father was a career Army officer, and the family moved frequently, living in Kansas, France, Germany, and Fort Benning, Georgia.

In 1958, the fifteen-year-old Gingrich accompanied his family on a trip to Verdun, France, site of the bloodiest battle of World War I. Deeply moved by the story and scene of the battle, along with a visit to rooms filled with bones of the dead, Gingrich experienced an epiphany that he later described as "the driving force which pushed me into history and politics, and molded my life." The day after this visit, he told his family that he would run for Congress because politicians could prevent such senseless bloodshed. Later, as both a student and a young professor, he would tell others of his desire to become Speaker of the House.

At age nineteen, Gingrich, who was then an undergraduate at Emory University, married his former high school math teacher, Jackie Battley. The couple had two daughters, Linda Kathleen and Jacqueline Sue. Gingrich completed his bachelor of arts degree at Emory in 1965 and a doctor of philosophy degree in modern history at Tulane University in 1971. A liberal, reform-minded Republican in these years, Gingrich worked for Nelson A. Rockefeller's 1968 presidential campaign in Louisiana.

Gingrich took his first college teaching job at West Georgia College, in Carrollton, Georgia, with one eye toward an eventual seat in Congress. He nevertheless became a popular teacher at West Georgia, and founded environmental studies and future studies programs.

In 1974 and 1976, Gingrich ran for a seat in the U.S. House from Georgia's Sixth District, a rural and suburban region on the northern outskirts of Atlanta. Still voicing moderate and even liberal positions, he was endorsed in 1974 by the liberal newspaper the Atlanta Constitution. He narrowly lost both elections.

In a move that some have called a calculated ploy to gain political office, Gingrich cast himself as a conservative for the 1978 election. In his platform, he called for lower taxes and opposed the Panama Canal Treaty. He beat the Democratic contender by seventy-six hundred votes, earning a seat in the Ninety-sixth Congress.

Shortly after his election, Gingrich and his wife separated. He married Marianne Ginther in 1981.

In Washington, D.C., Gingrich joined a number of Republican first-year Congress members eager to leave their mark on the political landscape. Unafraid of making enemies, he vigorously attacked Democrats and sometimes his own party, criticizing it for a complacent acceptance of its minority status in Congress. He called instead for an aggressive effort to build a Republican majority, a feat he would orchestrate sixteen years later.

In February 1983, Gingrich began meeting regularly with other young conservatives in an organization they called the Conservative Opportunity Society—a name designed to contrast with "liberal welfare state," the favorite target for their ideological barbs. Gingrich and other young Republicans also gained notoriety for their creative use of the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN), which broadcast live proceedings of the House. This group used the "special orders" period of the House, during which members of Congress may read items into the record, as a platform to denounce Democrats and advance their own views. Although they were actually reading their material before an empty House chamber, Gingrich and his colleagues attempted to create the impression that they were making unchallenged arguments to specific Democrats. House Speaker Thomas P. ("Tip") O'Neill, Jr. (D-Mass.), responded by ordering the C-SPAN cameras to periodically pan the empty chamber.

By 1984 Gingrich had developed the basic outlines of his conservative philosophy. He published his views in a book, Window of Opportunity, cowritten with his wife, Marianne, and David Drake. It remains an excellent guide to Gingrich's thought. In it, he exhibited, in addition to a strong belief in the efficacy of the free market, a strong devotion to technology as an answer to social ills. He wrote of a "window of opportunity" represented by "[b]reakthroughs in computers, biology, and space." Among his futuristic proposals was an ambitious space program, including a lunar research base by the year 2000.

He contrasted this vision of a bright future with a "window of vulnerability" that opened onto an alternative future of Soviet expansionism and U.S. decline. This dystopia was to be prevented by large-scale weapons programs such as Star Wars, also known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the dismantling of welfare programs and excessive taxation. The seventh chapter of the book, "Why Balancing the Budget Is Vital," foreshadowed a 1995-96 showdown with President Bill Clinton over the federal budget.

At the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Gingrich gained national attention as he led a move to make the party platform more conservative, successfully inserting planks against tax increases and abortion. He won still more influence in 1986, when he became chairman of GOPAC, a Republican political action committee that is a principal source of funding for Republican candidates across the United States. The organization, which Gingrich once called "the Bell Labs of politics," would also be the means for him to spread his conservative gospel. GOPAC has distributed printed and audiovisual works by Gingrich to hundreds of Republican candidates. In the early and mid-1990s, it would come under investigation by the Federal Election Commission for alleged improprieties, including illegal assistance to Gingrich during his 1990 election campaign. Gingrich would step down as the head of GOPAC in 1995.

In 1987, Gingrich took on a major Washington, D.C., figure when he accused House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Tex.)—occupant of the very office Gingrich coveted—of ethics violations. Gingrich claimed that Wright had violated House rules in his dealings with a Texas developer and in the manner by which he had profited from sales of a book. Gingrich's foes immediately attacked him as an irresponsible upstart but he remained unwavering in his attacks. As he later told a newspaper, "I didn't come here to pleasantly rise on an escalator of self-serving compromises." Gingrich won a major coup in 1989 when the House Ethics Committee formally charged Wright with sixty-nine ethics violations and Wright resigned from the House.

That same year Gingrich lobbied for and won (by two votes) the position of House minority whip. This victory represented an important step in his transformation from party pugilist to party leader. However, Gingrich himself soon became the object of a House Ethics Committee probe of alleged violations of House rules on outside gifts and income. The allegations focused on his earnings from two books, including Window of Opportunity. Later that year, Gingrich was investigated again by the same committee for improperly transferring congressional staff to work on his reelection campaigns. In both cases, the committee did not find sufficient grounds to reprimand Gingrich.

Gingrich nearly suffered defeat in the elections of 1990 and 1992, winning the former contest by fewer than 1,000 of the 156,000 votes cast. But these narrow victories were followed by a much wider reaching victory for both the man and his party in 1994.

Gingrich had done much to lay the groundwork for this win, particularly through his organization of the Contract with America, a ten-point plan of action that was intended to give Republicans a unified front against their Democratic opponents. The contract called for such measures as tax breaks, a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, a presidential line-item veto, term limits for members of Congress, get-tough proposals on crime, reduction of government regulations, welfare reform, military budget increases, and more. In September 1994, Gingrich gathered over three hundred Republican candidates for Congress to sign the contract on Capitol grounds.

The big GOP win in 1994 gave the party a gain of fifty-four seats and majority status in the House. In January 1995, Gingrich finally achieved his lifelong dream when he was voted Speaker of the House. His leadership soon led to a dramatic change in House protocol. Wresting control from committee chairs by placing loyal associates—many of them first-year Republican Congress members—on key committees, Gingrich became one of the most powerful speakers since the nineteenth century, at times virtually dictating the content of legislation.

Riding the crest of publicity attached to his new position, Gingrich published two books, To Renew America (1995) and 1945 (1995). To Renew America was a best-selling work communicating Gingrich's vision for the country. It presents a thesis that cultural elites have torn down the traditional culture of U.S. society. It also contains his already familiar calls to balance the federal budget and decentralize the federal bureaucracy by returning power to states and localities. The book 1945 is a "what if" novel that explores what the consequences would have been if Nazi Germany had been triumphant in World War II.

Gingrich, eager to make his mark as Speaker, initiated a one hundred-day plan to enact the Contract with America into law. He passed nine of the ten items of the contract through the House, but only three—the Congressional Accountability Act (Pub. L. No. 104-1, 109 Stat. 3), the Unfunded Mandate Reform Act (Pub. L. No. 104-4, 109 Stat. 48), and the Paperwork Reduction Act (Pub. L. No. 104-13, 109 Stat. 163)—were signed into law by the president.

Gingrich fought especially hard for one element of the contract: a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. After its defeat in the Senate, he organized a Republican plan to balance the federal budget in seven years. This plan included tax reductions and deep cuts in federal social programs. Most controversial were provisions requiring large cuts to such programs as Medicare and Medicaid, which provide health care to elderly, disabled, and poor people. Over the course of 1995, President Clinton gradually adopted the goal of a seven-year balanced budget plan—a change of mind that symbolized the pervasive power of the Republican agenda.

When President Clinton vetoed the House budget plan late in 1995, Gingrich and his Republican colleagues refused to compromise their budget priorities. As a result, the federal government was forced to shut down nonessential services for lack of funding. The budget showdown forced national parks, agencies, and other elements of the federal government to close their doors. Gingrich came under fire as people complained of undelivered paychecks and other problems. The impasse ended in January 1996, when Gingrich and Clinton reached a compromise that allowed provisional funding of the federal government and abandoned the seven-year goal of balancing the budget.

In 1995, Time magazine named Gingrich its Man of the Year, a fitting recognition of the Speaker's large role in shaping the national political agenda. Such power had not translated into universal public approval for Gingrich, however, particularly given the unpopularity of the federal government shutdown.

CROSS-REFERENCES: Dole, Robert Joseph.

Quotes:

"In every election in American history both parties have their cliches. The party that has the cliches that ring true wins."

"If Thomas Edison invented electric light today, Dan Rather would report it on CBS News as, Candle making industry threatened."

"We're all human and we all goof. Do things that may be wrong, but do something!"

"Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did."