The Little-Known, Inside Story About How Newt Became the Man He Is

By Max Blumenthal, Nation Books
Posted on December 18, 2011, Printed on December 19, 2011

*The following is excerpted from Max Blumenthal's book, Republican Gomorrah.

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.” Newt Gingrich was born Newt McPherson to teenaged parents. Gingrich’s mother divorced his father and married a Marine officer, who adopted him and throughout his childhood savagely beat him and his mother. (Gingrich’s half-sister, Candace, became a lesbian activist. At the moment Newt became Speaker, she became the Human Rights Campaign’s National Coming Out Project Spokesperson.) As a young man, Gingrich, fascinated with zoos and dinosaurs, longed for an illustrious career in academia. He wound up teaching history and environmental studies at West Georgia College.