This brand of warfare worked, not as a strategy for governance but as a path to power, and what Gingrich planted, his fellow Republicans reaped. He led them to their first majority in Congress in decades, and his legacy extends far beyond his tenure in office. From the Contract with America to the rise of the Tea Party and the Trump presidential campaign, his fingerprints can be seen throughout some of the most divisive episodes in contemporary American politics.
Burning Down the House presents the alarming narrative of how Gingrich and his allies created a new normal in Washington. Since then, Gingrich has spent much of the day using zoo animals to teach me about politics and human affairs.
The females hunt, and as soon as they find something, the male knocks them over and takes the best portion. But the most important lesson comes as we wander through Monkey Junction. Gingrich tells me about one of his favorite books, Chimpanzee Politics , in which the primatologist Frans de Waal documents the complex rivalries and coalitions that govern communities of chimps.
For several minutes, he lectures me about the perils of failing to understand the animal kingdom. Disney, he says, has done us a disservice with whitewashed movies like The Lion King , in which friendly jungle cats get along with their zebra neighbors instead of attacking them and devouring their carcasses. As he pauses to catch his breath, I peer out over the sprawling primate reserve. Spider monkeys swing wildly from bar to bar on an elaborate jungle gym, while black-and-white lemurs leap and tumble over one another, and a hulking gorilla grunts in the distance.
At a loss for what to say, I start to mutter something about the viciousness of the animal world—but Gingrich cuts me off. With his immense head and white mop of hair; his cold, boyish grin; and his high, raspy voice, he has the air of a late-empire Roman senator—a walking bundle of appetites and excesses and hubris and wit.
Check out the full table of contents and find your next story to read. When I ask him how he views his legacy, Gingrich takes me on a tour of a Western world gripped by crisis. In Washington, chaos reigns as institutional authority crumbles. Throughout America, right-wing Trumpites and left-wing resisters are treating midterm races like calamitous fronts in a civil war that must be won at all costs. And in Europe, populist revolts are wreaking havoc in capitals across the Continent.
Twenty-five years after engineering the Republican Revolution, Gingrich can draw a direct line from his work in Congress to the upheaval now taking place around the globe. But as he surveys the wreckage of the modern political landscape, he is not regretful. It was a natural audience for him. At 35, he was more youthful-looking than the average congressional candidate, with fashionably robust sideburns and a cool-professor charisma that had made him one of the more popular faculty members at West Georgia College.
But Gingrich had not come to deliver an academic lecture to the young activists before him—he had come to foment revolution. The speech received little attention at the time. Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids. But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta.
The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along.
His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. Gingrich recruited a cadre of young bomb throwers—a group of 12 congressmen he christened the Conservative Opportunity Society—and together they stalked the halls of Capitol Hill, searching for trouble and TV cameras. Their emergence was not, at first, greeted with enthusiasm by the more moderate Republican leadership.
They even looked different—sporting blow-dried pompadours while their more camera-shy elders smeared Brylcreem on their comb-overs. Gingrich and his cohort showed little interest in legislating, a task that had heretofore been seen as the primary responsibility of elected legislators.
Bob Livingston , a Louisiana Republican who had been elected to Congress a year before Gingrich, marveled at the way the hard-charging Georgian rose to prominence by ignoring the traditional path taken by new lawmakers. For revolutionary purposes, the House of Representatives was less a governing body than an arena for conflict and drama. And Gingrich found ways to put on a show. He recognized an opportunity in the newly installed C- span cameras, and began delivering tirades against Democrats to an empty chamber, knowing that his remarks would be beamed to viewers across the country.
Although Congress had been a volatile place during periods of American history—with fistfights and canings and representatives bellowing violent threats at one another—by the middle of the 20th century, lawmakers had largely coalesced around a stabilizing set of norms and traditions. Entrenched committee chairs may have dabbled in petty corruption, and Democratic leaders may have pushed around the Republican minority when they were in a pinch, but as a rule, comity reigned. This ethos was perhaps best embodied by Republican Minority Leader Bob Michel, an amiable World War II veteran known around Washington for his aversion to swearing— doggone it and by Jiminy were fixtures of his vocabulary—as well as his penchant for carpooling and golfing with Democratic colleagues.
And rather than focusing all the time on right versus left, conservative versus liberal, he went after the Democrats. He called them a corrupt Democratic establishment that maintained its power unfairly, unconstitutionally. Democrats had passed many reforms during the s to make Washington a better place. They had instituted ethics reforms, for example, that tried to hold leaders more accountable.
They had changed the campaign finance laws and a new generation of Democrats had entered and they thought that would be sufficient. And they didn't understand that Gingrich had a whole other kind of political game in mind. In , he would go on C-SPAN all the time, speaking from the floor of the House, basically accusing Democrats of being unpatriotic and not supporting Ronald Reagan's efforts to fight communism.
When he goes after Speaker Jim Wright in , he essentially criminalizes the speaker arguing he's trying to fill his pockets at the expense of taxpayers.
And he tells them, use words like corruption, traitors, sick [and] radical as a way to describe your opponent. So language was essential to him in large part because the right language would get you the attention that he needed. This was one of his first big moments in Washington. And he and a group of Republicans had gone on every night and made these blistering speeches about specific Democrats.
And viewers didn't know the chamber was empty. So when Democrats didn't respond to the charges, it looked like they were guilty. And then when Speaker Tip O'Neill turns the cameras on the chamber and shows it's empty and when he makes that speech about Gingrich — Gingrich doesn't stop. They're corrupt. And for the first time, because of the confrontation, Gingrich was on national television and he really arrived as a figure.
So he understood how to play the whole news cycle and that story of cam scam incredibly well. On how and why Gingrich took down Speaker Jim Wright. Regarded as the chief architect of the Contract with America, he was also considered a major force behind the victory that established Congress's first Republican majority in 40 years.
Newt Gingrich was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and spent his childhood on military bases in Europe and the United States. Gingrich earned a Bachelor's degree in history from Emory University in and a Ph. He taught history at West Georgia College during the s. Interested in politics since he was a young man, Gingrich joined the Republican Party and made two unsuccessful runs for the Congress of the United States in and He was elected to the U.
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