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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Newt's on his third glass of Chardonnay, and those sharp little teeth are out again. \"I mean, I think it's perfect! I can't believe it! I wanted to roll on the floor and giggle when I learned they got Howard Dean as chairman,\" he says. \"'What we need to do is get a Vermont governor who's an extreme antiwar left-wing nutcake and who screams on television!' I mean, I understand why the Clintons want him as chairman. He makes Hillary look normal!\"\n\n He's sitting in the first-class car of a southbound Amtrak train alongside two aides with stricken smiles. He's been on the loose in Philadelphia all day, lecturing businessmen on our shabby health care system, bursting into a bookstore to sign copies of his latest best seller, horrifying Sean Hannity's radio audience by raising\u2014as it seems Newt's destiny to do\u2014the specter of Clinton: The Sequel. (\"Anybody on our side,\" Newt warned me, \"who thinks you can beat Hillary just by being shallow and belligerent, they're just gonna get their lunch eaten.\")\n\n But the main event in Philly was a World Affairs Council luncheon speech. In the ballroom of the Union League building, he stepped to the podium with a cocktail napkin's worth of notes and reeled off a piercing analysis of Bush administration policy. After mildly applauding the president's \"vision level,\" Newt bore in, chiding the administration for its occupation of Iraq, warning that the president's Russian soul buddy, Vladimir Putin, was presiding over \"an alarmingly robust research-and-development program in weapons systems,\" and saying of Bush's Social Security initiative, \"What they are currently doing will not pass.\" Along the way, Newt said yes to stem-cell research, no to the \"concept\" of adolescence, yes to paying kids to study, no to the culture at the U.S. Agency for International Development, yes to \"the American model of rolling up our sleeves,\" and no to \"the European model of elegant decay.\"\n\n But did he convince anyone of anything? This is the eternal Gingrich question, of course. There is (and has always been) a repellent quality to his intelligence: Every utterance has the ring of a boast. And now, sitting across from him on the train back to Washington, I'm feeling that same magnetic confusion. I tell him he hasn't sold me on his notion that the decline of God in public life is one of America's \"preeminent\" threats. Didn't the 2004 election demonstrate that the secular lefties are on the ropes?\n\n \"No, they're not on the ropes,\" Newt says. \"They're out of power, but they're not out of control. They control the universities. They have control of the Senate, the staffs of bureaucracies. They have the control of the language we use.\"\n\n Uh, isn't the majority party in the Senate...Republican?\n\n \"You can't pass anything genuinely radical. You can't get it through the Senate.\"\n\n But why is radical the only way to go? Like the idea you raised in Philly today, the one about paying kids money to make good grades in math and science. C'mon. It's a nonstarter.\n\n Newt drains his wineglass. \"I'm eager to produce calculus, physics, and biology majors that will compete with those in China and India,\" he says. \"I think I have a strategy that does that. What's your solution? Another twenty years of hopelessness?\"\n\n This is classic Gingrich: Either go with my Big Idea or...fail! Take Iraq, for instance, where the administration \"messed up,\" Newt says, because \"we should've maintained the Iraqi army. And should have created an interim government immediately. And should never have had a single speech on television by an American speaking English. And the world would've been a different place.\n\n \"And just so you know this isn't armchair quarterbacking,\" he says, throwing a glance at his national-security adviser, Bill Sanders, a fair-haired soldierly sort who returns a knowing nod, \"we will give you, not to quote but to know it exists, a paper from August 2002 explaining how you do this.\"\n\n (Later, I obtain this paper, which Newt sent to the White House and the Pentagon. Since I'm not permitted to quote from it, let me instead present its essence: After the overthrow of Saddam, our Special Forces swoop in and somehow persuade Iraqi military units to immediately switch sides to the winning team, thus avoiding major bloodshed and facilitating true liberation. Now, that's big. Shall we try it in Iran?)\n\n Newt's phone rings. His hammerlike tones go mushy: \"Hello....Well, it's the best of all worlds here. We have GQ, Bill Sanders, and Vince Haley [Newt's aide-de-camp] all on the same train, drifting southward and drinking wine, and I'm trying not to say anything that'll make you angry. I have Sanders and Haley ready to dive on top of me when I start to get bad.\" Glaring at me: \"This is my daughter, you cannot use this, this is off the record....\"\n\n No one's springing out of his seat to pump the former Speaker's hand. No one's looking too giddy from such proximity to celebrity. Because the guy they're eyeballing was literally and deservedly America's most unpopular politician not long after he and his fevered minions, the freshman class of '94, demanded revolution. And when Newt's revolution wasn't revolutionary enough for his minions and they pounced on him like Willard's rats, no one shed a tear. Nor was it ever really acknowledged that Newt had some of it\u2014okay, a lot of it\u2014right. The ancient Democratic House committee chairmen were power-mad gasbags. The federal budget was a foul and bloated mess. Welfare could be reformed without millions dying in the streets....\n\n Here on the train, as Newt hangs up and signals for me to throw a few more fastballs his way, I can't pick a topic A without a not-so-casual reminder that, ahem, guess who's been all over this stuff from time immemorial?\n\n \"I did a speech on bin Laden in 1996.\"\n\n \"I've been paying attention to Iraq since I met with Cheney in September of 1990.\"\n\n \"My first speech on personal accounts for Social Security was November of 1986.\"\n\n \"I first talked about doing all of this in August of 1958.\"\n\n All of what?\n\n \"Saving civilization.\"\n\n It's the time of Newt. And guess who isn't ruling out a presidential bid?\n\n But hold on. When you talk about rolling on the floor and giggling about Howard Dean, you have to know that nothing would make the Democrats roll on the floor and giggle more than the prospect of you running for president.\n\n \"Sure. Sure. I understand that.\"\n\n No more glinting teeth. It's a tight, defiant smile now.\n\n So then would you be content to run just for the sake of promoting your ideas?\n\n Newt doesn't hesitate. \"No,\" he says. \"I have never in my entire life played just to play.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n There's no frolic to the man. He doesn't do small talk. Small is someone else's world. When Newt's footloose in a new city, he heads to the local zoo, asks to see the zookeeper (one of Newt's early ambitions), and quizzes him on disease prevention and mating in captivity. When he emerges from a movie\u2014say, one of his favorites, like Braveheart\u2014he's not rehashing plotlines or favorite scenes, he's locating the Message, the Undercurrent, the Historical Context. And when he's at home after a long day of transforming America, he dips into the light reading on his nightstand\u2014right now it's a study of the Mafia in Sicily (\"the perfect analogue for modern terrorism\") and a four-volume recap of the Civil War (\"so I can defend my novel when it comes out\").\n\n If you think he's an audacious, even preposterous character now, you should've been in Carrollton, Georgia, in 1970. That's when Newton Leroy Gingrich, a 27-year-old military brat and assistant professor of history, wandered onto the West Georgia campus. The students didn't know what to make of him. Clunky black plastic glasses, thrift-store khakis, and shaggy sideburns (a lame nod to the counterculture): the archetypal Geek Prof. Didn't quite talk raht, believed in integration and something called the environment. And a Republican, here in Dixie!\n\n You think he gave a damn what anyone thought? Newt was already in a rush to greatness, apportioning his time in savage little nuggets, duly noted in pocket-size appointment books: Five minute nap. Read watch girls swim. 10 min. \"All in the Family.\" 10 min. Reading Science Magazine. Hey, it worked: Twenty-four years later, he was the Second Most Powerful Man in America\u2014and still in a multitasking bustle, holding press briefings during his morning two-mile march from his apartment to the Washington Monument, shaping the day's message while working off last night's enchiladas.\n\n And for what, all this frenzy?\n\n \"This is not about Gingrich\"\u2014that's Newt talking\u2014but rather history. Newt's here to make history, and if that wins him a place alongside his heroes Lincoln and Churchill\u2014both of whom drew scorn until history waved its vindicating wand\u2014well, even better.\n\n Newt's unholy rich now, and on his own terms. Could've been a lobbyist, could've done a Visa commercial...All too trivial. Instead, he's made his pile consulting on health issues, delivering $50,000 speeches scrawled on the back of coasters, and writing marginally readable books that the faithful scarf up like OxyContin.\n\n How relad is he? Well, he's golfing now. \"Very badly,\" he says. \"But it's good for me. Because it forces me to stop. I would have been a much more effective Speaker if I'd been golfing back then.\"\n\n Callista, his wife, turned him on to the links. And to opera. And, it turns out, to modern marriage. \"It's a wonderfully humbling experience to have a wife with a real job,\" says Newt. \"Now I build all my vacations around her schedule.\"\n\n Getting here, of course, was not so fun. The press made great sport of it in 1999, when Clinton's Berater in Chief dumped his longtime \"best friend and closest adviser,\" Marianne (for whom he'd dumped Jackie, the mother of his two daughters), after a lengthy affair with House Agriculture Committee staffer Callista Bisek, a high-cheekboned blond twenty-three years Newt's junior. Though history is clearly not on the Gingriches' side, friends maintain that this marriage will stand. A Republican colleague recently witnessed a tableau of the Gingrich marriage in microcosm: Newt pacing outside a Tysons Corner department store, speed-reading some mammoth book, his index finger flying across the typeface...all the while standing sentry over an armada of shopping bags, with Callista depositing more bags at his feet before darting inside the store again.\n\n \"Monday and Tuesday nights we spend together,\" Newt says. \"And then we try to take Friday night also. But it's a very complex process\"\u2014squinting those eyes even tighter now, as if the topic were Sunni participation in post-Saddam Iraq rather than how to pleasure the spousal unit. Love is grand, but seldom has history been made sharing a bowl of popcorn and watching some poseur bloviate on The O'Reilly Factor.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n It's true. I heard him tell one adoring audience, completely without irony: \"For about three and a half years, we really did change things.\" Yes, well. It's doubtful the Contract with America will qualify as a document for the ages. Welfare reform? No one, not even Newt, is claiming that the Age of Entitlement has dwindled in our rearview. The end of the seniority system in House committees? Great, except that today's Republican-led committees are every bit as petty and secretive as the ones the Democrats tyrannized years ago. Budgetary discipline? Pshaw. Legal reform? Never got off the ground. In truth, the only lasting history achieved by Newt thus far is his monumental contribution to the art of partisan gut fighting.\n\n Back in 1978, he had this to say to a group of Georgia partisans: \"I think that one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty.\" By 1988, Newt was deep in the humus, reminding his minions, \"When in doubt, Democrats lie,\" and exhorting them to promote the Big Idea of \"the loony left\" and of candidate Michael Dukakis as \"Daffy Dukakis,\" who \"lies\" and \"is a joke.\" It delighted Newt that year to see George H. W. Bush lambaste Dukakis for his membership in the ACLU\u2014\"an organization with a long and distinguished history,\" he would acknowledge later, while still insisting the cheap smear was \"legitimate.\" Politics as history? Some other time.\n\n Amid all the crashing of cymbals and scalping of career politicians, Speaker Newt forfeited a golden opportunity to make history by reforming Social Security. Though he mentioned it in the Contract, it went largely unmentioned by Newt in 1995. Then he devoted all of 1996 to thwarting the reelection of Bill Clinton. In fact, Bill was amenable to touching the Third Rail\u2014and so, Newt tells me on the train, \"Clinton and I discussed it and plotted Social Security for the fall of '97. I believe if Lewinsky hadn't happened, he would've been able to propose it at the State of the Union in '98.\"\n\n Lewinsky happened? No, what happened is that Newt went hammer and tongs after Bill's crowning bimbo eruption, driven nearly insane by what he called \"the most systematic, deliberate obstruction of justice, cover-up, and effort to avoid the truth we have ever seen in American history\" and pledging before a red-meat crowd that \"never again, as long as I am Speaker [will I] make a speech without commenting on this topic.\" And to what end? Murder-suicide: Clinton got impeached, but the Lewinsky backlash cost the Republicans five House seats and Newt his bully pulpit...while Social Security reform, that one jewel of an accomplishable Big Idea, fell quietly off the table.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n \"Total admiration,\" Newt says of Hillary. \"You have to respect her. This is a first-class professional. And if Bill is First Spouse, it'll be one of the great moments. A new TV show! The East Wing!\"\n\n The Clintons are never far from Newt's mind. They're like the Kennedys were to Nixon: glamorous, charismatic, brazen power-grabbing elitist amoral lying dream killers. Wrong on health care, wrong on the budget, wrong on the military...and so goddamned clever! Newt's staff and the class of '94 had seen it time and again: Every time Speaker Gingrich galloped into the Oval Office with his musket loaded for Slick Willie, he shuffled out holding his own gonads. \"It got to the point where the Republican freshmen were afraid to send him in there alone,\" remembers Newt's archivist and friend, Mel Steely. \"By the time Newt would get back to his office, Clinton's press secretary had already announced the opposite of what they'd agreed on. I'd say, 'Newt, how did you get suckered in?' And he'd say, 'Clinton would come up from behind his desk, put his arm around me, and say, \"Newt, you're absolutely right.\" Just charm the pants right off of you.'\"\n\n Charmed Newt right out of the history books, too...but only for now. See, Newt's convinced that the Clintons will be there in 2008, that Hillary will be sitting atop the Democratic ticket. Picture that, and picture this: The Republican Party base consults reality. McCain is not one of them; he'll never make it out of South Carolina. Frist, Pataki, Hagel? Please. To fight a Clinton, a gladiator is required. Someone with big ideas, who sees that politics, in the words of Mao Tse-tung, \"is war without blood.\" Meanwhile, look who's in Iowa and New Hampshire\u2014just, y'know, signing books. A Lincoln's Birthday address in Sioux City? Sign him up! And wherever McCain and the GOP dwarfs of '08 show up, an earnest farmer or mother of seven will be there to proffer a barrage of cogent Newt-inspired questions: \"Uh, Senator, in what way does your health care plan fulfill the twenty-first-century imperative for a transformational binary market-oriented system?\" And as the candidates stammer and Clinton looms, the backstage boys of the GOP might very well cry out, much like they did with Reagan back in '66: Please, Newt! Save us! \n\n That's why Newt isn't ruling out the presidency. Sometimes the only way to make history is to let history come to you.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Newt's youthful Aide Vince comes rushing down the aisle. \"Sam Waterston's on this train!\" he says. \"He's\u2014you wouldn't believe this. He's performing at the White House tomorrow night! Reenacting Lincoln's speech at Cooper Union!\"\n\n Watching the clouds gather on Newt's face, I say, \"The Killing Fields. Law Order.\"\n\n Still nothing. But when Vince adds, \"Anyway, I thought I'd arrange a meeting,\" his boss shrugs in acquiescence, then gets up to take a leak.\n\n It's just us lilliputians now: me, Vince, who's massaging his BlackBerry, and Newt's military guy, Bill, who stands more or less at ease. I slide Bill the front section of today's Times and ask him what he thinks of the lead story, about U.S. torture policies in Iraq.\n\n The man who briefs Newt Gingrich on national-security matters shrugs and says with a grin, \"Hey. If it works, it works.\"\n\n I thought most experts say torture doesn't work, I say.\n\n Bill raises an eyebrow as a way of saying: Hmm. You've got a point there. Though not much of one. Then Newt returns, and he and Bill take two seats on the other side of the aisle. Vince is on the phone now, saying to someone at Gingrich Central Command, \"Yeah, Sam Waterston. I'm gonna hook 'em up. It'll be fun.\"\n\n Waterston is wearing a wide-brimmed hat and accepts Newt's handshake with a please-God-don't-let-anyone-see-me-doing-this sort of smile. (Sam coughed up $22,000 for the losing team last year.) Newt launches into a spiel on the Cooper Union speech\u2014Lincoln as teacher of history, the great man's punishing logic, core values up the wazoo...\n\n When he comes up for air, Waterston steps in. \"And the thing about the speech is, it's funny,\" he says. \"Not jokes. I mean, the structure.\"\n\n Newt says nothing, yet leaves no doubt what he's thinking: Funny? One of the most transformational speeches of all mankind...funny? \n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Here's what's funny, unless you're Newt Gingrich: It's not the Clintons who stand in Newt's way of making history. It's George W. Bush.\n\n When I ask Newt to describe where he and the president part company, he begins by saying, \"I'm not sure there's any major philosophical difference. There are a lot of nuances that I'd do different. I tend to fall into an analytical-historical model. I was politically aware by the late 1950s. If you asked the president, 'When did you start thinking about this stu?' I think you'd get a different answer.\"\n\n Ooof! \n\n Newt explains that history is jolted by a succession of cresting and receding waves. \"First we had a wave called Goldwater,\" he says. \"Then we had a wave called Reagan. Then a wave called the Contract with America. And in all fairness, you have a wave called Bush.\"\n\n In all fairness? The air is swampy with condescension.\n\n \"The challenge of the Bush legacy,\" he goes on, \"is this: You have pieces that are really terrific. Then you have pieces that are like, 'What were those guys thinking?'\"\n\n He tries so hard to choose his words carefully, he really does. He even describes himself as a Bush \"ally.\" (Think FDR and Stalin.) But he just can't hide his sense of intellectual superiority. Relying on gut instinct\u2014instead of on historical models? Spending political capital\u2014what the hell does that mean? (Newt: \"It's a term he loves, and it's not how I think.\") Now, if you consider the other side of it: proud egghead, inveterate grandstander, jelly-belly, philanderer...Does this sound like W.'s kind of guy?\n\n It drives Newt nuts, this \"wave called Bush\" that he can't ride. Though he shamelessly drops Karl and Dick Cheney and fifty-one hours of top-level briefings in December alone! like Scuds into his monologues, Newt's regular bombardment of e-mails goes largely unheeded by the White House, according to an administration official who's seen his missives.\n\n Newt managed to hold his tongue throughout 2004. He could've buried Bush on Iraq, but that might've cost 'em the election. This year is different. He's got books to flog, airtime on Fox News to fill, all those audiences the Washington Speakers Bureau has lined up for him to bedazzle, a candidacy to consider, Big Ideas to ratify...And Newt's no dummy: You don't get face time in the Oval Office with that kind of agenda. No, you stand in the hallway, whispering to Dick and Rummy about Iran and Syria and China and Russia. And you try to wait out the Bush wave.\n\n At which point, Newt will face a final barrier to history's Valhalla: himself. It's one thing to have Newt Gingrich standing outside the box, willing to risk ridicule rather than play smallball. It's another thing, though, to let Newt inside the box, permitting him to explode it with his outsize appetite for Radical Transformation. When I ask a longtime Newt admirer to assess the Speaker's political future, his praise falters. \"Newt's motivated by ideas,\" he finally says. \"But another motivation, in my view, is that he wants to be a historic figure....I'm done selling him short. This guy has an incredible ability to reshape himself. Almost Clintonesque.\n\n \"What worries me is his desire to make history. That could lead to overreaching\u2014and frankly, which presidents make history? The wartime presidents. That would make me a little nervous.\"\n\n But as Newt would surely argue, that's just one end of the seesaw. Look at it this way: You can stride fearlessly into the breach...or you can face extinction.\n\n Tough choice.\n\n Robert Draper is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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