What Does Newt Gingrich Know?
By ANDREW FERGUSON
Let’s
consult the literature — all 21 books
by the self-proclaimed ideas man of politics. (Gingrich
cites 23 books on his Web site. We are not counting the Contract With America
or the coffee-table book “Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous With Destiny.”)
When
his top campaign staff abandoned him not long ago, Newt Gingrich didn’t seem terribly surprised.
“Philosophically, I am very different from normal politicians,” he said. “We
have big ideas.”
The
“we,” as Gingrich uses it here, is akin to the royal we — it’s what might be
called the professorial we, employed when the intellectual and the ideas he
generates merge to create an entity too large for a singular personal pronoun.
“Over my years in public life,” he writes in his latest book about how to save
America, “I have become known as an ‘ideas man.’ ” And we shouldn’t doubt it.
As I write, a stack of books tilts Pisa-like on my desk, each volume written by
Gingrich and various co-authors. I got out my tape measure the other day and
discovered that the stack is precisely 15¼ inches high — a figure that does not
include the various revised and expanded editions that I have had Whispernetted
into my Kindle, along with the historical novels that Gingrich has published
with a co-writer named William R. Forstchen: three fat books on the Civil War,
three on World War II and a pair on the Revolutionary War. If I added these to
my stack, it would be taller than the mayor of Munchkinland and much heavier.
The
books taken together are evidence of mental exertions unimaginable in any other
contemporary politician. Professorial affectations are not high on the list of
tactics candidates like to use in this age of galloping populism. Within the
politico-journalistic combine, Gingrich’s status as an intellectual is accepted
as an article of faith — something that everybody just assumes to be true, like
man-made climate change or Barack Obama’s stratospheric I.Q.
Senator Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican, says Gingrich is “undoubtedly the
smartest man I’ve ever met.” Cokie Roberts calls him “a big thinker.” Without
irony the Democratic consultant Paul Begala praises his “intellectual heft” and
Howard Dean his “intellectual leadership.” Ted Nugent says Gingrich is probably
the “smartest guy out there.” So that settles that.
Or
does it? I built my stack of Gingrich books because I intended to read every
one of them, in chronological order, and I did read them, though my
chronological scheme broke down eventually. Aside from the sheer number of
words, what is most impressive about the Gingrich corpus is its range of
literary form, from confessional to guidebook.
Gingrich’s
first book, “Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future,” came out in
1984 and contained the seeds of much of what was to follow. Beneath its cover
image — a flag-draped eagle inexplicably threatening the space shuttle — the backbencher Gingrich was
identified as chairman of the Congressional Space Caucus, a position that
inspired a series of “space cadet” jokes that took years to die. “Window of
Opportunity” was co-written by Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, and a
science-fiction writer called David Drake. Anyone who takes seriously the books
that politicians claim to write must sooner or later confront the delicate
matter of co-authors and ghostwriters, especially when the books serve, as in
Gingrich’s case, as intellectual bona fides.
I have
no inside knowledge of Gingrich’s work habits as a writer, or co-writer. In
1994, I was asked to help write one of his books, but the offer never went far
enough to allow for close observation. There’s no reason to be prissy or
censorious on the subject of politicians and their ghostwriters. George
Washington had ghostwriters (pretty good ones, too: Hamilton and Madison).
Lincoln had his secretaries write some letters for him, including, some
historians say, the most famous Lincoln letter of them all, to the bereaved
Mrs. Bixby. And despite a long parade of co-authors — historians, novelists,
policy experts, journalists, even family members — Gingrich’s books show a
remarkable consistency from one to the next. His contribution to the books that
bear his name must be substantial — certainly greater than that of Charles
Barkley, who once admitted he hadn’t read his autobiography. (No one else did,
either.) Gingrich’s books are Gingrich’s books.
The
ghosts for that first book served him unevenly. They got him in metaphor
trouble from the first sentence. “We stand at a crossroads between two diverse
futures,” he wrote. This crossroads, it transpired, faced an open window. That
would be the window of vulnerability, which is widening. Three paragraphs
later, the crossroads, perhaps swiveling on a Lazy Susan, is suddenly facing
another window, also open. The important point, Gingrich writes, is that this
window of opportunity is about to slam shut. And if it does? “We stand on the brink
of a world of violence almost beyond our imagination.”
Reading
the Gingrich catalog, you get used to intimations — or are they threats? — of
Armageddon. Windows are slamming shut, or are just about to, all over the
place, all the time. “Time is running out,” he wrote toward the end of “Window
of Opportunity,” 27 years ago. It’s no wonder that Washington thinks he’s so
smart: Gingrich was panicky before panicky was cool. The political class runs
on his kind of excitement, as one crisis of the century succeeds another, week
by week. Politics on its own terms is so boring — decades of the same issues,
the same interests, the same charges of heartlessness against Republicans and
of profligacy against Democrats — that attention has to be stoked by artificial
means.
Gingrich
is better than anyone in the capital at arousing interest and maintaining the
capacity to surprise. Open one of his books at random, and who knows what
you’ll find? “Congressman Bob Walker of Pennsylvania has been exploring the
possible benefits of weightlessness to people currently restricted to
wheelchairs.” (He has?) He is mad for adjectives: stunning, grotesque,
enormous. His verbs get goosed, too, adverbially: remarkably, dramatically. The
intensifiers are part of what Gingrich in a later book called “my usual boyish
exuberance.” In his books the exuberance works as a stay against the
approaching cataclysm.
After
escaping the crossroads through the window, the reader follows the first
chapter of this first book as it rushes into a discussion of the sclerotic
technology of the welfare state circa 1984, the lengthening American life span,
the futurist Alvin Toffler, space tourism, newfangled telephones, organic
farming, the exercise boom, the return of apprenticeships, the decentralization
of higher education, the rise of Methodism in Britain and the Third Great
Awakening in America, Disraeli’s kinky sexual arrangements before he cleaned up
his act, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, historical revisionism, Idi Amin,
Jimmy Carter’s bungling of the Ayatollah, the future of Gabon and his,
Gingrich’s, daughter’s year off in France.
When
you come up for air, you notice you’re only on Page 39, with 233 pages still to
come.
In
“Window of Opportunity,” Gingrich introduced himself as a futurist, a role he
has played off and on throughout his career. There are problems inherent in
futurism, most of them involving the future, which the futurist is obliged to
predict (it’s his job) and which seldom cooperates as he would hope. Gingrich
has called some and missed some. In 1984, he saw more clearly than most that
computers would touch every aspect of commercial and private life, but nobody
any longer wants to build “a large array of mirrors [that] could affect the
earth’s climate,” warming it up so farmers could extend the growing season.
Gingrich’s
faith in technology, as his books express it, is total, undimmed by potential
misfirings. His artless belief in gadgetry and the power of human ingenuity,
his inexhaustible curiosity and magpie gathering of unexpected facts (did you
know Ray Kroc gave his autobiography the unappetizing title “Grinding It
Out”?), makes his first book the most winning of them all. Even the polemics
against the bureaucrats and liberals and other opponents of progress are mild
compared to what we’ve got used to in the intervening decades.
“It is
not their fault,” he writes empathetically. “They are simply ignorant.”
Stupid,
not evil: this is the kind of concession not often found in subsequent books.
After “Window of Opportunity,” Gingrich lapsed into a prolonged silence, at
least as a literary man. As a politician, of course, he was a dervish, and by
the time his next book appeared, in 1995, he was universally honored as the
architect of one of the century’s great political triumphs, the Republican
takeover of the House of Representatives the year before. “To Renew America”
was written in the headlong rush that followed Gingrich’s elevation to the
speakership and international fame.
Once
again America faced a crossroads, though the word itself wasn’t used. “There is
virtually no middle ground,” Gingrich wrote. He later concluded: “To renew or
to decay. At no time in the history of our great nation has the choice been
clearer.” To avert disaster, Gingrich had no choice but to present many
numbered lists. In addition to the Six Challenges Facing America — similar to
the challenges we faced 11 years before — and the “five basic principles that I
believe form the heart of our civilization,” there were the five forces moving
us toward worldwide medicine, a seven-step program to reduce drug use, the nine
steps we can take immediately to advance the three revolutions in health care
and more. The futurism was still there, too: “Honeymoons in space will be the
vogue by 2020.”
Meanwhile,
his polemics had hardened. “For some psychological reason, liberals are antigun
but not anti-violent criminal,” was a typically dubious example. As a former
professor (an unpublished one, at West Georgia College), Gingrich wrote about
university leftism with all the bitterness of an ex-academic: “Most successful
[alumni] get an annual letter saying, in effect, ‘Please give us money so we
can hire someone who despises your occupation and will teach your children to
have contempt for you.’ What is amazing is the overwhelming meekness of the
alumni in accepting this hijacking of their alma mater.”
This
is sharp and funny and nearly true, but it’s not a formulation designed to coax
the undecided into agreement. “To Renew America” marks the moment that
persuasion faded as a primary purpose of political talk and preaching to the
choir took over. Having won at last, and confident that the future was safely
in his pocket, Gingrich by 1995 no longer saw a reason to persuade anyone and
didn’t try. It’s the victor’s prerogative, but it doesn’t give you practice in
constructing arguments. And it’s catching. Hence talk radio, and in a few years
the blogs; hence Fox News and MSNBC.
Liberals
may not have liked this new aggressive tone from conservatives, but they had it
coming. At least since the Red Scare of the 1950s, mainstream institutions had
viewed ideological conservatism with condescension or contempt, as either a
joke or a personality disorder — a series of “irritable mental gestures which
seek to resemble ideas,” in Lionel Trilling’s excellent summary. Gingrich’s
rhetoric had the ferocity of a backlash. The liberal revulsion toward him
obscured how unorthodox — occasionally, how liberal — his conservatism was. The
books then and now are full of heresy. He showed a willingness to criticize
other Republicans, even Reagan at the height of his popularity. He advocated a
health tax on alcohol to discourage drinking — social engineering, it’s called
— and imagined government-issued credit cards that would allow citizens to
order goods and services directly from the feds. He thought the government
should run nutritional programs at grocery stores and give away some foodstuffs
free. He was pushing cuts in the defense budget in 1984 and a prototype of
President Obama’s cash-for-clunkers program in 1995.
The
ultimate problem with Gingrich’s firehose approach to idea-generation wasn’t
the ideological cast of the ideas but their practicality. To pluck a couple of
trivial examples from the scores of proposals he offers in “To Renew America”:
“We should work with every recovery program to develop low-cost detoxification
programs.” Terrific, but who’s the “we,” and what would the “work” entail, and
how would the cost be lowered? Before you can ask the question, Gingrich has
rushed ahead. Because “we need to know more about the environment,” we should
“develop a worldwide biological inventory.” Excellent idea, for all I know, but
administered how? Paid for by whom? Gingrich’s vagueness was always a problem,
but the books show something more: a near-total lack of interest in the
political implementation of his grand ideas — a lack of interest, finally, in
politics at its most mundane and consequential level.
Gingrich’s
inattention to detail is one reason his speakership was so chaotic, as readers
of a certain age will recall, and the primary reason he was shunned by his own
party after four years with the gavel. “Lessons Learned the Hard Way,” released
months before his defenestration, is a more conventional memoir than anything
else Gingrich has written, and it was supposed to serve as a mea culpa for his
mistakes as Speaker, as well as a bid to regain the loyalty of members who had
grown tired of his boyish exuberance. It didn’t work.
Admitting
mistakes comes easily to no public man — as memoirs from figures like Bill
Clinton and Donald Rumsfeld demonstrate — but in “Lessons Learned,” Gingrich
gave it the old West Georgia College try. This didn’t work, either. There’s
lots of mea in “Lessons Learned,” but the culpa is all on the other side.
Early
in the book, he offers an account of the drafting of the Interstate
Transportation Bill of 1997. Most readers, he admits, might think such a story
uninteresting. “But in this case most readers would be wrong.” In fact, in this
case most readers would be right. The point of the story, though, is that
Gingrich handled the transportation bill pretty damn well. Indeed, he handled
nearly all his duties pretty well — except for when he worked too hard or cared
too deeply or thought too much or trusted too many of the wrong people.
Democrats,
for instance. One lesson Gingrich claimed to learn the hard way was, as a
chapter title has it, “Don’t Underestimate the Liberals.” As speaker, Gingrich
discovered that Republicans are too good for their own — um, good. “The difference
between the well-thought-out, unending and no-holds-barred hostility of the
left,” he wrote, “and the acquiescent, friendship-seeking nature of many of my
Republican colleagues never ceases to amaze me.” Democrats flatter themselves
with the mirror image of this fantasy, of course, pretending to be envious of
the robotic efficiency of Republicans and the freedom of action allowed them by
their utter lack of conscience or shame. Self-awareness is not listed in the
catalog of traits required for faithful partisanship. About the true nature of
their enemies, however, if about nothing else, professional Republicans and
Democrats are both exactly right.
When
Gingrich finished his tenure as the “political leader of a grass-roots movement
seeking to do nothing less than reshape the federal government along with the
political culture of the nation,” he kicked back. Transformational leaders get
tired, too. “I found myself at an important turning point in my life” he wrote
in “Five Principles for a Successful Life.” “I had to stop and ask myself: . .
. How can I live up to my potential and be the best possible version of ‘me’?”
After
I closed the cover of “Lessons Learned,” my version of me was deeply fatigued.
I abandoned my chronological scheme and began reading through the remaining
books without method. As it happens, this is how they seem to have been
published, willy-nilly. Once Gingrich’s first post-speaker book appeared, in
2003, the others tumbled out like a litter of kittens. Including co-authored
historical novels, Gingrich has published 17 books over the past eight years.
The
mental energy and organizational skill required to produce all these
collaborative efforts are astounding. They ask a lot of a reader too. I found
it useful to divide this part of the corpus into Lesser Gingrich and Greater
Gingrich. Lesser Gingrich includes the guidebook, called “Rediscovering God in
America” (2006), the book of management advice called “The Art of
Transformation” (2006) and the works of straightforward advocacy with a
think-tank gloss: “Saving Lives and Saving Money” (2003), about health care reform;
“Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” (2007), about energy policy; and “A Contract
With the Earth” (2007), about conservation. More comprehensive books survey the
political and cultural scene at three-year intervals — “Winning the Future”
(2005), “Real Change” (2008) and “To Save America” (2010). They constitute the
Greater Gingrich.
Despite
these differences, every Gingrich bears the same trademarks and verbal tics and
jabs its readers in the ribs with the same sense of urgency. And every Gingrich
carries the same theme. “Today we have a horse-and-buggy style of public
administration presiding over a nation entering the space-shuttle age,” he
wrote in “Window of Opportunity.” “In an era of A.T.M.’s, iPods and eBay” he
wrote more than 20 years later, “we have government from the era of quill pens,
inkwells and paper ledgers.”
As a
result, he wrote in “To Save America,” “we stand at a crossroads: either we
will save our country or we will lose it.” “America today,” he announced in
“Real Change,” “is at an extraordinary crossroads.” In a revised edition of
“Winning the Future,” he phrased our predicament like this: “America is the
most energetic, resourceful and innovative nation in the history of mankind.
But we are at a crossroads.” Moreover, he said in “Saving Lives and Saving
Money,” “we find ourselves at a crossroads.”
The
choice between these two roads diverging in a yellow-bellied wood is always
stark: a question of “whether the United States as we know it will cease to
exist.” If nothing else, the Lesser Gingrich shows the author’s ingenuity in
adapting his theme. “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less,” for instance, is aimed
at the pure activist. It includes a chart to calculate how much the liberals
are making you spend on gas, along with checklists, printed petitions, a
membership card, a bumper sticker — everything but a decoder ring. In “The Art
of Transformation,” he manages to one-up the usual business-book jargon by
compiling an impenetrable lexicon of his own. He shows us an OODA loop, for
Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, and connects “Islands of Excellence With
Invisible Bridges” while “mind mapping” for project planning.
“Moving
to the sound of the guns,” he writes, “requires that we are externally rather
than internally oriented, so we can hear the guns; understand our antelope” —
that’s what he wrote — “so we know if the guns are worth hearing; think through
our deep-mid-near goals so we know which guns to respond to.” Senator Coburn
needs to get out more.
One of
Gingrich’s recent books had the potential to be charming. “Rediscovering God in
America” is a walking tour of buildings and monuments in Washington. The point
is to demonstrate how previous generations of Americans unabashedly included
religious symbols in civic life, in contrast to the picky legalisms and
hair-trigger sensitivities of our own era. The book is a collaboration with
Callista Gingrich, the wife (“whose support and love have made the adventure of
our life together exciting, enjoyable and fulfilling,” Gingrich writes in “To
Serve America”) who replaced the second wife, Marianne (“who made it all
worthwhile” back in the day of “To Renew America”). Callista is unavoidable in
all of Gingrich’s current endeavors. Having married a powerful man and suddenly
blossomed in fields in which she earlier showed seemingly no interest or
professional skill — writing books, taking photographs, making movies,
overseeing her husband’s not-for-profit company — Callista has emerged as the
Linda McCartney of the conservative movement.
Her
images in the most recent edition of “Rediscovering God in America” are lovely.
(Linda was a photographer too.) The entire sepia-toned production is so
elegant, that Gingrich’s attacks on the “ruthlessly secular society” in thrall
to “a media-academic-legal elite [who find] religious expression frightening
and threatening” sound wildly out of place, like a gunshot at afternoon tea.
If
Gingrich’s theme is timeless and the enemy unchanging, so is the solution, the
same one from 1984. The coming rush of high technology will dismantle the
welfare state and provide a replacement that is humane and efficient; it will
free the poor from government dependency, take apart a failing educational
establishment, relieve the drudgery of industrial labor and provide a steady
supply of pleasant jobs, defrock out-of-touch elites in every corner of the
ruthlessly secular society, clean up the environment and bequeath to us an
America that is “safe, healthy, prosperous and free,” as he wrote in “Winning
the Future” and, with slight variation, in most of his other books too. Technology remains the deus ex machina of
Gingrich’s vision.
His
attraction to it goes beyond the sci-fi enthusiast’s love of gadgetry. As our
country’s problems fall before technology’s advance, the need for politics and
its drudgery disappears: no fuss over compromise and horse-trading, no grubby
catering to commercial interests. Politics is just one more feature of the old
order that becomes obsolete. Yet a reader who scans the whole collection from
its beginning in “Window of Opportunity” might pause: Wasn’t this supposed to
have happened already? The explosion in digital technology that Gingrich
foresaw in 1984 has come off, with a bang. And yet still the country hangs in
the balance, its condition more dire than ever, its need for a transformational
leader never more pressing.
Like
most Utopians, Gingrich sees the world in binary terms. Only his alternative
future can prevent the cataclysm that has been about to happen for so many
years. Muddling through — which is the default option of our constitutional
system and the one that most Americans, latently conservative as they are, seem
to prefer — never surfaces in the swirling mists of his crystal ball. For all the
reciprocated disdain he claims to feel for the establishment in Washington,
where he has lived for more than 30 years, he is still its unwitting champion;
for without the crises that Gingrich chronically imagines, the establishment
would no longer be necessary.
I see
I have left little room for Gingrich’s novels. For a Civil War buff, the most
interesting of these, and the only ones I read with any care, are the trilogy
beginning with “Gettysburg,” continuing with “Grant Comes East” and concluding
with “Never Call Retreat.” These are what the trade calls counterfactuals: the
authors rewrite the pivotal events of history and then see how the alternative
narrative might have played out.
A
counterfactual account of history appeals especially to people who are disappointed
in the real thing. Settled fact is unsatisfying; history as it occurs seems
somehow a cheat. It is true that history hasn’t worked out the way Newt
Gingrich envisioned it, and this lends poignancy to the moral of his Civil War
trilogy. “This victory was a long way from inevitable,” Ulysses S. Grant says
in “Never Call Retreat,” “and every young American ought to learn just how
important one man can be. How one man can shape history and, in that moment,
save a nation.”
And
then, just when my stack had dwindled to nothing and I felt the thrill of
liberation, the mail arrived with my preordered copy of Gingrich’s latest book,
“A Nation Like No Other.” I thumbed through it. “The election of 2012,”
Gingrich writes, “will bring us to an historic crossroads.”
The
choice is stark, apparently — as urgent as any in our history.
Andrew
Ferguson (aferguson6396@yahoo.com) is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
and the author of ‘‘Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into
College.’’ Editor: Chris
Suellentrop (C.Suellentrop-MagGroup@nytimes.com)
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