Looking for a keynote speaker to strike just the right tone at its state convention in Houston next month, the Republican Party of Texas has turned to none other than Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. House Speaker who is “expected to be a big draw for Texas delegates,” according to a press release.
Indeed. A forthcoming guide to Republican family values, scheduled for publication just after Labor Day, devotes an entire chapter to the former Georgia congressman described in this week’s press release as “a source of inspiration to conservatives around the nation.”
“He made a political career out of preaching traditional family values, oversaw the Republicans’ “Contract with America” in 1994, and went on to become House Speaker, a post he used to lead impeachment proceedings against a President accused of extramarital dalliances in a corridor behind the Oval Office,” the book notes. “Gingrich’s own family values, however, weren’t exactly traditional.”
He was married the first time at 19 — to Jackie Battley, his high school geometry teacher… In 1978, Gingrich ran for Congress, touting his role as a family man. He claimed he worked to “keep his family together” — unlike his opponent, who planned to commute to work as not to uproot her family. A year-and-a-half after his election, Jackie was recovering from uterine cancer surgery when Newt showed up in her hospital room to say he wanted a divorce. Under his arm was a yellow legal tablet with handwritten details, which he demanded his wife sign.
Why divorce a woman who had sacrificed so much to further his political career? One former aide claims that Gingrich once gave him the answer: ‘She’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a president. And besides, she has cancer,’ Gingrich told him….
In 1981, Gingrich married for a second time. He and his new wife, the former Marianne Ginther, had been married for 18 years when she received a phone call from her husband while she was visiting her mother. She said she was “blindsided” when the voice on the other end of the line demanded that she agree to a divorce right then and there.
Two years after divorcing his second wife, Gingrich married Callista Beck, with whom he had carried on a six-year affair.
Two years after marrying Bisek, Gingrich pulled strings to have his previous marriage — the second one — annulled in a Catholic ceremony. The fact that it had been performed in a Lutheran church was apparently a minor detail….
When Gingrich’s idea to use the impeachment of Democratic President Bill Clinton as a central strategy for the Republicans’ 1998 midterm election cost his party seats in both the House and the Senate, Newt relinquished the Speaker’s gavel.
Years later, he admitted that he had been involved in an extramarital affair at the very same time Clinton had been sneaking Monica Lewinsky in the back door of the White House. Newt’s betrayal was different, though, because he never lied under oath.
‘If you don’t tell the truth under oath, the whole system breaks down,’ Gingrich explained.
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May 13, 2008 – 12:56 pm by APR
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