As Battley recovered, Gingrich brought the couple’s daughters to the hospital to visit her.
Accounts of what happened next vary in detail, but primary sources agree on a central point: Gingrich wanted to talk divorce with his hospitalized wife.
According to the first published account of the visit — a story by David Osborne in Mother Jones magazine in November 1984 — Gingrich went to Battley’s room with a yellow legal pad on which he had written a list of items related to the handling of the divorce.
Osborne attributed this anecdote to Lee Howell, Gingrich’s former press secretary, whom he quoted as saying: “He wanted her to sign [the list]. She was still recovering from surgery, still sort of out of it, and he comes in with a yellow sheet of paper, handwritten, and wants her to sign it.”
In an interview this week, Osborne said Battley confirmed the story when he interviewed her for his article. He also said Gingrich never explicitly disputed Howell’s account.
In a follow-up story in The Post in early 1985, two months after the Mother Jones story was published, some elements of the story were different. Neither Battley nor Gingrich mentioned a yellow legal pad or a list to be signed in The Post article.
“The two girls came to see me, and said Daddy is downstairs and could he come up,” Battley told Post reporter Lois Romano at the time. “When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from surgery.”
Osborne said Battley never mentioned that their daughters were in the room when Gingrich began the divorce discussion. “It’s possible that it could have happened on a different day” when the daughters weren’t present, he said.
In any case, Osborne said he’s seen nothing to suggest that what he described 27 years ago is essentially in error.
As Gingrich prepared to run for president this spring, his daughter Jackie Gingrich Cushman offered her take for the first time. In her column, titled “Setting the Record Straight,” she criticized media coverage of the episode, saying it contained “untruths” and “misstatement of facts.”
But Cushman never spelled out what was untrue. Nor did she mention what transpired in the hospital room when she visited her mother as a 13-year-old.
“For the four people involved, [the hospital visit] was one of a million interactions and was not considered a defining event by any of us. . . . As with many divorces, it was hard and painful for all involved, but life continued,” she wrote.
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