Newt Gingrich

Gingrich's mom, Kathleen (Kit) Daugherty, was 16 years old when she married Newton S. McPherson in 1942. Newt was born the following year, but his dad, "Big Newt," left when "Little Newtie" was still a baby. His mom later married Bob Gingrich, an Army officer, and Big Newt agreed to let Gingrich adopt the boy and give him a new last name in exchange for not having to pay several months of child support. "Isn't it awful, a man willing to sell off his own son?" Kit Daugherty said.

Gingrich would later say of both his biological and adopted fathers, "They're both angry. They both served in the military. They're both physically strong. They both believe in a very male kind of toughness. They're both totalitarian. Not much difference between them."

Gingrich was only 17, a junior at Baker high school in Columbus, Ga., when he first declared that his life's ambition was to become speaker of the House of Representatives. He also pledged that he would marry his geometry teacher, Jackie Battley, which he did two years later when he was 19 and she was 26 - though Bob Gingrich refused to attend their wedding.

With Jackie working to support them both, Gingrich went on to earn a bachelor's degree from Emory University in Atlanta and both a master's and doctorate from Tulane University in New Orleans by 1971. He got student and family deferments that allowed him to avoid military service in Vietnam and had been teaching history and environmental studies at the tiny University of West Georgia when he made his first run for Congress in 1974.

Origins of Political Career

Gingrich lost to incumbent Democrat Jack Flynt in 1974 and 1976 in a district that stretched from Atlanta's southern suburbs to the Alabama state line, though he got more than 48 percent of the vote in both contests. It was after his 1974 defeat that Gingrich told an Atlanta newspaper that his ambition "is to be an old-time political boss in 20 years."

Flynt retired in 1978 and Gingrich, in an early and ugly incarnation of the "family values" campaigns he would later champion, attacked his opponent, state senator Virginia Shapard (D), by claiming that if she won she'd have to break up her family by moving to Washington and that a nanny would have to take over her maternal responsibilities.

Gingrich beat Shapard, but, ironically, it wouldn't be long until he broke up his own family after moving to Washington. In 1980, he went to the hospital room where his wife, Jackie, was being treated for uterine cancer and told her he wanted a divorce. Gingrich would later marry Marianne Ginther, 15 years his junior, whom he'd met just before asking Jackie for a divorce. Gingrich said publicly that his second marriage had a 53 to 47 percent chance of succeeding. It didn't.

Gingrich would later admit that he'd cheated on his second wife, too, and that he was having an affair with a young staff member, Callista Bisek, even as he was leading the Republican charge to impeach President Bill Clinton over Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Gingrich maintained he was not being hypocritical because he focused his arguments for Clinton's impeachment not on the president's affair, but on Clinton having lied about it under oath.

Gingrich married Bisek, 23 years his junior, in 2000 shortly after his divorce from Marianne. The two now live in northern Virginia, where she heads Gingrich Productions, a movie production company.

"War for Power"

Gingrich has lived his life according to two rules he laid out as early as 1978 to a group of College Republicans at the Holiday Inn near the Atlanta airport. Be bold, take risks and don't be afraid to make mistakes, he told the crowd. And, secondly, "take yourself seriously."

"You're fighting a war. It is a war for power," Gingrich told the future Republicans. "When one of your elders comes in and says, 'I don't like what you're doing,' tell them, 'Tough.' They ain't you. Do you like what they do?"

"I think that one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the camp fire, but are lousy in politics," Gingrich said. He left his audience with one final piece of advice. When criticizing party elders or Democrats, "say it in the press, say it loud, fight, scrap, issue a press release, go make a speech."

It's easy to see over the course of Gingrich's congressional career that he took his own advice seriously.

Once in Congress, Gingrich built a bully pulpit where none existed, taking advantage of rules that allowed members to make after-hours speeches when the chamber was usually empty except for C-SPAN's television cameras. Gingrich used that time - and garnered national attention - by repeatedly assailing Democrats on ethics issues, calling them corrupt.

Targeting Democrats

Gingrich's first target was then-Rep. Charles Diggs (D-Mich.) , one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus who'd been in office 25 years when Gingrich led a call to expel Diggs for taking kickbacks from three of his employees. Diggs was censured by the House and later jailed on those charges.

With time, Gingrich grew even bolder until one day he attacked Democrats for believing "America does nothing right." House Speaker Tip O'Neill (D-Mass.) called Gingrich's attack "the lowest thing I've ever seen in my 32 years in Congress." But Gingrich and an ally, then-Rep. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), demanded that O'Neill's attack on Gingrich be struck from the record and it was, marking the first time since 1798 that a speaker had been rebuked in such as way. "I am now a famous person," Gingrich told reporters.

Starting in 1987, Gingrich went after the biggest target he could find: House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas), accusing Wright of using a book deal to cover up money he was receiving from political supporters. In 1989, Wright was eventually forced to resign.

Growing the GOP

All the while he was attacking Democrats, Gingrich was building a Republican Party in his own image, using a political action committee funded by corporate interests, GOPAC, to recruit and train GOP candidates.. Every month, he'd dictate his thoughts on the Republican Party's future into a tape recorder and mail the tapes to GOP candidates around the country.

In 1994, Gingrich helped write "The Contract with America," a poll-tested collection of reforms, and assembled 300 Republican House members on the Capitol steps to publicize it. The Contract nationalized the congressional elections and allowed Republicans to capture 54 House seats, eight Senate openings and take control of both chambers for the first time in 40 years. Gingrich was elected House Speaker shortly afterwards.

But during his rise to fame, Gingrich struck book deals of his own in which he invited political supporters and others to "invest" their money in his writings. One of those deals, a $4.5 million advance from conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, was for "To Renew America," a book based on material from a course Gingrich taught at Kennesaw State College in Georgia, which closely resembled the deal Wright had made for his own book.

Democrats quickly pounced on Gingrich, using his own tactics against him. They called for an outside prosecutor to investigate Gingrich, just has Gingrich had done with Wright. Even Gingrich was no match for his own tactics. Mired in ethical controversies of his own, Gingrich made several other political missteps, including allowing the government to shut down because of a budget feud with Clinton and then leading the 1998 charge for impeachment despite public resistance to it.

Shortly after Republicans lost seats in the 1998 elections, Gingrich stepped down as speaker and resigned from Congress.

Newt Inc.

Whatever the hopes of his adversaries, however, Gingrich never went away.

"Newt Inc.," the derisive term Democrats applied to Gingrich's budding political enterprises, which seemed to produce as much cash as ideas, has become Newt.org, Gingrich's main digs on the Internet from which he promotes all things Newt. The cyber-enterprise ranges from ideas about modernizing medical records to the vast array of books, audio recordings or DVDs he's produced and will sell with "a message customized for you or a loved one."

The lines between Newt the political philosopher and Newt the entrepreneur remain blurred. At the end of a recent article he wrote for the conservative Human Events magazine in which he outlined ideas for the rehabilitation of the Republican Party, Gingrich included this postscript: "Father's Day is just around the corner and there are great gift ideas available at great prices at Newt.org."

Gingrich remains a one-man conglomerate. He is chairman of the Gingrich Group, a communications and consulting firm; political analyst for Fox News; founder and general chairman of the advocacy group American Solutions; founder of the Center for Health Transformation; a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute; a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution; and a prolific writer with 18 non-fiction books and novels to his credit.. His production company recently released a DVD about Ronald Reagan called "Rendezvous with Destiny." All of that is in addition to endless book tours, speaking engagements, monthly newsletters and podcasts.

Future Ambitions

Gingrich's future political ambitions are ambiguous. In 2008, he generated massive publicity for himself and his most recent book by suggesting that he might run for president and then flying off to New Hampshire and Iowa to sign copies of "Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America."

2012 Contender?

In 2010 and 2011, he started raising his profile and was considered a likely 2012 presidential candidate in a field of many possible prominent Republicans including Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee.

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