Yet Gingrich doesn't look especially pressed. He shuffles from make-up room to recording studio at a leisurely pace. He muses about his upcoming vacation to Florida, about golfing. He stops to look up celiac disease on MedlinePlus because one of his employees has just been diagnosed with it. Back at his K Street office, he bounces out to her desk to inform her that she can still eat chocolate. "She loves chocolate," he explains.
The weekend before his book tour, a wire story headlined "Gingrich Open to 2008 Presidential Run" ran and now everyone's asking, will he run? Gingrich knows he's a nonstarter as a candidate and says so, but he also knows that while on a book tour one must be coy.
"I think you're always willing to be ambitious, but it's relatively impractical. I'm not a governor, I'm not a senator, I'm a private citizen with ideas," he says. "It's very hard to get off the ground if I don't have a natural machinery to raise the resources. Under the right circumstances would I consider it? Sure. Do I think it's at all likely? No."
Of the five priorities he grapples with in his new Contract With America -- terrorism, God in the public arena, immigration, science and Social Security and health savings accounts -- most interviewers linger on No. 2.
Plenty of Republicans readily bare their inner preacher, but Gingrich was never one of them. In his book he writes about God in purely impersonal terms. It's the one chapter where his old combative side shows: "There is no attack more deadly and more historically dishonest than the secular Left's unending war against God in American public life," the chapter begins. The decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to rule the phrase "one nation under God" unconstitutional was to him "the last straw," he writes, particularly since 91 percent of the country supports it. Here he loves to tell the story of how, in 1802, Thomas Jefferson's supporters abolished half the federal courts -- not by impeaching judges but just by firing them -- when they felt the courts had overruled the will of the people. He suggests, totally seriously, that the president do the same with the Ninth Circuit.
Is Gingrich born again? This was Dick Armey's thought when he read about this part of the book. As House majority leader under Gingrich, Armey recalls, he once "tried to approach Newt about the Lord one morning at breakfast. He wasn't very interested. He just kind of ignored me." Armey recalls Gingrich's then-wife Marianne poking him in the ribs and saying, "See, that's what I've been talking to you about" and Gingrich saying nothing, just pushing around his eggs. "I've never thought of Newt as a particularly spiritual guy," Armey says.
Gingrich says there's a difference between personal religiosity and the centrality of God in history. But he also says the Armey story is wrong, that he says a "private prayer" before every speech and always has. His devoutness, he says, comes from the time his mother was going through a divorce and left him in the care of his grandmother and a great aunt. The aunt had stopped being a schoolteacher and made the rightness of Gingrich's mind and soul her full-time project.
Name any current national priority and Gingrich will have presaged it, five or 10 years ago, as he is happy to point out. Osama bin Laden? He spoke about him in 1995. Personal savings accounts? Ditto. But Gingrich spoke about virtually everything. He was such an open hydrant of prophetic musings back then that Rich Galen, his press secretary at the time, took it upon himself in 1996 to follow Gingrich around and "make sure when he came back with another idea no one acted on it or took him at all seriously," Galen recalls.
Gingrich and his associates agree on what caused his downfall: He never got used to being in power. He was always that same guerrilla fighter from Georgia, holed up in his office in 1978, plotting a takeover on graphs and maps. Tony Blankley, another former Gingrich spokesman, recalls the first speech his boss gave in Washington after the Republicans had won a House majority in 1994. Blankley hadn't thought much about press logistics. When he got to the room where Gingrich was going to speak, "it was a mob scene, hundreds of reporters and boom mikes in his face, I had to physically with my 230 pounds force my way through the crowd.
"We'd never prepared for that level of intensity. We'd never prepared for all the top leaders in the world coming to kiss his ring, and at the same time all the vicious attacks. Overnight he went from 20-something name recognition to 90-something. A newly elected president gets a slower rise than that, but Newt shot up like a skyrocket. It was disorienting, and it couldn't sustain itself."
Gingrich, too, is reflective about that era. "There are times when it's better for speakers to shut up. That the behavior of a minority whip is not appropriate when you're speaker of the House. It's like the difference between a Broadway stage and a movie. On a Broadway stage you need to make big gestures so people in the back row can see you. But the same gesture in a movie looks grotesque."
His friends say he's happier now that the pressure's off. "More comfortable with himself," is how his daughter puts it. He works 80 hours a week but stays late only on the two nights that his wife, Calista, is at French horn practice or choir.
Right now, though, he looks beat. He's been hawking his new book for nine hours and there are six more to go. He's sitting at his desk at the Center for Health Transformation on K Street. The office is curiously empty. The only thing on the walls is a hook to hang up his coat. On his desk is one photo, of his staff.
By now he's told that story about Jefferson and the courts in 1802 dozens of times, and he's getting giddy. In the latest version, this one for G. Gordon Liddy's radio show, Gingrich is suggesting the judges "go belly up. We should just send them to the beach." He's rubbing his eyes, taking off his glasses. Finally he leans back in his chair and closes his eyes. In this half-sleep, he just keeps on talking.
