Gingrich carries lots of baggage from the past

Over such a long period, any politician is likely accumulate some debits on his or her record. But Gingrich isn’t just any politician. No matter how you feel about him, he is a forceful, driven, larger-than-life figure whose exploits, both professional and personal, have always drawn inordinate attention.

As he climbs within reach of the Republican presidential nomination, incidents from Gingrich’s past — many of them dating from the days he represented a metro Atlanta district in Congress — are certain to face increasing scrutiny. Here’s a guide to some of the most notable items in his luggage, and what he has to say about them.

Ethics controversy

Gingrich spent most of his House speakership under investigation by the House ethics committee on what would eventually total 84 allegations of misconduct. Ultimately, the Republican-majority House, on the bipartisan committee’s recommendation, voted to reprimand him in one of those cases and fined him $300,000 — the first time any speaker had been disciplined for ethical wrongdoing.

The background of the accusation dated back to the mid-1980s, when questions arose about the up-and-coming congressman’s creative use of tax-deductible contributions for what some saw as political and personal benefit.

The practice emerged as a major controversy in 1994, when Gingrich was on the verge of becoming House speaker. Democrat Ben Jones, the “Dukes of Hazzard” television actor who was Gingrich’s re-election opponent that year, filed an ethics complaint charging, among other things, that Gingrich had crossed legal lines when he used GOPAC, a national conservative fundraising group under his control, to finance a satellite-televised college course titled “Renewing American Civilization.”

The course, which Gingrich taught at Kennesaw State University, had a strongly conservative theme and coincided with his push to increase Republican political activism as the party sought to win a majority in Congress. Donation requests suggested a link between the course and that goal — even though donors were told their contributions, as gifts to an educational effort, were tax-free.

Gingrich was never charged with civil or criminal wrongdoing. But he acknowledged that he had brought discredit to the House and broken its rules by failing to ensure financing for the course would not violate federal tax law and by giving the ethics committee false information.

Some observers saw it as ironic that Gingrich, who had led the successful push for the resignation of a previous House speaker, Democrat Jim Wright, over ethics violations in 1989, was himself embroiled in an ethics scandal. Gingrich, however, said he had made an understandable error in interpreting the law, and that Democrats had long gotten away with the sort of behavior he was accused of. Asked about it recently, he said, “Eighty-three charges were repudiated, the one mistake we made was a letter written by a lawyer that I didn’t read carefully. Every other charge was found false in the long run.”

Still, Gingrich was politically weakened by the 1997 reprimand. The year after, the Republicans took heavy losses in midterm elections. Gingrich had been re-elected, but he resigned from Congress three days later.

Questioned book deal

Campaign finance laws limit how much donors can give to politicians. In 1984, however, Gingrich received investments from wealthy donors for promotion of “Window of Opportunity,” the first of his many books, and his then-wife received a hefty fee for handling the paperwork.

An ethics complaint went nowhere. But in 1994, the issue re-emerged. Gingrich, then preparing to assume the speakership, was negotiating a two-book contract with HarperCollins when the owner of the publishing house, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, showed up in his office.

Murdoch later said the bulk of their talk was about the new Republican majority’s agenda for Congress. But Murdoch, then a citizen of Australia, also acknowledged that they had spoken about the threat federal rules on foreign media ownership posed to his growing U.S. television holdings.

A few weeks later, HarperCollins announced Gingrich would receive a $4.5 million advance on the book deal — a record amount for a House member. The juxtaposition of the Murdoch visit and the payment prompted Democrats to charge that Gingrich had engaged in unethical conduct.

Gingrich denied the accusation, saying the regulatory issue was mentioned only in passing during his conversation with Murdoch and that there had been no talk of the advance.

Still, Gingrich and Murdoch were called to testify about the case before the ethics committee. And while the committee ultimately cleared Gingrich, he turned down the money.

Check bouncing

In the early 1990s, as Gingrich and his allies were pushing to wrest the House from Democratic control, they decided to publicize a report showing that numerous lawmakers — most of them Democrats — had bounced checks written on the House bank without being required to pay fees or penalties.

It was an effective tactic, but almost backfired on Gingrich when it was revealed that he, too, had written bad checks against the bank, including one for more than $9,000 to the IRS. His opponent in the 1992 Republican primary seized on the scandal and came within less than 1,000 votes of beating him.

Relationships with women

Claims of insensitivity toward, and infidelity to, the women in his life have long hounded Gingrich.

The most famous accusation dates from 1980. An often-repeated story has it that Gingrich asked his unsuspecting first wife to sign divorce papers as she lay dying of cancer in a hospital.

That version, however, has been disputed by all involved, including Gingrich’s ex-wife, Jackie Battley, who is still alive. According to the Washington Post, she said in a 1985 interview that Gingrich had already moved out of their home before the surgery connected with her diagnosis with uterine cancer, and that the encounter at Emory University Hospital occurred when he brought their daughters to visit her there. In her version, she said her daughters asked if he could come in to see her, and that when he did, “he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from the surgery.”

The Post said that earlier this year, the younger of the daughters, conservative commentator Jackie Gingrich Cushman, provided an account that said nothing about a divorce discussion — simply that her parents in spring 1980 had revealed their plan to divorce and that that summer, her father took her and her sister to see their mother in the hospital. Cushman made no mention of what her father and mother talked about, if anything.

Gingrich himself, in two interviews this year, said he took the girls to see their mother, and that during the visit, he got into an argument with Battley. But he didn’t say what the argument was about.

Gingrich’s second divorce came in 2000, and the circumstances surrounding it are also disputed. Gingrich and his second wife, Marianne Ginther — whom he had met in 1980 and married six months after his 1981 divorce — had had marital problems, including a lengthy separation. But Ginther told Esquire magazine in a 2010 interview that she was caught unaware when he told her, following her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, that he wanted a divorce and was involved with someone else.

Gingrich has said Ginther knew of and tolerated his six-year affair with Callista Bisek, an aide 23 years his junior who is now his third wife. Whatever the truth, Gingrich foes have accused him of hypocrisy for having an affair at the same time House Republicans were voting to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about his extramarital dalliance with Monica Lewinsky.

Gingrich, for his part, has said Clinton’s alleged perjury was too serious to ignore, even though he realized his own vulnerability.

'Whine and dine'

In 1995, as Gingrich clashed with Clinton in a budget dispute that led to a temporary government shutdown, the speaker accepted an invitation to fly home from the funeral of Israel’s assassinated prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, on Air Force One.

Later, at a breakfast with journalists in Washington, Gingrich complained that Clinton had failed to discuss the budget with him during the flight, and that he had been directed to use the plane’s rear exit, which he took as a snub.

Gingrich’s comments quickly backfired as Democrats accused him of petulance. Among them was Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, who famously quipped that Gingrich’s breakfast gripe “gives new meaning to the phrase whine and dine.”

Republicans also said they wished he had kept his dissatisfaction to himself, particularly after Clinton effectively used it to blame the shutdown on Republican intransigence. Ultimately, Gingrich was forced to accept a budget deal that included hundreds of millions of dollars more in spending than he wanted, and his and the party’s image took a hit in opinion polls.

Shifting positions

Gingrich has not had as many notable flip-flops as his main Republican opponent, Romney, but seeking the nomination at a time when GOP voters may be at their most conservative, he has found himself in awkward situations on some issues.

The worst of them may be climate change. In 2008, Gingrich appeared in a TV ad, sharing a loveseat with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as he acknowledged that while he and she did not concur on many issues, “we do agree: Our country must take action to address climate change.”

Now, facing a primary electorate that polls show largely believes climate change is a hoax, Gingrich says there is no compelling evidence that it exists. He also says that making the ad, sponsored by former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, was “probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years.”

Likewise, he has had to live down his past support for a health insurance mandate, his slam against Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform plan as “right-wing social engineering” and his acceptance of $1.5 million in fees from government-controlled mortgage agency Freddie Mac — whose supporters he now says should be imprisoned.

Appeal endures

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., spoke for many Democrats when he said recently that, “I did not think I had lived a good enough life to be rewarded by Newt Gingrich being the Republican nominee.”

Veterans of the 1990s partisan battles with Gingrich in Congress believe it was the behavior of the speaker himself, more than anything they did, that eventually brought him down. They hope that in the white-hot crucible of a presidential race, he would again self-destruct.

Some prominent Republicans acknowledge concern about Gingrich. Among them is Rep. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who, interviewed on RealClearPolitics, said he would not be a Gingrich supporter, despite — or rather because of — serving under his leadership in Congress.

“The thing is, there’s all types of leaders,” Coburn said. “Leaders that instill confidence. Leaders that are somewhat abrupt and brisk. Leaders that have one standard for the people that they’re leading and a different standard for themselves. I just found his leadership lacking and I’m not going to go into greater detail on that,” Coburn said.

But as the polls show, there is something broadly appealing to many Republicans about Gingrich’s undeniable energy and imagination. Endorsing him in a front-page editorial, the conservative Manchester, N.H., Union-Leader, an influential voice in the state that holds the nation’s first primary, praised his “innovative, forward-looking strategy and positive leadership.”

“He did so with the Contract with America. He did it in bringing in the first Republican House in 40 years and by forging balanced budgets and even a surplus despite the political challenge of dealing with a Democratic president,” the newspaper wrote.

Tea Party Express chairwoman Amy Kremer, part of a group of conservatives who grilled Gingrich in Washington last week, told The Associated Press he turned some — but not all — skeptics with his frank responses.

“At the end of the day, people are going to have to decide what they can live with,” Kremer said.

Sources: Washington Post, National Review, Associated Press, RealClearPolitics, Columbian, Los Angeles Times, CNN, Fox News, Slate, Esquire, Manchester Union-Leader, PBS, Politico, Atlantic, “Pat Schroeder: A Woman of the House”