Long sneered at by liberals and establishment Republicans, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is finally getting the recognition millions of supporters like President Donald Trump think he deserves as the world’s leading conservative voice and visionary.
“Newt Gingrich remains one of the four most important conservative leaders of the 20th and 21st centuries, following [former Sen.] Barry Goldwater, [journalist/author] Bill Buckley, and [former President] Ronald Reagan,” according to a new biography released today titled Citizen Newt: The making of a Reagan conservative.
In his latest, celebrated Reagan biographer Craig Shirley added, “Henry Clay in the first half of the 19th Century. William Jennings Bryan in the latter 19th Century. Richard Nixon in the middle of the 20th Century. Ronald Reagan in the last quarter of the 20th Century and early decades of the 21st. We can add Newt Gingrich’s name to that select list of individuals who had an impact on the national debate for more than three decades.”
Gingrich has been a central political figure since he first ran for office in the mid-1970s and even today he continues to increase his influence as one of the first advisors to Trump going back to January 2015 when he put a $70 million price tag on a winning presidential effort. In his own book published this summer, Understanding Trump, Gingrich said Trump responded, “That would be a yacht. This would be a lot more fun than a yacht!”
Gingrich’s wife, Callista, was recently named ambassador to the Vatican.
Shirley has been a long-time Gingrich watcher and gained the former Georgia lawmaker’s help in putting the book together. He was driven by the way other books dismissed the influence of Gingrich.
“Part of the reason I chose to write this political biography is because much of what has been written by leftists about Gingrich is false, exaggerated, or irrelevant and also because I’ve come to the conclusion that conservatives cannot allow most liberals to write our history,” wrote Shirley.
President Reagan talking with Rep. Newt Gingrich on a trip to Atlanta, Georgia. 8/1/83. (Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.)
In a note with our review copy, Gingrich agreed. “Many, frankly have been bad, error-strewn and rife with ideological bias. Not this one.”
Citizen Newt provides new details on Gingrich’s rise from a financially poor-House backbencher to the brains behind the 1994 “Contract with America” which gave the GOP control of the chamber for the first time in decades. It ends with the Republicans winning both the House and Senate in an anti-Bill Clinton election, one of the most shocking of the century. “Congratulations, Mr. Speaker,” Shirley quotes GOP pollster Frank Luntz telling Gingrich the night of the election..
Trump and Gringrich during the election. AP Photo.
Shirley also reports on the feud Gingrich had with both presidents Bush and how he was embraced by the Reagans including former first lady Nancy Reagan who said Gingrich was handed the Reagan “Revolution,” which he built into his own. “Ronnie turned that torch over to Newt and the Republican members of Congress to keep that dream alive.”
On the Bushes, Shirley said that neither forgave Gingrich for opposing former President George H.W. Bush’s broken promise decision to raise taxes, a blunder that cost the Bush his presidency in a defeat to Clinton.
“Newt was invited to the Obama White House but never in eight years to the Bush 43 White House. To this day, Gingrich and the Bushes and Bushies, such as Karl Rove, can barely be in the same room with one another,” wrote Shirley.
He then quoted Gingrich: “I have a PhD in history. I’ve written 23 books and made six movies and I helped engineer the rise of the modern Republican Party. You would think that at some point those credentials would get you somewhere.”
A long-time political advisor, analyst and communicator who has been part of the Washington scene for decades, Shirley also includes the type of insider nuggets that make his biography, published by HarperCollins imprint Thomas Nelson, a must-read.
For example, he pours cold water on other books that suggest Reagan and former Democratic House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill were pals. He called it a “myth.”
In a reference to former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, Shirley wrote that the sharp-tongued Kansan “never needed a doctor to find the jugular vein” of a political opponent.
He also rips the mainstream media and mined conservative media for his research. For example, he dinged the New York Times and its reporting on Nancy Reagan’s death as one of the reasons the liberal press can’t be trusted to write the history of conservatives.
“Case in point,” he wrote, “the unctuous and often unethical New York Times, in one of the first stories concerning Nancy Reagan’s death, devoted the first three paragraphs to Iran-Contra.”
Of course, Gingrich is nothing if not for his ideas and Shirley goes over many and tells how it all got started. “They began in old shoe boxes, Newt Gingrich’s ideas. Some good, some cocamami, some off-the-wall, some sound as a dollar, some, well, intriguing,” wrote Shirley of the former college professor.
“He hadn’t grown up friendless, but moving year after year, the nearsighted kid found joy and happiness in books. At one time he’d thought about being a paleontologist or a zookeeper. But reading and animals were just a few of his hobbies. Certainly politics, military history, American history, and writing had also animated the youngster,” wrote Shirley, who added, “and ideas.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
