The House Ethics Committee is reportedly seeking a special prosecutor to pursue the case against Speaker Newt Gingrich for committing ethical violations while writing his best-selling book, To Renew America. The thesis is that he improperly used non-partisan funds from the Progress and Freedom Foundation to teach a “partisan” course at Rinehart College in Georgia last January and February. The materials in this course then became the basis of To Renew America, published shortly afterward. Since Gingrich is making several million dollars from the book, he is accused of enriching himself while violating federal tax laws.
As the person who helped Gingrich write the book, I have been anxiously awaiting my summons to appear before the Ethics Committee — perhaps, I thought, my story might be relevant. As the hearings fade from view, however, it has become obvious that I will not be asked to testify. The more I think of it, the more I suspect there is probably good reason. My story is probably the antithesis of what Gingrich’s enemies want to hear.
I signed on to the project in February 1995, after two previous co-writers dropped off the job. Both authors had the same problems: 1) the uncertainty of the long payback period (I put up $ 4,000 on travel and expenses and have yet to receive my first check); and 2) the problems of creating a book out of the Speaker’s diffuse and often desultory oratorical style.
The book, it was suggested, should be written by spending long hours of ” quality time” with Gingrich while tape-recording his remarks. These conversations would then be transcribed into written form. (This is how Rush Limbaugh’s best-sellers were written.) I met Gingrich once in his office in late February. He bought me dinner at the House Dining Room and gave me a copy of a handwritten two-page chapter outline line worked out with the publisher a month before — paying 25 cents to his staff to avoid illegal use of his office’s copying machine. We set up a block of time on Sunday evenings for long phone conversations that would supposedly get the book under way.
Someone had suggested we start with a few fictionalized paragraphs of an Amer ica 50 years hence, as imagined by Newt. Somehow, this fantasy took on a life o f its own. With boyish enthusiasm, we began imagining what America would be lik e in the year 2045. Before we knew it, we had three chapters. Adrian Zackheim, our editor at HarperCollins, heard about it and went through the roof. That was not the book we were supposed to be writing, he thundered. Chagrined, we went back to the drawing board.
I began collecting Gingrich’s speeches and papers, and encountered both the tapes and transcripts of Gingrich’s Rinehart College lectures. Anyone who spent a few hours perusing this material (and I didn’t spend much more) would know immediately that it is essentially useless.
The course was as much a self-help regimen as it was an exploration of American history. At one point, Gingrich had his 100-odd students spend a week keeping track of their time in order to see how much they wasted (an exercise suggested by Peter Drucker). Another homework assignment was to list 10 things you would recommend to an immigrant just arriving in America.
All this made entertaining classroom discussion, but was hardly the material for a book. Much more relevant was Window of Opportunity, the Speaker’s 1985 manifesto (now a collector’s item on the remainder circuit). The book anticipates many of the major themes of To Renew America and is argued in finer detail. Unfortunately, I couldn’t locate a copy until most of our book was finished, so it only served antiquarian interest.
On St. Patrick’s Day, Zackheim, Gingrich, and I had our first joint meeting at HarperCollins’s offices in New York. We had abandoned the Sunday-night telephone format, and I was writing a rough draft of the first six chapters — the “six challenges facing America” — based on some of my own research. At a conference that included one of the marketing executives, I asked Gingrich if there had been any defining moment in his political evolution. He replied quickly that it was his visit to the Verdun cemetery at age 14. I suggested he use this incident as the starting point for an introductory chapter. Within a week, Gingrich turned in an excellent draft. I felt quite proud of having elicited this recollection from the Speaker — until I read the same memoir in Window of Opportunity and realized he has repeated it dozens of times.
At the same meeting it was decided that the book would also include a memoir of the 1994 campaign and the First 100 Days, plus “position papers” on several key issues (the list eventually grew to 17). This was an ambitious undertaking. Frankly, I suspected little of it would ever get done. Harper-Collins must have had the same thoughts because they began quietly telling me to “go ahead and write the book yourself” just n case the Speaker didn’t come through. Publication was set in stone for July 1. (The book had to fit into a “window of opportunity” that would end with the publication of Colin Powell’s autobiography September 10.) Our absolute deadline was May 1, six weeks away. The Speaker had yet to put one word to paper.
Over the next three weeks I finished drafts of the six “challenge-to-America” chapters. They reflected my plodding, academic syle rather than the Speaker’s more enthusiastic pace, and word filtered back that he didn’t like them very much. Still, with Congress in session, nothing else got done. When Congress finally recessed on April 10, I flew to Marietta for a final block of “quality time” in which the entire book was to be finished.
When I arrived, Gingrich was just learning to use his laptop. Techno- enthusiast that he is, Newt still knew next to nothing about word-processing. My wife, who is the computer expert of our family, talked him through a few early crises over the phone. I knew just enough to reassure him that, now he probably hadn’t lost that last four hours of work, and the file was certainly in there somewhere, if we could only remember under what name he filed it and in which directory. Only barely literate myself, I became the sage computer adviser to the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Over the first three days, Newt wrote his own versions of my six “challenge” chapters and handed them to me for editing. Then he tackled his recollections of the Contract and the 100 Days — a 25,000-word effort that took two days.
Now it was on to the 17 “position papers.” Zackheim had “arrived, and under his guidance Newt made his first assay — “English as the American Language.” It came out 45 typewritten pages. We urged him to shoot for eight. He went back in the kitchen and wrote the next essay — “Individual Versus Group Rights” — eight pages, letter-perfect. I went back to editing the first six chapters and lost track of what Newt was doing. Zackhim set up a printer on the dining room table, ordered out for meals, and began line-editing.
When I left Marietta on April 20, we had nearly-completed versions of the fir st six chapters. The memoir of the Contract with America and the 100 Days was i n rough draft that looked substantial enough to be boiled down. As I was leavin g, Gingrich handed me two additional disks. Not until I arrive d home did I realize that he had composed all 17 “issue” chapters, none in need of very much editing.
I spent the next 10 days editing and checking facts. Zackheim went to Washington to coordinate the traffic on different manuscripts and tend to the fine details. The concluding chapter — Newt’s account of his first experience in public life at age 12 — was conceived as he and Zackheim took a midnight stroll through the Capitol Rotunda — a very moving experience, according to Zackheim. It became one of the best chapters in the book.
Before publication, every reporter who approached me came armed with the moral certainty that the book had been ghost-written or patched together from old materials. Margaret Carlson of Time had a quote from someone saying the book had been completely ghosted. After I spent a half-hour trying to convince her that Newt had written the bulk himself, she reported: ” ghostwriter Bill Tucker went to Gingrich’s home in Marietta, Georgia, and extracted 70,000 words from the Speaker,” and “according to advance word, 1945 [Newt’s other book, which Carlson was also panning] is a work of art compared with To Renew America, which was written in about two weeks.” She had not yet read a single page.
Since publication, there have been few accusations that the book was ghost- written — or even composed in haste. It is too complete and too representative of Newt’s thinking to have been written by anyone else. Comments and criticisms have been limited to the substance — which is exactly how it should be.
All of us who worked together on the project were absolutely astounded by Gingrich’s ability to put words on paper once he got the hang of it and became comfortable with the word-processor. Anyone familiar with his speeches and writings knows he has been thinking seriously about these issues for nearly 20 years. The only difference is that people are now listening.
The Speaker has written a book that resonates with the American people. Some members of the House Ethics Committee remain determined to prove this was an illegal and immoral act. I suspect they will end up wishing they had made better use of their time.
By William Tucker; William Tucker is a free-lance writer living in Brooklyn
