Gingrich: Do as I Say, Not as I Do

The news that Newt Gingrich is headed for his second messy divorce, allegedly involving a longtime affair with a House of Representatives employee, has been largely ignored by news media that have not always been as sensitive to the privacy needs of major politicians.

It’s true that Gingrich is no longer in Congress, where he orchestrated the impeachment of the president of the United States over charges rising from Bill Clinton’s sexual dalliances. But Gingrich, through his many public appearances, remains a self-appointed definer of the Republican Revolution, which counted family values at its core. These very values are called into question if the married speaker of the House was having an affair with a much-younger congressional employee who ultimately reported to him.

Critics of Gingrich have long made much of the insensitivity he demonstrated in serving his first wife with divorce papers while she was in the hospital being treated for cancer. Nor did news of his efforts to cut life insurance coverage for the mother of his children always endear Gingrich to his family values supporters, but it was generally assumed that his marital errors were in the past.

This time, his approach was less personal. Marianne Gingrich told the Washington Post that she was informed of the affair and the request for a divorce last May in a telephone call from Newt to her mother’s home, where she was visiting.

After first expressing best wishes to his mother-in-law on her 84th birthday, he asked to speak to his wife, who was soon reduced to tears by Newt’s news.

“I said, ‘Marianne, what’s wrong?’ ” Gingrich’s mother-in-law told the Washington Post, and she said her daughter replied, “He doesn’t want me as his wife anymore.” According to the Post: “There was a second jolt soon afterward. Newt Gingrich, now 56, informed his wife that he was having an affair with a congressional aide, a woman 23 years his junior.”

Marianne Gingrich told the Post she was “totally shocked” by the news, and her attorneys last week obtained court permission to interview Gingrich and Callista Bisek, a scheduler and assistant hearing clerk for the House Agriculture Committee since early 1995. The relationship allegedly began that year.

As House speaker, Gingrich had ultimate power over the woman’s career, raising questions of sexual harassment. Was he engaging in this behavior while he led the condemnation of the president? And doesn’t Gingrich’s alleged behavior suggest the sort of “sexual addiction,” “compulsive risk taking” and “moral relativism” that Clinton’s critics have venomously denounced in him?

Gingrich has been a seminal figure in the trivialization of politics as a morality play in which an ever-virtuous family values right wing inevitably triumphs over what in a 1995 speech he termed “the moral decay of the left.” But as the adulterous affairs of several conservative Republicans and Gingrich’s own behavior suggest, infidelity and other moral wanderings do not lend themselves so neatly to partisan distinctions.

Why is this big news? Because Newt Gingrich was decisive in shaping one of the nastiest, most tumultuous and divisive periods in American history in the name of moral purity. In his dogged pursuit of a bloody culture war, he delighted in deriding as “abnormal” those who would not pledge allegiance to the pieties of his allies in the Christian Coalition, while he and his ilk claimed the moral high ground of traditional “core values.”

The very month he was moving to divorce his second wife, Gingrich denounced the liberal establishment in just such narrow terms: “We have had a 35-year experiment in a unionized, bureaucratic, credentialed, secular assault on the core values of this country, and we should not be surprised that eventually they yield bad fruit because they are bad seeds.”

Now it’s his turn to be judged bad fruit, and we shall see whether he seeks to blame that, too, on the liberals he has done so much to defame. But that explanation will not likely wash with his mother-in-law, who told the Post concerning his telephoned divorce request: “It’s about the cruelest thing you can do. I think it’s terrible when people get away with things like this. We accepted him like a son.”

I doubt there will be much consolation for the Clintons that Gingrich, their prime congressional tormentor, has turned out to be a serial home-wrecker. But Gingrich’s woes should serve as a cautionary tale for all who dare to presume that they can control the sword of virtue as a weapon.