NEWT GINGRICH; MASTER OF THE HOUSE

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(10 of 19)

On Dec. 5, 1994, when the whole, ruthless, breathtaking strategy finally paid off, and the Republicans nominated him to become the first Republican Speaker in more than four decades, Gingrich made a phone call. At 8:20, he dialed a number in Dauphin, a quaint Pennsylvania Dutch village just north of Harrisburg, where he reached Robert Gingrich. "I want to thank you for being an influence in my life," the new Speaker said over the phone, his voice choking. "You had a great deal to do with me being where I am today."

Bob Gingrich listened, stunned. In 48 years, Newt had never talked to him like that. "We had a very distant relationship," Newt says. "It's the first time I'd ever talked to him emotionally."

For a while Bob considered skipping his son's inauguration as Speaker; Why go, when he could watch it on TV? When he did turn up for Newt's triumphal speech, the crowd in the House chamber rose again and again to its feet--while Bob stayed clamped in his seat, chin in hand. "After the third standing ovation," Bob Gingrich said later, "it gets a little old."

As stern as he was, Bob came to embrace a wounded mother and her young son. Kit was 16 when she fell for a tall, strapping 18-year-old named Newt McPherson. They got married on Sept. 12, 1942. The day after the wedding, Kit knew she had made a mistake. She says that one morning when she tried to wake McPherson for work, after he had stayed out drinking the night before, he struck her. She left immediately; the couple broke up within days after the marriage. But Kit was already pregnant. On June 17, 1943, almost nine months to the day after they were married, her baby was born and she named him Newton after her estranged husband.

Bob Gingrich was, his children say, a hard man to talk to and a harder one to please. Bob led his military units and his family by example, not endearment. "We were all terrified of my father," Susan recalls. "It was very clear that he was the head of the household, and his word was final." When he learned by mail while in Vietnam that Susan was smoking as a teenager, he wrote back and told her to stop. From then on she never even thought of sneaking a cigarette. "Newtie," as his mother calls him to this day, was the kind of "nonreg" kid, Bob would admit later, that he would have transferred out of his unit in a heartbeat.

Bob married Kit when Newt was three and adopted him as his son. He spent the next 16 years trying to tame him; Newt spent those years trying to get his father's attention. Bob was a Democrat; Newt, from childhood, a Republican. Bob was a disciplinarian; Newt, a rebel. Once when Bob was stationed in Orleans, France, he was awakened at 5 a.m. by some MPs, who had caught young Newt hitchhiking. Newt's first love, a girl named Jeannette, had just broken up with him, and he wanted to go plead with her to take him back. Furious, Gingrich's father grabbed him by the shoulders and hung him up on a wall hook. "Don't you ever scare your mother like that again!" he raged. Gingrich got the message: It's pretty hard to be aggressive with your feet a few inches off the floor.

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