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GINGRICH was always clear about his academic ambitions: he had none. "The standard back then was to be interested in history and not anything else--not even your wife and kids," says Pierre-Henri Laurent, who supervised Gingrich's dissertation at Tulane. "This kid was deviant--he was talking about going into politics." When Laurent offered to help him get a good first teaching job, Gingrich told him not to bother. "He said, 'Don't worry, I'm close to getting something at West Georgia College.' 'West Georgia College,' I said. 'What is this?' He said, 'The congressional district--it's an interesting area.'"
Gingrich proceeded to offer a detailed analysis of Georgia's Sixth Congressional District, its demographics, how it divided between suburban and rural areas and why he had a shot at getting elected. True, the G.O.P. in Georgia barely existed. But Gingrich, as ever, was looking ahead, and saw an opportunity. After all, there was no powerful Republican establishment to screen out a presumptuous junior professor who was in a hurry to get to Congress and didn't want to waste time doing favors for party elders.
These were, as he might say, fluid years for Gingrich. As a student and, later, professor, Gingrich was no conservative firebrand; at Tulane, he admits, he smoked pot; protested the Administration's decision to censor a photo of a nude sculpture in the school newspaper, the Hullabaloo; and generally maintained a high profile as a Rockefeller Republican, serving as the Louisiana coordinator of that campaign in 1968. At West Georgia he started the environmental-studies program, an outpost on the lefty fringes of academia.
His fellow professors had nicknamed him Mr. Truth. Any time Gingrich finished reading a new book, recalls his mentor and friend, history professor Floyd Hoskins, he would come flying into the history department, brandishing the volume and declaring, "This book is THE TRUTH! It's the BEST BOOK I EVER READ!"
He was by all accounts the kind of popular, high-energy teacher who could get kids to come to a 7 a.m. class. He took his class canoeing in the Okefenokee Swamp or on field trips to Copper Hill, which he called "a famous industrial-pollution site in Chattanooga." Gingrich's effort to build such a large student following had a pragmatic side to it--a number of his students eventually became the ground troops in his campaigns for Congress.
Gingrich saw his big opening in 1974, when he challenged Sixth District Congressman Jack Flynt, a silver-haired, small-town patrician, very much part of the Democratic establishment. Flynt was no raving segregationist, but unlike Gingrich, he declined to talk racial justice, the environment and other populist themes. In this situation, Gingrich, with his bushy black hair, sideburns and citrus-colored double knits, came off to most people as the more liberal of the pair. He charged that Flynt was in cahoots with the lobbyists. One Gingrich campaign piece proclaimed, "Newt Gingrich ... his special interest is you!" In 1974 the Atlanta Constitution endorsed Gingrich because he seemed more progressive.