• U.S.

NEWT GINGRICH: TAKING HIS MEASURE

9 minute read
Compiled by Ratu Kamlani/New York

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN

Author of No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

DESPITE BEING A DEMOCRAT AND NOT NECessarily imagining that I would have liked him at the start, I thought his state-of-the-Speaker address last January was remarkable. He talked about cities, racial problems, the need for opportunity. But since that time, he has shown little of that large-heartedness. He seems like such a contradiction, because he obviously has big ideas. Yet he has fallen prey many times to petty mishaps that seem to emanate from part of his personality. You cannot brush off such incidents as just tiny mistakes.

There seems to be some pattern of anger underneath for people who don’t give him the right kind of approval or prestige. When somebody in power acts that way, it’s a very unsettling thing to see; there are always encounters with people who have more power or less power than you, and you have to know your ground and be proud of who you are.

Obviously, partisans are glad Gingrich has frittered away his momentum, because it helps the Democratic Party. So the part of me that’s a Democrat is delighted. But the part of me that is a political observer, that saw an interesting figure who might have really put his stamp on the country and had at least made an attempt to come out with some answers for the country, is disappointed. He somehow destroyed that opportunity little by little by whatever it is in him that’s not as confident as it seems to be on the surface.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS

Author of The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev 1960-1963

THERE’S A DISTINCTION THAT USED TO BE drawn between congressional Republicans and presidential Republicans. They were of different temperaments and styles. Gingrich is obviously someone who would like to run for President, but 1995 shows that he really is more of the congressional-Republican mold. It fits him a lot more. Usually the skills of someone who is powerful in Congress and someone who is an effective President are different.

Kennedy was a very undistinguished Senator. He was not much of a parliamentarian. His colleagues did not think very well of him. On the other hand, for all his failings as President, he was a very effective national spokesman. Johnson was a wonderfully effective majority leader, and as President, one of the things he did best was to get votes in Congress for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A President without all those parliamentary skills would not have done that well. On the other hand, even Johnson would say that one of his weaknesses was as a national spokesman for a certain set of ideas. Gingrich has tried to be both, and the experience of 1995 suggests that is very difficult to do.

Gingrich is also a revolutionary leader, a man comfortable with the kind of turmoil required to bring about change. But revolutionary leaders in America, even when they are successful, usually flare for only a year or two, and then they tend to fade. Gingrich may be able to resist that, but history suggests that would be very tough.

ROBERT A. CARO

Author of The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power

THE IMPORTANCE THE PRESS HAS GIVEN TO Gingrich is, as of this moment, out of proportion to his actual accomplishment. It may prove to be justified, but right now it is vastly inflated. It’s so inflated that if you look at Gingrich in the overall scope of American history or the American Congress, it bears little relationship to historical reality. He may want to be President, but what he is right now is a legislator. And the only measure of legislative leadership is legislation, the laws you get passed. Right now, Gingrich’s sum total of realized accomplishment is minuscule.

There have been three great Speakers in American history: Thomas Brackett Reed (1839-1902), Joseph Cannon (1836-1926) and Sam Rayburn (1882-1961). For almost two decades, Rayburn held power in Washington. Presidents came and went: Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy. But whoever was President, Sam Rayburn was Speaker. His power over one branch of government was so immense that it spilled over into the other branches.

Lyndon Johnson once said, “If you want to be President, you’ve got to do it through Sam Rayburn.” No one got onto any committee in the House unless Rayburn wanted him on that committee. He had a fearsome temper. He was a broad, massive man with a very hard face, and when he was in a bad mood he would come down the hall and Congressmen would be afraid to even talk to him because they were afraid of saying the wrong thing. He was like a stone coming through a wave. People would part before him.

Yet the contrasts with Gingrich are fantastic. Rayburn was absolutely silent. He gave very few speeches. If he really wanted to say something, he would step down from the Speaker’s platform and go into the well of the House. And he only did this a handful of times. When he did it, he would say, “Do this for me.” And they would do it for him. So far, Gingrich has great control over his party, but let’s see what happens now that things are turning against him.

I’m not saying Gingrich will not achieve major things. If he were to be Speaker for 17 years, as was Rayburn, he might, at the end of that time, have achieved what he wanted. But I wouldn’t say that right now.

IRVING KRISTOL

Author of Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

HE CERTAINLY HAS BEEN THE MOST INFLUential Speaker of the House in the past century, since Joseph Cannon. Sam Rayburn was respected and influential, but he was not an active formulator of agendas. He was very influential in lining up votes and he was consulted by the President, but he did not say, “I have a vision; I want the government to be this and do that.” It is very rare to have a Speaker of the House who has a vision of any kind, because they usually don’t get chosen for that role.

I don’t like the term revolutionary leader. We’re not in the midst of any kind of revolution. A good term would be reformation. Gingrich is the leader of the reformation, no one doubts that. He may have been misled by the rhetoric of revolution, having an exaggerated sense of what can be accomplished in the first couple of years. After all, there is a Democratic President; we haven’t chopped off his head.

I wish Gingrich spoke a little less off the cuff; he gets himself into trouble. But he is an extraordinarily intelligent man and always worth listening to. He obviously would like to follow in the footsteps of Franklin D. Roosevelt, except that it’s one thing to be President and another thing to be Speaker of the House. Sometimes these two roles get confused, perhaps less in his mind than in the mind of a lot of the Republicans in the House who forgot that the President is a very important and powerful person. They thought they could write the agenda to suit themselves.

Obviously much depends on the ’96 election. If we have a Republican President, [Gingrich] obviously will be very, very influential. And if we have a Republican Congress, he will remain influential. But with time, that influence may erode if we don’t have a Republican President.

ALAN BRINKLEY

Author of The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War

IN MANY WAYS GINGRICH IS AN OLD-fashioned political boss within Congress. He has a control over members of his own party that we haven’t seen in decades. Lyndon Johnson played a little bit of this role when he was a majority leader in the Senate, but not nearly as successfully as Gingrich.

If there are lessons that Gingrich can draw from the lives of other American leaders, it is that highly ideological politics in the long run are less successful than more pragmatic ones. If you look at the successful political leaders of this century, Presidents in particular, they have almost without exception been people to whom ideology was secondary to a pragmatic response to immediate problems. Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, they weren’t all successful Presidents, but they all had successes. They are people whom we think of as having had greater stature and impact than people who have come after them.

I don’t think what Gingrich is talking about is a revolution. I don’t think he has any vision of overturning the fundamental institutions of our society. I do think that the danger that Gingrich and the Republicans are flirting with is overinterpreting their mandate and assuming that public opinion is going to follow them simply because the results, as the G.O.P. sees them, will be so healthy and welcome. The history of public policy suggests that the results of policy are almost never those that the people who frame them foresee.

It’s dangerous to assume that once you implement a policy people will support it because of its results. You can’t know what the results are going to be. So you need the support up front, so people feel they have been a part of the policy change, rather than something that’s been imposed upon them. That’s something the Republicans have been unwilling to do. They’ve been quite convinced, because of ideological preconceptions, that market-based solutions to most social problems will make the world better. They haven’t paid very close attention to how fully the public is convinced about the same thing. I don’t think the public is yet convinced.

–Compiled by Ratu Kamlani/New York

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com