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Not only was this gauzy portrait of America misleading (births to teenagers reached record highs in the mid-'50s that are unsurpassed even now, and a third of marriages ended in divorce), but it especially wasn't like that for Newt Gingrich. His grandfather was born out of wedlock and raised in a household in which his real mother posed as his sister. His father was a Navy man who left right after Newtie was born and who later allowed him to be adopted by his stepfather in exchange for not having to pay child support. Newt's mother Kit said in the interview that she is manic-depressive and that Newt's stepfather Bob comes across as cold and silent. The senior Gingrich proudly recounts smashing Newtie against the wall when he was 15. Gingrich's half-sister, a lesbian activist, is writing a book about all this for Scribner's.
As for Gingrich's adult relationships, the Saturday Evening Post would never have printed this story either. His first marriage to his high school math teacher ended bitterly when it was reported that he visited his estranged wife's hospital room after her surgery for uterine cancer to discuss the terms of their divorce. He had to be pursued for adequate child-support payments, although he writes in his book that "any male who doesn't support his children is a bum." In a 1978 congressional campaign against Virginia Shafard, Gingrich, the "moral-standards'' candidate, charged that if she won, she would leave her family behind in Georgia. He won and left his family behind in Georgia.
These days, he spends far more time with Calista Bistek, a former congressional aide, and Arianna Huffington, who hosted a $50,000-a-plate dinner for him, than with his second wife Marianne, who has never actually moved to Washington and who has been candid about their marriage's being "on and off." Newt once gave the marriage 53-to-47 odds of lasting--and that was before Marianne said she wasn't going to stand by her man if he decided to run for President. "He can't do it without me," she told Vanity Fair, and if he does, "I just go on the air the next day and I undermine everything.''
In fact, the only factor that might allow Gingrich to overcome his own "family'' problems, if he does run, is that Bob Dole, Phil Gramm and Pete Wilson also left their first wives. And that's the stuff of Vanity Fair, not Reader's Digest.