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Newt's early proposals revealed the Gingrich paradigm: civic progress on a tight budget. One day when he was 10, he told his mother he was going to the library and instead took a bus to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to lobby city and state officials about building a zoo. He pressed his cause for the next two years, with arguments that echo eerily 40 years later. "A few minutes' conversation with Newton leaves an awed adult with a flying start toward an inferiority complex," reporter Jace Bennett wrote in the Harrisburg Evening News. "Don't you know an African lion costs only $250. And it's easily gotten!" argued the boy crusader. "We wouldn't even have to start out with the more expensive animals. And we wouldn't have to start with animals that need houses, like reptiles, birds or some mammals that can't stand heat." Newt estimated daily operating costs at $150. "Everything would be easy if we had a committee," he exhorted the town fathers. The zoo never got built, but Newt had made the newspapers and decided he was "hooked forever on public life."
From the age of 10 on, Gingrich lived the wandering life of an Army brat, learning early to form only those attachments that could travel with him. Other children, no surprise, found him rather strange, and he quickly stopped trying to prove otherwise. He found books more reliable than friends, particularly tales of men who brought old empires crashing down and built new ones in their place. Everyone from Ataturk to the Duke of Wellington, Abraham Lincoln to Father Flanagan, figures somewhere in his pantheon. If people don't like him, if they mock his aspirations or despise his principles, he doesn't much care--as long as they read about him one day.
Gingrich doesn't have much use for theories about his choice to pursue so much power in life. "You're trying to find a psychological compulsion for what in fact was simply a decision," he says. "The decision's not complicated. The world is real. Some people should do what they can to protect us. I am one of those." Whatever happens to Gingrich, it will take years to undo what he has done in months: grinding down the Congress into a precision instrument of his personal power. And he has only begun. He wants a multivolume biography.
THE GREATER GOOD
Gingrich marshals his forces in a completely new way: by offering his colleagues glory instead of goodies. It was near midnight on the night of Aug. 3 when Gingrich faced the prospect of watching the revolution he had plotted for 20 years stall before his eyes. The measure he was pushing through the House was a crucial 1996 spending bill designed to slice everything from summer-jobs programs to home-heating assistance. But in the byzantine way Congress packages its legislation, the bill had become laden with several measures involving abortion, the rare issue where principle promised to trump politics.