WASHINGTON -- If you believe in destiny, you might think that Newt Gingrich became the Republicans' obstreperous bombardier-in-chief because he was born, according to his mother, during a World War II air-raid drill in Harrisburg, Pa.
If you believe in politics, you might think the Georgia congressman has steamrollered everything in sight marked "Democrat" because he realized it was the best way to get to where he has always wanted to be: leading a newly elected, newly energized Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Newton Leroy Gingrich, 51, who in January will become the speaker of the House and perhaps the most powerful Republican in the nation -- and the third person in line to the presidency -- is widely credited with engineering the House Republicans' phenomenal comeback after 40 years in the passenger seat.
A bulky figure with a puckish face and Donahue-like cap of white hair, he seemed to bottle up the country's anti-government animus and cynicism like a tonic, filter it through his own vitriolic "Newtspeak" and unleash it on a majority party that didn't seem to see it, or him, coming.
He has called Democrats "the enemy of normal Americans" and "traitors," railed against the "liberal elite" that has turned the country into a "corrupt welfare state," and has come up with a digestible, action-oriented GOP "Contract With America" that may look like recycled Reaganomics to some economists but feels like fresh air to many Americans.
"In another age and another time, Newt might be out there all by himself -- where he started -- and looked at as a curiosity," says Steven F. Stockmeyer, former director of the National Republican Congressional Committee and a longtime associate. "He's really product of these times."
He is also a product of drive and ambition -- on the mornings after congressional defeats in 1974 and 1976, he was out at plant gates at 6 a.m. campaigning for the next election -- and a strategic mind that admirers call brilliant and detractors call dangerously brilliant.
"He's Machiavelli's best disciple," says Bob Norris, a Democratic strategist and former official at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has a dossier on Mr. Gingrich that fills six file cabinets. "A very dangerous man."
Since he was first elected to Congress in 1978, in fact, the former history professor has set out to tear the place down -- its leaders, its institutions, its rules -- then try to build it back up, along with his own political empire, on his conservative Republican terms. "I intend to go up there and kick the system over," he declared two decades ago when he first set his gaze on the House, "not try to change it."
Mr. Gingrich himself acknowledges that the most noteworthy accomplishment of his public life has been not a piece of legislation but the 1989 fall of House Speaker Jim Wright, a Democrat who was brought down on an ethics charge almost single-handedly by the sure-footed, insurgent Republican with the glint in his eye.
The question now facing Mr. Gingrich -- a man who once told college Republicans that his colleagues weren't "nasty" enough to succeed in politics -- is whether he can refrain from being as nasty as he wants to be and lead a diverse body.
He will even have to repair rifts within his own party, having once called Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas "the tax collector for the welfare state."
So far, there are few signs that he has tempered his rapier tongue.
In his first week as Washington's New Phenom -- a week in which packs of journalists followed him everywhere, racing up down escalators to get in front of his face -- he called the Clintons "counterculture McGovernites," sent outgoing Speaker Thomas S. Foley a bold list of demands regarding the transition and said he intended to "cooperate," but not "compromise," with the president.
"He's come off a little too hard and too confrontational since the election," says Rep. Steve Gunderson of Wisconsin, a moderate Republican who has been one of Mr. Gingrich's allies.
But Mr. Gunderson and others loyal to Mr. Gingrich believe that he will ultimately be up to the job. They point to his success in bringing moderate Republicans into his conservative tent, and his cooperation with Mr. Clinton in getting the North American Free Trade Agreement passed this year.
"It's a mistake to believe Newt is not going to be able to build coalitions," says former Rep. Mickey Edwards, a one-time House rival. "When he was confrontational, it was to gain power. Now he's got power. Now he has a different job -- to prove Republicans can govern. I think people are going to be shocked at how good he is at finding consensus."
Move to the right
The Newt Gingrich who entered the halls of Congress in 1979, having abandoned his boyhood dream of being a zookeeper, was a different political animal from the liberal-leaning, "New South" Republican who had worked on Nelson Rockefeller's 1968 presidential bid and lost two races for a Georgia House seat in the mid-1970s.
A hawkish Republican, who often mentions that he is the son (step-son, in truth) of a career soldier, Mr. Gingrich also has drifted far from the mildly anti-Establishment doctoral student at Tulane University who participated in a campus protest and opted for deferments available to him as a student and father instead of service in Vietnam.
"Given everything I believe in, a large part of me thinks I should have gone over," he said in a newspaper interview in 1985. "Part of the question I had to ask myself was what difference I would have made."
His political shift emerged in his 1978 victory -- when he became the first Republican elected from his district in this century -- and was dramatic to those who watched.
"He was a great environmentalist, stood for helping other folks, and then he took a direct right swing," says his former Baptist minister, the Rev. Brantley Harwell, who still considers himself a Gingrich friend although he believes the new speaker is an "amoral" politician.
"He saw that Reagan's philosophy was sweeping the nation and that the right wing was sweeping the nation. And he saw that that was going to be the way to become speaker -- which is what he's always wanted. With him, it's not a matter of what you believe deep down. It's what's going to get you where you want to go."
Mr. Harwell and others also saw Mr. Gingrich adopt a new mode of attack, notably in his brutal 1978 campaign against Virginia Shapard, a Democrat. Corraling the "family values" theme, he ran ads suggesting that, if elected, Mrs. Shapard would commute to Washington and leave her family behind while he would take his wife and two daughters with him.
Ironically, shortly after bringing his family to Washington, Mr. Gingrich filed for a divorce from his wife, Jackie. The episode has become an albatross for the politician and is the genesis of his contempt for the news media, which had, in some cases, exaggerated the story.
According to those around the congressman at the time, Jackie Gingrich, who had been Mr. Gingrich's high school math teacher, was being treated for uterine cancer around the time she was actively campaigning for her husband's 1978 House race.
A day after undergoing surgery in 1980, after the two had separated, Mr. Gingrich came into the hospital room to discuss the terms of the divorce. She threw him out of the room.
"Of course, that would have infuriated any woman," says Mr. Harwell, who had counseled the couple for many months.
The couple divorced in 1981, and that year Mr. Gingrich married his current wife, Marianne, who has been an integral part of his subsequent campaigns.
"It was not a happy time in his life," says former Rep. Howard "Bo" Callaway of Georgia, a longtime Gingrich associate.
"He gets pretty upset when the press brings up the divorce. It may be like [Sen. Edward M.] Kennedy feels about Chappaquiddick."
C-SPAN speeches
From his first days as a freshman congressman, when he sought to expel a senior Democratic member whose conviction for taking salary kickbacks was on appeal, Newt Gingrich set about lighting fires.
And in the early 1980s, the arrival of C-SPAN cameras in the House fanned the flames. The House's enfant terrible often stood before an empty House chamber, but a national TV audience, delivering diatribes against the majority Democrats. When he once questioned the patriotism of his opponents, Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill lashed out, calling the display "the lowest thing that I've ever seen in my 32 years in Congress."
But more people knew Newt Gingrich's name. He started building a power base, forming the "Conservative Opportunity Society" out of his ideas about the unraveling of American society and futurist Alvin Toffler's theories of a high-tech, post-industrial, information-age society.
His aggressive, energetic and agitating style -- and his inspirational talk of taking over the House -- appealed to many Republicans, especially younger members who had felt they had been scrapping for crumbs from Democrats for too long.
"His ascendancy was as much a generational thing as it was a philosophical thing," says Mr. Stockmeyer. "The younger moderates, along with the conservatives, always felt they needed a more forceful leader, something different from what I call the 'country club manager' style of leadership where you keep everybody happy but don't really have an agenda."
"The thing about Newt is he gets out there," says Rep. Nancy Johnson of Connecticut, a moderate Republican. "He's not always right, but he's always interesting. His style is part of the fun."
He also showed his party that attack politics works. After months of research and consultations with lawyers, he brought ethics charges against Speaker Wright in 1987 for an unusual book deal that, among other things, would force him from office two years later.
"Nobody thought it could happen," says Mr. Callaway. "The courage it took to go after Jim Wright was huge."
And it propelled him to the House Republicans' No. 2 leadership spot. His rise to House whip immediately revealed a Gingrich flaw: He was disorganized and so poor a manager that he had to borrow staff members from his colleague Vin Weber's office because he had filled his own office with only young and inexperienced aides.
L Ideas, not organization, are still what he is applauded for.
"It used to be that one out of 10 of his ideas was good," says Mr. Stockmeyer, recalling a Gingrich idea to have all the delegates at a Republican convention carry brooms to symbolize a "clean sweep." (The fire marshal declared it a nonstarter.) "Now eight or nine are good."
At a party several years ago, Mr. Stockmeyer made a video spoof of Mr. Gingrich that showed a wall of file cabinets all labeled "Newt Ideas." Down in a corner, the last drawer in the last file cabinet was labeled "Newt Good Ideas."
"I'm not sure he laughed very much," says Mr. Stockmeyer. "But we got a kick out of it."
Part of Mr. Gingrich's demolition strategy has been a Perot-like attack on Democrats for accepting perks and money from influence-peddlers.
He dispensed with the limo and driver he was given as whip (after his opponent in his 1990 re-election made an issue of it), and boasts about his only car, a 1967 Ford Mustang.
He has donated about $40,000, mostly from speaking fees, to the Atlanta zoo for the acquisition of a pair of snakes, a rhino, a couple of Komodo dragons and other "big, powerful creatures," says zoo director Terry Maple.
But he has built a controversial high-tech empire of upward of $35 million for his own projects, including a college course he teaches that is the subject of a review by the House Ethics Committee, and those of other Republicans.
Between GOPAC, the 15-year-old conservative political action committee he took over in 1986, and the non-profit Progress and Freedom Foundation, Mr. Gingrich receives financial backing for travel, for seminars he conducts that are available on audio and video tape, the college course that is broadcast by satellite (and sold on videotape), a cable TV show on National Empowerment Television as well as polls, focus groups and an 800 number.
The Ethics Committee sent Mr. Gingrich an eight-page letter last month questioning ties between the course he teaches at Georgia's Reinhardt College, "Renewing American Civilization," and GOPAC and the Progress and Freedom Foundation, which sponsor the course.
The panel is investigating "whether the course was in fact exclusively educational," according to the letter, or rather a partisan pursuit intended to benefit Republicans.
GOPAC has also come under fire from the Federal Election Commission for failing to disclose its contributors.
Although Mr. Gingrich said last week that he would begin disclosing names of future contributors, officials of GOPAC have long contended that federal disclosure laws don't apply because the committee merely trains candidates for office rather than funding them directly.
Indeed, GOPAC training tapes have been used by such conservative Republicans as Sen.-elect Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Rep. Jim Bunning of Kentucky and Mayor Bret Schundler of Jersey City, N.J.
One piece of GOPAC literature on language teaches candidates how to "speak like Newt," with a list of words to be used to !B define the opposition -- "sick," "pathetic," "traitors," "cheat," "lie," "taxes," "corruption," for example -- and a list for defining one's own campaign -- "moral," "courage," "reform," "children," "family," freedom," "peace," "empower." The literature acknowledges that speaking like Newt "takes years of practice."
Indeed, he still confounds his friends and colleagues with his techno-talk about cyber-this or that, or such arcane references as "two cicadas from now," an Egyptian measurement of time based on the arrival of the cicadas every 17 years.
"I bet only one out of five Americans could tell you who the speaker of the house is today," says Mr. Stockmeyer. "That won't be the case when Newt is in."