WASHINGTON -- Last Tuesday night, a beaming Newt Gingrich went before cheering supporters in suburban Atlanta and insisted that what looked like a disaster was in fact a victory. Not only had he kept his own congressional seat by a landslide, but for "the first time in 70 years," Republicans had retained control of the House for a third straight election.

Less than three days later, Gingrich would announce that he was quitting his job as House speaker and leaving Congress for good.

Power had slipped through his hands in a fashion that was, if anything, even more spectacular than the way in which it had been gained.

Perhaps the ultimate irony is that Gingrich's stunning fall was, at least in part, spurred by the Republicans' handling of the president's affair with Monica Lewinsky -- with Bill Clinton emerging from the year of scandal and sordid, humiliating revelations on the up side of the polls and his Republican nemesis headed for retirement.

The story behind Gingrich's demise as a congressional leader reflects a theme that repeated itself over and over in his career.

Perhaps caught up with his own victories and seeming #i invincibility, he would often make terrible miscalculations at the height of his good fortune that would burst the bubble.

In 1998, it happened again.

WEDNESDAY

By Wednesday morning, as he made the rounds of the network morning shows, Gingrich was still putting a positive spin on the election -- even though the Republicans had just lost House seats to the president's party in a midterm election for only the second time since the Civil War.

"I do think it's an historic achievement to still be the majority," he insisted. "Unless one member wants to argue it's better to be in the minority."

The exit polls indicated what Gingrich knew too well -- that he was the most unpopular major political figure in the nation. His sporadic efforts to recast his image -- earlier this year he wrote a book, "Lessons Learned the Hard Way," and road-tested a new, trimmer, friendlier mien -- generally came undone with some razor-edged remark or deed.

It wasn't that long ago that Gingrich was king of Capitol Hill. He made a presidential-style TV address to the nation in 1995, heralding the end of the first 100 days of the brash new Republican Congress.

So powerful was the bearish, white-haired Georgian who anointed himself a "definer of civilization," that Clinton was forced to defend his "relevance" at a news conference.

And so it had been ever since Gingrich catapulted to power, winning control of Congress for the GOP in 1994 for the first time in 40 years. The lives and fortunes of the two men, whose drives and personas have often been compared, have been inextricably linked.

"They are equal and opposite numbers of each other," said Rich Galen, a Gingrich confidant who runs the conservative political action committee Gingrich started. "It is almost uncanny how when one is up, the other is down."

For instance, underestimating Clinton's political savvy in the fall of 1995, Gingrich and his lieutenants held firm in their negotiations over the budget, and the government was forced to shut down around Christmastime.

Coincidentally, it was during the government shutdown that Clinton and Lewinsky's paths first crossed, setting in motion the sexual relationship that would later dominate the public's attention for months.

Gingrich made the government shutdown worse for the GOP by complaining that, in the course of their budget dealings, he and other Republicans had been snubbed when Clinton forced them to sit at the back of Air Force One.

The sense that Gingrich's intransigence and pettiness caused the government shutdown, coupled with the Democrats' portrait him as the embodiment of heartless budget cuts, ended his honeymoon in Washington, made him the Democrats' chief target and helped Clinton win re-election in 1996.

This year, as the Lewinsky matter threatened to derail Clinton's presidency, Gingrich at first kept quiet. But then he announced in the spring that he would never again make a speech without mentioning the scandal.

Even as polls showed the public tiring of an independent counsel's pursuit of the president's private behavior, Gingrich made a fateful decision to allow the GOP to unleash a $10 million TV ad blitz, including commercials that accused Clinton of lying.

That, and Gingrich's role in the House GOP's aggressive pursuit of impeachment, were among the factors that, analysts said, led to the five-seat Republican loss on Election Day, not the "40-plus" gain that Gingrich had talked up only two weeks earlier.

Not that his entanglements with Clinton alone caused Gingrich's undoing. In fact, it has been often argued by Gingrich friends and foes alike that the strident and tart-tongued speaker has generally needed no one's help in causing his own problems.

Galen keeps a signed note from Gingrich, dated March 1997 and related to an ill-advised comment Gingrich made during a budget battle, on his roll-top desk.

It says: "Rich, You were right. I was wrong. I should keep my mouth shut unless it's planned. Sorry, Newt."

Says Galen, "He could have written that note every day of his speakership."

THURSDAY

Gingrich remained at his home and in his district office north of Atlanta, while in Washington, the drumbeat was growing louder that the speaker had to go. Rep. Robert L. Livingston, the Louisianian whom Gingrich had personally installed as head of the Appropriations Committee in 1995, phoned the speaker and suggested to Gingrich that he resign. Gingrich didn't respond directly.

Gingrich loyalists believed that the recriminations and finger-pointing would subside as Washington grew to accept the Nov. 3 election results. Gingrich was the father of the Republican Revolution. He had raised millions of dollars for candidates. He had a lot of chits to call in.

"When all is said and done, he represents the leader, the visionary, the fund-raiser-in-chief for the Republican Party," former Rep. Robert S. Walker, a close Gingrich friend, said Thursday. "And the party is going to recognize that just because you're wounded, you don't cut your head off."

But Gingrich and Company underestimated the rank-and-file's desire for change. That night, an Arizona Republican who had come to Congress in the GOP's '94 sweep, Matt Salmon, appeared with little fanfare on CNN's "Larry King Live." He announced that he would not vote for Gingrich when the full House meets in January to consider who will be the next speaker. And Salmon said he knew of at least six others who would also withhold their support.

It was not necessarily an idle threat. With the new, thinner-than-ever Republican majority, seven opponents could be enough to doom Gingrich's return to the speaker's chair. Not coincidentally, Salmon had been among the plotters who tried to topple Gingrich in a failed putsch last year.

Vin Weber, former Republican congressman and a longtime Gingrich friend, said Gingrich did not say it to him directly. But he believes that when the speaker began to assess his chances of holding on to his job, "the most important factor was Matt Salmon's statement that seven Republican members would refuse to vote for him for speaker in January."

FRIDAY

Salmon's may have been the warning shot, but the fatal blow came Friday when Livingston strode across the Capitol plaza to announce that he would challenge Gingrich for the speakership when House Republicans meet Nov. 18 to choose their leaders for the next Congress.

Livingston insisted that it was an agonizing decision, the most difficult in his life. And he signaled that his challenge was deadly serious: "I don't do so lightly. I don't do so cheerfully, but I do so resolutely," the chairman declared.

Between about 1 p.m. and 4 p.m., Gingrich was closeted in Atlanta with a handful of his closest allies, including his wife, Marianne; longtime strategist Joe Gaylord; Nancy Desmond, an aide in his Atlanta office; and Steve Hanser, a college professor who has been a close friend since their days of teaching together.

Eventually, he called Weber, Walker and the chief of staff in the speaker's office, Arne Christensen. "Newt basically informed us," Weber said yesterday. "It was not a question of, 'What do I do?' He sounded like he had thought this thing through, and this is what it was going to be."

Weber, who knows Gingrich as well as anyone in Washington, said he was surprised by the decision.

"He's a fighter," said Weber, who clearly expected his friend to do just that. Gingrich's decision to quit "certainly shows a great maturity of judgment on his part."

That evening, in a conference call with fellow House Republicans, the politician who hounded Democrats from office and nudged aside more senior Republicans on his way to the top proclaimed that he wanted to "get the bitterness out" of Washington politics.

"I'm willing to lead, but I'm not willing to preside over people who are cannibals," he said, referring to the members of his party plotting against him and his fellow leaders.

Gingrich loyalists still insist that the speaker would have topped all comers if he had chosen to vie for a third term.

In deciding to step down, "it certainly wasn't that he didn't think ,, he could win. Anyone reporting that doesn't know what he's talking about," Walker said. "But in the course of all this, he concluded he would spend the next two years fighting with one faction or the other, or the latest group of 12 angry people that wanted to overthrow the system. He came to the conclusion that that wasn't the way he wanted to live his life."

Not everyone saw it that way, especially Democrats who have taken the brunt of Gingrich's bullying for years.

"He did a head count and saw he was going to lose," said Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. Said Maryland Democrat Rep. Steny H. Hoyer: "Newt was a savage player. He went as he forced others to go. He brought revolutionaries into power, and they turned on him."

SATURDAY

In the end, it seems, Gingrich demanded too much of his fellow Republicans, and they were no longer willing to put up with the strains of being led by someone who wasn't willing to listen to them, and who was unwilling -- or unable -- to adopt a more collegial style of leadership.

"He wore out the House Republicans," Weber said. "At the end of the day, it's too hard to follow Newt."

Striding out to the front lawn of his house in Marietta yesterday, Gingrich told the assembled reporters and cameras that he was not about to stand by and watch the Republican majority he created self-destruct.

"I spent 40 years working, since I was 15, to try to make sure that freedom survived against the Soviet empire, to try to help elect Ronald Reagan and to try to create a Republican majority in the House," he said. "And having led the party to three consecutive victories, in terms of having a majority in the House I could hardly stand by and allow the party to cannibalize itself in that situation."

His choice of words rang with irony -- and perhaps told the story of his remarkable rise and fall.

Forced from the speakership at the hand of Newt Gingrich less than a decade ago, Democrat Jim Wright, in his farewell speech, had told a hushed House chamber that he was the victim of a new, destructive brand of partisan warfare -- and that it was time for the "mindless cannibalism" in the House to come to an end.

Pub Date: 11/08/98