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Newton Leroy Gingrich entered Washington politics as a Georgia congressman in 1979 and exited in 1999 after resigning his position as Speaker of the House.
His four year speakership is most frequently marked in conservative circles by his efforts to pressure President Clinton into signing a conservative welfare reform package into law and overseeing a short period of balanced or near-balanced budgets. He also received a large share of the blame for the 1995 government shutdown, when the public saw him as a stubborn politician more willing to allow the government to run out of funds than to compromise.
But beyond the political capital he's cultivated in the conservative movement, Gingrich's real credentials have always been afflicted by a darker past. He's had three wives, the first of whom he brought divorce papers to while she was in a hospital bed recovering from uterine cancer. His eventual separation from his second wife was less dramatic, but no less memorable. According to an extensive profile from Esquire, he told Marianne Gingrich that she was a "Jaguar" and that "all I want is a Chevrolet." That brought him to his third marriage to Callista Gingrich, who was a House staffer when she began an affair with her eventual husband.
Newton Leroy Gingrich entered Washington politics as a Georgia congressman in 1979 and exited in 1999 after resigning his position as Speaker of the House.
His four year speakership is most frequently marked in conservative circles by his efforts to pressure President Clinton into signing a conservative welfare reform package into law and overseeing a short period of balanced or near-balanced budgets. He also received a large share of the blame for the 1995 government shutdown, when the public saw him as a stubborn politician more willing to allow the government to run out of funds than to compromise.
But beyond the political capital he's cultivated in the conservative movement, Gingrich's real credentials have always been afflicted by a darker past. He's had three wives, the first of whom he brought divorce papers to while she was in a hospital bed recovering from uterine cancer. His eventual separation from his second wife was less dramatic, but no less memorable. According to an extensive profile from Esquire, he told Marianne Gingrich that she was a "Jaguar" and that "all I want is a Chevrolet." That brought him to his third marriage to Callista Gingrich, who was a House staffer when she began an affair with her eventual husband.
His four year speakership is most frequently marked in conservative circles by his efforts to pressure President Clinton into signing a conservative welfare reform package into law and overseeing a short period of balanced or near-balanced budgets. He also received a large share of the blame for the 1995 government shutdown, when the public saw him as a stubborn politician more willing to allow the government to run out of funds than to compromise.
But beyond the political capital he's cultivated in the conservative movement, Gingrich's real credentials have always been afflicted by a darker past. He's had three wives, the first of whom he brought divorce papers to while she was in a hospital bed recovering from uterine cancer. His eventual separation from his second wife was less dramatic, but no less memorable. According to an extensive profile from Esquire, he told Marianne Gingrich that she was a "Jaguar" and that "all I want is a Chevrolet." That brought him to his third marriage to Callista Gingrich, who was a House staffer when she began an affair with her eventual husband.
