Gingrich's Daughter's Reason for Working & Her Deadbeat Dad

From Mike Sage, Editor-in-Chief -- America Needs Mitt:

At the debate, Gingrich was asked a question by moderator Juan Williams about his previous statements regarding putting the children of poor families to work as janitors and in other jobs at their schools in order to teach them values. The question ended with Williams asking, “Don’t you see that as insulting to all Americans, and particularly to black Americans?” Gingrich replied, “No, I don’t see that” – a response that drew both cheers and boos from the audience. He went on to say, “My daughter, Jackie Cushman, who is sitting right there (points) reminded me that her first job was at the First Baptist Church, in Carolton, Georgia, doing janitorial work, at 13.”

The audience, which reacted very favorably to the anecdote about his hard-working daughter, might not have done so quite as enthusiastically if they’d known why his daughter was working at 13 years of age in the first place.

The following excerpts are taken from a Vanity Fair/PBS interview published in September, 1995 with Newt Gingrich’s parents and his second wife, Marianne:

Bob Gingrich (Newt’s stepfather) boycotted his stepson’s wedding, but Newt and Kit (his mother) remained close. She remembers visiting the couple at Tulane University, where Newt entered graduate school. The Gingriches had one daughter, Kathy, who was born nine months after their marriage. Their second daughter, Jackie Sue, followed in 1966. Kit recalls that the young family’s living conditions were spartan. Their couch was “propped up with a brick,” she says. “I mean, Jackie didn’t have any clothes.”

Dolores Adamson, Gingrich’s district administrator from 1978 to 1983, remembers, “Jackie put him all the way through school. All the way through the P.h.D…He didn’t work.” Adds Adamson, “Personal funds have never meant anything to him. He’s worse than a six-year-old trying to keep his bank balance…Jackie did that.”

When I ask Marianne (Newt’s second wife) if she keeps the checkbook for the man determined to balance the nation’s budget, she laughs quietly: “Yes, I do a lot of our finances…I pretty much handle the money.” She acknowledges that at the time of their marriage, in 1981, Newt was in great personal debt, “so we had to work our way out of it,” a feat she says was accomplished only last year.

The legacy of manic-depression stemming from his mother, Kit Gingrich, may be relevant here, given the fact that the condition is an inherited one in about 80 percent of cases. After Kit acknowledged that she is manic-depressive, I asked whether Newt had been tested psychologically. She responded, “Smart kids don’t need it…They get mad and they get glad.”

In Manic Depressive Illness, which Goodwin co-authored with Kay Redfield Jamison, he describes the usual mood in hypomania as “ebullient, self-confident, and exalted, but with an irritable underpinning.” He goes on to quote earlier studies that characterizes the thinking of a person in a hypomanic state as “flighty. He jumps from one subject to another, and cannot adhere to anything.” Another study describes the role of hypomania and extroversion in some leaders, noting behavior that is “often intolerant and unyielding…given to impulsive action…full of energy and at the same time full of strong purpose and burning conviction…the outcry attracts other extroverts and soon there assembles a group of dominant men who unite in a common cause.”

During 1979 and 1980, Newt Gingrich –despite his political success– entered a period of crisis. He almost, to borrow a phrase, “wiped out.” “He went through a real down period, ducked his head, retreated from the battlefield,” says Eddie Mahe. According to other sources, Newt was drinking heavily. “There were people concerned about his stability,” says Kip Carter.

“It was a very, very bad period of my life,” Newt has admitted. “It had been getting steadily worse. I ultimately wound up at a point where suicide, or going insane, or divorce were the last three options.” In April 1980, he told Jackie, who was suffering from uterine cancer, that he was filing for divorce.

He was soon having an affair with a woman known to a member of his staff as “the mystery lady.” Fifteen years younger than Newt’s wife, she had “big cow eyes,” says one former congressman. It was the future Marianne Gingrich, whom Newt had met at a Republican fund-raiser in Ohio in January of 1980.

For some time, Jackie tried to hold on. “He can say that we had been talking about it for 10 years, but the truth is that it came as a complete surprise,” she told Lois Romano of The Washington Post. “He walked out in the spring of 1980…By September, I went into the hospital for my third surgery. The two girls came to see me, and said, ‘Daddy is downstairs. Could he come up?’ When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from my surgery.”

Jackie’s divorce lawyer, Edward Bates, expected that Newt would want to have the divorce handled quietly and diplomatically. But it started off very badly. “We went to court to get the basic financial necessities met.” The utilities were about to be cut off –it was dire. Jackie’s testimony at a hearing to determine alimony –revealing Newt’s $34,000 personal debt, his spending habits, his refusal to pay forwarded bills– appeared in detail on the front page of the hometown newspaper, the Carroll County Georgian, on October 23, 1980.

It was against this backdrop of marital infidelity, financial parasitism, and fiscal irresponsibility that Newt Gingrich’s daughter had to go to work at 13 years of age. One wonders, would the audience cheering Speaker Newt Gingrich’s “family values” rhetoric in the recent debates have been as enthusiastic if they knew the rest of the story?

This is the history of a man forced to resign as Speaker of the House for ethics violations --- We don't need Newt Gingrich.