When his top campaign staff abandoned him not long ago, Newt Gingrich didn?t seem terribly surprised. ?Philosophically, I am very different from normal politicians,? he said. ?We have big ideas.?
The ?we,? as Gingrich uses it here, is akin to the royal we ? it?s what might be called the professorial we, employed when the intellectual and the ideas he generates merge to create an entity too large for a singular personal pronoun. ?Over my years in public life,? he writes in his latest book about how to save America, ?I have become known as an ?ideas man.? ? And we shouldn?t doubt it. As I write, a stack of books tilts Pisa-like on my desk, each volume written by Gingrich and various co-authors. I got out my tape measure the other day and discovered that the stack is precisely 15¼ inches high ? a figure that does not include the various revised and expanded editions that I have had Whispernetted into my Kindle, along with the historical novels that Gingrich has published with a co-writer named William R. Forstchen: three fat books on the Civil War, three on World War II and a pair on the Revolutionary War. If I added these to my stack, it would be taller than the mayor of Munchkinland and much heavier.
The books taken together are evidence of mental exertions unimaginable in any other contemporary politician. Professorial affectations are not high on the list of tactics candidates like to use in this age of galloping populism. Within the politico-journalistic combine, Gingrich?s status as an intellectual is accepted as an article of faith ? something that everybody just assumes to be true, like man-made climate change or Barack Obama?s stratospheric I.Q. Senator Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican, says Gingrich is ?undoubtedly the smartest man I?ve ever met.? Cokie Roberts calls him ?a big thinker.? Without irony the Democratic consultant Paul Begala praises his ?intellectual heft? and Howard Dean his ?intellectual leadership.? Ted Nugent says Gingrich is probably the ?smartest guy out there.? So that settles that.
Or does it? I built my stack of Gingrich books because I intended to read every one of them, in chronological order, and I did read them, though my chronological scheme broke down eventually. Aside from the sheer number of words, what is most impressive about the Gingrich corpus is its range of literary form, from confessional to guidebook.
Gingrich?s first book, ?Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future,? came out in 1984 and contained the seeds of much of what was to follow. Beneath its cover image ? a flag-draped eagle inexplicably threatening the space shuttle ? the backbencher Gingrich was identified as chairman of the Congressional Space Caucus, a position that inspired a series of ?space cadet? jokes that took years to die. ?Window of Opportunity? was co-written by Gingrich?s second wife, Marianne, and a science-fiction writer called David Drake. Anyone who takes seriously the books that politicians claim to write must sooner or later confront the delicate matter of co-authors and ghostwriters, especially when the books serve, as in Gingrich?s case, as intellectual bona fides.
I have no inside knowledge of Gingrich?s work habits as a writer, or co-writer. In 1994, I was asked to help write one of his books, but the offer never went far enough to allow for close observation. There?s no reason to be prissy or censorious on the subject of politicians and their ghostwriters. George Washington had ghostwriters (pretty good ones, too: Hamilton and Madison). Lincoln had his secretaries write some letters for him, including, some historians say, the most famous Lincoln letter of them all, to the bereaved Mrs. Bixby. And despite a long parade of co-authors ? historians, novelists, policy experts, journalists, even family members ? Gingrich?s books show a remarkable consistency from one to the next. His contribution to the books that bear his name must be substantial ? certainly greater than that of Charles Barkley, who once admitted he hadn?t read his autobiography. (No one else did, either.) Gingrich?s books are Gingrich?s books.
The ghosts for that first book served him unevenly. They got him in metaphor trouble from the first sentence. ?We stand at a crossroads between two diverse futures,? he wrote. This crossroads, it transpired, faced an open window. That would be the window of vulnerability, which is widening. Three paragraphs later, the crossroads, perhaps swiveling on a Lazy Susan, is suddenly facing another window, also open. The important point, Gingrich writes, is that this window of opportunity is about to slam shut. And if it does? ?We stand on the brink of a world of violence almost beyond our imagination.?
Reading the Gingrich catalog, you get used to intimations ? or are they threats? ? of Armageddon. Windows are slamming shut, or are just about to, all over the place, all the time. ?Time is running out,? he wrote toward the end of ?Window of Opportunity,? 27 years ago. It?s no wonder that Washington thinks he?s so smart: Gingrich was panicky before panicky was cool. The political class runs on his kind of excitement, as one crisis of the century succeeds another, week by week. Politics on its own terms is so boring ? decades of the same issues, the same interests, the same charges of heartlessness against Republicans and of profligacy against Democrats ? that attention has to be stoked by artificial means.