NEWT'S BAD OLD DAYS

By MARGARET CARLSON

When Newt Gingrich was fighting his way through a horde of reporters into Border Books in Phoenix, Arizona, last Wednesday, it didn't take too much imagination to reduce the temperature by 70 degrees, raze the palm trees, and picture another gray-haired politician caught in press gridlock in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1992, right after Gennifer Flowers made her charges against then-Governor Bill Clinton. Now it's Gingrich's turn, and it's Anne Manning, a former campaign worker, who went on the record for the first time in a just-published Vanity Fair article saying she had an affair with Gingrich while he was married to his first wife. In the current climate, that's all it takes to open the door to the kind of microscopic scrutiny politicians from Gary Hart to Bob Packwood have endured. At first Gingrich quipped Gipperlike that he couldn't hear the questions, then he refused to respond to anything in the article (although he gave its author, Gail Sheehy, a long interview); finally, he resorted to calling a reporter "obnoxious." The next morning, in a radio interview, he suggested that Manning is politically motivated. "I knew...if we're going to have a revolution to replace the welfare state, we better expect those people who love it to throw the kitchen sink at us."

Manning--who said she had come forward because when Gingrich "talks about family values and acts righteous about stuff like that, it just gets my back up"--is hardly a shill for the American welfare state, nor are Gingrich's former campaign treasurer and another aide who both went on the record with Sheehy about Gingrich's various affairs, but never mind. Stonewalling the press in matters sexual often works, but it doesn't stop the frenzy of interest, which is particularly high when the person in question has set himself up as the putative leader of the family-values revolution and has even blamed Susan Smith's murderous act on the Democrats' countercultural ethics (until it was revealed that her stepfather, a leader of the local Christian Coalition, had molested her). In his book, Gingrich rails against sex outside marriage and celebrates family life as it was portrayed in the pages of Reader's Digest and the Saturday Evening Post from 1955.

Neither has much in common with Vanity Fair, which is one reason Gingrich likes them. Some troubling realities of that era, such as segregation, were not acknowledged amid the heartwarming Americana served up by the Digest, which featured Unforgettable Characters (an Arctic explorer), animals (What Snakes Are Really Like), business derring-do (Dr. Geiger's Little Magic Box) and side-splitting Humor in Uniform. As for family life, the Saturday Evening Post observed it only through a flattering scrim, with its Norman Rockwell portraits of boys gone fishin' and short stories such as "The Skipper Was a Dame (No one wanted to charter a boat that had a lady captain. What Helen needed was a man).'' In this well-ordered world, mothers stayed home and fathers, who smoked Lucky Strikes, worked and worried about their daughters going off on dates and about the menace of Red China, but not much else.

Not only was this gauzy portrait of America misleading (births to teenagers reached record highs in the mid-'50s that are unsurpassed even now, and a third of marriages ended in divorce), but it especially wasn't like that for Newt Gingrich. His grandfather was born out of wedlock and raised in a household in which his real mother posed as his sister. His father was a Navy man who left right after Newtie was born and who later allowed him to be adopted by his stepfather in exchange for not having to pay child support. Newt's mother Kit said in the interview that she is manic-depressive and that Newt's stepfather Bob comes across as cold and silent. The senior Gingrich proudly recounts smashing Newtie against the wall when he was 15. Gingrich's half-sister, a lesbian activist, is writing a book about all this for Scribner's.

As for Gingrich's adult relationships, the Saturday Evening Post would never have printed this story either. His first marriage to his high school math teacher ended bitterly when it was reported that he visited his estranged wife's hospital room after her surgery for uterine cancer to discuss the terms of their divorce. He had to be pursued for adequate child-support payments, although he writes in his book that "any male who doesn't support his children is a bum." In a 1978 congressional campaign against Virginia Shafard, Gingrich, the "moral-standards'' candidate, charged that if she won, she would leave her family behind in Georgia. He won and left his family behind in Georgia.

These days, he spends far more time with Calista Bistek, a former congressional aide, and Arianna Huffington, who hosted a $50,000-a-plate dinner for him, than with his second wife Marianne, who has never actually moved to Washington and who has been candid about their marriage's being "on and off." Newt once gave the marriage 53-to-47 odds of lasting--and that was before Marianne said she wasn't going to stand by her man if he decided to run for President. "He can't do it without me," she told Vanity Fair, and if he does, "I just go on the air the next day and I undermine everything.''

In fact, the only factor that might allow Gingrich to overcome his own "family'' problems, if he does run, is that Bob Dole, Phil Gramm and Pete Wilson also left their first wives. And that's the stuff of Vanity Fair, not Reader's Digest.