THE APOLOGY STRATEGY

By Karen Tumulty/Washington

By outward appearances, Newt Gingrich was spending his Christmastime in an unusually relaxed manner. He gazed upon his beloved dinosaur bones at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, then traveled with his wife Marianne to visit relatives in Pennsylvania. But the leisurely itinerary masked grave deliberations between the Speaker and the House ethics committee. And in a written statement released on Saturday, Gingrich made a dramatic admission: "In my name and over my signature, inaccurate, incomplete and unreliable statements were given to the [ethics] committee, but I did not intend to mislead...I did not seek personal gain, but my actions did not reflect creditably on the House of Representatives."

For weeks, Gingrich had been embroiled in a crisis. While voters decided on Nov. 5 to give his G.O.P. majority another chance, his House colleagues were increasingly tense about doing the same for him. The problem was timing. The House is scheduled to re-elect the Speaker on Jan. 7, and the ethics committee is scrambling to finish its work before that. While Gingrich's admission on Saturday--essentially a guilty plea to violations uncovered by the ethics committee's four-panel subcommittee--was clearly an attempt to speed the process, it also reflected a sharp, sudden change of course from his earlier insistence that he did nothing wrong.

As House G.O.P. leaders rallied to support his re-election, Democrats circled ravenously. Said David Bonior, Democratic whip and the Speaker's nemesis: "Mr. Gingrich engaged in a pattern of tax fraud, lies and cover-up in paving his road to the second highest office of this land. He is not worthy of that office." Bonior called for the Department of Justice, the FBI, a grand jury and others to investigate. Said he: "The Gingrich case does not end here."

Of the scores of ethical charges hurled at Gingrich over the past two years, one worried his allies the most. It was the suggestion that he may have lied to the House ethics committee about the college course he taught and financed through a tax-exempt foundation. Gingrich initially professed not to know what the committee was hinting at when it questioned whether the Speaker had provided "accurate, reliable and complete information." And in an interview with TIME shortly before the election, he noted, "My attorney, who by the way has won three Supreme Court cases, does not have a clue what they are talking about." But by last week Gingrich and his lawyer had figured it out--and each was blaming the other.

Attorney Jan Baran, whose roster of G.O.P. clients has included the Republican National Committee, announced that he would no longer appear before the committee as the Speaker's counsel. "I wish to make clear that my firm did not submit any material information to the ethics committee without Mr. Gingrich's prior review and approval," Baran said. Congressman John Linder, a fellow Georgian apparently deputized to speak for the Speaker, acknowledged that Gingrich had filed a false statement with the committee but fired back that any problem was the fault of the lawyer, who "was hired and paid a lot of money to not let Newt make mistakes."

The chief of those "mistakes" was Gingrich's false assertion that his political organization, GOPAC, was not involved with the college course. (Though he later insisted he was spreading his ideas, not his politics, Gingrich once boasted that his course, a lecture series carried on cable TV, would produce "200,000 committed activists nationwide before we're through.") Still, the subcommittee last week stopped short of saying the Speaker had broken tax laws by allowing politics to become tangled with the work of a tax-exempt nonprofit group. Instead, it faulted Gingrich for not taking "appropriate steps" to assure that he was complying with the law. Now it is up to the full committee--and perhaps ultimately the entire House--to determine what penalties, if any, he should suffer.

The bizarre exchange between Gingrich and his lawyer disturbed even Republican stalwarts. "For the first time, a few eyebrows are being raised," said Joe Scarborough, a House Republican from Florida. However, Gingrich's turnaround seems to have allayed the fears of the small but significant number of Republicans who were leery of re-electing him while he remained under an ethical cloud. Connecticut's Chris Shays, who had threatened to abstain unless the report was released, and New York's Peter King, a vocal Gingrich critic, came back into the fold, both pledging to vote for Newt on Jan. 7. What remains, however, is the problem House Republicans feared still more: daily partisan warfare over Gingrich that will make it even more difficult for their diminished majority to accomplish anything meaningful.

--With reporting by Tamala M. Edwards/Washington

With reporting by TAMALA M. EDWARDS/WASHINGTON