For Gingrich, Wives Always at Center of Career
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT
WASHINGTON — When Newt Gingrich was House speaker, lawmakers would routinely arrive at his elegant suite in the Capitol and find an unexpected adviser sitting on the couch: his wife, Marianne.
Like the wife who preceded her and the one who succeeded her, Marianne Gingrich was her husband’s political sounding board — “my best friend and closest adviser,” he once wrote. As a young congressman, he took her to private sessions with David A. Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s budget director, and to a dinner in Manhattan with Richard M. Nixon, the former president.
He sought her counsel during meetings; it made aides and colleagues uneasy, several said, because she seemed to feel awkward about it, and sometimes had little to say. When Speaker Gingrich flew aboard Air Force One to Israel for the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, Marianne was with him.
Now the second Mrs. Gingrich is making news with her allegation, denied by her former husband, that he asked for an “open marriage” while he and Callista Bisek, now his wife, were having an affair. Her remarks on ABC News have thrust Mr. Gingrich’s marital history — his pattern of replacing one wife with another, younger one — into the spotlight on the eve of the South Carolina primary, just as his bid for the Republican presidential nomination is appearing to surge.
(More here.)
NYT
WASHINGTON — When Newt Gingrich was House speaker, lawmakers would routinely arrive at his elegant suite in the Capitol and find an unexpected adviser sitting on the couch: his wife, Marianne.
Like the wife who preceded her and the one who succeeded her, Marianne Gingrich was her husband’s political sounding board — “my best friend and closest adviser,” he once wrote. As a young congressman, he took her to private sessions with David A. Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s budget director, and to a dinner in Manhattan with Richard M. Nixon, the former president.
He sought her counsel during meetings; it made aides and colleagues uneasy, several said, because she seemed to feel awkward about it, and sometimes had little to say. When Speaker Gingrich flew aboard Air Force One to Israel for the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, Marianne was with him.
Now the second Mrs. Gingrich is making news with her allegation, denied by her former husband, that he asked for an “open marriage” while he and Callista Bisek, now his wife, were having an affair. Her remarks on ABC News have thrust Mr. Gingrich’s marital history — his pattern of replacing one wife with another, younger one — into the spotlight on the eve of the South Carolina primary, just as his bid for the Republican presidential nomination is appearing to surge.
(More here.)
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