Arguing is clearly Gingrich’s favorite sport. This week, he launched a second wave of attacks against the State Department by inviting a small group of reporters (not including me) to his office to discuss an article he has written for Foreign Policy magazine. This being Washington, they accepted. The article calls for “culture shock, a top-to-bottom transformation that will make [the State Department] a more effective communicator of U.S. values.”
Gingrich may no longer walk the halls of power, but he still likes to tear through them with a skate key. I’d seen the pugnacious side of the man who penned the Contract with America and shut down the government during the budget impasse in the mid-1990s. What I hadn’t seen was the literary Newt. So I went to talk to him about his new novel.
When I arrived in his office, Gingrich was hunched over his laptop. The Internet has become a repository for Gingrich’s ideas–and there are many of them. His is not a quiet mind. Just check out Newt.org. He opines about a lot of issues, but what interested me were the myriad book reviews he’s done. It turns out that Gingrich runs a wonkish Oprah’s Book Club. But the reviews aren’t all on policy books like the one he’s reading now: “The Fifteen Weeks,” Joseph M. Jones’s 1965 inside account of the Marshall Plan. Gingrich’s latest review was in fact on John Sandford’s “Naked Prey,” the latest in the series featuring a Midwestern lawman who moonlights as a computer-game designer. “Reading is the way I clear my mind,” says Gingrich.
The new book he’s written with William Forstchen on Gettysburg is both imaginative and disciplined. It considers what would have happened if Lee had chosen a different military strategy. “The key to active history as an education tool is you have to follow the rules of reality,” Gingrich says. He hopes the book can be a teaching tool and challenge teachers and students to explore rather than memorize history. “The book is probably a little detailed in military terms for someone who wants to scan it,” Gingrich concedes. There is a show-off quality to the military knowledge, but that won’t bother Civil War buffs. “We wanted to say to historians this is an accurate version of Lee. It’s not the version Lee chose, but it’s a version Lee could have chosen,” Gingrich says.
The authors were so precise in their recreation that they calculated the marching rate of the Confederate and Union artillery and cavalry troops given weather conditions on certain key days in the battle. They laid out maps all over Gingrich’s basement and plotted the armies’ exact movements. They clearly know their audience. “There is no part of American life that has more intense students than the Civil War. If we had a glaring mistake in this book …,” Gingrich trails off.
He’ll soon hear from the toughest critics: Civil War re-enactors. Never shy about self-promotion, Gingrich will cap off his book tour on July 4 with a ride to Gettysburg on an antique train and wearing a period costume. The book-signing coincides nicely with the biggest Gettysburg reenactment ever. “I thought I’d play a role I know a lot about: politician,” says Gingrich, who was born not far from Gettysburg, but straddles the Mason-Dixon line by having grown up mostly in Georgia. He plans to take on anyone who wants to dispute his version of what could have happened at Gettysburg. “It’s a perfect ’late night, let’s sit and argue,’ kind of book,” he says. In Washington, debating over Civil War minutiae can pass as a hot date.
