My Miracle Mom

She is a woman of will. More than simply headstrong and determined, she is indomitable -- someone who cannot become overcome or subdued.

Spunky, determined, funny -- all these words describe Jackie Battley Gingrich. Her sparkling blue eyes, upturned mouth and constant activity belie her age. She is helpful, involved and active.

She has shaped me in many ways. She watched my ballet and band performances for hours, and cheered me on when I was down. She is convinced that I can do anything, and I almost believe it.

Most importantly, she has provided an example to me through her belief in God and her faith in him. She credits prayer, as well as medicine, for saving her life. She has served as a deacon in her church and still volunteers there.

She grew up in Columbus, Ga., the eldest of four children, and was diagnosed with polio at the age of four. "I do remember I could not go outside and play, so Mother pushed the crib slats next to the window so I could see the children outside playing," she told me recently. Her mother "did a lot of massaging, and that was my life. It must have been six months to a year before I got out."

She raced through college, earning a degree in math in just three years so her sister Carol could start college right after high school.

Mom taught mathematics at Baker High School in Columbus for three years. One of her students, Ruby Cantrell, class of '61, remembers her well. "She was always perfectly dressed and matched up. I just loved that teacher," Ruby said, smiling. "She was a leader, she made you feel so good that you felt you had to do something if she expected it -- she brought out the best in everyone."

My parents met when my father was a senior at Baker High School. They started dating when he was in college.

Mom left Columbus to live in Atlanta with three girlfriends. "Newt had a scholarship to go to Vanderbilt," she recalled. Mother, always practical, assumed that Dad would do what made sense. Instead, he moved to Atlanta and called on her.

They soon married, had two children and moved to Carrollton, Ga., where he taught college and she taught high school. Dad began to look into running for office. Mom had known that he was interested in politics before they were married. "That was part of the attraction -- I like politics," she said.

Mom was first diagnosed with cancer in the spring of 1978. She remembers going into her closet, crying and praying that she would live long enough for their children (my sister and me) to graduate high school.

Her prayers were answered: She's been given 27 more years and shows no sign of slowing down.

My father lost his first two congressional campaigns. After undergoing surgery and radiation, Mom and her two children continued to hit the campaign trail with him, determined to win.

Professional success did not secure personal success. In order to raise her two girls in an environment that she thought best for them, Mom asked for a divorce in the spring of 1980. When I asked her recently if she had made the right decision, her response was immediate: "No doubt about it. I never regretted it."

The three of us moved back to Carrollton, my sister and I graduated from high school, and time moved on.

In 2005, Mom was diagnosed with cancer a second time. After enduring surgery and chemotherapy, she ended up in a nursing home, her body exhausted by the treatment. After my sister and I had moved her in, we drove away crying, thinking that she would not make it out. But Mom never gave up hope, defied the odds, and -- through hard work and prayer -- moved into assisted living, then back into her own home, where she still lives.

My daughter describes her as "very pretty. She is someone you can look up to ... strong and kind." My son says "she's fun."

What I love most about my mom is that she is ever-changing and growing, but remains the same at heart: focusing on patience to allow God to act, staying the same, by offering to come and cheer me on at a recent tennis match.

Jackie Battley and Newt Gingrich Marriage Profile Newt’s first marriage was to Jackie Battley who he met in high school. Their bitter divorce didn’t end their long time conflict over money.

How Jackie and Newt Met:
Newt met Jackie when he was in high school when Jackie was his geometry teacher. Newt and Jackie secretly dated until their wedding.
Wedding Date:
Jackie and Newt were married on June 19, 1962 while Newt was still in college. Newt was 19 years old and Jackie was 26 years old when they married. Newt’s family boycotted the wedding because they thought Jackie was too old for him.
“Gingrich had a crush on his high school geometry teacher, Jackie Battley, and vowed to his high school friends that he would marry her. He made good on his intentions. He was a teenage student at Emory University in Atlanta, where Battley had taken a college teaching position, when he married her.”
Source: Monica M. Ekman. “Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Newt Gingrich.” USNews.com. 2/23/2007.

Gail Sheehy: “One of his first independent acts was to escape the totalitarian regime of his stepfather’s home. He chose a path that women have used for generations: he made a jailbreak marriage, attaching himself at the tender age of 19 to his high-school geometry teacher, Jackie Battley — a buxom blonde seven years his senior.”
Source: Gail Sheehy. “The Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich.” Vanity Fair. 9/1995. Pbs.org.

Children:
Newt and Jackie have two daughters.
•Linda Kathleen “Kathy” Gingrich Lubbers: Born in 1963.
•Jacqueline “Jackie” Sue Gingrich Cushman: Born in 1966.

Newt: “I was married very young and had my first daughter when I was very young, in fact at the end of my freshman year in college. And after a period of time, about 18 years, things just didn’t work out.”
Source: Jake Tapper. “Gingrich Admits to Affair During Clinton Impeachment.” ABCNews.go.com. 3/09/2007.
Gail Sheehy: “He was her [Jackie’s] little boy,” says Kit. Says Mary Kahn, “He saw a nurturing, mothering kind of person that he needed, and she finished raising him ... She certainly seemed to love him. But I don’t think he was capable at the time of loving anybody more than he loved himself.” Bob Gingrich boycotted his stepson’s wedding ...”
Source: Gail Sheehy. “The Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich.” Vanity Fair. 9/1995. Pbs.org.

Dolores Adamson, Gingrich’s district administrator from 1978 to 1983: “Jackie put him all the way through school. All the way through the P.h.D ... He didn’t work. Personal funds have never meant anything to him. He’s worse than a six-year-old trying to keep his bank balance ... Jackie did that.”
Source: Gail Sheehy. “The Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich.” Vanity Fair. 9/1995. Pbs.org.

Dot Crews: “It was common knowledge that Newt was involved with other women during his marriage to Jackie. Maybe not on the level of John Kennedy. But he had girlfriends — some serious, some trivial.”
Source: Gail Sheehy. “The Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich.” Vanity Fair. 9/1995. Pbs.org.

“[Floyd] Hoskins believes the couple never transcended the original teacher-student relationship.”
“Gingrich.” The New Mexican. 11/27/1994. pg. D-2.

Jackie: “He can say that we had been talking about it [divorce] for 10 years, but the truth is that it came as a complete surprise.”
Source: Gail Sheehy. “The Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich.” Vanity Fair. 9/1995. Pbs.org.

Katharine Seelye: “Jackie Gingrich filed court papers saying he had not provided reasonable support for her living expenses and that some of her accounts were “two or three months past due.” Some of her friends took up an informal collection on her behalf.”
Source: Katharine Q. Seelye. “Gingrich’s Life: The Complications and Ideals.” NYTimes.com 11/24/1994.

Newt: “And I think that literally was the crisis I came to. I guess I look back on it a little bit like somebody who’s in Alcoholics Anonymous. It was a very, very bad period of my life, and it had been getting steadily worse. I ultimately wound up at a point where probably suicide or going insane or divorce were the last three options.”
Source: Katharine Q. Seelye. “Gingrich’s Life: The Complications and Ideals.” NYTimes.com 11/24/1994.

http://tinyurl.com/3cbo6u4

As a high school student — precocious, lonely, overweight — Newt secretly romanced his geometry teacher, a buxom, matronly woman named Jackie Battley. The furtive romance with his 24-year-old teacher included nighttime sessions in the back of a car in remote areas of Fort Benning, Ga.

Once, Newt and Jackie were so worked up, they got their car caught in a tank trap on the military base and had to call his best friend to rescue them before a daylight exposé, according to the friend’s widow, Linda Tilton. Defying his stepfather, a stern Army colonel, Newt pursued Jackie, married her and promptly had two children.

Jackie Gingrich raised the daughters, worked to put Newt through graduate school and was a loyal political wife during his two unsuccessful campaigns for Congress in 1974 and 1976. In his make-or-break 1978 race, Gingrich enlisted Jackie to attack his female opponent, who had announced that if elected she would commute to Washington and allow her family to remain in Georgia. At Gingrich’s instigation, Jackie wrote a campaign letter declaring that Newt was a fine husband and would take his family with him, although his top aides already knew Gingrich was having affairs and the marriage was falling apart.

The most notorious incident in Gingrich’s marriage — first reported by David Osborne in Mother Jones magazine in 1984 — was when he cornered Jackie in her hospital room where she was recovering from uterine cancer surgery and insisted on discussing the terms of the divorce he was seeking.

Shortly after that infamous encounter, Gingrich refused to pay his alimony and child-support payments. The First Baptist Church in his hometown had to take up a collection to support the family Gingrich had deserted.

Six months after divorcing Jackie, Gingrich married a younger woman, Marianne, with whom he had been having an affair. They are still married, despite persistent (though unproven) rumors that Gingrich has had other dalliances.

http://tinyurl.com/3gyacgw

******

She met him in 1980, at a political fundraiser in Ohio. She was twenty-eight, the daughter of a small-town Republican mayor. He was thirty-six, a brand-new congressman from Georgia just emerging from an emotional crisis so severe that he drank heavily and contemplated suicide. She told him about the local economic decline, he said somebody needed to save the country. She said that he couldn’t do it alone, he asked about her plans for the future. Even then, he was making rash pronouncements that reasonable people made fun of, such as that he would be the next Republican Speaker of the House.

They kept the conversation going on the phone, often talking late into the night. Although he was still married to his first wife, Jackie Battley, Gingrich told Marianne they were in counseling and talking about divorce. That summer, she went to Washington to visit him, and soon afterward he introduced her to his mother and stepfather. “They were thrilled because they hadn’t wanted Newt to marry [Jackie]. I think his stepdad wanted to be able to say, ‘Look, we always knew this wasn’t going to work.’ “

At first, she had no idea that the wife he was divorcing was actually his high school geometry teacher, or that he went to the hospital to present her with divorce terms while she was recovering from uterine cancer and then fought the case so hard, Jackie had to get a court order just to pay her utility bills. Gingrich told her the story a little at a time, trusting her with things that nobody else knew — to this day, for example, the official story is that he started dating Jackie when he was eighteen and she was twenty-five. But he was really just sixteen, she says.

The divorce came through in February. They got married six months later, in August of 1981.

http://www.esquire.com/features/newt-gingrich-0910-5#ixzz1LVL2N9QU

Marianne was a trip. She was goofy and fun and almost completely unguarded, reeling off the stories and digressions with a wry sense of the human comedy that was very appealing. She was not bitter about the divorce or angry at Gingrich, but it was clear that she’d been brooding about what happened for years, that the divorce introduced a note of unreality that permanently shook her life — she’d been going along thinking everything was one way for eighteen years and then suddenly it wasn’t that way. “Good became bad and bad became good,” she said repeatedly. She talked a lot about faith and acceptance and forgiveness but, frankly, the doubt seemed to be buried pretty deep. It was all so human and touching.

And confusing. How could this woman have been married to Newt Gingrich for eighteen years? How could such a free spirit live with such a calculated, almost Machiavellian strategist? Clearly, I was going to have to rethink Newt Gingrich.

My skeleton key turned out to be one of Marianne’s hard-won insights: We mislead ourselves with glib remarks about politicians all being corrupt, she said, when the real question is when did they become corrupt, and why. Here’s the whole quote:

Newt grew up poor, always wanted to be somebody, make a difference, prove himself. That was his vulnerability, do you understand? Being treated important. Which means he was gonna associate with people who would stroke him, and were important themselves. And in that vulnerability, once you go down that path and it goes unchecked, you add to it. Like, ‘Oh, I’m drinking, who cares?’ Then I start being a little whore, ‘cause that comes with drinking. That’s what corruption is: when you’re too exhausted, you’re gonna go with your weakness. So when you see corruption, you don’t wanna say ‘They’re all corrupt.’ You wanna say, ‘At what point did you decide that? And why? Why were you vulnerable?’

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/marianne-gingrich-behind-the-scenes-081010#ixzz1LVMI0Pmg

******

It’s widely known that Gingrich’s first wife, Jackie, was once his high school geometry teacher. “To this day, the official story is that he started dating Jackie when he was 18 and she was 25,” says Richardson. But, according to Marianne, “he was really just 16.”

A few months after she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Marianne Gingrich confronted Newt, and he admitted he was having an affair (with Callista Bisek, then 32, a former Hill staffer who later became his third wife). The couple tried to talk through it, but Gingrich got stuck comparing his wife and lover to cars, saying Marianne was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. “I can’t handle a Jaguar right now,” Gingrich said several times. “All I want is a Chevrolet.”

When Marianne confronted Newt about his cheating, he had just returned from a speech where he spoke of the importance of family values. Yet he asked her to simply tolerate the affair. She refused, and asked him how he could give high-minded speeches while simultaneously running around on his wife. “It doesn’t matter what I do,” he answered. “People need to hear what I have to say.”

Explaining how his current wife, Callista, is simultaneously younger but more mature than he is, Gingrich tells Richardson, “Callista and I kid that I’m 4 and she’s 5, and therefore she gets to be in charge.” When Marianne hears the anecdote, she’s stunned. “You know where that line came from? Me. That’s my line. That’s what I told him,” she says. She pauses, then says, “I’m sorry, that’s so freaky.”

http://tinyurl.com/3mdjpcs

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