Jackie Battley Gingrich was Newt’s first wife. They married when he was 20 and she 26.
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
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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.”
And Jackie Gingrich Cushman is their daughter. She is the author of the article