Considering that he’s looking more and more likely to run for President in 2012, John Richardson’s Esquire profile of Newt Gingrich is a must read, but the headline grabbing parts are likely to be the excerpts from the interview with Gingrich’s second wife Marianne:
Early in May, she went out to Ohio for her mother’s birthday. A day and a half went by and Newt didn’t return her calls, which was strange. They always talked every day, often ten times a day, so she was frantic by the time he called to say he needed to talk to her.“About what?”He wanted to talk in person, he said.“I said, ‘No, we need to talk now.’ ”He went quiet.“There’s somebody else, isn’t there?”She kind of guessed it, of course. Women usually do. But did she know the woman was in her apartment, eating off her plates, sleeping in her bed?She called a minister they both trusted. He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. ” ‘I can’t handle a Jaguar right now.’ He said that many times. ‘All I want is a Chevrolet.’ ”He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused.He’d just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he’d given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values.The next night, they sat talking out on their back patio in Georgia. She said, “How do you give that speech and do what you’re doing?”“It doesn’t matter what I do,” he answered. “People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”
