Newt Gingrich’s Bipolar Mother Kit Gingrich and His Difficult Childhood
Gingrich’s painful childhood was scarred by his mother’s manic-depression—and a distant, violent stepfather. The Daily Beast’s Gail Sheehy draws upon dozens of interviews with family members to trace the former speaker’s path, including his mother’s assertion that she “almost didn’t” survive his childhood and his stepfather’s admission that he once “smashed [Newt] against the wall” for breaking curfew.
The psychology of Newt Gingrich has been under relentless public attack, with his former House colleagues lining up to declare him “unfit,” “unstable,” “positively scary,” and “a disaster.” He’s batted away his adversaries as Lilliputians unable to recognize “a big thinker,” “a definer of civilization” who “wants to shift the entire planet.” But when Mitt Romney began leveling his rise in the national polls by branding him as “zany,” it seemed to get under Newt’s skin.
What do we know about how his unique temperament was shaped? I was fortunate to interview his mother and stepfather before they died about Newt’s upbringing and his mother’s bipolar condition, and to discuss with Gingrich himself his self-invention as a “mythical person.”
“I think it is fair to say, if you want to write a psychological piece, that part of my life has been trying to live up to a standard of toughness and responsibility,” Gingrich told me. It was the summer of 1995. He sat back on the verandah outside his grand office as speaker of the House, rolled up his shirt sleeves, scratched his arms, and propped his hands on top of his head while surveying the Capitol lawn like Laird of the Manor. (Gingrich and his family declined, through spokesperson R.C. Hammond, to comment for this Daily Beast article.)
He’d agreed to meet and discuss his childhood for an article I was working on for Vanity Fair, intrigued that I had already done 70 interviews with his family, friends, and political operatives, and that I had read about Robert the Bruce, a medieval Scotsman who waged a private revolution against the whole British Army and preserved Scotland’s independence. The Bruce was enshrined among Newt’s pantheon of psychic heroes.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich leaves the North Portico of the White House with his mother, Kathleen, Jan. 13, 1995, Joe Marquette / FILE / AP Photo
“I had a period of thinking that I would have been called ‘Newt the McPherson,’” he told me, referring to his youth, when he strongly identified with his biological father, Newton McPherson.
What happened to dislodge that identity? I wondered aloud. He suggested that I go through his childhood and his background and find some way of describing it.
“A heck of a mess” was how his mother, Kit, described Newt’s background when we sat down alone earlier that year in her kitchen in Dauphin, Pa. With her brows knitted together in a permanent frown of anxiety, she tried to untangle for me the twisted history from which young Newt tried to construct an identity.
Kit was 14 when her father, a railroad worker, was killed in a violent accident. “Things for me went downhill,” she said. “My mother had a breakdown. She wiped out.” Kit took a job cleaning houses and fell for a big, brawling man named Newt McPherson. When she found herself pregnant at 16, she had to leave high school. “My mother made me go through with the wedding,” Kit told me. She wore gray and invited no one. Big Newt, she said, scared her to death. He was physically enormous: “6 foot 3, and he could use a nine-pound sledgehammer with one hand,” according to Newt. Days after giving birth, Kit filed for divorce. Big Newt joined the Navy and Kit moved back in with her mother.
“I almost didn’t” survive, Kit Gingrich blurted out. “I had manic-depressive illness.”
It wasn’t long before Kit married a bar-fighting bread-truck driver, Bob Gingrich. He had missed World War II, ridiculed for being 4-F. When he was later drafted, he turned into “your typical military father,” according to gay-rights activist Candace Gingrich-Jones, Newt’s sister. A brittle man with a wad of tobacco bulging behind his scowl, he stood at a distance from the table when the rest of the family gathered in a coffee shop for our interview. He boasted of having shown no physical affection to Newt. “You don’t do that with boys. I didn’t even do it with my girls,” he said, referring to Newt’s three half-sisters. He looked at his wife. “When was the last time I told you I loved you?”
“That’s a good question,” Kit said.
“If I tell you once, that’s all that’s necessary.”
Newt was a solitary boy whose extreme nearsightedness made it extremely difficult for him to recognize people until he was about 12, according to Bob Gingrich. He made few if any friends, said relatives. From heroes in history books and cowboy movies he extracted idealizations of himself. It was in the darkened theater of the mind, the local cheese box of a movie theater in Hummelstown, that he had his awakening, “a moment where I realized, I can be a leader,” he said.