The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (3 page)

At Christmas, he came home and told his father that he was quitting school and moving
out of the house. His father slapped him silly, knocked him to the floor. Dean got
up and said, “If you ever touch me again I will kill you, I promise you that.” It
was the last time he ever lived under his father’s roof.

After Dean moved out, his father went into a downward spiral. He took oxycodone pills
by the handful, for back pain, headaches, and other real or invented ailments, prescribed
by a dozen different doctors who didn’t know about the others. Dean’s mother found
pills hidden in his suit pockets, stashed away in garbage bags. They gave his father
a vacant look and wore away his stomach lining. He would retreat into his study as
if to read one of his religious books, but that was where he’d pop some oxycodone
and zone out. He was admitted into rehab several times.

Out in the world, Dean went hog wild. He quickly discovered the pleasures of alcohol,
gambling, marijuana, fighting, and women. His first girl was a minister’s daughter,
and he lost his virginity right under the church piano. He was full of rebellion and
wanted no part of his father’s God. “I was a shit-ass,” Dean said. “I had no respect
for anybody.” He moved to Greensboro and shared a house with a pothead. For a while
he had a job as the assistant golf pro at the Greensboro Country Club for a hundred
twenty dollars a week. In 1983, when he was twenty, he decided to go back to college
and enrolled at the state university in Greensboro. It took Dean six years of bartending
to graduate—at one stage his education was interrupted by a five-month trip with his
best friend, Chris, to California, where they lived in a VW bus and pursued girls
and good times—but in 1989 he finally earned his degree, in political science.

Dean was a registered Republican, and Reagan was his idol. To Dean, Reagan was like
a soothing grandfather: he had that ability to communicate and inspire people, like
when he spoke about “a city upon a hill.” It was something Dean thought he could do
as well, since he was a good speaker and came from a family of preachers. When Reagan
talked, you trusted him, and he gave you hope that America could be great again. He
was the only politician who ever made Dean want to become one himself—an idea that
ended the week he was busted for smoking pot on the steps of a campus building and
arrested a few days later for driving under the influence.

He had told himself that he would see the world, and after graduating, Dean bummed
around Europe for a few months, sleeping in hostels and sometimes even on park benches.
But he was still ambitious—“insanely ambitious,” he liked to say. When he came home,
he decided to look for the best job with the best company that he could find.

In his mind, that had always been Johnson & Johnson, up in New Jersey. The employees
at Johnson & Johnson wore blue suits, they were clean, articulate, well paid, they
drove company cars and had health benefits. Dean moved to Philadelphia with a girlfriend
and set out to meet anyone who worked at the company. His first contact was a fellow
with perfectly combed blond hair, in a blue seersucker suit, white shoes, and a bow
tie—the sharpest dresser Dean had ever seen. He called the corporate offices almost
every day of the week, he went in for seven or eight interviews, he spent a year trying
to will himself into a job, and in 1991 Johnson & Johnson finally submitted and made
him a pharmaceutical rep in Harrisburg. Dean bought a blue suit and cut his hair short
and tried to lose the southern accent, which he thought would be taken for backwardness.
He was given a pager and a computer, and he drove around in a company car from one
doctor’s office to another, sometimes eight a day, with samples of drugs, explaining
the benefits and side effects.

It didn’t take him long to realize that he hated the job. At the end of every day,
he had to report back to the office about every stop he’d made. He was a robot, a
number, and the company was Big Brother watching. Any personal initiative was frowned
on if it didn’t fit the Johnson & Johnson mold. After eight months, less time than
he’d spent trying to get the position, Dean quit.

He had bought into a lie: go to college, get a good education, get a job with a Fortune
500 company, and you’d be happy. He had done all that and he was miserable. He’d gotten
out of his father’s house only to find another kind of servitude. He decided to start
over and do things his own way. He would become an entrepreneur.

TOTAL WAR: NEWT GINGRICH

Big Newt McPherson was a bar brawler in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, during World War
II. On the third morning after he married Kit Daugherty, a sixteen-year-old housecleaner,
Big Newt’s young bride tried to wake him up from a hangover, and he punched her. That
was the end of the marriage, but it had lasted just long enough for Kit to get pregnant.
In 1943 she gave birth to a boy and, in spite of everything, named him after her soon-to-be-ex-husband.
Three years later, Kit married an army officer named Robert Gingrich, and Big Newt
allowed him to adopt Little Newtie to get out of paying child support. “Isn’t it awful,”
Kit said years later, “a man willing to sell off his own son?”

Long after Little Newtie became a politician, when he was nearly seventy and grasping
for his life’s ambition, he would say, “I grew up in kind of an idyllic children’s
background,” but that was on a presidential campaign video. The Gingriches lived above
a gas station on the main square in lower-middle-class Hummelstown, and life was narrow
and harsh and unforgiving. Little Newtie’s male relatives—farmers, industrial laborers,
highway workers—were hard, physical men. His stepfather (also adopted, like Little
Newtie, like Big Newt) was a tyrant around the house, silent and intimidating. Little
Newtie absorbed his stepfather’s code of toughness, but the pudgy, garrulous boy could
never talk his way into the affections of Lieutenant Colonel Bob Gingrich, so they
fought constantly. Kit was a manic depressive, spending most of her life tranquilized.
Little Newtie was a weird, myopic kid with no close friends. He sought out the older
women around him, who fed him sugar cookies and encouraged him to read. The boy who
would seem like a nine-year-old at fifty seemed fifty years old at nine. He escaped
from life into books and movies. He passionately loved animals, dinosaurs, ancient
history, and John Wayne heroes.

On a bright summer’s afternoon when Newt was ten, while his stepfather was stationed
in Korea, his mother let him ride the bus by himself into Harrisburg, where he watched
a double feature of African safari films. Newt came out into the sunlight at four
in the afternoon under the spell of crocodiles and rhinos and adventure, looked up,
and noticed a sign pointing down an alley:
CITY HALL
. Being mature beyond his years, he knew about the importance of citizenship. He was
directed to the Parks Department and tried to persuade an official that Harrisburg
should set aside money to build a zoo. The story made it onto the front page of the
local paper. That was the moment when Newt knew he was destined for leadership.

It took another five years before his mission became clear. At Easter in 1958, while
Newt’s stepfather was serving in France, the Gingriches visited Verdun—
l’enfer de Verdun
, total war. Forty years after World War I, the city still bore artillery wounds.
Newt wandered around the scarred battlefield and picked up a couple of rusted helmets
he found lying on the ground, which eventually made it onto his bedroom wall along
with a grenade fragment. He peered through a window into the Ossuary, where the bones
of more than a hundred thousand French and German soldiers lay in huge piles. He saw
that life was real. He saw that civilizations could die. He saw what could happen
when bad leaders failed to keep their countries safe. He realized that some people
had to be willing to give up their lives in order to protect their way of life.

He read Toynbee and Asimov, and his mind filled with visions of civilization in decay.
It could happen to America. He decided that he would not be a zoo director or paleontologist
after all. His future was in politics. Not as county administrator, or chairman of
the transportation committee, or secretary of defense, or even just as president.
He was going to be a Great Leader of his people. The models were Lincoln, Roosevelt,
and Churchill. (There would be a fourth, but he was still an ex-actor hosting
General Electric Theater
when Newt walked around Verdun.) He resolved to spend his life figuring out three
things: what America needed to survive, how he would persuade the American people
to let him provide it, and how he would keep his country free.

Decades later, Gingrich scrawled his destiny in notes on a classroom easel, like ancient
hieroglyphs in praise of a conquering warrior:

Gingrich—primary mission

Advocate of civilization

Definer of civilization

Teacher of the Rules of Civilization

Arouser of those who Fan Civilization

Organizer of the pro-civilization activists

Leader (Possibly) of the civilizing forces

A universal rather than an optimal Mission

But first, he had to get through the sixties.

When Bob Gingrich was sent home in 1960, Kit and her son joined him at Fort Benning,
Georgia, where Newt campaigned for Nixon against Kennedy. Nixon was his first political
interest, and Gingrich read everything he could find on him—another son of the lower
middle class, after all, another brooding loner with a hard father and more resentments
than friends, nurturing dreams of greatness. In November, Gingrich spent one of the
longest nights of his life by the radio listening to Nixon lose to Kennedy.

In high school he secretly dated his geometry teacher, Jackie Battley—seven years
his senior, another doting older woman. When Gingrich was nineteen, they married (Bob
Gingrich refused to attend), then had two daughters.

As a family man he wasn’t drafted, didn’t enlist, and never set foot in Vietnam. His
stepfather despised him for it: “He couldn’t see across the room. Flattest feet I’ve
ever seen. He’s physically incapable of doing military service.”

While Jackie worked, Gingrich studied history at Emory, went to Tulane for his Ph.D.,
became a campus activist. When the Tulane administration banned two pictures it considered
obscene from the school paper, Gingrich organized protests against the decision and
joined a sit-in. He was still a Republican, but he had reformist views on civil rights,
the environment, ethics in government. He read the Tofflers and became a futurist
nerd, a cheerleader for the information revolution. Most of all, he liked throwing
verbal rocks at established institutions. He had a favorite phrase, “corrupt elite,”
that could be hurled in any direction, and for the rest of his life he kept it in
his pocket. He would reach power denouncing the cesspool of the sixties and the liberals
who swam there, but the decade made him, too.

In 1970 he went back to Georgia and started teaching history at West Georgia College,
outside Atlanta. Immediately offered himself for the college presidency—was turned
down. In 1974 challenged the conservative Democrat in a district that had never sent
a Republican to Congress—lost in the Watergate wipeout. Ran again in 1976—lost again,
while a peanut farmer from Plains was elected president. “Gerald Ford personally cost
me a congressional seat,” he fumed. But Gingrich wasn’t about to run low on ambition.
And he was getting closer. When the incumbent announced his retirement, 1978 began
to look like Gingrich’s year. Gingrich and 1978 were made for each other.

He was something new in politics—a man of the New South (not really a southerner at
all), the modern, middle-class South of the space program and the gated community.
He didn’t make racial appeals, didn’t seem very religious. The suburbs north of Atlanta
were a mix of Norman Rockwell and fiber optics, the incarnation of a trend forecast
a decade earlier in Nixon’s 1968 campaign: an emerging Republican majority concentrated
in the Sunbelt. Gingrich, who loved aircraft carriers, moon launches, and personal
computers, understood these people.

In 1978, with vandalism in the cities, stagflation across the country, and a humorless
moralizer in the White House preaching sacrifice, the public’s mood was sour, frustrated,
suspicious of bureaucracies and special interests, antigovernment, antitax—populist
and conservative. Gingrich’s Democratic opponent was made to order, a wealthy liberal
female state senator originally from New York. Gingrich knew exactly what to do. He
moved to the right and went after her on welfare and taxes. He had a new rock in his
pocket, “the corrupt liberal welfare state,” and he nailed her between the eyes with
it. The Moral Majority was about to take Washington by storm, and Gingrich talked
about family values, said that his opponent would break her family up if she went
to Washington, and featured Jackie and the girls in his ads.

But Jackie looked fat and unattractive, and it was an open secret in political circles
that Newt was cheating on her. Like most Arousers of those who Fan Civilization, he
had powerful appetites, but he had not grown up to be the most desirable of men—big
head under big graying helmet, cold clever grin, belly pushing against his sky-blue
waistline—and his successes were limited. He tried to keep it to oral sex so he could
claim literal fidelity if anyone asked, but within two years the marriage was over,
another adoring woman about to become the next Mrs. Gingrich, the Advocate of civilization
standing at Jackie’s hospital bed as she lay recovering from uterine cancer, a yellow
legal pad with divorce terms in his hand. Years later, Gingrich would attribute his
indiscretions to hard work brought on by patriotic zeal.

Gingrich won easily in 1978, and his party picked up fifteen seats in the House (the
freshman class included Dick Cheney). It was a sign of what was coming in 1980.