Jackie Cushman, Newt Gingrich’s second daughter, tells National Review Online that her parents’ divorce, though painful, should not loom over her father as he pursues the presidency.
But Cushman acknowledges that the story of the divorce, and her father’s 1980 visit to Emory University Hospital to see her mother, Jackie Battley, has become political lore.
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Cushman sighs when I mention the November 1984 issue of Mother Jones.
For more than a quarter century, the magazine’s profile of her father has haunted Gingrich’s reputation. In the piece, her father’s associates claim that he approached his first wife, then battling cancer, with a “yellow legal pad” scribbled with a “list of things on how the divorce was going to be handled.”
Ever since the article was published, Gingrich has been accused, to various extents, of coolly and abruptly leaving his cancer-stricken wife for a much younger woman.
Cushman, who was 13 when her parents split, says she and her older sister, Kathy Lubbers, have for the most part moved on from their initial frustration with the Mother Jones story.
But as Gingrich continues to rise, Cushman hopes that “inaccurate” retelling — which she says skews and politicizes her parents’ conversations — will not define her father’s character.
“A lot of times, people have the wrong impression, repeating what they have heard,” Cushman says. “It’s very important that people understand what the truth is, and then they can decide.”
“This is a very private matter,” Cushman says. “Divorce is always painful; it’s never an easy thing. And that was a hard time for my family.” Yes, her parents argued, but to call her father a monster, she says, is a disservice to the “four people actually involved.”
Rather than walking out of his family’s life, Cushman says, Gingrich worked diligently to keep his daughters close after his marriage’s collapse. Three decades later, the episode has become a healed wound, she tells me, remembered but rarely discussed.
Gingrich, for his part, is a loving father and doting grandfather, Cushman says, inviting her two children, Maggie and Robert, to debates and playfully winking at them on live television.
Gingrich and his third wife, Callista, she adds, always send flowers to Maggie before recitals, a tradition Gingrich started with his own daughters. And though he is busy on the campaign trail, Gingrich, she says, takes care to visit the Cushman home near Atlanta “as often as he can.”
This changes nothing. Newt had a serial problem with infidelity for over 30 years. No new no-adultery pledge, or personal pleading from family will change the fact that Newt has significant character flaws which prevent him from being trusted with the presidency.
The $64 question is why anyone with any grasp of history trusts anyone with the metastasized powers of the presidency. Anyone holding the office should feel the press of a Sword of Damocles every hour of his tenure. The tenure of any president should be made at least as unpleasant as the campaign, lest they come to enjoy the job. Such a situation wold offer semi-permanent employment for the constellation of armchair umpires holding forth on the fitness or lack thereof of the assembled contestants as well as an outlet for what has become boring and repetitive invective.
A most interesting article-in a way this points out that more and more there are many of us who ourselves have or know of relatives or friends who have complicated personal lives. .
Well, first of all, no one is complaining about complicated. Complicated can be good or bad; we are complaining about Gingrich's wretched behavior. Second, we are not proposing to place our friends and relatives with complicated personal lives in the Presidency.
HC
Your comments read like you have intimate knowledge of the whole episode, and, with that insight, imply that it was a completely one sided affair. Anyone who has been through, or been close to a divorce knows that they are rarely one sided.
I won't defend Newt because I don't know, and frankly don't want to know, the details, but I'll take his daughters words over your (lack of) judgment any day.
And you would disregard the words of the second wife, for example? Why?
In any case, the daughter doesn't deny any of the basic facts, other than the fact that her mother didn't die. Who cares who filed the papers? I feel sorry for the daughter, who had to accept adultery in order to love her father.
In my opinion you don't need an "intimate knowledge" to conclude that Gingrich is a lying, hypocritical cad. All you need are the reported and undisputed facts. If he's not a creep, who is?
I would have to give all the credit there to the wife. (And why would the wife ever not have been viewed favorably, anyway? She didn't do anything wrong, as far as we know.)
Sorry. I appreciate what she's trying to do for her dad, and that it certainly may not preclude him from being a great president - but as far as a newsworthy rebuttal - it's weak tea.
A bunch of soft generalizations and vagaries about family and hard times just isn't going to cut it.
If this is the best they can do, they are in big trouble b/c it shows an underestimation of voters and grassroots opinion-makers.
He is an ego-maniacal serial marrier/divorcer with a only a casual relationship with political principles and integrity.
Going to have to do much, much better on this front.
It's not possible to do much better with the mess that is Newt Gingrich. He is who he is, and he does what he does. If conservatives abandon their principles for this guy, they'll regret it deeply -- profoundly, as Newt would say, quite frankly.
Adultery, twice. The denizens of the inner cities and trailer parks could learn a thing or two from Gingrich.
Does it matter? Yes, it does. Liberalism is like "the other woman" to Gingrich ... always worth a second look, an innocent flirtation, and then a full blown affair.
The mandate ... cap and trade ... expansion of entitlements ... the poor fellow just wants to be loved.
How desperate he must have been, to share a couch with Pelosi.
His rhetotic can be electrifying, but only in spasms. Most of the time this intellectual, this brain, is thinking deep and tortuous thoughts, i.e., trying to square circles and convince himself that Pelosi's right, that he's not left, that cheating isn't really cheating.
Remember Clinton's definition of "is"? Remember Gary Hart's definition of "marriage"?
In a nutshell, that's Gingrich.
There's a dismal lack of common sense in the man, which is so characteristic of an intellectual who sees more than is there in everything.
Reagan could tell you why adultery is wrong, and his policies were right, in a sentence or two. Gingrich can write a 100 page thesis on why the madate was conservative and a "market oriented" solution to whatever problem he set out to solve, and he can quote the Bible and the Summa to explain why his infidelities slipped through a theological loophole erasing the scarlet letter.
I agree - Newt's personal life has a bearing on his integrity or lack thereof, but there are plenty of other, more political reasons to oppose him as a candidate for President. Philosophically, he is hard to distinguish from Bill Clinton or perhaps, John McCain - about as far left as you can be while still remaining a Republican. But he triangulates, equivocates, and obfuscates so easily that Bill Clinton must be envious. For Newt, it all depends on your definition of the word "the".
Reagan was only divorced once -- everyone makes mistakes and the younger a person is the more likely they are to make a mistake.
Romney is too similar to McCain to run against Obama -- I believe we'll have the same result.
Newt will fight back. This is shaping up to be the nastiest election EVER and we need someone who will go toe-to-toe. Newt isn't perfect but he's far better than Obama.
Romney is similar to McCain? Gingrich is far more similar politically and in his messed up personal affairs to McCain. You're either stupid, or you just aren't paying attention.
Newt's flaws have been vetted so many times and his detractors, both on the right and left, have been chronicled. You can't have engaged in the political battles that he has without alienating some folks - like the old saw, in order to bake, you have to break some eggs.
I believe Newt is the man of the moment to "break some eggs", like the tax code, entitlements and spending. His past does NOT disqualify him from using that same past to take this nation in a new, freer, more federalist and capitalistic direction. The media and Obama's $1B assassination effort be damned! Newt can take it and prosper from it, exposing the shallow evil misleading of the left on the way.
Please explain how the kinds of acts discussed here -- those of adultery, hypocrisy, and abandonment of his family to serve his own need for gratification -- can be "us[ed] to take this nation in a new, freer, more federalist and capitalistic direction."
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