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Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House (R-GA), was the architect of the 1994 “Contract with America,” which helped the Republicans take over the majority in the House for the first time in 40 years. Though Gingrich left Congress in 1999, he has been a mainstay of conservative politics. After he returned to private life, Gingrich became a fellow at both the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Hoover Institution—two big guns in the conservative think-tank world—and a board member of the Clifford May-run Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative pressure group that claims to be the “only nonpartisan policy institute dedicated exclusively to promoting pluralism, defending democratic values, and fighting the ideologies that drive terrorism.”

When George W. Bush became president in 2001, Gingrich was tapped to serve on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (DPB), an advisory board for the Department of Defense to which a number of neoconservatives and hardline Republicans were appointed, including Richard Perle (as chairman), James Woolsey, Ken Adelman, Eliot Cohen, and Dan Quayle. When appointed in November 2001, Gingrich was one of eight Hoover Institution fellows given positions at the same time on the 31-member DPB.

In mid-2006, Gingrich appeared to begin fashioning himself as a potential Republic presidential nominee for 2008. At an AEI speech in mid-September 2006, Gingrich called the war on terror “World War III” and implied that he would be a more capable wartime leader than Bush. After the speech, the Weekly Standard published a glowing review: “His rivals should take note. The first speech of the 2008 presidential campaign was delivered on the fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001” (Weekly Standard, September 12, 2006). During the speech at AEI, Gingrich highlighted Iran as a primary target for a new U.S. intervention, a favorite position of neoconservatives. Describing Iran as “a dictatorship dedicated to Islamic Fascism and ... a mortal threat to our survival,” he called for using military force if necessary to change the country's regime: “If we do not stand up against a Holocaust-denying, genocide-proposing, publicly self-defined enemy of the United States, why should we expect anyone else to do so?”

As of February 2007, after many Republican and Democratic presidential hopefuls had already declared their candidacies, Gingrich remained uncommitted. Many observers, like the Washington Post's political reporter Lois Romano, speculated that he was not going to run (see “Post Politics Hour,” Washington Post, February 1, 2007). Gingrich's public activities, however, continued to indicate that he was considering a potential candidacy. In late January, for example, Gingrich joined several other likely Republican candidates—including former governors Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee—in speaking at the Conservative Summit in Washington. Gingrich took the opportunity to criticize the Republican Party, saying: “You have a Republican Party that resents ideas. We worked for 16 years to get a majority, which was thrown away” (Washington Post, January 28, 2007).

Gingrich was also a featured speaker at the Republican Party's annual retreat held in late January 2007. Reported the Post's Paul Kane: “Cloistered inside the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay Resort, Republicans spent Thursday in sessions looking back at 2006 and peering ahead to 2008. In between, they mixed in a lunchtime session with their onetime shepherd, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who urged the lawmakers to 'think outside the box'” (Washington Post, January 26, 2007).

After joining AEI's stable of rightist scholars, Gingrich became an important public mouthpiece for the neoconservative agenda, as illustrated by his support for a number of neoconservative-led pressure groups like the now-defunct Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and the recently revived Committee on the Present Danger.

During the immediate aftermath of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Gingrich joined many of his AEI colleagues in blaming the State Department and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell for many of the troubles the United States was facing in its relations with its allies and for undermining the foreign policy of the Bush administration. He also called a planned visit at the time by Powell to Syria “ludicrous,” despite the fact that Powell was going at Bush's request. When asked about the statement, a Pentagon spokesperson said, “Plain and simple, Gingrich speaks for Gingrich.” Paul Begala, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, remarked, “There's nothing the Democrats would like more” than to see Gingrich reemerge in the spotlight. “He's terribly bright, but he's more far right than he is bright. He's become the embodiment of what most Americans hate about right-wingers” (Chicago Sun-Times, April 27, 2003).

Gingrich maintains that the United States is confronting an existential threat in the war on terror. In a 2006 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Gingrich compared President Abraham Lincoln's preparations for the Civil War to President George W. Bush's efforts to prosecute the war on terror, arguing that where Lincoln succeeded, Bush was failing. Bush's strategies have three flaws, Gingrich opined: “(1) They do not define the scale of the emerging World War III, between the West and the forces of militant Islam, and so they do not outline how difficult the challenge is and how big the effort will have to be. (2) They do not define victory in this larger war as our goal, and so the energy, resources, and intensity needed to win cannot be mobilized. (3) They do not establish clear metrics of achievement and then replace leaders, bureaucrats, and bureaucracies as needed to achieve those goals” (Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2006).

In a September 14, 2006 Fox News appearance, Gingrich said: “I think we're seeing around the world an emerging Third World War from North Korea to Pakistan to India to Afghanistan to Iraq and Iran to the increasing alliance between Venezuela and Iran to the British terrorists who are getting trained in Pakistan. But I think if we could design powerful enough strategies, as we did in the Cold War to contain the Soviets, we might be able to avoid it actually degenerating into a world war.” Regime change in Iran and North Korea are solutions, Gingrich said, and criticized the Bush administration for its handling of the war on terror: “I don't think that the administration has yet come to grips with how big and complex this is.”

Gingrich's primary claim to fame has been the Republican Party's 1994 “Contract with America” slate of legislative proposals. Promoting the so-called contract, Gingrich used existential language similar to that which he employs today regarding the war on terror. He claimed that the key issue was “whether or not our civilization will survive,” arguing that “what is ultimately at stake ... is literally the future of American civilization as it has existed for the last several hundred years.” Such language, wrote the scholar Shadia Drury, is eerily reminiscent of the “sense of crisis” in Western civilization promoted by Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who was an early influence on many neoconservatives like Irving Kristol (see Leo Strauss and the American Right, pp. 21-22).

Gingrich, a historian, has written several books on politics and history. His 2005 Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America expanded his ideas from the previous decade. In it, according to his website, he “lays out the plan for America's greatness, including how to win the war on terror, reestablish God in American public life, reform Social Security, restore patriotism, and make American health care the global standard for excellence and accessibility.”

Gingrich's most recent book, Rediscovering God in America (2006, Integrity Publishers), is a paean to Christian Right arguments that liberals have weakened the United States by undermining the role of religion, specifically Christianity, in public life. In the opening of the book, which was on the New York Times top-35 bestselling nonfiction list in early February 2007, Gingrich argues: “There is no attack on American culture more deadly and more historically dishonest than the secular effort to drive God out of America's public life.” According to Publishers Weekly: “The book's arguments are predictable: Gingrich claims that references to God are sprinkled everywhere in our nation's founding documents; that most Americans believe in God; and our classrooms and courtrooms are the laboratories where such belief is being irrevocably eroded. He trots out quotations from founding fathers that suggest their allegiance to Christianity, or at least to theism, but conveniently ignores evidence that some of these men—particularly Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson—believed religion should have little, if any, role in the nation's government.”