Word: gingriched
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...accounts the kind of popular, high-energy teacher who could get kids to come to a 7 a.m. class. He took his class canoeing in the Okefenokee Swamp or on field trips to Copper Hill, which he called "a famous industrial-pollution site in Chattanooga." Gingrich's effort to build such a large student following had a pragmatic side to it--a number of his students eventually became the ground troops in his campaigns for Congress...
...fellow professors had nicknamed him Mr. Truth. Any time Gingrich finished reading a new book, recalls his mentor and friend, history professor Floyd Hoskins, he would come flying into the history department, brandishing the volume and declaring, "This book is THE TRUTH! It's the BEST BOOK I EVER READ...
These were, as he might say, fluid years for Gingrich. As a student and, later, professor, Gingrich was no conservative firebrand; at Tulane, he admits, he smoked pot; protested the Administration's decision to censor a photo of a nude sculpture in the school newspaper, the Hullabaloo; and generally maintained a high profile as a Rockefeller Republican, serving as the Louisiana coordinator of that campaign in 1968. At West Georgia he started the environmental-studies program, an outpost on the lefty fringes of academia...
...Gingrich saw his big opening in 1974, when he challenged Sixth District Congressman Jack Flynt, a silver-haired, small-town patrician, very much part of the Democratic establishment. Flynt was no raving segregationist, but unlike Gingrich, he declined to talk racial justice, the environment and other populist themes. In this situation, Gingrich, with his bushy black hair, sideburns and citrus-colored double knits, came off to most people as the more liberal of the pair. He charged that Flynt was in cahoots with the lobbyists. One Gingrich campaign piece proclaimed, "Newt Gingrich ... his special interest...
...there were many lawmakers who thought Gingrich was too flighty and volatile to be treated like a grownup. Paul Weyrich still sounds exasperated when he recalls Gingrich's early days: "The man had no organization; he was helter-skelter. Undisciplined. Unfocused, interesting, but not destined to accomplish much." Even as he was learning to be statesmanlike, to buckle down and count votes and hold his tongue when the circumstances required, he was working hard to recruit and train the G.O.P. troops who would eventually become his Republican Guard...