Herhold: An old exposé continues to haunt Newt Gingrich

Depending on whose poll you believe, Newt Gingrich is number one or two in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Good on his feet, a clever debater, fearless enough to take on his questioners, Gingrich still summons the red-meat crowd to ovations.

But for those who know him well, Gingrich has always had a problem with consistency, not just on political issues (was he for the Libyan intervention or against it?), but more particularly in his personal life.

More than anything else, one devastating detail has haunted the former House speaker. It is that he went to his first wife’s hospital room when she was recovering from tumor-removal surgery — and brought along a yellow legal pad to discuss divorce.

That detail, which was carefully attributed to an early Gingrich press secretary, Lee Howell, has a local tendril. It first appeared in a 1984 exposé of Gingrich in Mother Jones magazine by a writer named David Osborne, a 1969 graduate of San Jose’s Pioneer High School. (Longtime readers know that the local angle is critical in this space.)

Titled “Newt Gingrich: Shining Knight of the Post-Reagan Right,” Osborne’s piece depicted a conscience-free man who led a messy private life while selling himself as a champion of family values.

Given that Gingrich is soaring again, I contacted Osborne, who, after writing a best-seller called “Reinventing Government” in the early ’90s, is now a senior partner of the Massachusetts-based Public Strategies Group, a consulting firm.

After graduating from Pioneer, where he was student body president, Osborne went on to Stanford and graduated with honors. Over the years, Osborne has returned from time to time to San Jose, and he recently helped move his mother out of the family’s longtime home.

We talked a little about Gingrich’s character: “He’s not like you and me,” Osborne said. “Psychologically, he’s a fascinating and warped person. He’s very smart; he’s a charismatic speaker. But he knows how to manipulate people. And he will say whatever he needs to say to get power.”

Did Gingrich rebut the story or its details? (His campaign has said there was no yellow legal pad, only an argument.) “He admitted it all in general,” Osborne said. “Then, when he was talking to the local press, he’d say, ‘Well, that’s not true.’ I had reporters call me up, and I’d play them a tape.”

You can read the article, which explores the dissatisfaction with Gingrich in Georgia, at http://motherjones.com/print/14907. It has one salacious anecdote that I cannot repeat in a family paper.

Osborne also had one detail that he did not include in the piece. In his talks with Gingrich’s first wife, Jackie, she told Osborne that Gingrich was almost perfectly described in a 1956 book, “The Ninth Wave,” by Eugene Burdick, who later cowrote the popular novel “Fail-Safe.”

In “The Ninth Wave,” Burdick created the character of an up-and-coming political operator named Mike, who, like Gingrich, considered himself an expert on polling. More telling was his philosophy: Mike believed that if you find what people fear, you can control them. “Everybody,” Mike says, “is always scared of something.”

Contact Scott Herhold at sherhold@mercurynews.com or 408-275-0917.