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The truth about Newt and his cancer-stricken wife - Newt Gingrich - Salon.com
"For almost three decades, Newt Gingrich has been dogged by a single devastating anecdote from his past, one that has been repeated in the national press hundreds of times and that has arguably come to define his political persona. After being elected to Congress in 1978 on a family values platform, the story goes, he visited his wife Jackie, who was in the hospital recovering from an operation for uterine cancer, and demanded that she discuss terms of their divorce.
It's a story that, remarkably, Gingrich disputes to this day. Testament to how deeply it has reverberated, some version of the story -- often rendered as Gingrich "serving divorce papers" to his wife in the hospital -- has been cited in the last month alone by Slate, MSNBC, Politico, Commentary and the New York Times, among other outlets.
The pattern of attention on the episode when Gingrich is in the news -- this time for exploring a presidential bid -- has been repeated ever since the anecdote originally appeared in the first big national profile of the then-Georgia congressman. That was a 1984 piece in Mother Jones written by David Osborne and headlined "Newt Gingrich: Shining Knight of the Post-Reagan Right."
"For almost three decades, Newt Gingrich has been dogged by a single devastating anecdote from his past, one that has been repeated in the national press hundreds of times and that has arguably come to define his political persona. After being elected to Congress in 1978 on a family values platform, the story goes, he visited his wife Jackie, who was in the hospital recovering from an operation for uterine cancer, and demanded that she discuss terms of their divorce.
It's a story that, remarkably, Gingrich disputes to this day. Testament to how deeply it has reverberated, some version of the story -- often rendered as Gingrich "serving divorce papers" to his wife in the hospital -- has been cited in the last month alone by Slate, MSNBC, Politico, Commentary and the New York Times, among other outlets.
The pattern of attention on the episode when Gingrich is in the news -- this time for exploring a presidential bid -- has been repeated ever since the anecdote originally appeared in the first big national profile of the then-Georgia congressman. That was a 1984 piece in Mother Jones written by David Osborne and headlined "Newt Gingrich: Shining Knight of the Post-Reagan Right."