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Interview: Newt Gingrich comments on the legacy of Ronald Reagan, Iraq, health care, education and his new book

NPR Tavis Smiley June 11, 2004 | TAVIS SMILEY TAVIS SMILEY Tavis Smiley (NPR) 06-11-2004 Interview: Newt Gingrich comments on the legacy of Ronald Reagan, Iraq, health care, education and his new book

Host: TAVIS SMILEY Time: 9:00-10:00 AM

TAVIS SMILEY, host:

From NPR in Los Angeles, I’m Tavis Smiley. On today’s program, tough talk about Florida’s hopes to strike 48,000 possible felons from its voting rolls. Also, we’ll hear how record companies owe back pay for back play to scores of recording artists, and the first of a very special tribute to legendary singer, songwriter and performer, Ray Charles.

But, first, Newt Gingrich looks back at Reagan and ahead to Bush and Kerry. As Washington bids a final goodbye to President Ronald Reagan today, we turn to a politician who traces much of his political lineage to Reagan, the conservative activist, Reagan, the governor, and Reagan, the president. Newt Gingrich served as architect of the earth-shaking election of 1994 when the House of Representative went majority Republican for the first time in 40 years. Congressman Gingrich became speaker of the House shortly thereafter, and the speaker’s role has been filled by a Republican ever since. I spoke earlier with Newt Gingrich about a variety of issues. First, his ties back in the 1960s to the young and future president.

Mr. NEWT GINGRICH (Former Speaker of the House): I was a college student at Emory University in Atlanta, and I saw Ronald Reagan give the speech back in October of 1964 during the Goldwater campaign, 30 minutes on national television. And I was just blown away. And then three years later, in 1967, I was a graduate student in New Orleans at Tulane, and I watched a debate on the US foreign policy between Bobby Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. And Ronald Reagan did such a great job of defending and articulating America’s position that I became a Reaganite I think that night. And ever after, I paid attention to him, I studied him. And in 1974, the first time I ran for Congress, I had the privilege of spending about an hour with him one on one, talking about campaigning and getting his advice. And he was such a gentleman and he was so sincere. And he was willing to take a young guy who was going to get his tail beat that year and still put an entire hour just into one-on-one conversation. So I look back very fondly on a long period of some 40 years of having paid attention to Ronald Reagan.

SMILEY: One of your predecessors as speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, said that, of all the presidents he’d worked with and served under, Ronald Reagan was the worst president, but he went on to say that he would have made a great king. And also made the point that he was the most likeable, the most affable person you could have ever met and that part of his genius was that he was such a people person. But he, of course, didn’t see him as a great president. Talk to me about what you think made him such a wonderful people person. this web site newt gingrich bio

Mr. GINGRICH: Well, let me say, first of all, I mean, Tip O’Neill was the honest defender of the liberal system. I think he found himself fighting Reagan and losing, and I think some of his comments about that were he really did deeply disagree with what Reagan was trying to do. But I think history will record President Reagan as the second greatest president of the 20th century, after Franklin Delano Roosevelt who I think is the decisive president for the last 100 years. The reason I say that is I think that Reagan accomplished a number of very big things. He stood up for freedom. And, as a result, there are some 400 million people today in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, elsewhere who are free, who were living under tyranny and slavery in 1981. And that, by itself, is such an historic achievement. To have achieved that liberation without a war, to have been able to work with Mikhail Gorbachev who has given Reagan a great deal of credit–in fact, he said in one interview that Reagan was the only American president in his lifetime who could have pulled this off. Now to have Gorbachev say that is really quite an accomplishment on Reagan’s part.

SMILEY: I agree with you that we have to judge a great president, whatever the standard is. It seems to me the standard has to be on more than just their popularity, more than their likability. And you rate Mr. Reagan so highly because of his effectiveness. The people, his critics, in particular, who rate him not so highly rate him not so highly for the very same reason, that he was a likeable guy but that he was not effective in terms of making America better for all people, regardless of race, regardless of ethnicity, regardless of income. They don’t see him as a defender, as expanding opportunities, as FDR did, for all Americans.

Mr. GINGRICH: Well, I think that’s a fair criticism. I don’t think that President Reagan had a strategy for helping the poorest Americans rise. And I think that that was not–you know, he had focused his attention on foreign policy and on economic growth, and I think you would have answered in part that inheriting a country that had 22 percent interest rates and 13 percent inflation and 9 percent unemployment, that getting it back on track was probably the biggest single thing he did for the poor because he created an awful lot of jobs in the ’80s. But I do think that we have not had as aggressive and as positive an approach to really solving the problem, particularly of very hard-core poverty. I think we’ve done pretty well for people who are able to study and able to rise and able to go to work. But, as you well know, there’s a group of people in America who are really outside the system and who I think we need a lot more creative thought about how to help get them back in the system.

SMILEY: My sense is the Republican National Committee that the Bush White House is going to use, to their own end and for their own interest, of course, as the Democrats would if Reagan had been a Democrat, I suspect–but my sense is the Republicans are going to use this in a very, very shall we saw shrewd and effective way between now and Election Day, the memory, the legacy of Ronald Reagan. I can’t imagine now what’s not going to happen.

Mr. GINGRICH: Well, I’m sure I would if I were them. I mean, the Democrats got away with using Franklin Delano Roosevelt for 40 years and correctly so. He was, you know, the creator of the modern system and a man who got us through the Depression and got us through the Second World War. But I didn’t see any Democrat who was ever too shy about talking about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, so I suspect you may see a fair amount of George W. Bush explaining how much he admires Ronald Reagan and how much he has tried to follow the policies of Ronald Reagan. But I think–you know, in the end, I think the American people in 2004, while they’re very grateful and they look back with great sincerity and their heart goes out to Nancy Reagan, when they get around to voting, they’re going to want to know whether Bush or Kerry’s going to do more for them in the future, not who did something for them in the past. And I think the challenge to the Bush campaign and the challenge to the Kerry campaign is to give us an honest, positive explanation in a world that’s changing rapidly of how you are going to help us solve our problems so we can go into the future together. And I think the candidate who’s more effective at being positive is actually going to be the winner this fall, not the one who’s more effective at being negative.

SMILEY: Speaking of the future, let me throw a few issues at you. I cannot resist the opportunity to talk to you…

Mr. GINGRICH: I somehow knew you were going to do this, but go ahead.

SMILEY: Let me just throw a few words at you and give me some quick responses as to what you’d be saying if you were on the campaign trail. Let me start with health care.

Mr. GINGRICH: Well, I would be saying that every American ought to have an electronic health record, that we ought to shift to preventive care, that we need very big public policy changes to stop diabetes and obesity from ruining our young people, including, I think, going back to having daily physical education in K through 12 and I think, frankly, taking all these soft drink machines out of the schools or requiring them to have drinks that are healthy and not have young kids getting filled up with sugar water in a way that is clearly helping lead to obesity. Now that’s pretty controversial itself.

I would also say if we go to electronic health records and we use information technology–and Hillary Clinton recently commented on this in The New York Times and quoted my book, “Saving Lives and Saving Money” that you and I have discussed before very favorably–we could save enough money to provide for insurance through tax credits for every American. I think our goal should be to have no Americans without insurance, and I think that there’s a way to get that done. And I think that we’ve got to really rethink health care and not just play around with Band-Aids at the margin because the system isn’t working right today. It’s killing people unnecessarily, it’s bankrupting people unnecessarily and I am for a very profound transformation in health. newtgingrichbio.com newt gingrich bio

SMILEY: I’ve only got a couple minutes left here and I want to get to this new book you have coming out but a couple other issues right quick: Iraq.

Mr. GINGRICH: Well, I think on Iraq, they’re finally on the right track which is to put the Iraqis in charge of Iraq and have Iraqis govern themselves and have Iraqis patrolling their own streets. And the faster we get American troops off the street and put them in air bases outside the cities and get them out of the cities, the better off we’re going to be. In Afghanistan, we put Karzai in charge of the country within three weeks of having won that war. It’s taken us a year to do the same thing in Iraq, and I think that was a big mistake.

SMILEY: The economy.

Mr. GINGRICH: Oh, the economy’s going to keep getting better. I think one of the problems that the Democrats are going to have this fall is that they yelled, `Jobs, jobs, jobs’ all last year, and every month now you’re getting 200,000, 250,000 jobs being created. I think it gets harder and harder to explain that people are unhappy with the economy, although I think gas prices are a problem. And my hunch is that you’re going to see gas prices come down during the summer and early fall.

SMILEY: Last: education.

Mr. GINGRICH: I am for rethinking it from the ground up. I’ve been talking to some folks about a program called KIPP, K-I-P-P, which is a school system that is now in Houston and Washington, DC and a number of other cities. Well, it’s apparently doing a brilliant job of taking kids in the inner-city who are scoring in the 30th percentile, putting them in a very, very disciplined environment where the teacher, the student and the parent all sign contracts, and moving these kids up into the mid-70s and higher in terms of their achievements. Dramatic, dramatic change. Almost all of them end up with scholarships to private high schools and really the beginning of a new approach. I think we’ve got to face up to how much change there has to be if education’s ever going to work again.

SMILEY: You continue to write these wonderful books, the new one, “Grant Comes East.” What’s this one about?

Mr. GINGRICH: Well, this one I think you’ll find particularly interesting. In our first book on the Civil War, “Gettysburg,” we had Lee win at Gettysburg to show that the South could have won, but we didn’t assume that that meant the South would have won the war. In “Grant Comes East,” we have–Lee now has won in the East. He’s trying to knock Lincoln out of the war. He tries to take Washington, can’t do it and then he goes towards Baltimore. And here’s where I think we could have a great conversation sometime because we raise the question that I don’t think anybody’s ever raised that I’m aware of: If you were a free African-American and you were in Baltimore in 1863 and the army of Northern Virginia is coming your way, what’s your attitude going to be? It’s going to be terror because you don’t want to be sold into slavery, you don’t want to be scooped up.

And so I think we deal more directly with the issue of slavery at a personal level than any military book I know of about the Civil War. And we also deal directly with the impact of the African-American troops in the Union Army. By the end of the war, you know, there are 180,000 African-American soldiers and 10,000 African-American sailors, and they’re a very major part about why the North won the war. And we take this in a very, I think, dynamic way and show people in “Grant Comes East” the complexities of the war at levels that I think are much more interesting and much more emotionally complex than you see in a lot of battle books.

SMILEY: Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and now senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, author of the new book “Grant Comes East,” a novel about the Civil War.

Mr. Speaker, nice to talk to you. We’ll do it on TV.

Mr. GINGRICH: Good talking to you. Take care, Tavis.

SMILEY: It’s 19 minutes past the hour.

TAVIS SMILEY