WASHINGTON - For almost as long as Newt Gingrich has been in public life, an unflattering story has shadowed him: That as a rising young Republican congressman from Georgia, Gingrich ended his first marriage by serving his wife with divorce papers while she lay in a hospital bed dying of cancer.
The story has been trumpeted by Gingrich's political opponents, endlessly recycled by the news media and repeated even by would-be allies, including social conservatives, who have long had doubts about the thrice-married former House speaker. As candidate Gingrich has risen to the top of some polls in the past few weeks, the story has inevitably surfaced again. Variations have turned up on MSNBC and in National Journal, various columns and blogs and two British newspapers in just the past week.
Over the years, Gingrich himself has declined to comment on the story's details, although when asked about his divorces and extramarital relationships, Gingrich has usually relied on some variation of the comment he made to the New York Times earlier this year: "There are things in my life I'm not proud of, and there are things in my life I'm very proud of."
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Yet while the thrust of the story about his first divorce is not in dispute - Gingrich's first wife, Jackie Battley, has said previously that the couple discussed their divorce while she was in the hospital in 1980 - aspects appear to have been distorted.
Most significantly, Battley wasn't dying; she is alive today. Nor was the divorce discussion in the hospital "a surprise," as many accounts have contended. Battley, not Gingrich, had requested a divorce months earlier, according to Jackie Gingrich Cushman, the couple's second daughter. Further, Gingrich did not serve his wife with divorce papers on the day of his visit.
Gingrich's marriage to Battley had been troubled for many years before it dissolved 31 years ago, both parties have said. Battley, who is seven years older than Gingrich, had been Gingrich's high-school math teacher in Columbus, Ga. They began dating after he graduated and were married in 1962, when Gingrich was 19.
In time, the marriage grew contentious, and the couple spent several years in counseling. In the spring of 1980, Gingrich left her, Battley told The Washington Post in 1985. Around this time, the couple told their children, then ages 16 and 13, they intended to divorce, Cushman wrote in a syndicated column in May (none of the family members nor Gingrich would comment for this article).
According to the first published account of the visit - a story by David Osborne in Mother Jones magazine in November 1984 - Gingrich went to Battley's room with a yellow legal pad on which he had written a list of items related to the handling of the divorce.
Osborne attributed this anecdote to Lee Howell, Gingrich's former press secretary, whom he quoted as saying, "He wanted her to sign (the list). She was still recovering from surgery, still sort of out of it, and he comes in with a yellow sheet of paper, handwritten, and wants her to sign it."
In an interview last week, Osborne said Battley confirmed the story when he interviewed her for his article. He also said Gingrich never explicitly disputed Howell's account.
In a follow-up story in The Washington Post in early 1985, two months after Mother Jones' story was published, some elements of the story were different. The yellow legal pad wasn't mentioned.
"The two girls came to see me, and said Daddy is downstairs and could he come up," Battley told Post reporter Lois Romano at the time. "When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from surgery."
Battley could not be reached for comment.
In any case, Osborne said he's seen nothing to suggest what he described 27 years ago is essentially in error.
