The Unwinding Read online

  Decades later, Dean kept a black-and-white picture in a frame on his fireplace mantel. A boy with a bowl of shiny black hair cut straight above his eyes, wearing a dark suit with narrow pants that were too short for him, was squinting in the sunlight and hugging a Bible against his chest with both arms, as if for protection. Next to him stood a little girl in a lace-collared dress. It was April 6, 1971. Dean was a few weeks shy of eight, and he was about to give his life to Jesus and be saved. During the seventies, Dean’s father had a series of small churches in little towns, and in each church his dogmatism and rigidity created a rift in the congregation. Each time, the church members voted on whether to keep him as their preacher, and sometimes they went for him and sometimes against him, but he always ended up leaving (for he would get restless, he wanted to be a Jerry Falwell, leading a church that had thousands of members) with hard feelings on all sides. Eventually he had trouble getting another church. He would visit a new town and try out for the job by preaching a sermon, always fire and brimstone, only to be voted down. There was one church in particular, Davidson Memorial Baptist Church, down in Cleveland County, which he’d had his heart set on, and after failing to get that pulpit he never really recovered.

  From his father Dean acquired ambition and a love of reading. He went straight through the family’s set of World Book encyclopedias from beginning to end. One night at dinner, when he was around nine or ten, the subject of his ambitions for the future came up. “Well, what do you want to do?” Dean’s father said with a sneer.

  “I’d like to be a brain surgeon, a neurologist,” Dean said. It was a word he’d learned in the encyclopedia. “That’s really what I think I’d like to do.”

  His father laughed in his face. “You got as much chance of being a neurologist as I’ve got to flying to the moon.”

  Dean’s father could be funny and kindhearted, but not with Dean, and Dean hated him for being a quitter and for being cruel. He heard his father preach many sermons, even a few on street corners in Madison, but on some level he didn’t believe them because the meanness and the beatings at home made his father a hypocrite in the pulpit. As a boy, Dean loved baseball more than anything else. In seventh grade he was intimidated by girls, and at ninety pounds soaking wet he was too skinny to play football, but he was a pretty good shortstop at Madison-Mayodan Middle School. In 1976 there were black and white boys on the team, and his father didn’t want him around the black boys. To get Dean away from them, and to win points with his congregation of the moment, Dean’s father pulled him out of public school (Dean begged him not to) and sent him to Gospel Light Christian, a strict, all-white Independent Fundamental Baptist school in Walkertown, a two-hour bus ride from the parsonage on Mayodan Mountain where the Prices then lived. That was the end of Dean’s baseball career, and of his black friends. When Dean was in tenth grade, his father started teaching American and Bible history at Gospel Light, and it would have been easy enough for him to let Dean play baseball after school and then drive the boy home at the end of the day, but his father insisted on leaving school at three o’clock so he could go home and read in his study. It was as if Dean was the competition in the family, and his father had the upper hand and wouldn’t give an inch.

  When Dean was seventeen, his father quit the church on Mayodan Mountain and moved the family out to the eastern part of the state, near Greenville, where he took the pulpit of a small church in the town of Ayden. It was his last one. After four months there, Minister Price was sent packing, and the family went back to Rockingham County. They had very little money and moved into Dean’s mother’s family house on Route 220, outside the little town of Stokesdale, a few miles south of Madison. Dean’s grandmother Ollie Neal lived in an apartment they had built in back, and behind the house was the tobacco farm that his grandfather, Birch Neal, had won in a card game in 1932, when Route 220 was a dirt road.

  By then, Dean wanted only to escape his father’s dominion. When he turned eighteen, he drove to Winston-Salem and met with a Marine recruiter. He was supposed to return the next morning to enlist, but overnight he changed his mind. He wanted to see the world and live life to its fullest, but he would do it on his own.

  At the time Dean graduated from high school, in 1981, the best job around was making cigarettes at the huge R.J. Reynolds factories in Winston-Salem. If you got a job there you were set for life, with good pay and benefits plus two cartons of cigarettes a week. That’s where the B students ended up. The C and D students went to work at the textile mills, where the pay was lower—DuPont and Tultex in Martinsville, Dan River in Danville, Cone in Greensboro, or one of the smaller mills around Madison—or in the furniture factories down in High Point and up in Martinsville and Bassett, Virginia. The A students—three in his class—went to college. (Thirty years later, at his high school reunion, Dean found that his classmates had grown fat and were working in pest control or peddling T-shirts at carnivals. One guy, a career employee at R.J. Reynolds, had lost a job he’d believed to be secure and never got over it.)

  Dean never applied himself in school, and the summer after graduating he got a job in the shipping department of a copper tube factory in Madison. He made damn good money for 1981, but it was the kind of job he’d always feared ending up in—the lifers around him with no ambition, spending their days talking about drinking, racing, and fucking. Dean hated it so much that he decided to go to college.

  The only one his father would help pay for was Bob Jones University, a Bible school in South Carolina. Bob Jones barred interracial dating and marriage, and in early 1982, a few months after Dean enrolled, the school became national news when the Reagan administration challenged an IRS decision that had denied Bob Jones tax-exempt status. After a storm of criticism, Reagan reversed himself. According to Dean, Bob Jones was the only college in the world where the barbed wire around the campus was turned inward, not outward, like at a prison. The boys had to keep their hair above their ears, and the only way to communicate with the girls on the other side of campus was to write a note and put it in a box that a runner would take from dorm to dorm. The only thing Dean liked about Bob Jones was singing old hymns in morning chapel, like “Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow.” He stopped going to class and failed every course his first semester.

  At Christmas, he came home and told his father that he was quitting school and moving out of the house. His father slapped him silly, knocked him to the floor. Dean got up and said, “If you ever touch me again I will kill you, I promise you that.” It was the last time he ever lived under his father’s roof.

  After Dean moved out, his father went into a downward spiral. He took oxycodone pills by the handful, for back pain, headaches, and other real or invented ailments, prescribed by a dozen different doctors who didn’t know about the others. Dean’s mother found pills hidden in his suit pockets, stashed away in garbage bags. They gave his father a vacant look and wore away his stomach lining. He would retreat into his study as if to read one of his religious books, but that was where he’d pop some oxycodone and zone out. He was admitted into rehab several times.

  Out in the world, Dean went hog wild. He quickly discovered the pleasures of alcohol, gambling, marijuana, fighting, and women. His first girl was a minister’s daughter, and he lost his virginity right under the church piano. He was full of rebellion and wanted no part of his father’s God. “I was a shit-ass,” Dean said. “I had no respect for anybody.” He moved to Greensboro and shared a house with a pothead. For a while he had a job as the assistant golf pro at the Greensboro Country Club for a hundred twenty dollars a week. In 1983, when he was twenty, he decided to go back to college and enrolled at the state university in Greensboro. It took Dean six years of bartending to graduate—at one stage his education was interrupted by a five-month trip with his best friend, Chris, to California, where they lived in a VW bus and pursued girls and good times—but in 1989 he finally earned his degree, in political science.

  Dean was a registered Rep
ublican, and Reagan was his idol. To Dean, Reagan was like a soothing grandfather: he had that ability to communicate and inspire people, like when he spoke about “a city upon a hill.” It was something Dean thought he could do as well, since he was a good speaker and came from a family of preachers. When Reagan talked, you trusted him, and he gave you hope that America could be great again. He was the only politician who ever made Dean want to become one himself—an idea that ended the week he was busted for smoking pot on the steps of a campus building and arrested a few days later for driving under the influence.

  He had told himself that he would see the world, and after graduating, Dean bummed around Europe for a few months, sleeping in hostels and sometimes even on park benches. But he was still ambitious—“insanely ambitious,” he liked to say. When he came home, he decided to look for the best job with the best company that he could find.

  In his mind, that had always been Johnson & Johnson, up in New Jersey. The employees at Johnson & Johnson wore blue suits, they were clean, articulate, well paid, they drove company cars and had health benefits. Dean moved to Philadelphia with a girlfriend and set out to meet anyone who worked at the company. His first contact was a fellow with perfectly combed blond hair, in a blue seersucker suit, white shoes, and a bow tie—the sharpest dresser Dean had ever seen. He called the corporate offices almost every day of the week, he went in for seven or eight interviews, he spent a year trying to will himself into a job, and in 1991 Johnson & Johnson finally submitted and made him a pharmaceutical rep in Harrisburg. Dean bought a blue suit and cut his hair short and tried to lose the southern accent, which he thought would be taken for backwardness. He was given a pager and a computer, and he drove around in a company car from one doctor’s office to another, sometimes eight a day, with samples of drugs, explaining the benefits and side effects.

  It didn’t take him long to realize that he hated the job. At the end of every day, he had to report back to the office about every stop he’d made. He was a robot, a number, and the company was Big Brother watching. Any personal initiative was frowned on if it didn’t fit the Johnson & Johnson mold. After eight months, less time than he’d spent trying to get the position, Dean quit.

  He had bought into a lie: go to college, get a good education, get a job with a Fortune 500 company, and you’d be happy. He had done all that and he was miserable. He’d gotten out of his father’s house only to find another kind of servitude. He decided to start over and do things his own way. He would become an entrepreneur.

  TOTAL WAR: NEWT GINGRICH

  Big Newt McPherson was a bar brawler in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, during World War II. On the third morning after he married Kit Daugherty, a sixteen-year-old housecleaner, Big Newt’s young bride tried to wake him up from a hangover, and he punched her. That was the end of the marriage, but it had lasted just long enough for Kit to get pregnant. In 1943 she gave birth to a boy and, in spite of everything, named him after her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Three years later, Kit married an army officer named Robert Gingrich, and Big Newt allowed him to adopt Little Newtie to get out of paying child support. “Isn’t it awful,” Kit said years later, “a man willing to sell off his own son?”

  Long after Little Newtie became a politician, when he was nearly seventy and grasping for his life’s ambition, he would say, “I grew up in kind of an idyllic children’s background,” but that was on a presidential campaign video. The Gingriches lived above a gas station on the main square in lower-middle-class Hummelstown, and life was narrow and harsh and unforgiving. Little Newtie’s male relatives—farmers, industrial laborers, highway workers—were hard, physical men. His stepfather (also adopted, like Little Newtie, like Big Newt) was a tyrant around the house, silent and intimidating. Little Newtie absorbed his stepfather’s code of toughness, but the pudgy, garrulous boy could never talk his way into the affections of Lieutenant Colonel Bob Gingrich, so they fought constantly. Kit was a manic depressive, spending most of her life tranquilized. Little Newtie was a weird, myopic kid with no close friends. He sought out the older women around him, who fed him sugar cookies and encouraged him to read. The boy who would seem like a nine-year-old at fifty seemed fifty years old at nine. He escaped from life into books and movies. He passionately loved animals, dinosaurs, ancient history, and John Wayne heroes.

  On a bright summer’s afternoon when Newt was ten, while his stepfather was stationed in Korea, his mother let him ride the bus by himself into Harrisburg, where he watched a double feature of African safari films. Newt came out into the sunlight at four in the afternoon under the spell of crocodiles and rhinos and adventure, looked up, and noticed a sign pointing down an alley: CITY HALL. Being mature beyond his years, he knew about the importance of citizenship. He was directed to the Parks Department and tried to persuade an official that Harrisburg should set aside money to build a zoo. The story made it onto the front page of the local paper. That was the moment when Newt knew he was destined for leadership.

  It took another five years before his mission became clear. At Easter in 1958, while Newt’s stepfather was serving in France, the Gingriches visited Verdun—l’enfer de Verdun, total war. Forty years after World War I, the city still bore artillery wounds. Newt wandered around the scarred battlefield and picked up a couple of rusted helmets he found lying on the ground, which eventually made it onto his bedroom wall along with a grenade fragment. He peered through a window into the Ossuary, where the bones of more than a hundred thousand French and German soldiers lay in huge piles. He saw that life was real. He saw that civilizations could die. He saw what could happen when bad leaders failed to keep their countries safe. He realized that some people had to be willing to give up their lives in order to protect their way of life.

  He read Toynbee and Asimov, and his mind filled with visions of civilization in decay. It could happen to America. He decided that he would not be a zoo director or paleontologist after all. His future was in politics. Not as county administrator, or chairman of the transportation committee, or secretary of defense, or even just as president. He was going to be a Great Leader of his people. The models were Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Churchill. (There would be a fourth, but he was still an ex-actor hosting General Electric Theater when Newt walked around Verdun.) He resolved to spend his life figuring out three things: what America needed to survive, how he would persuade the American people to let him provide it, and how he would keep his country free.

  Decades later, Gingrich scrawled his destiny in notes on a classroom easel, like ancient hieroglyphs in praise of a conquering warrior:

  Gingrich—primary mission

  Advocate of civilization

  Definer of civilization

  Teacher of the Rules of Civilization

  Arouser of those who Fan Civilization

  Organizer of the pro-civilization activists

  Leader (Possibly) of the civilizing forces

  A universal rather than an optimal Mission

  But first, he had to get through the sixties.

  When Bob Gingrich was sent home in 1960, Kit and her son joined him at Fort Benning, Georgia, where Newt campaigned for Nixon against Kennedy. Nixon was his first political interest, and Gingrich read everything he could find on him—another son of the lower middle class, after all, another brooding loner with a hard father and more resentments than friends, nurturing dreams of greatness. In November, Gingrich spent one of the longest nights of his life by the radio listening to Nixon lose to Kennedy.

  In high school he secretly dated his geometry teacher, Jackie Battley—seven years his senior, another doting older woman. When Gingrich was nineteen, they married (Bob Gingrich refused to attend), then had two daughters.

  As a family man he wasn’t drafted, didn’t enlist, and never set foot in Vietnam. His stepfather despised him for it: “He couldn’t see across the room. Flattest feet I’ve ever seen. He’s physically incapable of doing military service.”

  While Jackie worked, Gingrich studied history at E
mory, went to Tulane for his Ph.D., became a campus activist. When the Tulane administration banned two pictures it considered obscene from the school paper, Gingrich organized protests against the decision and joined a sit-in. He was still a Republican, but he had reformist views on civil rights, the environment, ethics in government. He read the Tofflers and became a futurist nerd, a cheerleader for the information revolution. Most of all, he liked throwing verbal rocks at established institutions. He had a favorite phrase, “corrupt elite,” that could be hurled in any direction, and for the rest of his life he kept it in his pocket. He would reach power denouncing the cesspool of the sixties and the liberals who swam there, but the decade made him, too.

  In 1970 he went back to Georgia and started teaching history at West Georgia College, outside Atlanta. Immediately offered himself for the college presidency—was turned down. In 1974 challenged the conservative Democrat in a district that had never sent a Republican to Congress—lost in the Watergate wipeout. Ran again in 1976—lost again, while a peanut farmer from Plains was elected president. “Gerald Ford personally cost me a congressional seat,” he fumed. But Gingrich wasn’t about to run low on ambition. And he was getting closer. When the incumbent announced his retirement, 1978 began to look like Gingrich’s year. Gingrich and 1978 were made for each other.

  He was something new in politics—a man of the New South (not really a southerner at all), the modern, middle-class South of the space program and the gated community. He didn’t make racial appeals, didn’t seem very religious. The suburbs north of Atlanta were a mix of Norman Rockwell and fiber optics, the incarnation of a trend forecast a decade earlier in Nixon’s 1968 campaign: an emerging Republican majority concentrated in the Sunbelt. Gingrich, who loved aircraft carriers, moon launches, and personal computers, understood these people.