After so many years in exile the Republicans were at the mercy of a system rigged by their enemies. They calculated that even when G.O.P. candidates captured 47% of the total U.S. vote, they won only 40% of the seats because of gerrymandered districts; Democrats then grudgingly offered them only 35% of the committee seats and 17% of the committee staff. The best a Republican Representative could hope was that if he went along most of the time without making too big a fuss, some Democratic committee chairman might occasionally feel generous and throw a few dollars to his district.

What the newcomers saw was the Stockholm syndrome at work, as the Republicans began to identify with their long-time captors. By its sheer existence, the obnoxious cos was threatening that cozy arrangement. Senior Republicans took newly elected ones aside and counseled that if they wanted to have any future in the House, they would do well to avoid the cos crowd. Time and again, Newt was told by his elders to sit down, shut up, quit making a fool of himself and the institution. But on he went.

Gingrich did not chair the Conservative Opportunity meetings, but he was the idea man, never showing up without a memo to distribute. The society wanted to finish the unfinished Reagan Revolution. Reagan had succeeded in taming the Soviet threat but had left the hated welfare state intact because the G.O.P. was unwilling to mud-wrestle the Democrats. In a 1986 interview with National Journal, Gingrich spoke of Reagan as a sort of John the Baptist figure, "the brilliant articulator of a vision that will take a generation to sort out."

While they had few sympathizers in the House, Gingrich and the cos were developing an audience outside it. The happiest coincidence of Gingrich's political career is the fact that he and the TV cameras arrived in that chamber the same year. In those days, the brightest and most ambitious in Congress made their reputations in the hearing rooms, by developing an expertise on one important issue. But exiled to such legislative backwaters as House Administration and the Joint Library Committee, Gingrich was never going to leave much of a mark that way. While most members avoided the House floor for all but votes, Gingrich and the cos seemed to live there. At night, for interminable hours after official business was done, they would rail on with only the weary doorkeepers there to hear them. Thanks to rules that kept the cameras fixed on the person who was doing the talking, millions of viewers had no idea that the orators were addressing a huge chamber full of empty leather seats.

Finally, an exasperated Speaker Tip O'Neill decided to call their bluff and order the cameras to pan the chamber. It amounted to a declaration of war, ultimately leading to an infamous 1984 showdown. O'Neill referred to one of Gingrich's antics as "the lowest thing I've seen in my 32 years in Congress." Whereupon Gingrich succeeded in having O'Neill formally disciplined for having made a personal criticism of a House member, Gingrich, on the floor. It was the first time a Speaker had been rebuked that way since the 1790s, and gleeful Republicans had television ads on the air within days. With that smirk that still drives the Democrats crazy, Gingrich announced: "I am now a famous person."

But that was just a momentary victory. It would take a little noticed defeat in the battle for a single congressional seat before most Republicans would begin to accept the unlikely and unliked Gingrich as their gladiator. The showdown came after the 1984 election, which left the result in Indiana's Eighth District too close to call. Incumbent Democrat Frank McCloskey had come out ahead in the initial balloting, but Republican challenger Richard McIntyre edged him out in two recounts. The House Democratic leadership ordered yet another count and put then Congressman Leon Panetta in charge of a three-member panel overseeing it. With two Democrats against a lone Republican, the minority party said they could predict the outcome, and they turned out to be right.

The fight was virtually ignored by the national press, but it would become the Republicans' Ruby Ridge--the kind of radicalizing event that would help elevate the party's most combative member to its leadership. Gingrich wrapped 30 years' worth of G.O.P. humiliation into this one dispute, comparing it at one point to the Holocaust. When the House voted along party lines to give the seat to McCloskey, Republicans walked out of the Chamber. Moments later they froze in disbelief as their leader, the affable Michel, returned and shook McCloskey's hand. "It validated Newt's thesis," Weber recalls. "The Democrats are corrupt, they are making us look like fools, and we are idiots to cooperate with them."

Gingrich is a man with a long memory; when he sits down these days to wrestle over the budget with Panetta, now White House chief of staff, that earlier showdown is never out of the Speaker's mind. "When Panetta stole the seat, we crossed a watershed," Gingrich says, "and we never returned." He ultimately got his revenge: McCloskey was a casualty of the 1994 Republican landslide.

Gingrich is now in a position to make himself the most powerful Speaker in modern history, largely because he succeeded in destroying another Speaker who had pursued the same ambition. In 1988 he took on Democrat Jim Wright, launching a yearlong ethics probe that ultimately brought Wright down. Gingrich's weapon of choice was always charges of corruption: by showing that the people who ran the system were venal, he could undermine the entire Democratic edifice. His favorite term for the House leadership: thugs. Wright, he flatly stated, was "the most corrupt Speaker in the 20th century," a man "so consumed by his own power that he is like Mussolini."

Gingrich needed to destroy Wright because they were after the same thing. Wright had begun to take the very steps Gingrich would take when he became Speaker: centralizing authority, reining in his committee chairmen, forcing discipline on unruly, self-interested Democrats. Even before Gingrich filed his initial ethics complaint, he told author John M. Barry that "if Wright survives this ethics thing, he may become the greatest Speaker since Henry Clay."

Against the advice of his Republican elders, Gingrich took on the fight. And by the time Wright resigned, House Republicans had elected Gingrich to their No. 2 post by a two-vote margin, carried by the faction that was tired of being beaten on every question and saw an opportunity to set a new, more activist agenda.

But there were many lawmakers who thought Gingrich was too flighty and volatile to be treated like a grownup. Paul Weyrich still sounds exasperated when he recalls Gingrich's early days: "The man had no organization; he was helter-skelter. Undisciplined. Unfocused, interesting, but not destined to accomplish much." Even as he was learning to be statesmanlike, to buckle down and count votes and hold his tongue when the circumstances required, he was working hard to recruit and train the G.O.P. troops who would eventually become his Republican Guard.