All that changed in 1986, when Gingrich took over as general chairman of GOPAC, the machinery created in 1979 to help get Republicans into state and local office. He made himself available to G.O.P. candidates in weekly conference calls, mailing them his audiotapes and appearing in person in their districts. His coaching didn't just help them get elected; it also helped hone their message, so that Republican candidates all across the country would be hitting the same themes, with the same language, and creating an impression of a growing consensus in the party.

"We are on the way to becoming the Bell Labs of politics," he once declared. "The first thing you need at Bell Labs is a Thomas Edison, and the second thing you need is a real understanding of how you go from scientific theory to a marketable product." Divisive issues such as abortion were explicitly avoided; the focus was on strategy, not philosophy. Gingrich taught his acolytes "our rhythm and style," how to use his serrated language to cut their opponents; Democrats were to be described as traitors and with such adjectives as sick, corrupt and bizarre. Gingrich eventually became such a cult figure among young Republicans that supporters considered publishing a comic book with him as the hero fighting bureaucratic bloat.

In the long, happy sessions spent dreaming about what he would do when he was king, Gingrich put everything on the table. At one "ideas meeting" of GOPAC charter members, he suggested that the government should offer an $8 billion reward, tax-free, to the first private enterprise that could put people into lunar orbit. And he even tried selling it as a deficit-reduction strategy. "If they do it, they just pre-empted nasa's $140 billion program. We saved $132 billion," he said.

Within a year of becoming minority whip, Gingrich was already obsessed with the next job, which became clear when President Bush and congressional leaders met to hash out a deal to reduce the deficit by $500 billion over five years. This was the first time Gingrich was invited to sit with the grownups. If his goal had been to perform as a successful whip who rounds up the troops and keeps them in the party line, he would have used all his energy to support the deal Bush, Dole and minority leader Bob Michel worked out. But Gingrich had a different success in mind; faced with the devil's bargain of raising taxes to reduce the deficit, Gingrich declared war on his own party's President. In a stunning vote, 105 House Republicans sided with Gingrich to defeat the plan; only 71 voted with Bush. "I was astonished that they didn't understand we were the party of no taxes," Gingrich says. "I do think the actual fight was one of the saddest things I've ever been involved in."

The decision was certainly a gamble; he burned the President, the minority leader and many fellow lawmakers who took Gingrich's disloyalty as a sign that he was unfit for leadership. But by refusing to perform his role as whip he laid the foundation for a bigger prize. In one skirmish he had cast himself as a populist, antitax revolutionary and vanquished both the Democrats and the moderate Republicans who stood in his way.

The rebellion very nearly brought him down. In 1990 Gingrich held on to his seat by fewer than 1,000 votes out of 156,000 cast, after his opponent charged that he was more interested in playing God than in seeing to the care and feeding of his constituents. That brush with political death, it turns out, has produced an even more harrowing one. Some of the charges that are now ruining his holiday stem from that tight race. GOPAC was permitted by law to help only candidates for state and local offices, but documents filed by the Federal Election Commission charge that the lobby spent more than $250,000 in "Newt support" to help Gingrich hang onto his seat. Democrats have long claimed that Gingrich used GOPAC as his political piggy bank; the fec charges that GOPAC paid his American Express fees, lent him consultants for his campaign "to help Newt think" and urged its big donors to direct their money to the re-election effort.

Once he became Speaker, his adversaries began holding him to the same ethical standards he so righteously enforced as the House proctor. During his first months in the job, the Democrats hounded him for his lavish $4.5 million book deal with Rupert Murdoch, to the point that he settled for a $1 advance, plus royalties. By last spring there were no fewer than five ethics charges pending against him, and now the ethics committee has recommended bringing in outside counsel.