4. He was not the main force behind the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. By the time that the House voted to impeach Clinton in late 1998 — due to perjury charges stemming from his sexual involvement with White House intern Monica Lewinsky — Gingrich had lost his mojo as speaker. His party had dropped seats in the midterms and he had been portrayed by Newsweek magazine as "The Gingrich Who Stole Christmas." In the winter of 1995-1996, he had engineered two shutdowns of the federal government. Throughout the impeachment process, it turned out, Gingrich himself was having an affair with House staffer Callista Bisek — more than 20 years his junior. In 2000, she became his third wife. The real primum mobile of the proceedings was Texas Rep. Tom DeLay. "If Newt had still been speaker, the House may have settled for censuring Clinton and not pressed ahead on impeachment — given there was no realistic prospect of conviction in the Senate," says NPR Senior Washington Editor Ron Elving. "But DeLay and others, believing they could win over the country and the Senate — and just wanting to do it because they could — pressed the issue once Gingrich was out of the way."

5. He is not considered a conservative — by all conservatives. "Gingrich has never been a conservative," according to an appraisal in May 2011 by The American Conservative magazine. "Gingrich has rarely, if ever, been for smaller government. He simply believes Republicans can preside over big government more effectively." Earlier this year he called for dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency and replacing it with another governmental bureau, the Environmental Solutions Agency. However, Craig Shirley, a conservative consultant and author of the forthcoming biography, Citizen Newt: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Speaker Gingrich, points out that Gingrich's lifetime rating by the American Conservative Union is 90 out of a possible 100. "On all the gut check issues of the last 30 years from abortion to championing the individual over the state," Shirley says, Gingrich "has almost always been on the side of conservatism." In the annals of American conservatism, Shirley predicts, "Gingrich will rank high."