Newt Gingrich's decision to step down as Speaker of the House of Representatives and to resign his seat was a spectacular end to a political career which has flared and crashed like a meteor.
Just four years ago he was standing on the steps of the Capitol surrounded by the young turks he had led to victory in the Republican landslide. Mr Gingrich was about to become the first Republican Speaker of the House in 40 years, while over at the White House, President Clinton and his aides were shattered at the Gingrich "revolution" that swept the Democrats from control of House and Senate.
Now Newt Gingrich is contemplating the ruins of a political career that he once saw as carrying him to the presidency. His own troops had mutinied as the Republican victory he had been predicting even on the morning of last week's election crumbled as the results poured in.
While the Republicans just held on to control of the House, under Mr Gingrich they have seen their once-huge majority dwindle to a handful over two elections. If the Republicans were to survive the next election in 2000 it was clear he had to go.
With bitterness, he said he could "hardly stand by and allow the party to cannibalise itself", referring to his once-loyal followers jockeying to replace him. For a man who was a military historian and often saw politics as a martial art, the revolt in the Republican ranks was especially painful. (He once said the Sands of Iwo Jima was "the formative movie of my life".)
His disciplinarian stepfather had been an army man but he himself was not fit for military service in Vietnam because of poor eyesight and flat feet. Instead he became a history professor in a small Georgian college, from where he plotted his entry into Republican politics out of a then strongly Democratic state.
He was born Newton Leroy McPherson in June 1943 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but the marriage between his Scottish-American father and Irish-American mother broke up when he was three.
When Mr Gingrich's own marriage to his high school maths teacher broke up and he married his present wife, Marianne, his parents refused to attend the wedding to show their disapproval.
Within days of his election to Congress in 1978 after two failures, he was telling the Republican leadership it should be aiming to take over the House and was laughed off as the "Newtron bomb". But gathering the younger conservative members around him, Mr Gingrich began laying down the strategy for a campaign to end Democrat control of the House.
The opportunity came in 1994 as voters expressed their anger at the first two years of the Clinton presidency and Mr Gingrich promised a Republican "revolution" through the 10 goals of the Contract with America for cutting taxes, big government and welfare.
Mr Gingrich began to be hailed as a "visionary" and he described himself as a "transformational figure". But flaws became exposed as he took over the leadership of the House and the party.
The aggressiveness that won the revolution turned him into a polarising, confrontational figure who was held responsible for shutting down the government in 1995 during a budget struggle with the White House. Democrats exploited this negative image of Mr Gingrich, whose popularity ratings never recovered.
His departure will be regretted by the Irish Government: he was becoming increasingly interested in his Irish roots, having spent a week touring Ireland, North and South, and had helped to push through a scheme for 12,000 US visas for young Irish people.